Without Gaza ceasefire, Biden’s sea-ramp substitute? Gaza Pier is a hollow gesture that will change almost nothing!

Biden’s pier for Gaza is a hollow gesture that will change almost nothing | Jonathan Cook | 8 March 2024

The US President and the Democratic party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right.

A few observations on President Biden’s building of a “temporary pier” – or what his officials are grandly calling a “port” – to get aid into Gaza:

1. Though no one is mentioning it, Biden is actually violating Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza with his plan. Gaza doesn’t have a sea port, or an airport, because Israel, its occupier, has long banned it from having either.

Israel barred anything getting into Gaza that didn’t come through the land crossings it controls. Israel stopped international aid flotillas, often violently, from reaching Gaza to bring in medicine. The blockade also created a captive market for Israel’s own poor-quality goods, like damaged fruit and veg, and allowed Israel to skim off money at the land crossings that should have gone to the Palestinians in fees and duties.

2. It will take many weeks for the US to build this pier off-shore and get it up and running. Why the delay? Because every western capital, including the United States, has supported the blockade for the past 17 years.

The siege of Gaza caused gradual malnutrition among the enclave’s children, rather the the current rapid starvation. By helping Israel inflict collective punishment on Gaza for all those years, the US and Europe were complicit in a gross and enduring violation of international law, even before the current genocide.

With his pier, Biden isn’t reversing that long-standing collusion in a crime against humanity. He has stressed it will be temporary. In other words, it will be back to business in Gaza as usual afterwards: any children who survive will once again be allowed to starve in slow-motion, at a rate that doesn’t register with the establishment media and put pressure on Washington to be seen to be doing something.

3. Biden could get aid into Gaza much faster than by building a pier, if he wanted to. He could simply insist that Israel let aid trucks through the land crossings, and threaten it with serious repercussions should it fail to comply. He could threaten to withhold the US bombs he is sending to kill more children in Gaza. Or he could threaten to cut off the billions in military aid Washington sends to Israel every year. Or he could threaten to refuse to cast a US veto to protect Israel from diplomatic fallout at the United Nations. He could do any of that and more, but he chooses not to.

4. Even after Biden buys Israel a few more weeks to further aggressively starve Palestinians in Gaza, while we wait for his temporary pier to be completed, nothing may actually change in practice. Israel will still get to carry out the same checks it currently does at the land crossings but instead in Lanarca, Cyprus, where the aid will be loaded on to ships. In other words, Israel will still be able to create the same interminable hold-ups using “security concerns” as the pretext.

5. Biden isn’t changing course – temporarily – because he suddenly cares about the people, or even the children, of Gaza. They have been suffering in their open-air prison, to varying degrees, for decades. If he had cared, he would have done something to end that suffering after he became president. If he had done something then, October 7 might never have happened, and all those lives lost on both sides – lives continuing to be lost on the Palestinian side every few minutes – might have been saved.

And if he really cared, he wouldn’t have helped Israel in its efforts to destroy UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinians and a vital lifeline for Gaza, by freezing its funding, based on unevidenced claims against the agency by Israel.

No, Biden doesn’t care about Palestinian suffering, or about the fact that, while he’s been busy eating ice cream, many, many tens of thousands of children have been murdered, maimed or orphaned – and the rest starved. He cares about the polls. His timetable for helping Palestinians is being strictly dictated by the schedule of the presidential election. He needs to look like Gaza’s saviour when Democrats are deciding who they are voting for.

He and the Democratic party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right.

__________
source
__________

---

ALSO SEE:
Still no Gaza ceasefire. Biden’s sea-ramp substitute. Palestinian poetry. And more. | Helena Cobban | 8 March 2024

I guess the big news from Washington DC, capital of the now-crumbling global hegemon, was Pres. Biden’s announcement last night that his administration would establish a temporary seaport somewhere in Gaza so that the aid the Strip’s 2.3 million residents so desperately need could be delivered there by sea. That announcement came after it became clear that Biden’s much-touted efforts to negotiate a “halt” in hostilities that– per Israel’s longstanding instructions to him– would only be temporary, led absolutely nowhere. The leaders of Hamas, whose fighters in Gaza continue to impose non-trivial casualties on Israel’s assault forces, have said for some weeks that while they are eager for a ceasefire they need it to be longlasting and to be embedded in strong, UN-based provisions for the withdrawal of Israel’s forces from Gaza and real progress toward Palestinians’ exercise of their recognized national rights. (As part of the essay I wrote on Globalities yesterday, I included this brief presentation and assessment of the position recently outlined by Hamas spokesman Khaled Qadomi. Do check it out and leave any reactions you have in the Comments box there.)

