I fervently hope that I'm completely deluded here and that I've overthought things and none of what I say below will happen.
Thursday night in his State of the Union speech, the President announced that the Corps of Engineers is going to install a large floating platform in the Mediterranean, offshore from the rubblefield formerly known as Gaza with its 2,200,000 mostly starvin people, to "solve" the problem of Israel using food as a genocidal weapon.
The timing for constructing the platform is pretty vague, with "officials" saying it will take 30 to 60 days to install. There are lots of unanswered questions that I won't go into, particularly around how the Israelis will have complete control over all shipments once they're brought ashore, and how Biden has made it strictly clear that there will be no US troops involved onshore.
Biden is using this flimflam innovation to silence at least some criticism by the appearance of taking action that might deflect some of the shallower doubters. That much is obvious.
What is less obvious is that Ramadan, the supposed Israeli-set cutoff date for a second temporary "humanitarian" suspension of the Gaza invasion, is the deadline for Hamas to make a deal or not. Ramadan begins March 11 or 12, depending on the sighting of the moon. And March 15 has been set by Israel as the deadline for Hezbollah to indicate whether will pull its forces 5 or 6 miles back from the Lebanon-Israel border. Israel and Hamas are exchanging accusations as to who caused the breakdown in negotiations, although Israel dropped out days ago.
The IDF takes a great deal of pleasure in trampling on Muslim rituals and observances, and will accelerate the genocide with the arrival of Ramadan. A week or so ago, Biden spokesman Jack Kirby said that the US had no plans to punish Israel if they go on a Rafah murder spree.
Biden's 30 to 60 day construction delay signals (or actively conspires with) the Israelis that apart from continued symbolic but low-volume U.S. airdrops of aid, there will be no continuing pressure from the U.S. on Israel take any significant steps to end the famine or expand aid coming in. What I'm saying is, Biden has guaranteed that the U.S. will take the flack for the next month or so while Israel utterly destroys Rafah.
The Israelis will block all aid coming into Gaza when the Israeli meat grinder starts to execute tens of thousands in the next week. And after hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the Sinai Desert, Biden's floating famine flummoz will be ready to deliver to the smattering of Palestinians left in the north, until they can be executed by the IDF.
I hope to hell I'm wrong.
