The “Humanitarian” Pier Is Really About Biden’s Election — And Colonizing Gaza

-Analysis-

As the decisive stages of the U.S. elections approach, U.S. President Joe Biden is trying to wash his hands of Gazan blood. He is looking for ways to persuade American Muslims, whose votes in November may be crucial in certain key states like Michigan, to change their negative attitudes against the current U.S. administration.

Biden, torn between his election prospects and his ideological desire to support Israel, announced in his State of the Union address that he had instructed the military to establish a temporary pier on the coast of Gaza to receive shipments of food, water, and medicine as signs of an Israeli-made famine appear across the war-torn Palestinian enclave.

The pier move came after the U.S. Central Command announced on March 5 that it carried out aid airdrops over Gaza.

What is of course notable about Israel’s quick and positive response to Biden’s announcement is that the same government has spent months obstructing the entry of aid by land. So what made the Gaza sea route different from the land?

The most important questions remains: What’s the reason for establishing a sea corridor when land entry ways exist, most notably the Egyptian Rafah crossing?

Yet other key questions arise: Will the pier play a role other than just facilitating humanitarian relief? Who will distribute the aid on the ground and organize the operation?

To respond, three important facts must be noted: the first is that the U.S. does not want to deploy its forces on the ground; the second is that the U.S. refuses to deal with Hamas and classifies it as a terrorist group; and the third is that the U.S., like Israel, wants to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).

Israel’s de facto rule in Gaza

To clarify the U.S. objectives in creating the pier and sea corridor, look at the following four factors:

First, the U.S. is negotiating with Israel to organize the distribution of aid coming from the sea and to regulate crowding on the beach, which is what Biden referred to when he announced that Israel would work to secure the distribution process.

The plan prevents Palestinians from organizing themselves, gives Israel policing roles, through which it decides unilaterally who deserves assistance and who deserves starvation to death, and enables Israel to undermine any role of the Hamas government on the ground.

That means Israel, or whoever it allows, will form a de facto government to erode Hamas’s powers.

Second, the plan is consistent with an Israeli desire to gradually isolate Gaza from the Rafah crossing, or at least reduce dependence on the crossing. Israel looks at the crossing with suspicion, and considers it a smuggling corridor more than a corridor for international food aid. Israeli military sources confirmed that the Egyptian border is Hamas’s main source of armament, a claim denied by Egyptian officials.

Military and political goals, disguised as a purely humanitarian act.

Establishing an aid line away from the Rafah crossing would help turn the border area into an arena for military operations and Israeli security influence.

Third, the Biden administration is suffering from a crisis with voters who support Palestine and Palestinian rights, especially after the relative success of the Non-committed campaign that refused to vote for Biden in recent Democratic Party primary elections in Michigan.

Biden needs to change his negative image and present the image of the good American who provides food and medicine instead of the image of the villain who gives the weapon to Israel that kills the Palestinian civilian.

Fourth, the American artificial pier appears to be another monitoring and warning point for any possible breach of Israel’s blockade by the Palestinian resistance. Israel has long accused Iran of smuggling weapons to Gaza across the Mediterranean, through complex smuggling routes using small fishing boats, or in the form of civilian goods that can be reused to manufacture weapons.

All of these indicators reflect military and political goals, disguised as a purely humanitarian act.

A Marshall Plan for the Middle East

With its new pier, the U.S. is trying to establish a relief line for Gaza while retaining its military support for Israel, creating an extremely contradictory situation. It provides aid to the Palestinians in the morning with its seaport, while its weapons kill them at night.

Trying to make Palestinians accept the occupation in exchange for promises of economic well-being

The Marshall Plan is based on a simple logic: Isolating our enemies from violent ideology and providing direct services that improve their lives and economic conditions which, while creating a friendly ideology, will gradually transform them into allies.

Therefore, establishing a pier for Gaza lies at the heart of the U.S. plans to create a “Marshall Plan of the Middle East.” The attempt to implement a limited economic recovery plan that would make the Palestinians accept the occupation in exchange for promises of economic well-being is a plan as old as the occupation itself.

These are policies that Israel adopts for a period of time and then destroys them, given to its state of schizophrenia: containing the Palestinians to buy their acceptance, and cracking down on them to suppress their resistance.

Origins in Oslo

This project does not come out of nowhere. Non-binding plans appeared in the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to build a port and airport in Gaza. In 2000, the Palestinian Authority began constructing a small port on Gaza’s coast with Israeli approval and European funding.

Only three months after the construction of the port, Israel, which has long suffered from political schizophrenia, withdrew its approval and destroyed the port. Its implementation disappeared from the regional and international agenda after the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

The idea of the port was revived in 2011 when an Israeli transportation minister called for the construction of an artificial island off Gaza. This coincided with the proposal to build a pier for Gaza in Cyprus, but it did not materialize due to the Cypriots’ pushback and Israel’s refusal to give Hamas a symbol of sovereignty.

The U.S.-built pier is an attempt to repeat the vision of the Marshall Plan, with aid entering the strip with and from an American, not Arab, direction.

According to the U.S. point of view, that would be a way of separating Gaza from its Arab neighbors as much as possible, and ultimately convincing Gazans to surrender.

Israel’s supervision of the distribution of aid on the beach would also enable it to better target the resistance factions in its war of starvation, preventing and giving food to whomever it chooses. The pier would enable Israel to find new allies among the Palestinian beneficiaries.

Imaginary solutions, root causes

Still this will not work like the Marshall Plan in Europe. The Palestinians’ hatred of Israeli colonialism does not stem from a misunderstanding or terrorist tendencies that can be dried up with economic projects. It comes from the heart of reality and the eye of truth.

Palestinians hate Israel’s colonialism, which represents all criminal practices, including humiliation, identity-based killing, ethnic cleansing, land theft, and home demolitions.

Israel fundamentally rejects any better life for the Palestinians.

They also hate claims of racial superiority, which espouse the belief that a Jew has more rights than a Palestinian simply because he is Jewish, racially or religiously, giving him (the Jewish) greater privileges over land, water, and air.

The essence of the Marshall Plan, which is based on winning hearts and minds with aid and a better life, does not exist; not only because Israel fundamentally rejects any better life for the Palestinians, but also it rejects even their right to life.

This is the core of the crisis that the U.S. refuses to address, so it creates imaginary solutions to the symptoms of the crisis, not its rooted causes.