More news on humanitarian aid to Gaza:
The U.S. military will build a temporary port and pier on Gaza’s coastline to provide a new route for humanitarian aid, President Biden is set to announce in his State of the Union address Thursday evening, according to senior administration officials. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, said the plan is part of Biden’s orders to “flood the zone” with assistance arriving by air, land and sea.
This is late, but better late than never.
I realize the "free Palestine" crowd will never buy this, but I think it shows yet again Biden's basic human decency. He's obviously a longtime supporter of Israel and, regardless of the politics, feels strongly that Hamas needs to be destroyed. At the same time, he has slowly but inevitably come around to the view that Israel is deliberately starving the Gazans and the US can't allow that to happen.
He'll get credit from no one for this plan. Progressives will deride it as a token gesture against genocide while hawks will condemn it as weakness in the face of terrorism. In reality, it's just Biden being Biden in a no-win situation.
But in the end, it will be important. It will ramp up steadily, just like other aid programs always have, but it will prevent mass starvation in Gaza. Finally.
I think it would be good for Biden to say exactly what Kevin ends with. Say "I know that hardly anyone will be happy with this. My friends to my left will say it's too little too late, and that's fair. My friends to my right will say it undermines Israel's right to defend itself, but we have to do what we can to alleviate suffering of people who are caught in the middle of this. We have to do what's right regardless of the political fallout, and that's what I've chosen to do."
Agree.
At the very least, it'll put Israel in a tough spot. What are they going to do, interdict the US armed forces? They going to shoot at American troops? Literally take food from the mouths of starving Palestinian children?
The Guardian says US troops won’t have to step ashore; the UN and NGO’s will operate on the land side to distribute the aid. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/07/biden-us-port-gaza-aid-delivery
After the hysteria about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, caution is good.
Exactly! This is a very important gesture; more than a gesture actually. The US explicitly stakes out a position that is incompatible with Israeli disregard for Gazans' suffering.
"Literally take food from the mouths of starving Palestinian children?"
Israel is already doing that every time they don't let an aid truck through.
Yeah, but this time they won't be able to block the trucks.
You sure about that? They can make it quite difficult for the trucks to leave the port area.
True that extremists on each end of the political spectrum won’t be satisfied, but most people aren’t on the extreme ends. I think this step will be broadly popular in the US.
Could he be -- Gasp! -- targeting the middle!?!?! [1] But I thought that Sleepy Joe wasn't that smart, canny, or forceful! Even the liberal New York Times says he's past his sell-by date!
[1] I'd be a fool if I didn't think there was considerable rumination on the politics of the thing. But I also don't believe for one second that President Biden wouldn't have done this if he didn't think it was the right thing to do.
'Would have done this', obviously. The hazards of walking away from and going bact to a draft, sigh.
Yes, Biden will get little credit from extremists. But he has to chart a middle course. The election will turn on swing voters. Saying there are too few of them to matter ignores the closeness of recent elections.
Those who see only the Palestinian side are oblivious to how the pro-Israeli or anti-Hamas faction would react if he changed sides suddenly - Biden has to be aware of things like this. He has gotten where he is - a successful President of the US - by knowing how to balance things, not by taking sides violently.
It is remarkable how many people think that they know how to win elections better than the people who have actually won elections.
Love that last paragraph! There are still people who think Sec. Clinton ran a poor campaign, though she won the popular vote by millions, despite the best efforts of Russia, the New York Times, the FBI, and of course the howling hyenas of the rightwing media (apologies to four-legged hyenas).
"There are still people who think Sec. Clinton ran a poor campaign"
Not to relitigate the past, but I think what you are saying is the exact opposite of the point in skeptonomist's last paragraph. Clinton lost. There was a fair amount of bad luck and ratfuckery involved, but by the harshest and most final calculus, yeah, she ran a poor campaign. That's what you call a campaign that loses.
I am skeptical that this is going to work out well, at least in terms of getting food to Gazans. (The optics are different.) Without troops on the ground, a makeshift port facility is extremely vulnerable. Even if neither Israel not Hamas targets it, a big if, criminal gangs will. I don't see that it will have the tools needed to deal with the masses of desperate looters that will flood it.
I'm all for giving it a try, but my expectations are low.
Hmmm. Bait for a trap, possibly?
Troops will be on the boats?
Unless they intend to get into gunfights from the boats, that isn't going to do a lot of good. If they do intend to get into gunfights from the boats, expect repeats of the massacre from last Thursday.
He will get credit for me even though I think it is late, and somewhat little, it is something and that is a lot more than the Palestinians could expect from Trump. There is still the issue of whether it is safe enough to move around Gaza to get the food to the people. But hopefully it is enough of a PR nightmare for Israel to interfere with this aid that they will provide some protection, at least in the form of making a point of not bombing it.
