What Would You Do With An Extra $320 Million?

U.S. Army Soldiers and Sailors assemble the floating pier off the shore of Gaza. April 26, 2024. (photo)

The US government knows how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unwisely…for a useless trinket that enabled mass starvation

by Kathy Shihadah, reposted from Patheos

No, really – think about it for a minute. What would you do with $320 million? You can only buy so many cars, take so many exotic vacations, pay off so many credit cards. What would you do with the rest? Especially if you are a person of faith, how would you use that money to be a blessing?

House the unhoused in your city?
Provide job training for one hundred young men and women?
Fund an underperforming public school in your area?
Upgrade a neighborhood of dilapidated public housing?
Provide clean water for a region in Africa?
Subsidize the fight for a cure to cancer?

There are probably 320 million great ways to spend that much money for the benefit of personkind and our planet.

Let me tell you about one way to waste $320 million – and this is a true story.
The main character of this story is our own United States government.

Very hungry people

For many months now, the Palestinians of Gaza have been on the brink of famine, at times even over the brink. If you’ve been following the news (or Grace-Colored Glasses), you know these conditions were not brought on by a drought or pestilence, but by the conscious choice of the prime minister of Israel – and with acquiescence from the US.

It’s not that there’s no food available – hundreds, possibly thousands of humanitarian aid trucks have been waiting just outside Gaza with food, medicine, and other things that the people of Gaza desperately need. The Israeli government and military have made it extremely difficult for goods to pass the border, employing complicated and arbitrary inspection procedures (watch this CNN video if you don’t believe me).

The withholding of food is not surprising, as Israeli leaders expressed the desire to cut off all supplies to Gaza in the first days after the October 7th attack.

President Biden would have none of this malarky, so he did the right thing: he called Netanyahu and said, “Open the borders and let Gaza have food, or else I will stop sending Israel $10 million in military aid.”

I’m kidding. He said no such thing. Rather, he sent massive quantities of bombs and other weapons to Israel.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken helplessly wrung his hands over the starvation in Gaza. He and his spokespeople have declared on a daily basis, “We’ve expressed to Israel our disappointment about the lack of humanitarian aid, and urged Israel to try harder to allow aid into Gaza.”

Similarly, they repeat the mantra, “We’re encouraging Israel to try harder to avoid hitting civilians with the bombs that we’re sending.”

President Biden, an avid Zionist, would not use the leverage at his disposal – as the purported most powerful country in the world and Israel’s most generous benefactor – to make demands like, “stop the war and bring in the aid or else.”

And that’s why Biden announced his $320 million road apple.

Gaza Floating Pier causeway shore connection, from Wikimedia Commons (photo)

What could possibly go wrong?

On March 7th, 2024, in his State of the Union address, President Biden announced the brilliant idea:

Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.

This temporary pier would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.

Seventy-one days later, on May 17, the pier was finished and the first humanitarian aid trucks brought aid ashore.

And it had only cost about $320 million (roughly twice the original estimate) of US taxpayer money.

AND THEN…

The U.S. was forced to halt operations four times due to weather events. In fact, in the two months since the pier was up and running, it has been operational for only nineteen days. Repairing the damage cost millions.

In those nineteen days, about nineteen million pounds of food were brought ashore. If that sounds like a lot, it’s not – it’s about 9,700 tons (8,800 metric tons). That translates to about 646 truckloads, an average of less than fourteen trucks per day.

(Mind you, this pier was supposed to handle ninety to one hundred fifty trucks per day – even the most optimistic numbers were still a far cry from the five hundred trucks per day that Gaza used to receive before the war, and before Israel destroyed farmland and food processing facilities.)

Oh, and most of that aid only made it to the beach, not to the starving people. Israel had killed so many Palestinian police that there was no one to guard convoys; killed so many aid truck drivers that there was no one to drive. And Palestinians had grown so desperate that gangs had begun to disrupt deliveries, often violently, in order to steal food and then sell it – when it should have been distributed for free.

So after more than $320 million spent, the US project did next to nothing to help the people of Gaza.

Hang on for the spin

As this fiasco crashed and burned, our military spun it into a brilliant victory:

Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander at US Central Command, told reporters on Wednesday that the pier had achieved its intended effect in what he called an “unprecedented operation.”

“The maritime surge mission involving the pier is complete, so there’s no more need to use the pier,” he added.

“Having now delivered the largest volume of humanitarian assistance ever into the Middle East, we’re now mission complete and transitioning to a new phase,” said Cooper.

MEANWHILE…

Food in the trucks still waiting just outside the border has begun to spoil and pass expiration dates. Starving Gazans who eventually got ahold of some of this food have gotten violently ill.

Of course, hospitals are also undersupplied (aid trucks also contain medical necessities) so they can do little to help people with food poisoning or malnutrition – never mind the thousands of Palestinians in need of treatment for injuries caused by American-made bombs.

A waste on so many levels

This is, importantly, a story of tremendous waste of American taxpayer dollars. $320 million for nineteen days of meager service? This was a pathetic project.

This is also, for the Palestinian people, another example of American promises unkept, American subservience to Israel’s desires (first to keep the borders closed, then to keep the food out of Palestinian hands), and American neglect of Palestinians’ legitimate needs.

If – and this is a big IF – the US had any credibility at all with the Palestinian people, it has no more.

The pier is an embarrassment to all Americans, a waste of our money, and a disgrace before God.

Kathryn Shihadah is an editor and staff writer for If Americans Knew. This is reposted from Patheos – Grace Colored Glasses – Kathy’s blog on Patheos, an online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality.

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