Biden is taking drastic measures to get aid into the Strip instead of using military aid to pressure Israel
by Dave DeCamp , Antiwar. com, March 7, 2024
President Biden announced during the State of the Union on Thursday night that he ordered a military mission to establish a port in Gaza to get more aid into the Strip as Palestinians are starving to death and Israel is still restricting aid.
The drastic measure is being ordered instead of Biden using the enormous leverage he has over Israel to pressure them to allow in more aid or halt the genocidal campaign. The US also recently started conducting airdrops of aid into Gaza, which aid groups have slammed as a public relations ploy.
“Tonight, I’m directing the US military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters,” Biden said.
US officials claimed to Axios that the pier in the sea off the Gaza coast will allow hundreds of aid trucks to enter the Strip per day. But the pier will take weeks to build, and Palestinians are already starving to death at a rapid rate.
Biden insisted there would be “no US boots on the ground.” But the plan does still run the risk of US personnel being targeted off the coast, which could lead to a major escalation of US involvement in the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians.
The aid will pass through Cyprus before heading to the pier and will be subject to Israeli inspections, which means some could be turned away.
CNN reported that some of the items most frequently rejected by Israel include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators, and water filtration systems. The CNN report said other items that have faced restrictions are dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets, and maternity kits.
Biden acknowledged in his speech that Israel has killed “thousands and thousands of innocent women and children” but gave no indication he was reconsidering his policy of unconditional military support for the slaughter.
“More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine,” he said.
The Washington Post revealed on Wednesday that Biden’s administration has approved over 100 arms deals for Israel since October 7.
Arguments over whether Israelis or Palestinians count as “really indigenous” are beside the point. No one’s human rights should depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors come from.
People who insist that either Palestinians or Israelis are “indigenous” to the land are embracing the logic of reactionaries. (Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Claudia Tenney is a congresswoman from upstate New York. Much of her district (NY-24) was, for centuries before “New York state” came into existence, the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy. A right-wing Republican, Tenney presumably doesn’t think much of land acknowledgments or hand-wringing about the idea that NY-24 sits on “stolen land.”
And yet, Tenney is in the news this week for introducing something called the RECOGNIZING Judea and Samaria Act. She wants to require that US government documents stop referring to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as the “West Bank” and start calling it “Judea and Samaria.” She claims that “the term ‘West Bank’” is “used to delegitimize Israel’s historical claim to this land.”
The idea seems to be that, because ancient Jewish kingdoms were located there thousands of years ago, and Israeli Jews are descendants of the people who lived in those kingdoms, Palestinian rights are irrelevant. It’s a bit like an extremely high-stakes diplomatic land acknowledgment.
Tenney is far from the only one on the Right thinking this way as Israel rains death and destruction on the civilian population of Gaza and pogroms by Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank. At a recent appearance at the Cambridge Union in the UK, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro argued that Israel is “the ultimate case of decolonization in human history after return of a native population to its homeland and battle to throw off the shackles of the British Empire.”
There’s surely an element of trolling in Shapiro’s use of this language. Since when does he care about “decolonization” anywhere else? But he’s deadly serious about his support for the status quo in Israel/Palestine. He recently claimed, for example, that a Palestinian state would be an unacceptable “terrorist entity on Israel’s borders.” And I seriously doubt that Shapiro wants the five million or so Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to be granted Israeli citizenship, which would make Israel no longer a specifically “Jewish state” but a multiethnic democracy with roughly equal numbers of Jewish and Palestinian citizens.
So presumably he wants those millions of people to continue to be denied basic rights — to continue to be tried in military courts instead of real courts when they’re accused of crimes, for example, and to continue to be unable to vote their rulers out of office. And the justification for that would have to be the one cited by Congresswoman Tenney: Israel’s “historical claim” to the land.
There’s also a misguided — and, I hope, relatively small — segment of Palestine solidarity activists who take the mirror image of this position. They’re rightly horrified by the denial of democratic rights to the Palestinians, and especially by the mass starvation and indiscriminate bombing in Gaza, where the Israeli military has displaced at least 85 percent of the population from their homes since October. This anger leads them to indulge in ugly rhetoric about how the entire population of seven million or so Israeli Jews, the great majority of whom were born in the country, are “settlers” and “colonizers.” I’ve seen social media posts, for example, where pictures of stereotypically “white”-looking Israeli Jews with European-sounding surnames are used to mock the idea that Israelis are “indigenous to the Middle East.”
