‘Armchair humanitarianism’: The problem with Gaza’s maritime aid corridor
Palestinians wait for a hot meal prepared by volunteers in Rafah, 20 February 2024
Samer Badawi writes in +972 on 16 March 2024:
When Huwaida Arraf helped organize the first “Free Gaza” sea voyage from Cyprus in 2008, she knew the effort was mostly symbolic. It had been two years since Israel began imposing restrictions that would eventually transform into a near-total siege of the Strip, forbidding all inbound maritime traffic and banning fishing beyond a maximum of six nautical miles. The blockade severely limited a key source of food and livelihood for many Palestinian residents, but the aim of the Free Gaza journey — which carried just a single box of hearing aids for a charity working with deaf children — was not to deliver aid.
“We had two fishing boats that barely got us across the Mediterranean,” Arraf, a human rights attorney and activist, told +972. “The real goal was to confront and challenge Israel’s illegal blockade itself.”
Now, five months into Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, Arraf is working with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition to organize a new voyage. The new flotilla, which has not yet announced a departure date, will certainly carry aid, but its long-term mission, Arraf explained, is about “challenging policies of control.”
Those policies, say critics, are at the heart of a new “maritime corridor” for Gaza, including an offshore port, announced by the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom. Although the project is being touted as a means of speedily delivering humanitarian aid to the besieged Strip, it essentially leaves Gaza’s Palestinians at the mercy of the same governments aiding and abetting Israel’s assault on the enclave.
It also reveals the impotence of Israel’s backers. After all, the bloodbath they continue to bankroll is measured not just in mangled Palestinian bodies and ravaged landscapes, but by a deliberate starvation campaign that is happening on their watch — one that, even American officials admit, cannot be undone with stopgap measures. At the same time, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians grapple with hunger, the proposed maritime corridor may be their only chance at near-term survival.
“The children who have already starved to death in Gaza had survived countless bombings and displacements before dying in anguish,” said Yara M. Asi, an assistant professor of global health at the University of Central Florida and author of “How War Kills.” “No one wants to see another child die of hunger.”