Joe Biden has long been one of the staunchest supporters of Israel and has even called himself a Zionist. He has been a steadfast supporter of that country’s governments, refusing to condemn them even when they did the most appalling things. So it was no surprise when he rushed to Israel following the October 7th attacks by Hamas and embraced prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although Netanyahu had shown his disdain for Barack Obama when he was president and Biden was vice-president and Netanyahu even accepted an invitation to speak to Congress, bypassing the Obama White House. Netanyahu’s preference for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and Republicans is not hard to discern.

Biden’s seeming unqualified support for Israel has angered many progressives in the US and infuriated many Arab Americans who see him as condoning the ongoing slaughter of Gazans by the Israeli military machine. The US has been increasingly isolated on the world stage as leaders of many countries and the United Nations have condemned the Israeli policy of essentially starving the entire population of Gaza, numbering about two million people, by refusing to allow in relief trucks to bring in adequate amounts of food, water, energy, and medical supplies. Israel controls ground access to the Gaza strip and has long imposed a blockade to prevent access even by sea. The situation is so bad that the few relief trucks that Israel allows in have been besieged by starving people and Israeli troops have opened fire on them, reportedly killing over a hundred.

This level of sheer brutality was finally too much for the government for Jordan and it started to do air drops of food and other supplies into Gaza. Biden then ordered airdrops as well and now the US is in the process of building a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza to allow relief ships to dock. A relief ship has just departed from Cyprus.

This raises an interesting dynamic. The airdrops and sea relief operations are a direct challenge to the Israeli government’s stance that they have the right to completely control access to Gaza. But the US is their patron and has shielded them over the decades from any consequences for their actions, not to mention supplying them with massive amounts of aid and military equipment. So far Netanyahu has not taken any action to stop the aid relief operations nor even protested as far as I am aware. To do so would be to put him on a collision course with the US. Bernie Sanders has already called on the Biden administration to stop sending any more military aid to Israel. If the US were to actually get close to threatening to cut off military and other aid, you can be sure that Israel would have to give in. But Biden is not willing to go that far and these airlifts seem to be meant to mute criticism of what is widely seen as his callous condoning of the atrocities.

The problem with airdrops is that they are more symbolic than of tangible value because the amount of aid that can be sent this way is far less than what is needed. Ships can deliver more but what is really needed is an immediate ceasefire and the opening of the Gaza borders to trucks.

A ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza has departed the port city of Larnaca in Cyprus, according to World Central Kitchen, a non-profit which said it is the first maritime shipment of aid to the war-torn strip.

“After weeks of preparation, our team in Cyprus loaded almost 200 tons of food onto the Open Arms boat that will deliver the desperately-needed aid,” WCK said in a statement on Tuesday.

The non-profit said it had partnered with the United Arab Emirates, Cyprus and the Spanish charity Open Arms to coordinate the dispatch.

The aid dispatch comes as Cyprus, the European Commission, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom are working to establish a maritime corridor to deliver aid assistance directly to Gaza.
…

The ship will be towing a large barge packed with pallets of food aid, including rice, flour, beans, lentils, and canned meats.

To see why these airdrops will never be sufficient, we can compare it with another famous event in which a siege of a city was relieved by air and that is the Berlin airlift of 1948. In his book How to Hide an Empire, historian Daniel Immerwahr describes what it took then.

In 1945 the Allies had divided Germany into zones of occupation, and they did the same to the city of Berlin, lodged within the Soviet zone. Yet in their haste, the occupiers had failed to sign any agreement granting the Western powers access to their zones in Berlin. Since all the ground approaches passed through Soviet-occupied Germany, this meant that Joseph Stalin could entirely blockade the Western sectors of Berlin. Which, in 1948, he did.

It was a bold move. Berlin was importing fifteen thousand tons of goods per day. Stalin apparently hoped that by sealing it off, he could force the West to abandon it and perhaps retreat from Germany altogether.

That probably would have worked in the past. Indeed, after the First World War cut Belgium off from its markets, Herbert Hoover, tasked with relieving the Belgians, had been compelled to negotiate the right of free passage from Britain, France, and Germany to get supplies in. If he hadn’t gotten ground access, he wouldn’t have been able to aid Belgium.

Berlin was Belgium without the permission slips. Yet the experience of the Second World War raised a question. Was permission even necessary?

“I may be the craziest man in the world,” said the U.S. military governor of occupied Germany, Lucius Clay, to the mayor-elect of Berlin, “but I am going to try the experiment of feeding this city by air.”

General William “Tonnage” Tunner, hero of the Hump, was placed in charge of the operation. It was a fitting hire, “like appointing John Ringling to get the circus on the road,” noted the commander of the air force in Europe. Tunner brought his familiar bureaucratic style. “The real excitement from running a successful airlift comes from seeing a dozen lines climbing steadily on a dozen charts,” he wrote.

The lines did climb. Tunner set the planes in a brisk three-takeoffs-per-minute cadence. Flights were synchronized to the second and kept on an exact path by ground-to-air radio. To celebrate Easter, Tunner tapped the accelerator and landed a plane in Berlin every 61.8 seconds.

The aircraft, departing from bases in western Germany, flew necessities: coal, oil, flour, dehydrated food, and salt. But they also flew grand pianos and, in one case, a power plant. Berlin’s economy ran by air. Stalin, ultimately, could not hold out—the blockade hurt him more than it hurt his adversaries. In the eleventh month, after more than a quarter of a million flights, he lifted the barriers. (p. 295-296)

As one can see, the Berlin airlift was a massive round-the-clock operation. Unlike Gaza, Berlin had an airport and so planes could land and take off. Dropping stuff using parachutes is more dangerous, as we saw with one case where the parachute failed to open and the aid pallet killed five people.

So the current airdrops have to be seen as largely symbolic, designed to show the Israeli government that they should be wary of alienating the US too much, if even an ardent supporter as Biden is willing to take steps to work around their embargo.