Biden administration throws obstacles at Israeli op in Rafah while tooling an unfinished pier around the Eastern Med

The short summary of where Israel’s war in Gaza stands this week is that Israel has seized the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing and begun warnings and evacuation of Rafah, followed by bombing, in preparation for the final push to remove Hamas from Gaza.  The Biden administration is attempting to impede this operation by touting a supposed ceasefire/hostages agreement with Hamas, warning Israel not to go into Rafah, and withholding a previously-approved and scheduled delivery of munitions to Israel in order to extort Israel’s policy compliance on the Rafah campaign matter.

🔴 Watch an operational update from @LTC_Shoshani on what has happened in the Rafah area during the past few days, and how the IDF has called on Gazan civilians in the area to evacuate to the expanded humanitarian area: pic.twitter.com/HDlpNXy2VZ

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 7, 2024

In case it isn’t clear that Biden is favoring Hamas and its national patrons over Israel,

The Biden pier caper and Israel’s war

It’s tempting to place a major focus on the mishaps now besetting the U.S. temporary pier project off Gaza.  But we’re going to get past that lightly, for a brief, even more important discussion of a couple of unbudging realities in the overall situation.

One is that the Biden administration continues to try to thwart Israel’s strategy for Gaza, which is to eliminate Hamas as a factor there and reset post-Hamas conditions for long-term arrangements as advantageously as possible for stability and Israeli security.

The other is that the condition of Gaza has already been altered to the extent that it cannot go back to the status quo ante (i.e., before 7 October 2023).  The status quo ante is a dead letter.  What Biden is trying to thwart is Israel’s strategy for shaping the new status quo.  That’s what all the jockeying about Rafah, the hostages, cease fires, and what Israel is doing about Iran is about.

Two pings on strike that killed food-aid workers in Gaza

This will be two short pings.  The set-up is that PM Netanyahu has acknowledged the IDF role in the strike on 1 April, in which seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen (WCK), traveling in a group of two armored vehicles and one soft-skin vehicle in central Gaza, were tragically killed in an air strike. 

WCK founder José Andrés is quoted as saying the trip had been deconflicted with the IDF, which would be expected after Israel said last month that it would ensure secure conditions for the food deliveries.  WCK, which transports food from a collection point in Cyprus, is working through the jetty hastily built off Gaza, just south of the existing jetty of the Gaza City port.  The delivery mechanics at the jetty look inconvenient and unwieldy; basically, small barges are being towed to the new jetty through the choppy, unsheltered waters of the Eastern Mediterranean just off the coast.  Barges are hard enough to deal with on inland rivers, as a recent barge-bridge collision on the Arkansas River in Oklahoma reminds us.  It doesn’t get easier on the open sea.

We can, of course, feel awful about the lives lost in this event.  Netanyahu says it is under investigation and there will be a full accounting.

There it is: Biden administration ponders blocking Israel with “peacekeeping” force in Gaza

The first thing to be said about this concept – and we’re going to keep this short and focused – is that it’s not fundamentally about the debacle in Beirut in 1983 or about the “Samantha Power” Doctrine of “responsibility to protect.”

By far the most important thing to be said is that the purpose is to thwart Israel in Gaza.

This isn’t enacting the pie-in-the-sky Power Doctrine.  This is a serious armed power move against Israel.

The purpose is to subject whatever Israel wants to do in Gaza to an outside veto backed by armed force.

One ping on the motive behind Biden’s and Democrats’ intervention attempts with Israel

This will be one ping, one ping only, and a short one on the subject.

There’s a distracted and incorrect belief that President Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer are truckling to the immigrant anti-Israel vote in Michigan (and to some extent, potentially, in other states, where similar concentrations of immigrants amplify the impact of a voting bloc).

The media have been pushing the narrative about this, and many people have been accepting that vote-seeking is the motive behind Biden’s threats to deny arms sales to Israel (Democratic senators already urging that), along with his cease-fire demands in U.S. diplomacy and the UN, his insistence that it’s a non-starter for Israel to enter Rafah in order to drive out Hamas, etc., etc.

The same is said of Schumer’s public statement that Prime Minister Netanyahu is bad for Israel and needs to be removed