NEWS ANALYSIS: Even US aid is killing people in Gaza
As 5 were crushed as US air drops aid in Gaza, the US can't help but expose its cynical humanitarianism for what it is.
Has the United States finally grown a conscience?
For a split second, the question occurred to me as I saw Biden announce a plan for a pier on Gaza shore to facilitate human aid at the State of The Union Address. “People are starving,” I thought, “and this could help.”
But a split second later, I remembered the reason people are starving. $14.5 billion of U.S. military aid soon to make it to Israel, the repeated vetoes of ceasefire resolutions in the UN, and the president’s continued endorsement of Israel’s project of expansion, driven by a fundamentally inhumane, colonialist ideology.
This message was driven home this morning when Palestinian and Israeli sources reported that at least 5 people were killed by a US aid airdrop into the besieged strip. The haphazard way in which the tiny amount of aid is being delivered only demonstrates that the health and well being are a complete afterthought for the Biden administration. They are devoted to continuing the massacre, but sometimes they respond to the needs of public relations.
All of this become all the more maddening when you again remember that, despite the “mounting alarm”, Biden could stop all of this with a mere stroke of his pen. Israel doesn’t have the firepower to continue the war on its own. The Washington Post reported that since October, the US has secretly sent over 100 shipments of bombs and other weapons to Israel to support the genocide.
The Post’s headline for the story that reported this reads almost as a parody of itself: “U.S. floods arms into Israel despite mounting alarm over war’s conduct.”
Obviously, building a pier for humanitarian aid, while continuing to slaughter women and children by the thousands should not be taken as an act of benevolence. Political cartoonist Eli Valley’s illustration sums up the cruelty with a grim bluntness:
To be clear, the aid that killed those Palestinians wasn’t the only indication of America’s humanitarian cynicism. With an airdrop last week, the US military generated positive headlines like: “US military aircraft airdrop thousands of meals into Gaza in emergency humanitarian aid operation.” But a closer look shows the reality. They only drooped 38,000 meals — not nearly enough to combat the starvation crisis or to overcome Israel’s blockade on aid trucks. A few days later, on March 5, 36,800 additional meals were dropped.
At a rate of 70,000 meals a week, it would only take 34 weeks for everyone in Gaza to get a meal. Thank you Biden.
For the past seventy-five years, a core component of its imperial strategy has been the cultivation of its image as a benevolent superpower, encouraging “human rights and democracy” around the world. From a marketing standpoint, this was certainly an improvement over the unabashed strong-arming and paternalism that came earlier in the twentieth century. But the marketing material masks a bleak continuity: exploitation, war profiteering, and a callous disregard for the humanity of the people of the Global South.
The situation in Gaza is no different. If the U.S. believes that it can wash the Palestinian blood off its hands with Band-Aid “humanitarian” aid while it is actively participating in the crisis, it is sorely mistaken. All around the world, the friends of Gaza stand in solidarity, and they will continue to expose the barbarity of the U.S. and Israel until Palestine is free.