Aiding Those We Kill: US Humanitarianism in Gaza
The spectacle, if it did not say it all, said much of it. Planes dropping humanitarian aid to a starving, famine-threatened populace of Gaza (the United Nations warns that 576,000 are “one step from famine”), with parachuted packages veering off course, some falling into the sea. Cargo also coming into Israel, with bullets, weaponry and other ordnance to kill those in Gaza on the inflated premise of self-defence. Be it aid or bullets, Washington is the smorgasbord supplier, ensuring that both victims and oppressors are furnished from its vast commissary.
This jarring picture, discordant and hopelessly at odds, is increasingly running down the low stocks of credibility US diplomats have in either the Israel-Hamas conflict, or much else in Middle Eastern politics. Comments such as these from US Vice President Kamala Harris from March 3, made at Selma in Alabama, illustrate the problem: “As I have said many times, too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. And just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching Northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.”
Harris goes on to speak of broken hearts for the victims, for the innocents, for those “suffering from what is clearly a humanitarian catastrophe.” A forced, hammed up moral register is struck. “People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act.”
It was an occasion for the Vice President to mention that the US Department of Defense had “carried out its first airdrop of humanitarian assistance, and the United States will continue with these airdrops.” Further work would also be expended on getting “a new route by sea to deliver aid.”
It is only at this point that Harris introduces the lumbering elephant in the room: “And the Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses.” They had to “open new border crossings”, “not impose any unnecessary restrictions on the delivery of aid” and “ensure humanitarian personnel, sites, and convoys are not targeted.” Basic services had to be restored, and order promoted in the strip “so more food, water, and fuel can reach those in need.”
In remarks made at Hagerstown Regional Airport in Maryland, President Joe Biden told reporters that he was “working with them [the Israelis] very hard. We’re going to get more – we must get more aid into Gaza. There’s no excuses. None.”
In a New Yorker interview, White House National Security spokesman John Kirby keeps to the same script, claiming that discussions with the Israelis “in private are frank and very forthright. I think they understand our concerns.” Kirby proceeds to fantasise, fudging the almost sneering attitude adopted by Israel towards US demands. “Even though there needs to be more aid, and even though there needs to be fewer civilian casualties, the Israelis have, in many ways, been receptive to our messages.”
The other side of this rusted coin of US policy advocates something less than human. The common humanity there is tethered to aiding the very power that is proving instrumental in creating conditions of catastrophe. The right to self-defence is reiterated as a chant, including the war goals of Israel which have artificially drawn a distinction between Hamas military and political operatives from that of the Palestinian population being eradicated.
Harris is always careful to couple any reproachful remarks about Israel with an acceptance of their stated policy: that Hamas must be eliminated. Hamas, rather than being a protean force running on the fumes of history, resentment and belief, was merely “a brutal terrorist organization that has vowed to repeat October 7th again and again until Israel is annihilated.” It had inflicted suffering on the people of Gaza and continued to hold Israeli hostages.
Whatever note of rebuke directed against the Netanyahu government, it is clear that Israel knows how far it can go. It can continue to rely on the US veto in the UN Security Council. It can dictate the extent of aid and the conditions of its delivery into Gaza, which is merely seen as succour for an enemy it is trying to crush. While alarm about shooting desperate individuals crowding aid convoys will be noted, little will come of the consternation. The very fact that the US Airforce has been brought into the program of aid delivery suggests an ignominious capitulation, a very public impotence.
Jeremy Konyndyk, former chief of the USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration gives his unflattering judgment on this point. “When the US government has to use tactics that it otherwise used to circumvent the Soviets and Berlin and circumvent ISIS in Syria and Iraq, that should prompt some really hard questions about the state of US policy.”
In his remarks to The Independent, Konyndyk finds the airdrop method “the most expensive and least effective way to get aid to a population. We almost never did it because it is such an in-extremis tool.” Even more disturbing for him was the fact that this woefully imperfect approach was being taken to alleviate the suffering caused by an ally of the United States, one that had made “a policy choice” in not permitting “consistent humanitarian access” and the opening of border crossings.
Even as this in extremis tool is being used, US made military hardware continues to be used at will by the Israel Defence Forces. The point was not missed on Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch: “We have a situation where the US is airdropping aid on day one, and Israel is dropping bombs on day two. And the American taxpayer is paying for the aid and the bombs.”
The chroniclers of history can surely only jot down with grim irony instances where desperate, hunger-crazed Palestinians scrounging for US aid are shot by made-in-USA ammunition.
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There should never have been an invasion in the first place.
So much of the attack has been word weasled to eliminate the truth of what’s going on. Cruel and cynical like Germany eighty years ago.
Paul walker,
Cruel yes, cynical no. Cynics do not covet the possessions of others. They prefer to possess as little as they can. The cruelty in both Israel and Nazi Germany has been inspired and driven by devotion to the ignorance of faith and the desire to believe that they are special and entitled beyond the rights of all others as either the chosen people of god or the master race of creation. Both are complete fallacies. There is nothing cynical about it. I know your misuse of the word is unintentional. You can rely on everyone to misuse it nowadays, but in doing so you and everyone else are weaseling the word to eliminate the truth of what it really means.
As for Kamala Harris, her statement that too many innocents have died implies that it is acceptable for innocents to die provided their deaths do not exceed the ‘too many’ limit, whatever that is. If a handful of nations are permitted to regard and treat Hamas as a terrorist organisation because of its crimes then there is no reason why the rest of the world shouldn’t regard the governments of Israel, the US and all the governments of all the other nations, including Australia who have been complicit in this crime of genocide as terrorist organisations as well.
