Why did Washington commemorate Gaza?

Some are calling it Harris’s “Sister Souljah moment,” referring to the June 1992 moment when then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly rebuked racist comments made by a popular hip-hop artist in an effort to distance himself from extreme elements of the Democratic base.

For her part, Harris appeared to draw her own line Wednesday, silencing chants from pro-Palestinian protesters at a rally in Detroit Wednesday with a firm “I speak now.” The chants — “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we will not vote for genocide” — were met with this stern rebuke from the vice president: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, say so. If you don’t, I’ll speak.”

Harris’s team said the Democratic presidential nominee had met with the protesters before, and any suggestion that she was ignoring this important segment of her electorate was false. Her defenders on social media applauded her willingness to denounce the disruptive tactics that fuel the idea that the party is divided. “At a time when former President Donald J. Trump has attacked her as ‘radical,’ her confrontation with left-wing protesters offered a visual rebuttal,” wrote Rebecca Davis O’Brien of The New York Times.

Aside from a few moments of reprimanding the protesters and Sista Souljah, the incident raises another, equally important question:East Is Kamala hiding from the Israel-Gaza issue? And are the mainstream media and the Biden administration helping her do so?

Just four months ago, his boss stood in the State of the Union address and promised a military “surge” of humanitarian aid to Gaza to save starving Palestinians on the ground. “I say this to Israeli leaders: Humanitarian aid cannot be an afterthought or a bargaining chip,” Biden said. “Protecting and saving innocent lives must be a priority.”

In July, four months later, the humanitarian dock project was built and then dismantled in a resounding failure. The main reason was that the Israelis never provided safe passage for the aid. The whole spectacle has been forgotten. But the people of Gaza are feeling the effects. less help than in March, and is now at risk of diseases not seen since the 1950s – like polio – and somehow the “priority” has simply disappeared as a topic of discussion at White House and State Department briefings.

Calls for Israel to allow more trucks into Gaza? Silence. Questions about which aid agencies are equipped to deliver international donations waiting at the border? Crickets. Any news on the maritime corridor that was hailed in May as a “multinational, combined effort” between the United States, Cyprus, Israel, the UN and international donors including the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the European Union? None.

“For the White House, no news from Gaza is good news, whether it’s food aid or anything else,” said Steve Semler, a journalist and co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI). He has closely followed the rise and fall of this military “dock” that was supposed to bring salvation to two million residents but ended up taking off with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

“The Biden-Harris administration knows that its policy toward Israel is a huge political liability, but refuses to compromise with its base on that policy. Instead, the administration is trying all sorts of things to make the issue go away,” he told TAC. “It stops talking about food aid at press conferences, it omits details about taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel, it pretends that Biden has no leverage on Israel to open humanitarian corridors despite these billions in military aid.”

Instead, the focus is on the looming conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and the possibility that the United States could be drawn into the conflict, which could include a direct confrontation with Iran. The United States is moving more military assets into the region, including providing Israel with F-22 Raptors. CENTCOM chief Michael “Erik” Kurilla met twice with the leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) last week.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps repeating the same things, only to allow Israel to continue its ravages of Gaza. He is urging Israel and Hamas to sign a ceasefire agreement. After Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, the prospects for an agreement have dimmed considerably. The administration is putting no visible pressure on the Israeli government to stop bombing civilian structures, including schools used as shelters (more than 100 people were killed in one such attack on Saturday), tent camps, water facilities, and private homes, let alone its complete refusal to provide aid to the starving and sick population inside.

According to a Reuters report a month ago, humanitarian aid is struggling to reach northern Gaza. While some food is reaching the southern crossings, deliveries are irregular: trucks have to be manned by armed guards paid by the companies, meaning that the prices, when they reach the market, are far too high for ordinary Palestinians. There are now fewer than 80 trucks of any kind entering Gaza each day, far short of the 600 trucks needed to feed the population.

“Food aid is coming in dribs and drabs, just a few dozen trucks a day,” Chris Gunness, director of the Myanmar Accountability Project and a former spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), told TAC. “That’s why people are literally starving.”

Trucks coming from Israel and the West Bank have been attacked by Israeli settlers. If they make it through the crossings, the food is left to rot and pile up waiting to be delivered. Even when the trucks pass the laborious Israeli inspection process, they face a host of security problems inside: Israeli military attacks, armed gangs. About 70 percent of the aid trucks, which are usually unguarded (too expensive), are looted. There are few or no police officers on the streets; the Israeli army has killed or driven them all away, according to the report. Wall Street Journal report.

Interestingly, USAID Director Samantha Power, probably the most prominent humanitarian in the administration, has only a minor role these days. The last time she spoke openly about Gaza, it was to say that Israel was the main obstacle to food delivery. That was last May. She has since announced $100 million in U.S. aid, but we know that this is not going away. Apparently, the administration does not want to talk about it openly, only to reporters who are behind the scenes.

And yet the administration continues to actively fuel the Israeli military with weapons used in Gaza to make matters worse, releasing a new tranche of $3.5 billion on Friday and deciding not to withhold aid to an Israeli army unit accused of human rights abuses in the West Bank. It turns a blind eye to comments by Likud members and ministers who have defended the use of rape against Palestinian prisoners and the starvation of the entire population as “morally justified.”

Speaking on the Judge Andrew Napolitano podcast this week, retired Col. Doug Macgregor, TAC’s editor, noted that senior Israelis have spoken about how “they treat the Amalek – animals – who deserve the worst, and that anything you do to the animals in front of you is justified, so the notion of any kind of moral restraint is completely absent.”

“The only way to deal with this is to confront it directly, but we’re not going to do that. Our government is not going to confront it. They can say it privately, but from the perspective of the current leadership in Israel, they know that they have infinitely more influence and control over the United States Senate and House of Representatives than President Biden, or for that matter, President Harris,” he added.

Harris raised hopes when she said the following after her visit last month to Benjamin Netanyahu: “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time. We cannot look away from these tragedies. We cannot afford to become numb to the suffering, and I will not remain silent.”

But is this more rhetoric than substance? His office’s response to the controversial protester story Wednesday appears to have tried to play both sides of the issue, the administration’s default tone. It came in an X-rated message from his top adviser, Phil Gordon:

@VP has been clear: she will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iranian-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel. She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and uphold international humanitarian law.

Harris is clearly engaged in a delicate dance. Her progressive base is in no mood to triangulate on this issue, but she is running a national campaign in which many major Democratic donors are particularly pro-Israel, as are the party’s leadership and establishment.

Semler sees the glass as half full and doesn’t think that, given the political dynamics, Harris’ team can ignore the issue any longer: “In Minnesota, for example, one in five Democrats voted ‘uncommitted’ in the presidential primary. Current Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has no choice but to talk about Gaza, and so the media has no choice but to cover it. So while the food aid issue is on the back burner for now, I think the broader Gaza issue is here to stay.”

Perhaps especially if a candidate is only allowed one “Sista Souljah moment” per campaign.

The article Why did Washington punch a hole in Gaza’s memory? appeared first on The American Conservative.