I have organized airlifts of women legislators, judges, and journalists out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell; delivered ongoing aid to Ukrainian front-line villages during Russia’s invasion; worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwandan refugees after the genocide; and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army.
None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip.
It’s easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children. Yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I’ve come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel’s end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.
The Biden administration isn’t just complicit by refusing to condemn Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid — an absurd situation leading the U.S. to incur significant costs and unnecessary risks for symbolic airdrops. He’s actively supporting Israel’s oft-stated but ill-defined war aim of eradicating Hamas, a military effort with little concern for Palestinian lives or the fate of Israel’s hostages held in Gaza.
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell got an honest, if muddled, answer from Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week. She asked him to explain the “incompatible policy” of being “the leading supplier of weapons to Israel” while, at the same time, “leading an international rescue effort” being impeded by Israeli government officials. Her question laid bare the ugly reality of Biden’s complicity in Israel’s campaign resulting in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Blinken looked into the camera and attempted to make the incompatible compatible. “These two objectives are not in conflict,” he insisted, defending the ongoing flow of no-strings-attached aid to Israel, Washington’s biggest foreign aid recipient. “The question is whether Israel, on the one hand, is and can effectively deal with its security needs in defending the country, while at the same time maximizing every possible effort to ensure that civilians are not harmed and that assistance gets to those who need it.”
Blinken has since ratcheted up that rhetoric, promising a United Nations resolution urging “an immediate ceasefire” — while at the same time sending endless arms to Israel.
Biden Sends Weapons, Not Aid
Israel’s war has already cost the lives of over 31,000 Palestinians and brought Biden closer to electoral peril, with 364,000 Michigan and Super Tuesday voters choosing “uncommitted” on their primary ballots, largely a result of grassroots efforts to generate a political cost for the White House’s support for the Israeli war.
Biden and his advisers’ refusal to change policy on aid to Israel or rethink the diplomatic cover it provides for Israel at the United Nations reveals a U.S. presidency with little regard for civilians in Gaza. There’s nothing beyond a steady trickle of statements of concern about Palestinian civilians and anonymous West Wing officials suggesting ongoing frustration with the execution of the war.
Israel’s devastating bombardment of Gaza wouldn’t be possible without tens of thousands of bombs and guided munitions sent by the U.S. since October 7. The Biden administration organized more than 100 arms transfers but only notified Congress of two, utilizing a variety of mechanisms to mask the scale and frequency of weapons transfers.
While he provided a steady flow of weapons to Israel, Biden withheld funding from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. The largest humanitarian aid body in Gaza, UNRWA was targeted by Israel with unfounded claims — that its employees participated in the October 7 attack in Israel.
Biden’s aid efforts implicitly accept Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings.
Israel has yet to provide any evidence to back up its allegations — Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., called the claims “flat-out lies” — and Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the European Commission have all resumed their funding. The Biden administration, however, continues to withhold financial support, even as UNRWA faces a $450 million budget shortfall. Instead, Biden chose to engage in humanitarian aid theater, endorsing costly, dangerous, and impractical methods for transporting aid into Gaza that won’t require forcing Israel to end its blockade of food and medicine.
In the short term, Biden’s aid policies won’t deliver any meaningful relief for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. The latest effort involves the U.S. military constructing a causeway off the coast of Gaza to deliver as many as 2 million meals per day. The process implicitly accepts Israel’s decision to deny the passage of food into Gaza through more efficient land crossings. The causeway is expected to take two months to implement, a timeline guaranteeing famine for Gaza’s most vulnerable populations.
Israel, to its credit, has been more honest about its goals in Gaza. Internally, the country has made its goals clear: A leaked October 13 concept paper from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry explored the possibility of mass population transfers from Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
In public, the same agenda is stated more crudely. Statements by senior Israeli politicians in the wake of October 7 include calls for mass depopulation of Gaza and exhibited consistent disregard for any distinction between Hamas militants and innocent civilians. One government minister spoke openly of removing up to 90 percent of the Palestinians. Another said Israel was “fighting human animals.” A third said there were no civilians in Gaza and suggested using a nuclear weapon. A top parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party said Israel’s goal is “erasing the Gaza strip from the face of the earth.”
The statements were used in a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, where a preliminary ruling found enough merit to the allegations to let the case go forward.
By imposing food scarcity on Gaza, and bombing refugee camps, apartment buildings, hospitals, universities, and aid distribution centers, it’s clear that Israel is following through on the words of its political leadership.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s occasional expressions of concern with the civilian death toll in Gaza while enabling the war raises a disturbing question: Is the Biden administration knowingly complicit in maximizing civilian killing in one of the most deadly military campaigns in recent history — or stunningly naive and incompetent?
Either way, hundreds of thousands of Democratic Party voters already came to the same conclusion as Andrea Mitchell: It is incompatible to claim concern for Palestinian lives while actively participating in their extermination.
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