Of the seven land based border crossings between Israel/Egypt and Gaza the Israelis will only permit limited aid through the Rafah (Egypt) crossing and the sea access has been entirely blockaded by Israel. However, it seems that the US are going to breach the sea blockade on the Gaza coast which could frustrate the Israeli attempts to starve the Palestinian population.
My question is , with Putin and others in Russia being issued with arrest warrants by the ICC, why has Natanyahu not been summonsed.
Terence, that’s a good question about Netanyahu.
This might be the answer — The fact that the US threatened ICC staff and got away with has had serious consequences. It effectively means that the US now controls the court. The ICC has become a tool, a plaything of the US.
TM,
Short answer: time.
The ICC took over year to assemble the cases to issue warrants over war times (allegedly) commited by Russian forces upon Ukrainian civilians, whereas Netanyahu’s army have ‘only’ been unleashing this current wave of incessant hell upon Gaza’s citizenry for a little under 5 months.
Longer answer; realpolitik.
Were an international warrant to be issued for Bibi’s arrest, it would encounter the same logistical problems as involved in nabbing Vlad; how to smoothly extradite the head of state from a nuclear armed belligerent.
PS, as someone of abysmal expectations i’m not going to join a chorus of “yeah-but” over the US actually commuting a relatively non-putrid act (distributing food to starving people).
I mean, at least this time around their humanitarian emergency rations aren’t being interspersed with cluster munitions of similar appearance;
.https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2003/04/02/UNICEF-Rations-bomblets-same-color/87821049335611/
Oh yeah, oh dear, in the US, as the militarist mercantile ‘free market’ goes rogue, particularly via the feckless coders and leaders of social media, mostly Meta and Google and the msm cringing in their shadows, so the fragility of the democratic project is set aflame in preference for building kleptocratic authoritarianism.
Whilst once the USA aspired to be the gatekeeper of déntente, its Bill of Rights and arcane Constitution have internally been used to wheedle away any notion of noble egalitarian purity it may once have intended. In the past, attempts to solve its problems have seen revolutions and civil war – much of their own blood spilled. They bounce back, but that has done nothing to stem the progression of criminality and corruption, to the extent that the USA is now probably in one of its darkest periods ever. Its endless growth paradigm (also adopted by the entire ‘west’) has put paid to its ecology and accordingly is diving its constituents crazy.
The ‘system’ is on the brink, and provides incentives for those the US has traduced to arm-up against them, and others backing Uncle Sam to refresh their hideouts, all giving rise to a further state of precariousness.
Seeing opportunity, the criminally lunatic Putin and Netanyahu have gone completely rogue pressing via destruction and blood-letting their hostile and brutal agendas for imperialist dominance. Putin, not only in Russia & Urkraine, but also in North / Central Africa.
All this seems to come down to the idiosyncracies and deficiencies of the US political system. And horrendously, in a year of an apparently divisive presidential battle of the febrile, for election by a mind-blown populace.
Oh dear, to stand by powerless, watching such cruel and destructive lessons recur.
Palestinian supporters and human rights activists around the world are quite understandably frustrated and even angry about so many nations’ political inertia and apparent apathy towards the Palestinian noncombatants’ worst nightmare.
However, the mainstream news-media, even the otherwise progressive outlets, are largely replacing daily Gazan deaths and suffering with relatively trivial news as leading stories. Sadly, that’s what most of those news outlets’ subscribers or regular patrons want. Still, to me that fact does not morally justify it.
Without doubt, growing Western indifference towards the mass starvation and slaughter of helpless Palestinian civilians will only further inflame long-held Middle Eastern anger towards us. Some countries’ actual provision, mostly by the U.S., of highly effective weapons used in Israel’s onslaught will likely turn that anger into lasting hatred that’s always seeking eye-for-an-eye redress.
Meanwhile, with each news report of the daily Palestinian death toll from unrelenting Israeli bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally, including present Ukraine, ever since I began regularly consuming news products in 1988. And I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this nor that it’s willfully callous.
It has long seemed to me as a news consumer that the value of a life abroad is typically perceived according to the abundance of protracted conditions under which it suffers, especially during wartime, and that this effect can be exacerbated when there’s also racial contrast. Therefore, when that life is lost, even violently, it typically receives lesser coverage.
Seemingly countless Palestinian non-combatants, especially the children, were/are being prevented from accessing safety/sanctuary, not to mention deprived of food. Yet, Western politicians, especially U.S. Republicans, have gone into their ‘Christian’ mode by withholding help for literally starving Palestinian children. Jesus undoubtedly is spinning in heaven.
There have been tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian non-combatants killed by Israeli assaults, largely the result of the decades-long Israeli occupation.
Normally there are rockets fired from Palestinian territory, intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and Israel retaliates in their usual very-many-fold-measures way with smart bombs [etcetera] supplied by U.S. taxpayers, typically killing civilians or just school children.
This is Israel’s and the collective West’s business-as-usual perception thus inevitable non-intervention. Palestinians are considered disposable. Generally, Israel and Westerners, including our legacy news-media, have been getting accustomed to so many Palestinian deaths over many decades of violent struggle with Israel.
For quite some time, maybe even decades, they have been perceived thus treated as not being of equal value to those within Israel. This may help explain the relative poverty, with Palestinian children picking through the mountains of Israeli waste basically dumped on territory annexed or on the way to being annexed. Thus their great suffering and deaths are somehow less worthy of our actionable concern.
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