You don’t get credit for doing the right thing when you had to be forced to do it- you’re trying to give him moral dessert. He should have supported the Palestinians before 12,000 kids died. Instead, his hand was forced, mostly by the Michigan vote. It’s good politics but he’s a bad person.
Biden's very late to the party and only grudgingly doing this, probably in the wake of all the "uncommitted" votes in recent primaries. If this were 2022 I seriously doubt Biden would be fussed about the Gazans.
Bullshit. Those 12000 kids would be fine if not for Hamas. Supporting Israel was the right thing to do. He may changing tack a bit late, but he's done well.
Bullshit. Hamas didn't kill 13000 kids. They're barely responsible for a tenth that.
Israel chose to kill over thirty thousand for an attack responsible for less than a twentieth that.
Those children were not fine even before the Al Aqsa Flood. They were already malnourished and condemned to live in a prison camp by the racist Israeli nationalists colonizing Palestine.
This is a awful way to look at this situation. Similar to blaming the Jews for their suffering in the holocaust.
THEY MADE ME KILL THE WOMEN, CHILDREN, THEY MADE ME DO IT! THEY ARE TO BLAME FOR THE BOMBS I AM DROPPING ON CIVILIAN AREAS!
Ummmm, no, this is a lie.
Biden providing aid is a good thing on its own. It certainly doesnt make up for providing the weapons that are being used to slaughter so many innocent people.
Michigan vote?
And how many voters actually peeled off?
101,000 in Minnesota.
46,000 in Minnesota, which makes it the only state in which the share of the vote in the Democratic primary going to Uncommitted is up substantially over the last time a Democratic incumbent was running, in 2012. Across all states that have voted so far, that share is down relative to 2012.
Overall, Biden is doing a pretty good job, from a political standpoint, of threading the needle on an issue that poses high danger to his coalition, no matter what choices he made.
48,000 in a state he won by 233,000 (with 75,000 going to third parties) in 2020. He will win Minnesota by a similar margin this year.
Haley got 97,000 votes on Tuesday and I suspect as many of them won’t vote for trump as of the 48,000 won’t vote for Biden.
My bad. 46,000 in Minnesota and 101,000 in Michigan.
I don't think the Michigan "uncommitted" vote moved things very much.
I don't think it was significantly higher than it was in 2012, when Obama was running for re-election.
The states where "uncommitted" of one form or another was an option on Super Tuesday seem to have given in the area of 8% of the vote that way. Some of that was no doubt not even related to Gaza: people who recognized the outcome was already certain, so they wouldn't vote (admittedly, a lot of these just wouldn't have voted at all, but some might come out for down ballot elections); and people who aren't happy with Biden (FauxNoise audience?) for one non-Gaza reason or another.
Really, Trump would be so much worse for the Gazans than Biden that Biden would only lose some fools who are more concerned with making a point than with helping Gaza if he did nothing at all to help the Gazans' plight.
Does this count as invading Palestine? Or invading Israel?
This isn't just logic-chopping. I need to know to accurately calculate whether Biden is only just as bad as Bush, or actually worse than Bush.
Since you're one of those who thought Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan was 'catastrophic', I know just how much weight to put on your words.
Track record, folks. Everyone's got one.
What is truly bizarre is that they could just route supplies in through the southern entrance to Gaza, but are can't because.....?
Not to say this effort isn't without value.
They can't because the Israeli/Egyptian peace treaty gives Israel the authority to limit what goes through the Rafah crossing. Egypt, for very good reasons, isn't willing to tear up that peace treaty.
If it continues to create positive visuals* like some of the recent parachute drops, then it will be a win for Biden publicly, even if the deeply engaged folk remain unhappy.
* positive to normies that aren't paying that much attention or thinking through the implications of everyone being so desperate that parachute are such a positive thing.
He gets credit from me.
Biden is pretty clearly stuck in his early 1970s perception of Israel, when it was run by socialists, many of whom probably did want the Palestinians to have their own state.
That's clearly nothing like the Israel of today, and Biden is at the very best late coming to that realization.
He also seems to share Obama's flaw of being unwilling to see malevolence in those around him: the Trumpublicans really were more interested in making Obama fail than in serving the interests of the country; and Israel and its supporters in America are more interested in helping Israel at every opportunity than in trivial things like human rights and not killing children.
But Biden really does possess a strong sense of human decency, and even through the fog of those two clouds he could see that something unacceptable is happening in Gaza. There will probably be 100,000 dead before the situation is stabilized, but I can forgive Biden for not believing that the IDF would block essential aid going into Gaza and, when they weren't the ones blocking it, refusing to police Israeli citizens who were blocking the aid. I'm no fan of Israel, but it was surprising even to me that they would be so evil.
