The People of Gaza Starved as US Built a Public Relations Ploy in the Form of a Pier

 Juan Cole

July 12, 2024

The Navy Times reports that the US aid pier at Gaza will be permanently decommissioned. The $270 million pier could not be reattached this week because of heavy seas.

 

U.S. and Israeli troops assemble the Trident Pier off the shore of the northern Gaza Strip on April 26, 2024. (Photo: U.S. Army Central Command)

President Joe Biden announced the pier in his State of the Union address, pledging that “massive amounts” of humanitarian aid would come through it for Gaza civilians. The Pentagon is reported to have been taken aback by the announcement, on which they were apparently not consulted.

The little aid that came in through the pier could not easily be distributed because the Israelis have not permitted any governing force to replace Hamas, lest it prove the kernel of a Palestinian state. The security chaos created by the rolling Israeli military operations, which keep chasing people from one place to another, enabled armed gangs to form with an eye to usurping the aid.

The pier broke up in late May because of heavy seas, a problem that critics predicted before it was built. The pier’s humanitarian purpose was belied when it was usurped for a botched Israeli mission to rescue four hostages, in the course of which the Israeli military killed 270 innocents. That use of it ruined it for humanitarian purposes because it was then seen as an adjunct to the Israeli army and was marked as a target for Hamas. UN and other aid workers after that could not afford to have anything to do with the pier. The World Food Program had to hire anonymous contractors to take away the pallets brought in over it, lest they spoil.

It seems clear that the entire operation was a failed exercise in public relations by the Biden administration, which has sat on its hands while the extremist Netanyahu cabinet, full of the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, has half-starved or in some instances whole-starved the Palestinians of Gaza. A US administration has to have an answer when reporters ask it why it is allowing Palestinian children to become emaciated, and the pier was an attempted answer.

The other possibility was for the Biden administration to man up and just tell Netanyahu and his rogues’ gallery cabinet that they cannot starve innocent civilians as part of their campaign against Hamas, and that if they do not cut it out there will be hell to pay. But Biden is in the tank for the Israeli government. He keeps talking about knowing Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, and though neither was, let us say, nice to Palestinians, they were not genocidal maniacs in the mold of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Biden may or may not be up to the job of the presidency in general, but he certainly is not up to dealing with Netanyahu, whom he has literally enabled to get away with murder (tens of thousands of murders). And Secretary of State Antony Blinken has all the sympathy for the human rights of Palestinians that Henry Kissinger had for those of the Cambodians, East Timorese or the Chileans.

The pier is gone, but the aid requirements remain. This week a group of United Nations special rapporteurs and other experts said that “The recent deaths of more Palestinian children due to hunger and malnutrition leaves no doubt that famine has spread across the entire Gaza strip.”

They pointed to the documented deaths of three Palestinian from malnutrition, saying, “With the death of these children from starvation despite medical treatment in central Gaza, there is no doubt that famine has spread from northern Gaza into central and southern Gaza.”

Nor, they argue, is this outcome, of stick-thin little kids expiring from Israeli abuse an accident. They write, “We declare that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza. We call upon the international community to prioritise the delivery of humanitarian aid by land by any means necessary, end Israel’s siege, and establish a ceasefire.”

World Health Organization leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus likewise weighed in on Thursday, saying, that 74 aid trucks destined for Gaza are stalled at the Rafah crossing or in Ismailia.

The Israeli military has seized the Egyptian checkpoint at Rafah and is declining to let aid enter there, in contravention of the 1978 Camp David Peace Treaty.

Dr. Hanan Balkhy, the director of the World Health Organization for the Eastern Mediterranean region, is recently back from an 11-day visit to Gaza and the West Bank. She reported “running sewage and garbage in the demolished streets and the smell of fermented waste permeating the air,” saying, “This situation is providing the perfect breeding ground for diseases to spread, leading to an increase in cases of acute watery diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections among many others.” She spoke of a breakdown in law and order that makes it difficult to distribute food and medical supplies, and hinted at widespread violence and rape.

