I’m of sharply mixed mind about our air-dropping aid to Gaza. On the one hand I think our motives are good. However, I’m concerned that it’s a kneejerk response that hasn’t been thought out very well.
There are many factors behind that reaction. For one thing I think that either the Israelis have erred in their tactics in Gaza or it is their intention to remove or exterminate the Palestinians in Gaza, neither of which is morally defensible. What they’ve done was not the only approach to accomplishing their stated goals that was available to them.
For another thing I can see no moral justification for entering into Israel’s war against Hamas on Hamas’s side and there is danger of our doing that. A state that provides medical and/or material support for a belligerent “indiscriminantly”, to use the phrase being applied to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, is in a sort of gray area of the laws of war. Again, I think we’re well-intentioned but not particularly thoughtful.
One of the things that concerns me about the aid we’re providing to the Gazans it that I’m afraid that President Biden is trying to make a course correction. He was too supportive of Israel at the outset of the war and he may be too supportive of the Gazans now. As is not uncommon it’s harder to correct mistakes after they’ve been made than not to make them in the first place.
So, what should we think?
60,000 single meals for 2,000,000 starving people is a sick joke, especially when the genocide of the native Palestinians by the Ashkenazi colonists continues unabated.
The US (and we) are fully complicit in these brutal murders: 30,000 dead and 70,000 wounded. A few days ago, IDF troops gunned down people waiting for a food distribution. Over 100 were killed outright, and over 700 were wounded. The IDF has destroyed most of the hospitals and clinics in Gaza, and it is preventing medical supplies from entering it.
A dismayingly large number of Americans justify the horror show, because the victims are Muslims. But a significant minority of Palestinians are Christians, and Israeli Jews have attacked Christians, their churches, their schools, their homes, and their hospitals.
Israel was going to attack Gaza in response regardless of what we did. Given the nature and brutality of the attack our initial support was merited. Note that as far as I can remember we have always opposed cutting off food and water and medical supplies. The air drop of food wont do much but it’s what is possible. I have no doubt that Hamas has enough food piled away for many months yet and it’s the ordinary Palestinians that are starving.
Steve
“What they’ve done was not the only approach to accomplishing their stated goals that was available to them.”
You’re begging the question here.