The implication happens to be wrong. On at least some estimates, Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors once lived in Northern or Eastern Europe, make up less than a third of Israel’s Jewish population. They’re greatly outnumbered by Israeli Jews whose ancestors lived in various Middle Eastern countries during the same time period and who often had to flee from those countries in the twentieth century. But this kind of rhetoric isn’t just wrong because it’s based on a shaky understanding of the facts. It’s deeply wrong in principle.
The great German socialist thinker August Bebel famously said that antisemitism is “the socialism of fools,” since antisemites tend to scapegoat cabals of “Jewish bankers” for the problems of an entire economic system. To tweak Bebel’s observation a bit, this kind of rhetoric about all Israelis being “settlers” whose presence in their country is illegitimate represents the anti-Zionism of fools. Zionism should be rejected because ethnostates are wrong in principle. No nation-state should be a state “of” a specific ethnic or religious subset of its residents, and the most just solution would be a single secular democratic state with equal rights for everyone.
People who insist that Palestinians are “indigenous” and Israelis are not, and who think this is what makes the struggle for Palestinian rights legitimate, are embracing the logic of reactionaries like Tenney and Shapiro while reversing the implication. The problem with the Right’s claim that Israel is justified in denying basic rights to millions of people because of historical Jewish claims to “Judea and Samaria” is not that the right-wingers are misidentifying who counts as “truly” indigenous. The wildly reactionary premise is that this is even a relevant question.
The Iroquois Confederacy probably came together somewhere between five hundred and nine hundred years ago, depending on which estimates you believe. The tribes that made it up were already there before that, and presumably before they were there, other groups lived in the same area. Humans have lived there for about ten thousand years. It was wrong to displace the Iroquois, and if their ancestors displaced some earlier group, that was wrong too. Whatever injustices fill the history books, though, everyone except for outright racists and fascists takes it for granted that everyone who lives there now should have equal rights now, regardless of any ethnic group’s “historical claims.” The exact same principle should apply to Israel/Palestine.
Even someone as rabidly right-wing as Tenney would presumably grant that everyone in her district should have democratic rights, regardless of whether their ancestors lived in the Iroquois Confederacy or their great-great-grandparents came to New York from Ireland in the 1800s or they’re first-generation immigrants who take their citizenship test last week. And anyone who can acknowledge that should also recognize that no one in Israel/Palestine should be denied rights based on their ancestors having lived in the wrong place — whether “wrong” ancestry means not being descended from ancient Judeans and Samarians or not having great-great-grandparents who lived in Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel.
The problem with Zionism is that it’s obscene for anyone’s status or rights in the area where they live to depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors lived. Zionism should be rejected not because we think Palestinians have a better claim than Israeli Jews to a blood-and-soil connection to the land, but on the basis of the universalist principles that have always formed the rock-solid normative basis of the socialist movement and, before that, were proclaimed by the French Revolutionaries in 1789.
Those principles say that everyone is entitled to the same package of rights, just for being a human being. Socialists think that package includes the right to have your material needs met and the right to have a say in the economic decisions that touch your life. But even liberals believe in a set of universal rights that are clearly inconsistent with displacing anyone from their homes or denying anyone a democratic say in the political institutions that govern them because they come from the “wrong” ethnic background.
Many actually existing liberals are woefully inconsistent in their application of these principles, especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine. But the principles themselves are correct, and sticking to them is the only way out of interminable and deadly land feuds.
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Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.
Biden is using his speech for his re-election campaign. His reference to what is going on in Gaza is not to end the massacres of Palestinians by calling for a permanent ceasefire and the end of Israeli genocidal war: He is doing so only to woo the Arab-Muslim and anti-war voters. The real test of his intentions is: What will do with his weapons for Israeli genocide in Gaza? Well, he will continue to provide weapons and full military and diplomatic support to Israel as before. — Nasir Khan
He didn’t elaborate on his position and focused on claiming the October 7 attack wouldn’t have happened if he was still president
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, March 6, 2024
Former President Trump, the likely GOP candidate for the 2024 presidential election, said he supported Israel’s brutal military operations in Gaza in an interview with “Fox & Friends on Tuesday.”