Hundreds of Palestinians needing dialysis or radiation treatment for cancer are thought to have died since the Israeli campaign began.

WHO says that there are at least 10,000 patients in Gaza with conditions, including cancer and severe malnutrition, that cannot be treated under current conditions in the Strip, and who need to be evacuated abroad immediately.

 

We Must Understand Israel as a Settler-Colonial State

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

While attending the University of Oklahoma in 1956 – 57, I met a Palestinian petroleum engineering student named Said Abu-Lughod. Said, whose older brother Ibrahim Abu-Lughod would become a renowned professor at Northwestern University, told me how Israeli settlers had violently forced his family out of their ancestral home in Jaffa during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This had happened only eight years earlier, when Said was 12 years old. His family fled as refugees to Jordan. ‘

Said also gave me a book—What Price Israel? by Alfred M. Lilienthal — that truly changed my thinking. Now there are many excellent studies by Palestinian and other historians, but in the 1950s there was nothing else like it. (Later, I met the author while attending the 1983 United Nations’ Conference on Palestine— also attended by Yasser Arafat and a large Palestine Liberation Organization delegation — and was able to thank him.)

This experience as a teenager was my introduction to the concept of settler colonialism and made me a supporter of Palestinian self-determination and right of return. It’s also what led me to study history and eventually to write my doctoral dissertation on Spanish settler colonialism in New Mexico, still a major issue there today.

When I left Oklahoma in 1960 to attend San Francisco State College, I had expected — without basis — the city to be a hotbed of anti-colonial fervor. This was long before the famous strikes of 1968, but there was a very visible group on campus of mostly white activists attached to the U.S. Communist Party. I was attracted to the zeal with which they supported the burgeoning Black civil rights movement in the South, and, though I was married and working part-time, I attended their rallies on campus as often as I could. What puzzled me about them, however, was their vocal celebration of the state of Israel. Many had visited and lived and worked for a time in the socialist kibbutzim there. Most of these students were not themselves Jewish; the one who became my best friend was from a working-class Greek immigrant family in Indiana.

Just as the U.S. celebrates itself as “a nation of immigrants,” Zionists celebrated Palestine as a land without people for a people without land.

Their support for Israel was emblematic, I came to understand later, of the seductive mythology that settler-colonial states cultivate and depend on. These young people were drawn to the story about a state created to protect Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Also, the mystic chords of American settlement resonated strongly then, largely due to the ​“new frontier” rhetoric of John F. Kennedy. The grandson of immigrants was elected president and inspired young people. In accepting his nomination in Los Angeles, Kennedy intoned: ​“I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. … We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.” In the young students’ minds, the state of Israel was duplicating that promise. They had little knowledge of the Indigenous peoples who were driven out of their villages and homelands here in North America and even less about the existence of Palestinians.

Although there are stark differences and time frames for the establishment of settler colonialism, there is a common thread that defines the process. To understand this, it’s helpful to distinguish, as historian Lorenzo Veracini does, between ​“settlers” and ​“immigrants”: While migrants enter existing political orders, ​“settlers are founders of political orders” and carry their sovereignty with them.

Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of South Asian origin who grew up in Uganda, puts it this way in his book Neither Settler Nor Native: ​“If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead, they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.”

Still, the United States celebrates itself as ​“a nation of immigrants,” just as Israeli Zionists celebrated Palestine as ​“a land without a people for a people without a land,” a homeland for Jews from all over the world, a nation of refugees — rhetoric that echoes U.S. ​“nation of immigrants” mythology. Rhetoric that ignores settler colonialism, writes Mamdani, ​“is essential to settler-colonial nation-state projects such as the United States and Israel,” which cloak themselves in the nonpolitical project of immigration to hide their true project of fortifying the colonial nation-state.

