Their pontoon bridge, which came into operation last Friday to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gazans, may ease the conscience of the United States, but above all it testifies to its indifference to the fate of the Palestinians and the trap in which they have locked themselves in their relationship with Israel, out of self-interest and lack of courage. Refusing to take the necessary means to convince the Israeli ally to loosen its grip on land crossing points, President Joe Biden claimed to be doing good by committing last March to massively transfer aid by sea, from Cyprus. In fact, this amounted to giving Benjamin Netanyahu’s government a license to use food and medicine as a weapon of war against all Gazans, in the name of its fight against Hamas.
And this is how we can now see activists from Tzav 9, a far-right Jewish group that appeared in January, attacking and destroying trucks loaded with food with complete impunity.
For two months the UN has been talking about “imminent famine” in Gaza. It is already a reality for a large part of the population, as the Israeli army launches its assault in stages on the town of Rafah, in the far south, and more than 600,000 people have been forced to flee to the coast in distress. that we can barely imagine. However, for the new American sea route to operate at full capacity, this would still represent only a tenth of what it would take to reduce, according to the United Nations, the malnutrition and health emergency which prevail in the strip.
In a powerful text, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) describes the vexatious measures applied by the Israeli authorities to block the delivery of medical supplies – such as oxygen concentrators, essential devices for the care of malnourished children suffering from severe anemia. It often takes months, says MSF, before obtaining the only authorization to bring biomedical equipment into Gaza; it will take several more weeks before the material finally crosses a crossing point. MSF describes an arbitrary, opaque and labyrinthine process: “Without access to medical care, thousands of lives have been lost and will continue to be lost. These “silent murders” are the result of deliberate deprivation. » Serious accusations that Israel and even Washington brush aside. From the Israeli campaign to denigrate UNRWA (the UN organization which helps Palestinian refugees) to the drone attack, on 1er April, against a convoy of the NGO World Central Kitchen, what the Gazans are suffering shows unvarnished the threats weighing on humanitarian law and on all the workers who, on the ground, defend it.
To specifically note “the act of deliberately starving civilians as a method of war”, the arrest warrants requested Monday by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity do not say nothing else. And to run to his defense by claiming that “there is no equivalence, none, between Israel and Hamas [lui aussi ciblé par la CPI] », Biden makes a biased and partial reading of the reasons put forward by the prosecutor.
Will we ever be able to escape from the vicious circle of violence and extremist postures, which makes Hamas and the Israeli hard right complicit in the current catastrophe? Faith of Lao-tzu: “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. »
It turns out, which does not often happen, that diplomacy has given rise to a glimmer of hope in recent weeks, while the disapproval induced by the Israeli-American alliance over Gaza is gaining momentum within the international community. The vote by the UN General Assembly on May 10 was significant: 143 of the 193 members voted for a resolution paving the way for full membership of the Palestinian Authority in the organization, which the United States was one of the few countries to oppose.
Although the day is far away when a real political solution will emerge from the maze of diplomatic and geopolitical calculations, we can still see the potential emergence, through a common front against the fixed positions of the United States and the delaying positions of Israel, of a capital “change”. paradigm”, to use the established expression. A change which calls for the reversal of the process of the Oslo Accords of 1993, by which the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel would be the basis and not the aim of a peace negotiation. Even Canada — it was time — agreed to take a step in this direction. In the current order of things, the result is that the United States, even a superpower, like the Netanyahu government and its far-right clique, looks increasingly lonely. The ICC’s approach deepens this isolation. That said paradigm shift finally occurs is imperative. For the Palestinians first, but also for the Israelis, it will never happen fast enough.