Old Jewish joke: The Abramoviches want to emigrate out of the Soviet Union, and they meet with an American immigration official. He asks Moshe Abramovich: How is your living space? “I can’t complain,” Moshe responds. How’s the food? “Can’t complain.” How are the schools? “Can’t complain.” Well, the immigration officer says, if you have no complaints about life here why do you want to leave? To which Moshe says: “No, you don’t understand. I can’t complain!”
How would Antony Blinken get through his days if suddenly he couldn’t complain about Israel’s aid restrictions in Gaza? And Blinken is far from the only one who finds a life-sustaining energy force in complaining about Israeli humanitarian-aid policy while Hamas is hoarding the aid that does come in and starving its own people.
Which is why you can see a real fear develop in the faces of these people any time Israel tries to actually solve the problem.
Case in point: reports that Israel is considering hiring private security firms to deliver aid.
The main obstacle to delivering aid to Gaza is that it’s dangerous. Hamas militants hijack deliveries or put aid convoys in danger by insisting on riding with the delivery vehicles.
Could Israel do the aid deliveries itself? No, because any safe delivery regime would look a lot like an IDF occupation, and anything that looks like a military occupation won’t be countenanced by the parties involved.
Doesn’t the United Nations’ Gaza team masquerade as an aid agency? Why can’t they deliver the aid? Because Israel instituted the most basic customs rules, including requiring ID from anyone entering the war zone and an accurate listing of the contents of the deliveries. The UN doesn’t want or doesn’t think it can comply with such conditions—which, let’s be honest, should be a massive UN scandal all its own. It’s an admission that the agency cannot disentangle itself sufficiently from Hamas.
Airdropping aid, as other Muslim and Arab countries have done, is inefficient in the extreme and was reportedly responsible for the death of a young boy recently.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Aid could be delivered by sea, but then you’d have to build a pier…
What’s the solution? Well, the most realistic solution is to let Israel win the war already and defeat Hamas, whose existence is the barrier to feeding and supplying the Palestinian residents of Gaza. But Western governments are adamantly opposed to this option. They want a ceasefire and a cessation of hostilities that leaves the conflict frozen and gives Hamas a chance to regroup and survive as an organization.
That leaves one option: hire private security firms not to police or pacify the battle zones but to carve out humanitarian-aid collection fortresses. What will the professional complainers say about this one?
“Essentially, this would privatize military rule over Gaza by handing it over to private companies with private financial interests and nothing beyond that,” claims Haaretz’s Noa Landau. “The goal is to transfer moral and legal responsibility from Israel to these armed militias.”
That is, quite simply, not what is being considered at all. In fact, the plan under consideration would be designed specifically to avoid that. Gaza is not being sold by the IDF.
In the Guardian, the head of Refugees International, Jeremy Konyndyk, raises a different concern: “US-funded contractors [in the war on terror] that took an armed security approach got hit a lot because they were seen as combatants.”
Fair enough, but the point is that in Gaza, aid convoys are attacked by Hamas not because they are seen as combatants but because they are seen as aid convoys. So whoever delivers the aid to Gaza is going to be attacked, at least at first. Experienced security firms might be willing to deliver the aid anyway—which the UN, recall, is not doing.
Moti Kahana, however, is. His Global Delivery Company, which has rescued Jews from war zones around the world, has been in touch with a British firm of military contractors and is pitching itself as a solution to the aid problem.
One riddle Kahana aims to solve: the fact that local Palestinians cannot distribute aid without being targeted by Hamas. GDC would hire Gaza-based Palestinians and put them under armed protection. That would keep Palestinians from being locked out of the process as well.
Such a plan is not without its risks or costs, either, of course. Perhaps the best way to evaluate any plan’s chances of success is to put it before the doubters and complainers. If the proposal is any good, they can be expected to oppose it. After all, if the problem gets solved, they can’t complain.