by Dr Amira Abo el-Fetouh
MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
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These airdrops of humanitarian aid are hypocrisy in action
PRECIS: Mar 2, 2024 #Gaza #Palestine #MiddleEast • The United States has airdropped 66 pallets holding 38,000 ready-to-eat meals over Gaza’s coastline where U.S. officials said Palestinians would be best able to access the aid. Officials said the drop is the first of more to come. NBC News’ Allie Raffa reports. The author argues this is a display of cold-blooded cynicism calculated to provide a p.r. cover for American collaboration with Israel genocide against Palestinians. |
In order to hide the shame of complicity in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, the killing and starvation of the Palestinian people, and to save face in front of the world, airdrops have been used to parachute humanitarian aid into the Palestinian enclave. Jordan’s King Abdullah II started this as a means to show-off and wear his military uniform, and wash away the shame of the shipments of fruit and vegetables that he sends across the border daily to the Zionist enemy, while his Palestinians relatives die of hunger. When Jordanian citizens formed a human chain to prevent lorries of goods from crossing the border, the protest was dispersed forcibly by the Jordanian authorities, and some protesters were arrested. The subsequent airdrops by the Royal Jordanian Air Force over Gaza went ahead by arrangement with the Zionist state, which pointed out repeatedly that it gave permission for them.
This is a world without conscience and humanity
Claims about being civilised and law-abiding ring hollow as the West promotes its unjust leadership to the world. The Israeli military offensive against the Palestinians in Gaza has exposed their ugly racist face. Yet again, we only have to compare the response to what happened in Gaza last Thursday — the Israeli attack on starving people as they tried to get desperately-needed humanitarian aid — with the Western response to events in Ukraine, and the hateful racism is highlighted even more. If Russia had done what Israel did last week, we would have seen more Security Council resolution and sanctions on Moscow in the blink of an eye.
Instead, what did the US do after Thursday’s massacre? President Joe Biden wants to make sure that Israel has enough ammunition “to defend itself”. This followed Washington’s first airdrop of humanitarian aid. Feeding people with one hand, and giving Israel the tools to kill them with the other, is a tacit admission by the Biden regime that it has no control over its proxy state in the Middle East; that the Israeli tail does indeed wag the US dog.
In the occupation state itself, Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir describedthose responsible for Thursday’s massacre as heroic. May Golan, the Minister of Social Equality, declared her pride in the way that the Israel “Defence” Forces have destroyed the Gaza Strip.
According to UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths, “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.” Oxfam International, meanwhile, took to X to say that it is “appalled by reports of killing people in #Gaza waiting for food aid. Israel deliberately targeting civilians after starving them is a gross violation of international humanitarian laws and our humanity. The risk of #Genocide is real.”
READ: UNRWA says children in Gaza are dying slowly before our eyes
Now we see Arab air forces vying to parachute aid into Gaza, so we are entitled to ask what has changed. Have the regimes just realised that the Zionist state is cowardly and may not attack aircraft with the insignia of the “normalised” Arab states on their fuselage? Or did they suddenly discover that they had some hitherto unknown courage to challenge Tel Aviv? Or has their collective conscience woken up to the fact that Palestinians are starving to death in real time on social media?
It is actually none of the above. The Zionists announced that the airdrops in Gaza are part of the cooperation between Israel, the US, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt and France, and that the occupation army units collaborated in them.
There appears to be a cynical PR exercise behind all of this in an effort to change the image of the heroic people of Gaza in the minds of the world. Hence, the starving Palestinians in Gaza are portrayed as hungry savages scrambling and fighting each other to get food; homeless savages without dignity.
That, of course, is the exact opposite of the reality. The people of occupied Palestine have made huge sacrifices in the efforts for peace, justice and freedom. And people around the world have recognised this, and hail them for their resilience, and support their resistance against a cruel, Israeli occupation. That is the reality that the airdrops are intended to change; in the perverted Western worldview, it is the “normalised” regimes that are the heroes, and the occupation state itself, which has acquiesced to “allow” aid to get to starving people.
But they fool nobody; they only delude themselves. These airdrops are hypocrisy in action. Without a genuine ceasefire, and an end to the brutal military occupation of Palestine, there will be no peace, justice or freedom for anyone.
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1 comment
An exceptionally compassionate article by a great feminist writer.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/07/i-could-not-save-a-single-child-in-gaza-revisited