The U.S. military finished installing a floating pier for the Gaza Strip on Thursday, with officials poised to begin ferrying badly needed humanitarian aid into the enclave besieged over seven months of intense fighting in the Israel-Hamas war.
The final, overnight construction sets up a complicated delivery process more than two months after U.S. President Joe Biden ordered it to help Palestinians facing starvation as food and other supplies fail to make it in as Israel recently seized the key Rafah border crossing in its push on that southern city on the Egyptian border.
Fraught with logistical, weather and security challenges, the maritime route is designed to bolster the amount of aid getting into the Gaza Strip, but it is not considered a substitute for far cheaper land-based deliveries that aid agencies say are much more sustainable. The boatloads of aid will be deposited at a port facility built by the Israelis just southwest of Gaza City and then distributed by aid groups.
I’d at it’s more 'there are two regional powers here, Israel and Iran. The more aid we give Israel the easier it makes Iran"
And that zero-sum game thinking is idiotic.
Frankly, if we (read: mainly the US and the UK) made amends with Iran (and I know precisely how enormous of a conditional statement that is), and successfully ameliorate and rationalize their policy towards Israel (i.e. convince them to call off their own frankly genocidal policy towards Israel), that could be the the start of the path towards a much more robust peace in the middle east. It’ll likely take several generations to mellow things to a truly sustainable and reasonable level. But something like that might, I believe, be the start of the path to lasting peace in the Middle East - or at the very least, significantly diminished violence and conflict.
We had a tiny chance when Obama and Rouhani were talking. Hell, at one point we had a treaty. There was a road map and some hope.
Then Trump fucked it all up for no reason, along with all the other shit he pulled.
I mean… he fucked it up because one of the primary motivations of his entire goddamn presidency was to just shit in as many punch bowls that Obama was even remotely affiliated.
Also, he’s deeply racist, and he’s also sore that Obama got a zinger in at the Press Correspondents dinner that one time (for real - but for one joke that a psychopath took poorly, we might have avoided the Trumpian era).