Trump agreed when a host described him as being “firmly in Israel’s camp.” He was then asked if he was “on board” with the way the Israeli military was carrying out its campaign.
“You’ve got to finish the problem. You had a horrible invasion that took place, that would have never happened if I was president, by the way,” Trump replied.
Trump did not elaborate on his position and only claimed the October 7 Hamas attack wouldn’t have happened if he was still president. When asked whether or not he would support a ceasefire in Gaza, Trump said, “Look, I hate seeing what’s happening. Again, it would have never happened. This attack on Israel and, likewise, Israel’s counter-attack, which is what it is, would never have happened if I was president.”
During his time in office, Trump was extremely pro-Israel and carried out several policies to support Israeli claims to occupied land. His administration recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory and declared that illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate international law.
Trump’s administration moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and unveiled a so-called “peace plan” that would have seen Israel annex large swathes of the West Bank. Trump also brokered the Abraham Accords, deals that resulted in Israel normalizing ties with the UAE and Bahrain.
Trump has been relatively quiet on the campaign trail about the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, but he is expected to continue unconditional military support for Israel if he wins in November. So far, nearly 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, and about two-thirds of the casualties are women and children. Author: Dave DeCamp
A collage of photos of Khaled, his wife Majdoleen, his brother, Mohammed, daughter Sarah, son Anas, mother Fathiya, daughters Aya, Rafeef and Malak, and son Osama – all killed by an Israeli attack on January 31, 2024 in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip [Courtesy of Ghada Ageel]
Dear President Biden,
I am writing to you for the second time. I first wrote to you on November 4 after 47 members of my community, including 36 from my own family, were murdered in a single attack by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). The massacre occurred in Khan Younis refugee camp, located in the southern region of the Gaza Strip, where people were supposed to be safe, as claimed by your ally, Israel.
I am uncertain if my first letter reached you or if your media team made you aware of its contents. Either way, you have not changed your position. Your unequivocal support for Israel, including through large weapons transfers, means that many more such massacres have been committed with your help since then.
Since writing that letter, I have lost another 220 members of my own family.
Just a month ago, on January 31, my father’s cousin, Khaled Ammar, 40, who was displaced in Khan Younis, was killed alongside his entire family when the place they were staying in was shelled by an Israeli tank. Khaled’s wife, Majdoleen, 38, their four daughters, Malak, 17, Sarah, 16, Aya, 9, and Rafeef, 7, and their two sons, Osama, 14, and Anas, 2, all perished in the attack.
Among the victims were also Khaled’s disabled brother Mohammed, 42, and their mother Fathiya, 60. Their bodies remained unburied for over a week. Khaled’s surviving brother, Bilal, 35, made repeated calls for assistance to the Palestinian Red Cross Society, but they could not dispatch a rescue team to look for survivors because the IOF did not grant them permission.
Majdoleen and her two young daughters, Rafeef and Aya, came to see me last summer when I visited Gaza. I still remember Rafeef trying to ride the bike of my youngest niece, Rasha. I still remember them racing down the street, eating the candy they had bought from the shop of my cousin, Asaad. Their laughter still echoes in my ears.
But today, Mr President, there is no Aya, no Rafeef, no Asaad, who was also killed by the IOF along with his wife, children, mom, two sisters, sister-in-law and their children. There are no roads, no homes, no shops, no laughter. Only echoes of devastation and the deafening silence of loss.
Today, the residential area of Khan Younis refugee camp I grew up in is reduced to rubble. Tens of thousands of refugees, including all surviving members of my extended family, are now displaced to al Mawasi and Rafah. They are living in tents. They are not faring well, Mr President.
I have not heard from them in a while, as Israel has cut off communication. On February 10, my nephew, Aziz, 23, walked three kilometres despite the danger to reach the edge of Rafah to use the internet. He told me that death has passed by them many times but spared them for now. They are hungry, thirsty, and cold.
There is no power, no sanitation, no medications, no communications, or any services available to them, despite the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel has to ensure the delivery of aid to Gaza.
If people do survive the Israeli bombs, they may not survive wounds sustained in the Israeli bombardment and the explosion of communicable and non-communicable diseases. The health care system has collapsed under the Israeli onslaught.
