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,

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,

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.