I hope in the future he remembers what Israel demonstrated about itself. Much of the rest of the world will.
...how does any of that change Biden's situation caught between the warring parties, though?
I think he at least is no longer clinging to Israel's legs in the space between the warring party of Israel and the people of Gaza.
I reject your suggestion that there are two warring parties. You could say Israel and Hamas are the two warring parties, but Israel has jet fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks, armored vehicles, some of the most sophisticated air defense in the world, guided missiles, etc.; Hamas has a few thousand rifles, maybe a few hundred grenade launchers, maybe some drones, and some homemade or smuggled in dumb rockets.
It's a bit like if the US went to "war" with our remaining Native American tribes: even if they had given us some excuse for attacking them, we wouldn't call it "war."
Biden has long been adept at knowing where the middle of the Democratic Party is, and trying to occupy that space.
That makes it hard to know if Biden is stuck in the 70s, or if he's just trying to work with a public that is stuck in the past. Surveys of Democratic voters these days still show a ton of support for Israel. The Pro-Palestinian protesters get a lot if press attention, but they are not the majority. Most Americans pay very little attention to the news, and are running off of decades-old assumptions about the world.
That is why Biden has been so focused on trying to do quiet diplomacy. It takes a long time for regular people to wise up.
Underappreciated and important predicate here is that there can be a difference between what Biden thinks and what he says, and on this particular issue I think there's a huge difference, and should be. He presides over the richest nation in the history of the known universe and is c-in-c over immense military power. How can he not guard his words and be careful about what effect they might have? In fact one of the biggest raps on him throughout his public career has been that he isn't careful enough. Imagine if he cut loose with what he really thinks of Netanyahu! No, in that position you shape your words to achieve what you think is the best outcome, or the least-worst; you don't shape them to express your own thoughts and feelings.
Think of the contrast with the trump fan-bois who idolize him in large part because what he says is often so completely simple-minded and transparently self-centered and self-righteous that it's obvious the only good they're aimed at achieving is for himself.
In the end, I think Biden as president is far more shrewd than he gets credit for from most quarters.
In the end, I think Biden as president is far more shrewd than he gets credit for from most quarters.
THIS
It takes two here. As tattered a fig leaf it may be, Hamas’ continued fighting provides pretext for Israel to continue to block aid.
But we are all smart enough to see through this false 'pretext', arent we?
Fighting Hamas doesnt require starving the people of Gaza. This is a choice.
Cruelty always has a pretext, an excuse.
I'm glad Biden listened to me, and that's the important thing.
https://jabberwocking.com/what-could-biden-do-to-stop-the-fighting-in-gaza/comment-page-1/#comment-151044
The timing of this new policy to aid Gaza with humanitarian support raises suspicion it is more a stunt than a solution to end the deliberate starving of Palestinians. The policy was announced right before the State of the Union address and will be included in Biden's remarks. The MSM also recently broadcast videos of Palestinian children with multiple amputations starved to death, along with newborns, which must have alerted the White House such displays of US supported policy have to be countered with some type of relief. Critics of Biden's policy to support Israel welcome the aid and hope it saves Palestinian lives, but still have to point out Biden wants to send more weapons to Israel so Israel can kill more Palestinians. Feeding future victims can be claimed humanitarian but US policy supporting Israel's genocidal aggression must still be condemned.
Not a stunt. A line in the sand, methinks.
That sounds like exactly what Kevin said you would say...
"At the same time, he has slowly but inevitably come around to the view that Israel is deliberately starving the Gazans and the US can't allow that to happen."
So does this mean that Biden (and Kevin) are finally admitting that this is a genocide. From the UN defintiion of genocide:
"Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;"
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml
Seems like it fits what Israel is doing to a T.
Seems like the whole "Hamas must be destroyed" goal keeps bumping into something that nobody wants to talk about, which is that Hamas is de facto based in Qatar and therefore cannot be destroyed without extremely strong measures of some kind against a country that is about two thousand miles away from Israel.
Anyway, dropping aid by air and building a harbor are what you do when you're trying to help a civilian population against an unfriendly adversary, not a country that purports to be a strong ally. If we're going to, on the ground, treat Israel like in former years we treated Serbia or Libya or Syria, maybe we should treat them differently in other ways.
Speaking as a progressive, this is one hell of a huge token. Go, Biden, Go.
It will take TWO MONTHS to build the pier. In the meantime thousands will die of malnutrition and thousands more will die from the bombs that Biden is sending to Israel.