it broke today that biden airdropped aid to gaza. other than the fact that this is an obvious pr move ahead of his re-election campaign, i think it’s important to stress how ineffective this method is compared to just allowing humanitarian aid to come through. airdrops carry far less aid than truck convoys, for one, and require an airdrop zone with a lot of idealistic conditions that don’t often coincide. this is a major reason why you hear a lot of airdrops being conducted at beaches–and why a lot of them have been blown to the sea. and what’s even more dangerous about that is that a lot of these palestinians are malnourished, starving, in a delirious state of mind. many of them are so utterly hungry that they’d be willing to swim through just to get their hands on a sodden meal. but apparently this is the best thing the us, which literally funds israel’s ongoing genocide, can do for palestinians at the moment.
i think the biggest reason i find this so insidious is because it implies the us has to play by israel’s rules, even though it’s basically already confirmed that there are us soldiers in palestine. the us is telling us that the best thing it can do is airdrop aid, rather than strongarm israel into allowing ground-delievred aid to come through. the us is acting like it has red tape it has to contend with.
but the us is the red tape. the us literally holds the power. it knows what it’s doing. it’s actually jarring watching the united states government try to infantilize itself.