After months of sharp criticism from Arab Americans and pro-Palestine activists, US President Joe Biden finally responded to calls to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza Thursday with a new proposal during the State of the Union address.
“More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas,” admitted Biden, appearing to endorse a death toll from Gaza’s local health ministry he had previously discredited. “This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined.”
Biden’s solution: a US-built pier on Gaza’s coast allowing Palestinians in the enclave to accept maritime aid shipments from Cyprus and other countries.
The proposal was greeted with skepticism from various quarters.
“We need to live normally like other people in the whole world. Establishing a port in Gaza will not change the reality,” said Bader Al-Saif, a professor of history at Kuwait University. “How long is it going to take to build a port? The aid was needed yesterday.”
“A temporary pier that could take weeks to construct or airdrops are not a solution,” read a statement from the International Rescue Committee. The US must use its influence to ensure that Israel lifts its siege of Gaza… and allows the safe and unimpeded movement of humanitarian workers and aid – including fuel, food, and medical supplies.”
Israel also raised the prospect it could continue to delay and obstruct aid sent to the temporary port, with foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat insisting the shipments would be subject to “security checks” in a post on the X social media platform (formerly Twitter). Israel has used the pretense of security inspections to slow the movement of aid by land into Gaza to a trickle.
The logistical complexity of the scheme – necessitated by Israel’s continued blockade of road crossings – has led many to dismiss it as merely a PR stunt. Former US State Department counterterrorism analyst Scott Bennett offered another criticism of the proposal in an interview with Sputnik Friday.
“In an amazing display of theft or irony, President Joe Biden has taken the very idea which I, Scott Bennett, put forth two and a half months ago on various international TV platforms,” said Bennett, “which specifically laid out a plan to build a navy flotilla of ships from the BRICS nations – plus Iran, Turkiye, and Saudi Arabia – to sail to Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid and build piers… that they lease from the Palestinian government in an effort to re-develop that area for long-term projects.”
“This speaks volumes, and among other things, tells me that Joe Biden and his CIA and his NSA and Israeli Mossad are actively listening and reading Sputnik, RT, Press TV, and other international channels that provide an alternative view that the mainstream American media does not dare discuss,” he speculated.
Bennett agreed the proposal was "a political survivability maneuver by Biden," also calling it “a potential deception operation in which a pier can give a firm permanent foothold in the area and give [the United States] a listening post, if not a control capability of Palestine, which the Israelis will then exploit.”
He speculated the pier could be used as an entrypoint for spies or US troops and compared the idea to Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 2019 “humanitarian convoy” stunt in Venezuela, noting “this is routinely done by the United States in color revolutions.”
The former psychological warfare officer also insisted the plan was a response to the public backlash against Israel’s deadly Western-backed Gaza campaign, which has manifested in the election of George Galloway in the UK and the campaign by Democratic Party activists to vote “uncommitted” in the party’s presidential primaries.
Almost 31,000 Gazans have died amidst Israel’s military operation in the besieged enclave, according to the latest figures from the local health ministry. The number includes several deaths by starvation as Israel has bombed food production facilities in Gaza and prevented food shipments from entering.
Fundamentally, Bennett said the idea is an act of “political posturing” on the part of the Biden administration to distract from the “demonic violence, bloodlust and genetic hatred” demonstrated by the Israeli assault on Gaza. Meanwhile, he noted that US “secret supplies of weapons given to the Israeli government are kept off the books to avoid public scrutiny.”
“It's an act of treason and theft against the American people by stealing from their treasury and secretly depositing it in Israel's treasury,” he claimed, noting that the United States has sent over 100 secret arms packages to the country since October. Only two of the shipments have been publicly reported.
Bennett called the US’ covert military action since 9/11 a “lethal wound which killed the American Republican form of democracy, where government was a servant of a people not its tyrannical jailer, abuser or a pathological liar.”
Although Al-Saif questioned the effectiveness of Biden’s temporary pier gambit, he said the idea was quite revealing about the US response to the latest escalation of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
“It sends a very bad signal on US leadership,” said the academic. “It reinforces what many Arabs think: that Israel is running the show, and the US follows.”
“Our problem is not aid,” said Wissam Thabet, a 40-year-old Palestinian refugee interviewed by The Washington Post. “We need a ceasefire. We need to end the suffering completely.”