I have organized airlifts of women legislators, judges, and journalists out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell; delivered ongoing aid to Ukrainian front-line villages during Russia’s invasion; worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwandan refugees after the genocide; and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army.
None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip.
It’s easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children. Yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I’ve come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel’s end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.
The Biden administration isn’t just complicit by refusing to condemn Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid — an absurd situation leading the U.S. to incur significant costs and unnecessary risks for symbolic airdrops. He’s actively supporting Israel’s oft-stated but ill-defined war aim of eradicating Hamas, a military effort with little concern for Palestinian lives or the fate of Israel’s hostages held in Gaza.
While he provided a steady flow of weapons to Israel, Biden withheld funding from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees. The largest humanitarian aid body in Gaza, UNRWA was targeted by Israel with unfounded claims — that its employees participated in the October 7 attack in Israel.
By imposing food scarcity on Gaza, and bombing refugee camps, apartment buildings, hospitals, universities, and aid distribution centers, it’s clear that Israel is following through on the words of its political leadership.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s occasional expressions of concern with the civilian death toll in Gaza while enabling the war raises a disturbing question: Is the Biden administration knowingly complicit in maximizing civilian killing in one of the most deadly military campaigns in recent history — or stunningly naive and incompetent?
Either way, hundreds of thousands of Democratic Party voters already came to the same conclusion as Andrea Mitchell: It is incompatible to claim concern for Palestinian lives while actively participating in their extermination.