In February, the IOF laid a siege on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the second-largest in the Gaza Strip. There were 300 medical staff trapped in the hospital alongside 450 patients and about 10,000 internally displaced persons seeking refuge within or in the hospital’s vicinity.
For days, the IOF would not let a rescue team from the World Health Organization (WHO) evacuate patients and staff or deliver much-needed food, medical supplies and fuel. Throughout this time, the medical staff demonstrated remarkable courage and dedication to their patients, trying to keep them alive in the face of the Israeli attacks. Dr Amira Al Assouli, who rushed under Israeli fire to aid one of the wounded in the hospital courtyard is one bright example.
Countless people who sought shelter in the hospital premises were killed or wounded; some of these murders were recorded on camera.
On February 13, the IOF sent a young man named Jamal Abu Al Ola, whom Israeli soldiers had detained and tortured, to the hospital to tell the Palestinians sheltering there to leave. Wearing a white PPE garment and with his hands bound, he delivered the message and then – as instructed – headed towards the gate of the hospital, but was shot dead. His execution was documented by a journalist at the hospital and released to the public.
Will you order an investigation, Mr President? Will you demand that those responsible for the killing of Jamal and the many others at Nasser Hospital be punished or will you accept the IOF’s version of events again?
On February 15, the IOF raided the hospital, expelling thousands of people amid heavy bombardment and forcibly disappearing hundreds – at least 70 of them medical workers. This continues a pattern started in Gaza City. When the IOF raided Al Shifa Hospital, it detained some of its staff, among them, Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the hospital director, who remains in Israeli jail. The excuse then, as now, is that they were hunting for a Hamas command centre – a false narrative, you, Mr President, readily embraced.
During the raid of Nasser Hospital, the cutting off of electricity and oxygen resulted in the deaths of at least eight patients. When a WHO team was finally allowed to enter the hospital, its staffers described it as “a place of death”. After the evacuation of hundreds of patients, some 25 medical staffers stayed behind to care for the remaining 120 patients in the hospital without a secured supply of food, water or medications.
Among the regular patients of Nasser Hospital was my relative, Inshirah, who suffered from kidney failure and required dialysis every week. She lived in the Al Qararah area, east of Khan Younis.
When the IOF bombed her area, she moved to a camp for displaced people. When the IOF attacked the camp, she moved to Hay al Amal. When the latter was bombed, her children decided to move her to the vicinity of Nasser Hospital.
As the conditions at the hospital deteriorated, the frequency of her dialysis sessions was reduced to once every 2 weeks and then to once every 3 weeks, causing her significant suffering. When the IOF besieged the hospital, Inshirah was forced to leave. Then we lost contact with her and her children. We do not know if she has survived.
The vast majority of chronically ill people like Inshirah cannot access proper health care after Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s health care system. This is a death sentence for them. Destroying a health care system is a war crime, did you know that, Mr President?
Mr President, 2.3 million people in Gaza are living in a concentration camp. They are starved and killed relentlessly. They are bombed in their homes, on the streets, while collecting water, while sleeping in their tents, while receiving aid, and even while cooking. In Gaza, people tell me that drinking water costs blood, a loaf of bread is dipped in blood, and moving from place to place means bleeding.
Even the act of seeking food to feed your children can kill you – as happened to many parents on February 28. Some 112 Palestinians were murdered by the IOF as they tried to get flour to feed themselves and their families.
Their deaths are painfully real. As were the deaths of small babies like Anas, children like Aya, mothers like Majdoleen, and the elderly like Fathiya. There are among the more than 30,000 that have been recorded in the official death toll; many more thousands have perished but are recorded as “missing”.
Some 13,000 of the murdered are children. Many are now dying of starvation. Israel is killing 6 children an hour. Each of these children had a name, a story, and a dream that is never to be fulfilled. Do the children of Gaza not deserve life, Mr President?
The Palestinians are among the most educated nations in the entire Middle East. They are a very curious people. Their most burning question they all have today is, “why”? Why do the Palestinian people have to endure genocide at the hands of your ally, carried out with your weapons and money, while you refuse to call for a ceasefire? Can you tell us why, Mr President?
