Sunset: The limits of pier politics

This day has been visible on the horizon since Israel went into Rafah to finish off Hamas, in the teeth of opposition from the Biden administration.

The New York Times, which has been sturdily retailing Team Biden’s narrative on the U.S. pier in Gaza, reported on 18 June 2024 that signs now point to the pier being dismantled and hauled away sometime in July.  “Military officials” are reportedly telling aid organizations to expect such a timeline.

The original hope was to keep the pier in operation until at least September (if necessary), when autumn weather and sea conditions would become increasingly adverse.  But NYT is now giving it the sunset-of-expectations treatment, slinging around the words “failing” and “failure” to get us all in the right frame of mind.

Says the Times:  “In the month since it was attached to the shoreline, the pier has been in service only about 10 days. The rest of the time,

TOC Ready Room 10 June 2024: D-Day in a time of turmoil (Israel, Western culture, 80 years)

In today’s Ready Room, it will suffice to weave together three incomplete threads, disparate but connected, as things often are if you look closely enough.  We wind up at the end on 6 June at a windswept beach in Normandy, as always since 1944.  (It is salutary to remember, as we are apt to forget with the passing years, that by the first anniversary of the amphibious landing at Normandy on D-Day 1944, the war in Europe had already been declared won, following Germany’s surrender in May 1945.  It has been decades since such rapid action attended a “great” war.)

The initial  stop, however, is in Gaza, where a pier has resurfaced.

Hostage rescue, Lebanon, Gaza

First, naturally, Israel’s rescue of four hostages.

One essential ping on the Trump trial(s)

UPDATE:  I composed this Wednesday evening and am going to simply post it now, as is, after the absurd verdict  just reported out from the jury in New York.  The “conviction” on misdemeanors attested to by Michael Cohen, of all unreliable witnesses, and that are past their statute of limitations toll, as well as a fake state “crime” that is also past the toll and can’t even be defined in the language of an actual statute, but instead is predicated on an implied federal campaign violation that the feds declined to call a violation – this is a vicious beclowning of the American judicial system.  Pray for our country.

The jury is deliberating now in Trump’s New York trial over a series of alleged misdemeanors having to do with bookkeeping for campaign funding – a transparently absurd basis for prosecution, as the accusation is that Trump didn’t count hush-money payments as campaign donations – and a felony-to-be-named-later.  The alleged felony, never articulated in the charging documents until just before the end of the prosecution and defense presentations, turned out to be a “scheme” to tamper with the election by not counting the hush-money payments as campaign donations.

Columbia in Gaza: The purpose of the pier*

With the Gaza pier now reportedly shooting off support infrastructure to bounce away with utility landing craft in the choppy seas, thoughtful Americans may be trying to puzzle out why the pier has been put there.  The point is especially puzzling in light of how little humanitarian aid has actually gotten to inland distribution points, much less to certified hungry Gazans.  (For a mental adjustment, the first aid shipment was transferred at sea for delivery to the pier between 11 and 16 May, and the pier was declared operational on16 May.  It’s now 26 May.)

A U.S. army landing craft along with a piece of the floating Gaza pier are currently stuck on an Israeli beach. pic.twitter.com/ytUnuFLFgw

— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) May 25, 2024

Day 2 of the US army landing craft LCM 8558 on the beach of Ashdod along with a tug that is often referred to as part of the floating pier but is actually a kind of vessel used to help move the pier. The tug broke free when the floating pier was being taken to Ashdod due to heavy… pic.twitter.com/NHwWBUCu16

— Seth Frantzman (@sfrantzman) May 26, 2024

Four pings on the Gaza war as climax in Rafah nears

These pings will be short.  Basically, I’m doing little more than teeing up posts on X/Twitter from the last week.  As each day gives hindsight on the day before, we see the signal of what’s going on emerge more clearly from the background noise, and find both concern and hope renewed.

The last comprehensive(-ish) summary is this one, from 9 May 2024.

At that point we were aware that the Biden administration had suspended a shipment of air-delivered bombs to Israel.  The shipment involved 2,000-lb and 500-lb bombs, which had been approved for shipment in March 2024 and were actually in fulfillment of a sales contract from 2008.  They weren’t part of the aid package Congress voted on for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.  The reason for the suspension, according to the administration,