In other news regarding the “sea-ramp” plan, several leaders worldwide have noted serious problems with it. As this report in today’s Washington Post notes, Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, said that though she welcomed the plan, “At the same time I cannot but repeat, air and sea is not a substitute for land.” British Foreign Minister David Cameron also noted that delivery by sea or air cannot substitute for ground delivery, by truck. And the International Rescue Committee (headed by former British FM David Miliband) noted that construction of even a temporary pier could take weeks… And meantime, significant numbers of people in Northern Gaza will continue to die from malnutrition and lack of any, even basic medical care. Five months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, what the Strip’s pulverized residents need is not just intermittent aid deliveries dumped at the borders of their enclave but a robust plan to re-establish hospitals, bakeries, emergency feeding centers, housing, schools, and to rebuild all the infrastructure that’s needed to support those facilities– infrastructure that Israel has been systematically targeting and demolishing since Day 1. The Holy Month of Ramadan will start on Sunday or Monday. This will not be the “blessed” season that Muslims everywhere look forward to– not for the Palestinians of Gaza… not for Palestinians anywhere else… and not for the billions of Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide (including in North America) whose hearts are scoured with pain for our sisters and brothers in Gaza.

But… I have so many powerful resources to share with you today! First must be the PalCast episode we released this week, in which Yousef, Tony, and I got to discuss the “Palestinian Voice” with the amazing Palestinian-American poet (and physician) Fady Joudah. On the same day we recorded our convo with Fady, his latest poetry collection was released by Milkweed Editions! This collection is such a gift to humanity. It is enigmatically titled […] and consists of around 50 poems (including ten maqams) that he composed during the first two months of Israel’s current genocide in Gaza. In our 50-minute convo with him, Fady discussed the importance of poetry, memory, Palestinian narratives, silence… and much, much more. You can listen to this episode on Apple or Spotify. (Be aware that the recording start with a– slightly profane– teaser for another of Tony Groves’s projects. The PalCast comes in at 2:25.)If you head over to this post on the JWE blog you can read two of the poems from Fady’s new collection there. One of those, he wrote after hearing of Israel’s killing of our friend and author Dr. Refaat Alareer. And now, as a special treat, you can hear Fady’s own reading of that poem here. (I hope you catch the resonances with Refaat’s own “kite” poem that Fady deployed there.) What an honor to have been in conversation with Fady. Big thanks to our PalCast host Dr. Yousef Aljamal for making it happen! The other resources I want to share today are as follows:  First: Susan Abulhawa’s report in Electronic Intifada of her just-completed visit to Gaza You probably know Susan as a novelist, a poet, or a talented organizer for Palestine-related cultural projects. She took all those skills and more with her during her recent visit to Gaza, and emerged with this deeply insightful piece of more-than-reporting. Read her whole text. But here is a small excerpt: [H]ow does one reckon with losing your entire family, watching and smelling their bodies disintegrate around you in the rubble, as you wait for rescue or death? How does one reckon with total erasure of your existence in the world – your home, family, friends, health, whole neighborhood and country? No photos of your family, wedding, children, parents left; even the graves of your loved ones and ancestors bulldozed. All this while the most powerful forces and voices vilify and blame you for your wretched fate. Genocide isn’t just mass murder. It is intentional erasure. Of histories. Of memories, books and culture. Erasure of potential in a land. Erasure of hope in and for a place. Erasure is the impetus for destroying homes, schools, places of worship, hospitals, libraries, cultural centers, recreational centers and universities. Genocide is intentional dismantling of another’s humanity… #2: This interview in Mondoweiss with Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah Dr. Abu-Sittah is a British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who has been traveling periodically to to Gaza to work in the hospitals there for many years– especially in times when yet another Israeli assault on the Strip caused great need for his skills. Earlier during the current genocide, he spent many weeks working in Al-Ahli hospital. In this interview, medical student Mary Turfah gets Dr. Abu-Sittah to describe and reflect on some of what he experienced there. Again, this whole text is worth reading. But here’s a snippet: When you arrived in Gaza in October, what were you expecting?   