Not exactly a shining moment for U.S. in Gaza

Gaza sealift all about saving face in Washington

There is no need for piers, ships or aircraft to get food into the Gaza Strip. There are lots of roads available.

Besson en route to Gaza
The U.S. Army vessel General Frank S. Besson prepares to depart Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia on Saturday en route to the eastern Mediterranean.

Good news! The U.S. logistical support ship General Frank S. Besson Junior has just sailed from Norfolk, Va., carrying the equipment needed to build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza. That will enable the U.S. to deliver food to the starving (yes, literally starving) Palestinian population of the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip

Once U.S. President Joe Biden finally decides to do something, it happens fast. Only three days after the White House’s announcement, the General Frank was at sea, and in only 15 more days it will reach the Gaza coast.

Then it’s only a question of time until the floating pier is in place, because the U.S. navy is very good at this sort of thing. The Pentagon says 60 days max, so with luck the surviving children of northern Gaza should be tucking into scrumptious American hamburgers by mid-May.

This is, of course, a far better solution to the problem of starving Palestinians than the current U.S. practice of airdropping meal packets to them. A total of 112,896 meals in the past week divided up among several million Palestinians doesn’t go very far, and when the parachutes don’t open the heavy pallets tend to squash unwary Palestinians.

When White House officials announced this brilliant plan to build what will probably be called the Pier of Hope, 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. They will not dangle Seabees from hovering helicopters to put the final few metres of the roadway in place. Neither will they build a sort of reverse drawbridge they can lower from the pier onto the beach. That would be ridiculous.

Promises must be kept, but all the White House said was that there would no American “boots” on the ground. The Seabees will finish the job themselves, but they will do it 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 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. If the Israelis 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 U.S. 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 two and a half million people at bare survival level.

Since the court’s ruling, food deliveries have collapsed: only 57 trucks went in between Feb. 9 and 21. Why did Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin 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, presumably to contain a flood of starving refugees from the Strip. (Cairo claims that it is a “logistical hub,” but that is palpable nonsense.)

Yet Biden ignores all this and goes along with the fiction 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 poltroons — 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.

Gwynne Dyer

Gwynne Dyeris a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

2 thoughts on “Not exactly a shining moment for U.S. in Gaza”

  1. Why not call it for what it is? The U.S. is a party to genocide, much like the German manufacturers who made cyclon-B for the death camps. It is really is not that difficult to understand.

    Won’t it be great to dock U.S. naval ships with nuclear weapons right off the coast of Gaza?

  2. Most people who have reached the point of starvation don’t have the luxury of surviving 18 more days. Biden owns this because the nation who pays the piper calls the tune. He also owns the war in Ukraine having IMHO deliberately spent years provoking it. It is a little hard to watch an upcoming US election where one contester advocates genocide because he loves Israel and more generally loves paying for proxy wars, and the other advocates genocide because he hates muslims.

    I was disowned for saying this but Israel looses world sympathy with every building it destroys, and every innocent person it kills. Eventually there will be no sympathy left.

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