From Auschwitz to Gaza’s ‘Humanitarian City’
The genocide in Gaza and Israel’s unrestrained colonial and imperial arrogance have reached a point beyond redemption. Benjamin Netanyahu’s endless wars now bleed into Syria, attacking the heart of Damascus with absolute impunity. Meanwhile, the United States, supposedly the world’s leading superpower, remains tragically mired in subservience to successive Israeli governments, often sacrificing core American values and international law.
Nowhere has this dynamic been clearer than in Gaza over the past 21 months. Starting with former President Joe Biden, alongside his Israeli-first Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who had repeatedly enabled Netanyahu’s most extremist and racist tendencies. One of the worst manifestations of this absurdity was the construction of a floating pier—as if Gaza were facing a natural disaster rather than a state-imposed catastrophe. Far from providing real help, the token gesture only entrenched Israel’s starvation siege, and offered Netanyahu relief from international pressure while maintaining the genocidal blockade.
The Biden administration embraced Netanyahu’s scam, and funded the pier with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. It was a farcical undertaking from the start: a $320 million structure that took months of planning and military coordination. By the time it became marginally functional—enough days for a few photo ops—it was soon swallowed by the Mediterranean waves. The pier wasn’t an engineering failure. It was a moral disgrace.
The floating pier, as in the so called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), was a symbol of American naivety and Netanyahu’s mastery of deception. It gave Washington the appearance of trying to help without actually helping. It let Israel continue its starvation siege while numbing the world conscious. Instead of forcing Israel to allow food in, the U.S. chose optics over substance, willingly participating in a theatrical stage-managed sideshow.
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While the pier was sinking, former President Biden and the aviator-uniformed King of Jordan staged a showmanship airdrop. Echoing past failures, the disastrous food airdrop is being revived now in discussions between Israel and impotent Arab collaborators, offering Israel yet another fig leaf to avoid lifting the diabolical land siege. Meanwhile, in Gaza, 57 deaths by starvation have been confirmed, a reality that persists even as UNRWA reports that it has enough food to feed the entire population of Gaza for three months. Yet, using aid as a weapon, Israel. shielded by the U.S. won’t allow any to reach the starving babies.
And just when you thought the pageantry couldn’t get more cynical, Israel contrived another cunning scheme: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. After four more months of starvation and bombardment, GHF was another distraction —designed by Israel, paid for, again, by the US, aimed not to end the starvation, but at neutralising international pressure. Unsurprisingly, Trump, like Biden with the pier, bowed to the same servitude to Israel.
Following three months of operations, GHF has turned out to be another Israeli lethal treachery. Instead of serving as a lifeline, GHF’s lines have transformed into a deadly game of Russian-Rollet. According to the UN almost 900 Palestinians, or 300 per month, desperate mothers, fathers, and children have been murdered seeking aid. Starvation awaited them at home; Israeli bullets met them at distribution centers. The very military that engineered the famine guns down the victims at the gates of so-called salvation.
American-funded GHF handed Israel control over food aid—and now, young girls at water collection points are being targeted. Every basic necessity for survival—food, water, medicine—is no longer a right, but an Israeli weapon. A weapon to starve, to deny water, and to withhold medicine—designed to cage Palestinians and cultivate the conditions for “voluntary” ethnic cleansing.
Outdoing the oxymoronic “Humanitarian Foundation,” Israel unveiled a new Orwellian scheme: “Humanitarian City” to house 600,000 Palestinians from northern Gaza into a walled compound in the south—where people can check in, but cannot check out. The Israeli new concentration camp, envisioned to confine over a quarter of Gaza’s population, dwarfs many of the Nazi camps of World War II.
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Calling a concentration camp a humanitarian city is part of Israel’s linguistic warfare. In this context, Israel has perfected the weaponisation of language. Israel doesn’t starve Palestinians; it imposes “calorie restrictions.” It does not establish ghettos; it constructs “safe zones.” It does not ethnically cleanse; it gives an option for “voluntary” emigration. And now, it does not commit mass displacement, it proposes a “humanitarian City.”
Israel can only get away with this kind of escapade because AIPAC wags the dogs of Washington. Meanwhile, the world powers posture. France timidly teases symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state. The EU issues mealy-mouthed warnings of potential political consequences. Britain, the ever master of equivocation, merely offers advice to Israel on how to wage its war “humanely,” and “leash” the settler mobs terrorising the West Bank. These are not serious threats, they are empty, inert gestures calibrated to maintain a facade of engagement while protecting Israel from accountability.
Aa for the Arab world? Eerily hush, no less complicit and shamefully divided into three vassal camps. Egypt, to the west, is effectively an active participant in the siege of Gaza. In the east, Jordan and the Gulf states trade openly and act as military buffers protecting Israel. And then there are those who showered Trump with their largess while Gaza is immolated and the West Bank systematically dismembered by roads dedicated for Jewish-only colonies.
This collective silence—the choreographed outrage, lacking an outright condemnation—isn’t simply indifference. It’s connivance. It is the resurrection of Nazi ideology, draped in a different flag and uniform. Not copying the mechanics of extermination, but encountering the same moral apathy that made such atrocities possible.
As a Palestinian, I am outraged. But more than that, I am appalled as an American and as a human being. It is beyond offensive for the world to offer a mere pantomime of objection, watching a concentration camp being erected under the euphemism of a “Humanitarian City.” I am left to wonder how the world—how Jews in particular—would have reacted if a Nazi had absurdly referred to Auschwitz as a “resort.”
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.