By JAMES MARKIN
In this year’s State of the Union address, Biden, clearly desperate to cast off the infamy he has earned for his active support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, announced a new “humanitarian” measure for the besieged enclave. No, Biden did not promise to force Israel’s hand and guarantee the passage of more aid trucks into the strip. Nor did he promise to push Israel to stop the killing. Instead, he has moved forward with an absurd distraction—constructing a floating temporary harbor off of the Gazan coast and using it to ferry aid into the enclave from Cyprus.
How will Biden’s plan even work?
The details of Biden’s plan are as follows: Biden has promised to deploy the U.S. Navy off of the coast of Gaza, where it will construct a floating harbor. International aid ships will then dock in Cyprus and load up food aid, which will then be transferred to the new harbor. From there, aid will be carried down the artificial dock and onto the beach in Gaza, where “partners” will distribute it to hungry people.
According to reporting by the BBC, the private corporation Fogbow, which is led by former State Department, U.S. military, and CIA officials, will be responsible for leading the “partners” in getting the aid from the pier to civilians in Gaza. This will ensure that the USA maintains its commitment of carrying out the plan without putting U.S. “boots on the ground.” It is clear that non-interference into Israeli military operations has been prioritized over effectiveness in distributing aid.
The entire plan amounts more or less to a military mission to deliver aid in a convoluted and ineffective way. Indeed, this will not only include U.S. troops; the BBC reported that the Israeli Defense Forces will also be involved, helping to create an “outer cordon” to prevent Palestinians from getting near or onto the pier. In fact, the IDF is involved in the plan at all levels. For example, the U.S. promised to let Israel search the food aid before it leaves Cyprus. This means that Israel will be fully capable of cutting off aid as they have in the past to serve their broader strategy of “starving out” Gaza.
The floating pier: Too little and too late
If the goal of Biden’s plan is to provide relief to the victims of Israeli crimes in Gaza, then the plan has already failed even before it has begun. According to reporting from various outlets, it will take around six weeks for the temporary harbor to be finished. By then, thousands will have starved.
It is also the case that the plan simply is not capable of bringing in enough aid into the strip to justify the construction of the pier. As the Hamas led government in Gaza has pointed out, the ships being sent from Cyprus cannot carry more than two standard box trucks worth of aid. Clearly, a much more efficient and effective strategy would be to bring in aid through border crossings with Sinai, or even Israel, by truck. This way, just as happened before the war, hundreds of aid trucks could cross the border in a very short period of time.
This very clear and obvious solution has been stymied intentionally by the Israeli state and reactionary Zionist political groups. While Israel claimed that in March 126 trucks of aid have been going through the border each day, this is only a trickle compared to the 500 or so that went through daily before their war began. Israel’s demands about inspection have slowed aid to a crawl, and Zionist protesters at the border with Egypt have been able to intentionally prevent the admission of food aid for days at a time. Israel could obviously clear these protesters if it chose, but it has not because they further the overall strategy of the Israeli military—starving Gaza into submission.
Israel has demonstrated that this is its plan through its repeated attacks on food aid in Gaza. The most brutal examples of this campaign have been the string of massacres of Palestinians waiting in line for food, including the now notorious “Flour Massacre,” which killed 118 civilians at the end of February. All told, these attacks have claimed the lives of 400 innocents, according to Al Jazeera. This week, Israel continued its strategy of attacking food distribution with a direct assault on an UNRWA distribution center in the besieged city of Rafah, killing one aid worker and injuring 22. This deadly attack demonstrates the real reason behind Israel’s campaign of lies against the UN aid agency; by providing aid to starving Palestinians, UNRWA is undermining Israel’s plan to intentionally starve the population of the Gaza strip.
Behind Biden’s “humanitarianism”
As we have seen, if Biden truly wished to end the suffering of the people of Gaza, there are a million ways he could choose that would be more effective. Indeed, if he wanted, he could force Israel to stop its military campaign in the Gaza Strip altogether. Since the USA is the source of much of Israel’s military hardware, including all of its combat aircraft, Biden effectively controls its military. All he would have to do is cut off further military supplies, including replacement parts and ammunition, and Israel would essentially be unable to continue. However, Biden has not chosen to pull this lever because doing so might endanger the effectiveness of the IDF as a tool of U.S. imperialism in the region and damage the relationship that the Unite States has with its client state. Tens of thousands of dead Gazans are an acceptable loss for Biden to ensure that the Zionist project remains strong enough to shoulder the tasks of policing the region on behalf of U.S. imperialism.
However, the floating harbor plan demonstrates that Israel is not capable of carrying out this task on its own. Indeed, Israel is not a powerful maritime power, and this has consequences for the new boom of natural gas extraction in the eastern Mediterranean.
With Europe’s natural gas needs increasing due to supply shortages caused by the Russian war in Ukraine, the continent has sought out new sources of natural gas. Israel has stepped into this void by massively expanding its capacity for offshore drilling and brokering new economic deals around liquid natural gas (LNG) extraction with Egypt and Lebanon. The leadership of these countries did not seem to be perturbed by the fact that every drop of LNG Israel extracts is a direct theft of Palestinian natural resources.
But despite the massive boom, the growth of the Israeli LNG operation has been challenged following the Hamas offensive on Oct. 7. For a month, Israel was forced to shut down production at the Tamar LNG field, which was within the range of rocket fire from Gaza. However, according to Reuters, production continued at the Leviathan LNG field, of which Chevron purchased a 36% share in 2022 along with 10% of the Tamar field.
Nonetheless, the instability caused by the war has continued to have a negative effect on Israel’s LNG operations. In early March, BP and an oil company linked to the UAE canceled plans to invest in NewMed Energy, the major player in Israeli LNG extraction, due to the ongoing war. Thus, if the extraction operation is to grow and attract further international investment, it is clear that more is needed to guarantee the security of the Leviathan and Tamar LNG fields.
Enter the floating pier: As soon as the pier is constructed, the shallow waters around the temporary harbor will also need to be secured, and this will mean further justification for involvement of U.S. naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean. These forces will be ideally positioned to provide security for Israel’s offshore natural gas extraction operations. Given that U.S. oil giant Chevron is involved in LNG extraction off the coast, the U.S. has a clear motive to ensure that the rigs keep running and profits keep flowing back to U.S. capitalists. Additionally, expanding Israeli LNG production will be massively helpful for the U.S. empire in weaning its subordinate countries in Europe off Russian natural gas. Thus, just as with previous U.S. military interventions that were justified under the facade of humanitarianism, such as in Yugoslavia or Libya, there is clear imperial rationale at work here.
Don’t fall for Biden’s lies, fight for a free Palestine!
After a cursory examination, it becomes clear that Biden’s supposed huge new plan to help starving Gazans is a vile lie. As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians face imminent starvation, Biden refuses to call off the IDF and instead is selling the public the impractical and self-serving floating harbor plan.
This plan will do little to help actual starving Gazans and will only further entrench U.S. military forces in the eastern Mediterranean. Working class people around the world must be careful to not fall for this scheme and to instead fight for the only real solution to the suffering of Gaza: immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces.
Photos: (Top) Children line up for food distribution in Rafah. (Getty Images)
(Below) In 2000, gas exploration began off the coast of Gaza. Last summer, U.S.-brokered talks that included Israel, Egypt, and private oil companies agreed to open the Marine One and Two gas extraction sites in the area, under management of the Palestinian Authority. The project has now been suspended. (AFP)