Give humanitarian aid convoys into Gaza a UN military escort

Socialists should foreground this as a central demand in the defense of Palestine.

Topher McDougal, from the USD’s Economic Development and Peacebuilding program, on defending humanitarian convoys in Gaza:

If the U.S. were to provide the humanitarian convoy a military escort, by contrast, Hamas could see its presence as a provocation. Washington’s support for Israel is so strong that the U.S. could potentially be judged as a party in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

In that case, the presence of U.S. armed forces might provoke attacks on Gaza-bound aid convoys by Hamas and Islamic jihad fighters that otherwise would not have occurred.

Even within the framework of the Biden Administration’s supposed strategic objectives in Israel and Palestine this analysis has never made any sense. Refusing to provide security for humanitarian aid has not somehow prevented attacks on the convoys or deterred anyone from viewing the US a direct and highly engaged party to this conflict. Ironically, it has only guaranteed that Israelis are the ones who are attacking the convoys, further alienating them from the rest of the world — two things that we ostensibly oppose. Forcing Hamas to attack the convoys, on the other hand, might have driven a wedge between it, Palestinian civilians, and the international community. It also would have forced Israel to exercise precisely the sort of restraint and narrowly targeted war on Hamas that the Biden Administration says that it expects. If the US’s policy in the region really is what Biden says that it is, the case for providing a military escort to these convoys was always a slam dunk.