When White House officials announced this brilliant plan, there was only one possible hitch. They were very clear that under no circumstances would there be any American “boots on the ground”. So how will the American Seabees (naval construction battalions) connect that pier to the shore?
Speculate no further; a solution is at hand. The Seabees will put the final few metres of the roadway in place either barefoot or in stocking feet. Or in ballet slippers, if that’s their preference.
Forgive the sarcasm, but this cruel farce has nothing whatever to do with saving Palestinian children from starving to death under the Israeli siege. It’s about saving face in Washington, where a wave of sympathy among potential pro-Biden voters for hungry, helpless Palestinian civilians is breaking on the rocks of Joe Biden’s lifelong love for Israel.
There is no need for piers, ships or aircraft to get food into the Gaza Strip. There are lots of roads available, most of them a bit cluttered with debris at the moment, but the Israelis have lots of bulldozers. If they wanted the Palestinians to have food, then the Palestinians would have food.
More to the point, if Biden really wanted the Palestinians to have food, he would order the Israelis to let them have it or face losing American support with arms, money and the regular loan of the US veto at the UN Security Council. But he can’t bring himself to do that, no matter what Israel does.
In late January, before the International Court of Justice agreed to consider genocide charges against Israel, an average of 147 trucks a day were delivering food into the Gaza Strip. That’s only a third of the peacetime amount, but it was enough to feed 2.5 million people at bare survival level.
Nothing else has changed but since the court’s ruling, food deliveries to Gaza have collapsed: only 57 trucks went in between February 9 and 21. Why did Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu order that cut? It could just be anger at the court’s decision — or it could be a strategy for driving Palestinians out of the Strip by an artificial famine.
That’s clearly what the Egyptians think, because they are clearing a 16-square-kilometre area just across the border from Gaza and building a wall around it. (Cairo claims that it is a “logistical hub”, but that is palpable nonsense.)
Yet President Biden ignores all this and goes along with the fiction that there is some sort of undefined problem causing a famine in Gaza that must be solved by this elaborate charade about delivering food by sea. Various Nato/European Union countries are launching their own equally nonsensical plan to ship food into Gaza by sea.
They are either fools or spiritless cowards — whereas both the Hamas leadership and Netanyahu’s government definitely belong in both categories at once. They are both determined to continue the war until the other side caves in, and neither has any hope of achieving that aim.