Ghada AgeelProfessor of political scienceDr Ghada Ageel is a third-generation Palestinian refugee and is currently a visiting professor at the department of political science at the University of Alberta, Canada
More than 200 lawmakers from 13 countries issued a joint statement Friday expressing opposition to their nations’ weapons exports to Israel and pledging to do everything in their power to halt the flow of arms that are being used to massacre Palestinians in Gaza.
“We, the undersigned parliamentarians, declare our commitment to end our nations’ arms sales to the state of Israel,” reads the statement, which was coordinated by Progressive International. “Our bombs and bullets must not be used to kill, maim, and dispossess Palestinians. But they are: We know that lethal weapons and their parts, made or shipped through our countries, currently aid the Israeli assault on Palestine that has claimed over 30,000 lives across Gaza and the West Bank.”
The statement’s signatories include legislators from Israel’s top allies and weapons suppliers, including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. Just two U.S. lawmakers—Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.)—backed the statement.
The statement includes six signatories from Germany, which is facing an International Court of Justice (ICJ) case alleging complicity in genocide against Palestinians.
The lawmakers argued that an arms embargo on Israel is both “a moral necessity” and “a legal requirement,” given the ICJ’s interim ruling in late January.
“We will not be complicit in Israel’s grave violation of international law,” the statement reads. “The ICJ ordered Israel not to kill, harm or ‘deliberately [inflict] on the [Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about… physical destruction.’ They have refused. Instead, they press on with a planned assault on Rafah that the secretary-general of the United Nations has warned will ‘exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare.'”
“Today, we take a stand,” the statement continues. “We will take immediate and coordinated action in our respective legislatures to stop our countries from arming Israel.”
Niki Ashton, a member of Canada’s Parliament and a statement signatory, noted on social media that the Canadian government has approved $28 million worth of weapons exports to Israel since its latest assault on Gaza began in October.
“That is horrifying,” Ashton wrote. “Which is why I along with Jeremy Corbyn and 200+ parliamentarians across the world are backing [Progressive International’s] call for a ban on arms exports to Israel.”
“Make no mistake. These weapons are directly used to kill and maim starving Palestinians,” she added. “As Canadians, we can no longer claim to respect international law while sending arms to a country involved in genocidal acts. Enough is enough.”
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The statement was released amid global outrage over what’s been dubbed the “flour massacre.” On early Thursday morning, Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd of Gazans that surrounded an aid convoy in the northern part of the territory, which has been largely cut off from humanitarian assistance.
Israel’s military claimed dozens were killed and injured in a stampede, but witness accounts and video footage show that Israeli forces fired on Gazans as they desperately tried to get their hands on sacks of flour. One Gaza doctor said that 80% of the patients treated at his hospital in the wake of the attack had gunshot wounds, an account corroborated by United Nations teams and rights groups on the ground.
“Witness testimonies obtained by our field researchers and videos shared on social media documenting the events, clearly and unequivocally demonstrate that the crowd was hit by bullets coming from Israeli tanks and snipers,” Palestinian human rights organizations said in a statement Thursday.
A day after the deadly attack, U.S. President Joe Biden announced plans to airdrop humanitarian aid into Gaza as ground deliveries plummet.
The U.S. president said he would “insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes” for ground shipments, but he didn’t promise to impose consequences if the Israeli government continues obstructing humanitarian assistance.
“Unbelievable,” Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, wrote following Biden’s announcement. “There is a serious risk of genocide and in response the U.S. is proposing to airdrop supplies, while continuing to arm the perpetrator.”
Late last month, dozens of U.N. experts called for an immediate arms embargo on Israel, warning that “any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international humanitarian law and must cease immediately.”
“State officials involved in arms exports may be individually criminally liable for aiding and abetting any war crimes, crimes against humanity, or acts of genocide,” the experts said.
The US president’s team is carefully organising his public appearances so as to minimise “disruptions from pro-Palestinian protests”, reports NBC News.
This includes keeping his public events smaller, not disclosing their exact location ahead of time, and staying away from college campuses, the US outlet said, citing a Biden ally and a source “familiar with his planning”.
The measures come after Biden was interrupted more than a dozen times by pro-Palestinian protesters while speaking at a campaign rally in January.
Protesters at the January 23 event shouted phrases such as “ceasefire now”, “let Gaza women live”, and “genocide Joe”.
Peace and Justice Post 