Peter Baker and Michael Crowley, Providing Both Bombs and Food, Biden Puts Himself in the Middle of Gaza’s War, NYTimes, Mar. 9, 2024.
From the skies over Gaza these days fall American bombs and American food pallets, delivering death and life at the same time and illustrating President Biden’s elusive effort to find balance in an unbalanced Middle East war.
The president’s decision to authorize airdrops and the construction of a temporary port to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza has highlighted the tensions in his policy as he continues to support the provision of U.S. weaponry for Israel’s military operation against Hamas without condition.
The United States finds itself on both sides of the war in a way, arming the Israelis while trying to care for those hurt as a result. Mr. Biden has grown increasingly frustrated as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel defies his pleas to do more to protect civilians in Gaza, and the president went further in expressing that exasperation during and after his State of the Union address this past week. But Mr. Biden remains opposed to cutting off munitions or leveraging them to influence the fighting.
“You can’t have a policy of giving aid and giving Israel the weapons to bomb the food trucks at the same time,” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said in an interview the day after the speech. “There is inherent contradiction in that. And I think the administration needs to match the genuine empathy and moral concern that came out last night for Palestinian civilian lives with real accountability for Netanyahu and the extreme right-wing government there.”
There's more at the link.
As its election year we had the local Labour candidate on the doorstep, finding out what concerns people on the doorstep and apparently then determining the best method of patronising them.
ReplyDeleteGazza and ceasefire was the issue. Although master political brain responded that ' their was no point in "jumping up and down asking for a ceasefire"
He then attempted to demonstrate that the finest political minds were on the case. Both highly questionable in regard to talent with no experience of government let alone the intricacy and issues of diplomacy in the middle east.
They have as much experience of the issues as I do, which is not exactly reassuring and judging by the assumptions of our prospective M.P. possible less experience.
My sister in Laws Dad was one of the members of the team that brokered the Oslo peace accord. So I have some idea of what experience looks like and a small sense of just how complicated it is.
I was also diplomatic enough not to tell him to fuck off, after the jumping up and down remark. He was very polite but like all the politicians who have turned up on the doorstep over the last five years, unable to get past the stereotype they have in their heads of who or what a voter is or what they think.
Not interested in the reality of peoples lives or what they think. Worked out a script and the perceived audience response in advance.
They leave disappoint, left with a sense that the disappointment is you. You're fault for not buying into the crap and mindless inflexible script being deployed.
Ironically the whole message changed the next day, highly fluid situation, ill suited to the static ' the voter is always wrong' script deployed on the doorstep
On these issues you want a representative capable of weighing the political reality and fully aware of the obvious political issue staring them in the face. Do I understand and back local voters or do I take the party line in spite of local opposition?
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