It’s hard to avoid the impression that Joe Biden’s plan to deploy the U.S. military to construct a humanitarian pier in Gaza wasn’t that well thought ...
It’s hard to avoid the impression that Joe Biden’s plan to deploy the U.S. military to construct a humanitarian pier in Gaza wasn’t that well thought out.
The pier proposal, which the president revealed during this year’s State of the Union Address, conflicts with his desire to limit America’s direct involvement in Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. Soon after the announcement, independent reports indicated that the project would take two months to complete and involve 1,100 U.S. service personnel. According to Israel’s Channel 14, the Biden administration has sought the services of a Qatar-based firm to build the thing — “a company controlled and sponsored by Hamas,” according to correspondent Baruch Yedid. Counterproductive though that might have been, it would preserve Biden’s objective of ensuring that no U.S. troops make landfall on the Gaza Strip.
But even if this pier is constructed at sea and successfully anchored to Gaza at some point (the project remains in the planning stages), the problem of distributing the aid it is meant to facilitate persists. That’s where the Israel Defense Forces come in, apparently. Politico reported on Wednesday that the IDF has agreed to create a “security bubble” around the pier to “protect the U.S. personnel building the pier as well as the individuals involved in offloading and distributing the aid.”
So much for the fiction that there would be “no U.S. boots on the ground” in Gaza. Additionally, the administration’s request for Israeli security to protect Americans would not be necessary if Israel had not experienced attacks on its troops amid efforts to disburse humanitarian assistance in Gaza, both from its besieged civilians and Hamas terrorists. And despite all this effort, Biden is unlikely to benefit from the gratitude of Israel’s critics.
“We can talk all we want about temporary piers and airdrops and more land crossings, but if there aren’t people on the inside who can safely deliver [aid],” said American Near East Refugee Aid president and CEO Sean Carroll before trailing off in his recent interview with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner. “And that’s why the ceasefire is so important.” The Biden administration is committing U.S. troops and treasure to a risky mission that puts additional strain on the IDF, and he will get no credit for the effort from those he seeks to mollify. Maybe the administration believes the mission is self-justifying, but nothing will alleviate the suffering of Gazans faster than a speedy and victorious conclusion to Israel’s war. Anything that makes securing that objective harder runs counter to the White House’s interests.