Though the apt term ​“settler colonialism” wasn’t invented until rather recently, the practice of settler colonialism dates back many centuries. It didn’t begin in Palestine in 1948 or with Dutch Afrikaners establishing the apartheid regime in South Africa around the same time, but was an invention of British colonialism, starting with the 1607 establishment of the ​“Plantation of Ulster” in colonized Ireland. It soon became a model for the Anglo colonization of North America.

The founding of the United States as a capitalist settler state less than two centuries later marked the beginning of a hundred-year war to erase North America’s Indigenous nations and communities, violently seizing their farms and grasslands, replacing them with Anglo and other Western European settlers and creating a massive economy. This was made possible by violently kidnapping, enslaving and transporting Africans, practically depopulating the west coast of Africa.

Anglo settlers also established colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with their own ethnic cleansing of Indigenous populations. The French and Spanish, meanwhile, established their own settler colonies in Central and South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific and North Africa, the most famous being Algeria.

These settler colonies all had a common purpose, what the Nazis called Lebensraum—that is, the territory that a state or nation believes is needed for its perceived natural development. This was initially tied to the rise of capitalism in Great Britain and the creation of the plantation and single-crop agriculture for profit. In the case of Britain’s settler colonialism in Northern Ireland, that single crop was the potato. The 13 settler colonies that Britain planted in North America starting in 1607 were required, with enslaved Africans’ labor, to produce tobacco and indigo (for dye) to market in Europe initially and then, with the conquest of the Caribbean islands, rice to feed the enslaved Africans.

Though not the dominant form of Western imperialist conquest, settler colonialism has distinct advantages over other forms, such as European military and administrative control over India and Africa — and, if measured in terms of the land, resources and wealth accumulated by the colonizing nation, it’s been the most effective. The British colonization of Ireland helps explain why: By enticing landless Scots, Welsh and Anglo settlers to usurp land from Irish farmers, Britain evicted the Irish off their small holdings in Northern Ireland — exploiting the settlers’ zeal to take free land forcibly. With British colonization across the Atlantic, landless Britons were encouraged to do the same thing in North America. After its founding, the new United States used the same settler-colonial tools to seize the rest of the continent within a century.

It is no coincidence that these imperial powers, with their histories of violent anti-Semitism, became the strongest backers of a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab region. A heavily-armed, Western-leaning state was just what they needed to protect their interests against a rising tide of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialist sentiment.

Jewish settler colonialism, culminating in the state of Israel, was a compressed version of these earlier Anglo-settler colonies, encouraged by the British under the mandate of Palestine. Jewish people had always lived in the area, along with dozens of other communities, including new monotheistic religion offshoots of Judaism with the rise of Christianity and Islam. The late 19th-century rise of political Zionism called for all Jews to return to and dominate Palestine.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency, announced the establishment of the state of Israel, immediately recognized by U.S. President Harry Truman and, a year later, by the United Nations. But settler colonialism in Palestine did not begin with Jewish Holocaust refugees. In 1908, oil was found in Iran, a discovery that would condemn the Middle East to more than a century of imperial interference and violence. British, French and U.S. oil companies came to dominate the region. It is no coincidence that these imperial powers, with their histories of violent antisemitism, became the strongest backers of a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab region. A heavily armed, Western-leaning state was just what they needed to protect their interests against a rising tide of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialist sentiment. Imperial Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, supporting a ​“Jewish homeland” in Palestine.

At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Jews made up about a tenth of the population of the territory. The British did not consult with the Palestinian Arab majority. By 1947, the Jewish population was about 33%. Nevertheless, the partition plan passed that year by the UN General Assembly gave them about 55% percent of the land.

It’s vitally important that Israel be understood as a settler-colonial state because it would be impossible to understand the current conflict in Gaza without understanding its settler-colonial context. As historian Rashid Khalidi observes, the conflict is not between two equal national movements fighting over the same land, but rather is ​“a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.”