Why Did Washington Memory-hole Gaza?
Suddenly a White House “priority”—getting aid to starving civilians—has vanished from the news cycle.
Some are calling it Kamala Harris’s “Sister Souljah moment,” referring to when, in June 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly rebuked racist comments made by a popular female hip-hop artist as a way of distancing himself from extreme elements of the Democratic base.
For her part, Harris appeared to be drawing her own line Wednesday, shutting down chants from pro-Palestinian protesters at a Detroit rally on Wednesday, with a firm, “I’m speaking now.” The chants— “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide”—received this stern rebuke from the vice president: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Harris’s team said the Democratic nominee for president had already met with the protesters earlier so any suggestion she was ignoring this important segment of her constituency was wrong. Her defenders on social media applauded her willingness to call out disruptive tactics that feed into the notion that the party is divided. “At a moment when former President Donald J. Trump is attacking her as ‘radical’ her confrontation with protesters on the left offered a visual rebuttal,” wrote the New York Times’s Rebecca Davis O’Brien.
Heckling protesters and Sista Souljah moments aside, the incident raises another question, just as important—is Kamala hiding from the Israel–Gaza issue? And are the mainstream media and the Biden administration helping her do it?
Consider that just four months ago, her boss had stood up at the State of the Union and pledged a military “surge” of humanitarian aid into Gaza to save starving Palestinians on the ground. “To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip,” Biden said. “Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.”
By July—just four months later—the humanitarian pier project was built and then dismantled amid stunning failure. A major reason: The Israelis never provided safe passage for the aid delivery. The entire spectacle has been memory-holed. But the population in Gaza is getting less aid than it was in March, and is now at risk of suffering from diseases not seen since the 1950s—like polio—and somehow the “priority” has just vanished as a topic at White House and State Department briefings.
Calls for Israel to allow more trucks into Gaza? Silence. Questions about what aid organizations are equipped to deliver global donations waiting at the border? Crickets. Updates on the maritime corridor which in May was hailed as a “multinational and combined effort” between the U.S., Cyprus, Israel, the UN, and international donors, including the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the European Union? None.
“For the White House, no news on Gaza is good news, for food aid or otherwise,” charged Steve Semler, journalist and co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI). He diligently tracked the rise and fall of the military “pier” that was supposed to bring salvation to the 2 million population, but ended up floating away with millions of U.S. tax dollars instead.
“The Biden-Harris administration realizes its Israel policy is a massive political liability, but refuses to compromise with its base on that policy. Instead, the administration tries all sorts of things to make the issue go away,” he told TAC. “It stops talking about food aid in press conferences, it omits details about taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel, it pretends Biden has no leverage over Israel to open humanitarian corridors despite those billions in military aid.”
The focus instead is on the looming conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and the potential for the U.S. to get dragged into the fight, which could include a direct confrontation with Iran. The U.S. is moving more military assets into the region, including giving F-22 Raptors to Israel. CENTCOM chief Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla, has met twice with Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) leaders in the last week.
Appearing only to buy time for Israel to continue laying waste to Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken shuttles back and forth to say the same things over and over about urging Israel and Hamas to sign a ceasefire agreement. After Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, the prospects for a deal have dimmed significantly. The administration puts no obvious pressure on the Israeli government to stop the ongoing bombing of civilian structures, including schools used as shelters (more than 100 were killed in such an attack Saturday), tent cities, water facilities, and private homes, not to mention its complete refusal to ensure aid to the starving and diseased population inside.
According to a Reuters report a month ago, humanitarian aid is barely getting into northern Gaza. While some commercial food supplies are making it into the southern crossings, deliveries are erratic—trucks have to be manned by armed guards paid for by the companies and that means prices, when they actually get to market, are far too high for regular Palestinians to afford. There are now fewer than 80 trucks of any stripe getting into Gaza a day, far below the 600 trucks needed to feed the population.
“Food aid is getting in as a trickle, just a trickle, a few dozen trucks a day,” Chris Gunness, Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project, and former spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), told TAC. “That is why people are literally starving to death.”
Trucks coming from Israel and the West Bank have been attacked by Israeli settlers. If they do make it to the crossings, food piles up and rots while waiting for delivery. Even when trucks make it through the laborious Israeli inspection process, they run into a buzzsaw of security issues inside: Israeli military attacks, armed gangs. Some 70 percent of humanitarian aid trucks, which typically do not have guards (too expensive) are looted. There are few or no police on the streets anymore, the Israeli military have killed or sent them all fleeing, according to this Wall Street Journalreport.
Interestingly, USAID Director Samantha Power, probably the administration’s most prominent humanitarian, plays only a bit part these days. The last time she spoke candidly out about Gaza was to say that Israel was the chief impediment to food deliveries. That was back in May. She has since announced $100 million in U.S. aid, but we know it is not going anywhere. The administration apparently won’t talk about it openly, just to reporters on background.
And yet the administration is actively continuing to fuel the Israeli military with weapons used in Gaza to make the situation worse, releasing a fresh $3.5 billion tranche on Friday and deciding not to withhold aid from an IDF unit accused of human rights abuses in the West Bank. It turns a blind eye to comments made by Likud party members and ministers who have defended the use of rape against Palestinian prisoners and the starving of the entire population as “morally justified.”
Speaking on the Judge Andrew Napolitano podcast this week, Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor, a TAC contributing editor, pointed out how high-level Israelis have talked about how “they're dealing with the Amalek—animals—that deserve the worst, and that anything you do to the animals that are In front of you is justified, so the notion of any sort of moral restraint is completely absent.”
“The only way to deal with that is to confront it directly but we're not going to do that. Our government will not confront it. They may say something in private, but from the standpoint of the current leadership in Israel, they know they exert infinitely more influence and control over the Senate and the House in the United States than President Biden, or, for that matter, President Harris, does,” he added.
Harris did raise hopes when she said the following after her visit last month with Benjamin Netanyahu: “The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”
But is this more rhetoric than substance? Her office’s response to the heckling protester story Wednesday smacked of trying to have it both ways, the default administration tone. It came in a X post by her top advisor, Phil Gordon:
.@VP has been clear: she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel. She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.
Harris is obviously engaged in a delicate dance. Her progressive base is in no mood for triangulation on this issue, yet she is running a national campaign in which many Democratic top donors are especially pro-Israel, as is the leadership and party establishment.
Semler sees a glass half full and doesn’t think, given the political dynamics, the Harris team can ignore the issue for much longer: “In Minnesota, for example, one in fiveDemocrats voted ‘uncommitted’ in the presidential primary. Current Minnesota Governor and [vice-presidential nominee] Tim Walz has no choice but to talk about Gaza, and so the media has no choice but to cover it. So while the food aid issue is for the time being in retreat, I think the broader Gaza issue is here to stay.”
Perhaps especially if a candidate only gets only one “Sista Souljah moment” per campaign.