Trudy Rubin: Biden and Schumer are more pro-Israel than Netanyahu

Mousa Shawwa was just getting home from a day of coordinating food distribution to desperately hungry Palestinians in Rafah when an Israeli missile hit the house where he and his family were staying in central Gaza. It killed him.

Shawwa, 41, was “gentle, kind, and effective, a dedicated humanitarian,” I was told by Sean Carroll, the CEO of the nonprofit American aid agency Anera, which has been delivering humanitarian relief in the Middle East since 1968. Shawwa had been a valued member of Anera’s staff for nearly 15 years.

What makes his death on March 8 all the more heartbreaking is that Anera’s staff had been “deconflicted” – or checked out, according to Israeli requirements. In addition, “Anera had given Israelis the map coordinates for the residences of all our staff,” added Carroll, “including screenshots of the buildings where they lived.” All of this had been rechecked again with Israeli forces only four days before the missile killed Shawwa.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

The missile also killed other refugees sheltering in the same house, and injured Shawwa’s wife and daughter. The strike critically injured Shawwa’s 6-year-old son, whom Anera staff desperately tried to evacuate to the United Arab Emirates, since Israeli strikes have pretty much destroyed Gaza’s health-care facilities.

Yet, despite pleas from heads of other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and even senior UAE officials, Anera couldn’t get him through Israeli and Egyptian checkpoints and out the Rafah crossing in time to make a plane out of El Arish, Egypt, on Friday. The boy died.

Shawwa’s death is one grim indicator of why the acute food shortage in the Gaza Strip has become so devastating that “famine is imminent,” according to a global agency that monitors food security for U.N. agencies and aid groups.

Around 200 humanitarian aid workers from the United Nations and private international aid agencies have been killed, Carroll said. This makes it harder to distribute what aid does get in, as workers stay home for fear of dying.

Meantime, hungry civilians in northern Gaza and Rafah make do on one meal a day – or none. Children line up for hours hoping for some soup to feed their entire family. Desperate Palestinians now sheltering in tents attack the few food trucks that enter – as Israel fails to ease bureaucratic and political hurdles that block more aid from crossing into Gaza.

The Biden administration’s last-ditch effort to drop pallets of food along Gaza’s shore only highlights how absurd Jerusalem’s food policy has become. Israel’s staunchest ally – which protects it at the United Nations, sends military aid, and supports its right to self-defense – is forced to use such inadequate methods by Israel itself.

How embarrassing is that? And Washington’s efforts to build a temporary landing dock for large deliveries of aid will take another two months at best.

No wonder President Joe Biden is angry at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. No wonder Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made a passionate speech urging, among other things, a new election in hopes of changing Israel’s leadership.

Both see that Netanyahu’s self-destructive starvation policy is playing right into Hamas’ hands.

Of course, the administration recognizes that Hamas leaders are using Palestinians as human shields, hiding deep below in tunnels Israel tries to destroy by bombing from above. But Hamas has no compunction about civilian casualties if they further its aim of winning sympathy for the Palestinian cause – and increasing hostility toward Israel around the world, including among many young people in the United States.

As Columbia University terrorism expert Page Fortna wrote in the Israeli paper Haaretz, “Hamas leaders know they cannot defeat the (Israel Defense Forces) militarily. Their only hope is to provoke Israel into killing enough civilians to defeat Israel politically. This is a classic terrorist strategy of provocation. Israel has fallen for it, hard.”

And as Nimrod Novik, former foreign policy adviser to Shimon Peres, and executive board member of Commanders for Israel’s Security, told me weeks ago: “If you want the support of the international community for more time (to destroy Hamas), you have to show this is not a war on Palestinian civilians.

“I would have sent 500 trucks of aid when the ask is 250.”

Instead, driven by his hard-right ministers, who openly seek to drive Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank, Netanyahu has proved indifferent to civilian casualties. He insists that Israel will soon attack Rafah, where more than one million hungry civilians who have fled their homes are sheltering.

Yet, Israel has yet to put forward any clear plan on how it would prevent further civilian carnage.

“Israel has not presented us or the world with a plan for how or where they would safely move those civilians, let alone feed and house them and ensure access to basic things like sanitation,” U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a news briefing on Sunday.

So, whether Israel and Hamas reach a humanitarian cease-fire, Biden should demand – not beg – that Israel prevent the predicted famine. At this point, White House policy is more pro-Israel than Netanyahu’s, a leader who is dragging his country to a military dead end, all to pacify his far-right allies so he can keep power and stay out of jail.

Speaking of which, Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters’ criticism of Schumer for interfering in Israeli affairs is grotesque hypocrisy, given that the GOP welcomed Netanyahu to address Congress in a 2015 pre-election year without even clearing it with then-President Barack Obama. As for Trump’s disgusting claim that Americans who support Democrats “hate Israel,” this comes from the mouth of a man who dines with, and praises, domestic and foreign antisemites.

Anyone who truly cares about Israel should ponder Mousa Shawwa’s death, and how a Gaza famine would not only be a humanitarian disaster but would rebound on Israel. And every American should consider whether the United States should militarily aid a country that allows that famine to occur.