“Israel MUST open the borders and allow the United Nations to deliver supplies in sufficient quantities.”
“The United States, which has helped fund the Israeli military for years, cannot sit back and allow hundreds of thousands of innocent children to starve to death,” Sanders (Vt.) said in a statement. “As a result of Israeli bombing and restrictions on humanitarian aid, the people of Gaza are facing an unprecedented humanitarian disaster.”
Israeli forces have killed more than 30,200 Palestinians in Gaza—most of them women and children—while wounding over 71,300 others and displacing around 90% of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people. Children are now starving to death, and experts say adults, especially elders and other vulnerable people, will soon follow absent urgent intervention.
According to UNRWA, the number of Palestinians currently in need of food assistance is more like 500k. 30k is a good start, especially when you consider that it was just the first drop. Negotiations are reportedly going well to start bringing in boats, but time will tell if Israel is as open to that as they claim.
Any boots on the ground, even those protecting aid workers, carry a risk of more incidents like the flour riots, so that’s not going to happen without operational coordination agreements. Israel would love it if there were an incident between American soldiers and Palestinians. It would be a propaganda goldmine.
All 2+ million are in need of food assistance. 550k aren’t just in need of food assistance, they’re close to famine and famine is different. That’s when you literally die from starvation and it can take weeks of food assistance to recover from famine.
Also what the fuck are you talking about with this “flour riot” bullshit? It was a massacre. Fuck off trying to blame Palestinians for it.
Flour massacre is fair. I’m not exactly stumping for Israel when I say that they would love to use another incident involving US troops as propaganda. Ultimately, Israel is at fault for their deaths no matter how it occurred.
Again, this was just the first drop, so the number of people needing food immediately is what’s relevant. Air drops are a terribly inefficient way to do this, but they are also the safest for everyone. The air drops are expected to accelerate, and other methods of delivery are being negotiated. The appropriate response is “great, but we need more, and we need to make them unnecessary.” Calling them “a fucking joke” is as likely to contribute to ending deliveries as it is to encourage accelerated deliveries.
The safest way to do this would be to force Israel to stop doing genocide.
EDIT Oh look Israel massacred aid-seekers again!
We don’t need to be airdropping aid packages into Gaza. We need to be airdropping something else onto the IDF.
I appreciate (and share) the desire, but the idea that the US can force Israel to leave Gaza isn’t realistic.
US support for Israel is done in pursuit of US interests. Those interests aren’t going away, and are neither particularly sinister nor altruistic. Israel depends on aid but, under Netanyaho, it doesn’t care where that aid comes from. If the US pulls out, Russia has multiple incentives to take it’s place. That is not an acceptable outcome for America, and would arguably be a disaster for Palestine too.
I do not argue that the Biden administration has done everything it should to restrain Israel but, from a cold foreign policy perspective, the leverage the US has is far more limited than people think.
Of course the US always has the capability to project military force into the situation, and Israel has no realistic means to resist that. However, I don’t see where support would come from for such a move. It’s not there internationally, domestically, or even popular with supporters of Palestine.
First off, Russia doesn’t have the capacity to fight in Ukraine and support Israel. It would bankrupt itself.
Secondly, Russia doesn’t have the geopolitical capacity to alienate its allies like Iran by supporting Israel’s genocide. Russia would basically be cutting itself off from every other ally it has except maybe China, and for what? A country that will gladly backstab Russia at the first opportunity?
Your realpolitik excuse is just that. The reality is that Israel is dependent on the US and has no one else that will step in to fill the void.
Iran is the only ally Russia has that has a real interest in what Israel does to Palestine. If Iran has to choose between Russia and Palestine, that doesn’t end well for Palestine. Countries have interests, not friends. Russia would leap at the chance to be Israel’s protector while fighting the “Nazis” in Ukraine. It fits right in with their narrative and would make it harder for Europe to escalate aid to Ukraine.
Even if it’s not Russia, you already named the other option. China would also love to give the US a black eye.
Biden has no interest in this genocide. It does nothing for him, it damages him politically, and his administration has been against it from the start. The reason he isn’t doing what you think he should is exactly what I’m saying.
Biden is deeply flawed, but his delusion about being a man of principles is real. He does not want this to be his legacy.
What about Syria? You know, the country Russia has sunk billions of dollars into and has military bases in? You think they’d just let that asset go?
Russia and China don’t have to give the US a black eye when it keeps punching itself in the face. It’s increasingly isolated on the world stage because the entire world is revolted by what Israel is doing. The ICJ and ICC proceedings are going to make Israel geopolitically radioactive and Biden is tying us to a sinking ship. Every crime of Israel reflects back on the US and it’s going to destroy the so-called “rules based international order”. You’ve invented some nice sounding real politik excuses for Biden, but I have an alternative explanation.
Biden is a Zionist. He has principles and his principles say that there needs to be a white settler-colony in the Middle East to act as the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier.
And it’s backfiring on us and is going to destroy every piece of diplomatic power the US still has in this quickly multipolarizing and dedollarizing world.
That’s a really simple world you live in. I don’t think things are going to wind up the way you do, but only time will tell.
Lots of people share your perspective, but not as many as your bubble leads you to believe. The US has been against the ground war from the beginning, and the world knows it. A UN resolution calling for a ceasefire would be toothless and ineffective, and the world knows that too. It would only serve to undermine the authority of the UN. The ICJ already made demands of Israel (with US backing) and those demands are sitting in Netanyaho’s waste basket.
It seems to me that the dollar has been losing its trade status for decades, while somehow never actually doing so. Weird that.