I was thinking it was going to be a worse version of the 2014 war. It’s not a worse version of anything. This is a different war. This is a genocidal war. The difference between it and other wars is the difference between tsunamis and floods. They’re both made out of water, but that’s where the similarity ends. I imagine you feel that you’ve been changed by what you’ve seen. Absolutely. I’ve been changed as everybody else has been changed. I mean, I’ve changed because of my experience, but I don’t think there’s anyone else who hasn’t been changed. I don’t think there is a single non-white person living in the West who has been keeping an eye on what’s happening, who hasn’t been changed. When you listen to Lula talk, you realize that this war has changed the South in its relationship with the North. … Compared with those magisterial texts– or with Laila El-Haddad’s beautiful piece in Saveur about how she learned Gaza-Palestinian cooking from her aunt, Um Hani– my own contributions to the written record feel paltry indeed. (Um Hani, as Laila writes there, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in November, along with three of her children. Loss upon loss. Horror upon horror.) But I do feel strongly led, as Quakers say, to carry on trying to scry and understand the political/geopolitical dynamics of what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians of Gaza. So yesterday, I quickly pulled together four pieces of brief analysis on different aspects of the broad topic of Gaza-in-geopolitics, and published them all together as an essay on Globalities. The essay is titled, “Ramadan coming. Gazans starving. U.S. policy in chaos. Hamas sketches political future”… and if you go there, at the top you’ll find a clickable guide to those four brief analyses. Personally, I am most intrigued by the last of those sub-topics, the one about Hamas’s negotiating position. Their position is a very serious, nuanced, and well-studied one, and it’s one that is covered in the corporate media in “Western” countries almost not at all. The Hamas leaders have been trying– for many years now– to move towards some form of (perhaps temporary) acceptance of a two-state situation while also keeping alive the rights and dreams of those many of their supporters who were sent into exile and stripped of their properties in 1948 by the fighting forces that then became “Israel.” It is a complex political dance for the Hamas leaders, and one I became very familiar with at the time the Fateh/PLO leaders were making an almost exactly analogous move some 45 years ago… Well, it all ended very badly for Yasser Arafat and the sidekick who inherited his mantle, Mahmoud Abbas, who now serves as (barely) Mayor of a part of Ramallah while fully on the US-Israeli payroll. Obviously I hope it all works out a lot better for Hamas and their allies in the Palestinian Resistance Front. One big difference between their situation today and that of the Fateh/PLO leaders in the late 1970s is that today, the Global Majority is on the brink of cracking the stranglehold that Washington has exercised since 1973 over all aspects of Arab-Israeli relations… ___________________________________ These past couple of days have seen several important revelations and analyses related to Israel’s still-continuing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. I don’t have time to delve deeply into any of them. But here, to help establish a record, is information about four such revelations/analyses that I see as most consequential: * The WaPo’s (still incomplete) revelations about the scale of Washington’s recent arms transfers to Israel * Biden admin whisperer reveals the chaos in U.S. policy * The humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially in the north, worsens * Spox Dr. Khaled Qadomi lays out Hamas’s negotiating terms ____________________________________ Well, I wrote some about those big global shifts last month, in this piece at Boston Review. I now think that the remaining weeks of March may see some very broad, Gaza-spurred and Gaza-relevant developments in the global balance… Well, I’m off to London soon, as i said, to do some business at the London Book Fair on behalf of Just World Books. My main goal there will be to support and extend the brilliant and timely books that JWB has published over the years– books by Gaza-Palestinian authors, other Palestinian authors, Zionism-questioning Jewish figures, and others… Look beneath my signature for the brochure that I’ll be taking to London. And/or check out all our offerings on the JWB website! Meantime, please know that Just World Ed is a separate entity from Just World Books… and it’s wholly reliant on donations from the public. It is Just World Ed that supports the PalCast, supports our blog and the other great materials on our website, that supports my Globalities platform, and that keeps all these projects– and this newsletter– going. My fellow JWE board members and I have been really touched by the degree of support we have received from donors in recent months. Our big thanks to you all! But if you haven’t donated recently and want to now– or you’d like to increase the size of your regular monthly donation– click on the link below to find out how to do that. My thanks to you. Have a lovely weekend and a Blessed Ramadan– if those two are possible– and anyway stay sane as we work together for the ceasefire and national liberation that our friends in Gaza oh so desperately need– Helena

__________
source
__________

---

---

The US is sending 1,000 soldiers to Gaza on the pretext of building a port to deliver aid, even though there are trucks waiting that could be let in with just a word.

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) March 9, 2024

---