The British word “omnishambles” fits well as a description for President Joe Biden’s Gaza pier experiment. The Cambridge Dictionary defines omnishambles as “a situation that is bad in many different ways, because things have been organized badly and serious mistakes have been made.”
The pier constructed off Gaza’s coast has taken months to build and cost at least $320 million (likely more) in taxpayer money. Yet it already appears to be a near-total failure.
The pier was designed to provide large amounts of food, medical, and other aid to Gaza every day. Instead, however, the Pentagon’s chief military spokesman, Maj. Gen Patrick Ryder, announced on Tuesday that he does not believe any pier-provided aid has actually reached the Palestinians it was destined for. While hundreds of tons of metric aid have crossed the pier into Gaza over the past few days, everything has been stolen. As Politico’s Lara Seligman reports, the Pentagon is now considering “alternative routes” for aid flows.
Talk about omnishambles: $320 million, months of logistics works, large deployments of finite specialist military units, and heavy diplomatic expenditure have led to a very public mission failure. It’s not a great look for a Biden administration that so loved to claim that the “adults are back in charge.”
Biden must bear significant responsibility here. His motive with the pier was at least partly pure: to secure aid to a civilian population held hostage between Hamas fanatics and Israel’s war effort to defeat those fanatics. The problem is that it was always apparent to anyone with any basic knowledge of military operations and Gaza security realities that this port was always a hairbrained scheme. The Biden administration was never able to address the fundamental reality that unless you have security control at the pier’s Gaza jump-off point and road routes to aid storage depots, the aid was always going to be vulnerable to those willing to seize it. For some inexplicable reason, the Biden administration believed that U.S. allies would be willing to put their own military forces at risk performing these security roles even though Biden had rightly ruled out using U.S. troops for that same responsibility.
In so, aid is still not getting to where it is most needed. One major problem is that Hamas has stolen large amounts of aid that has entered Gaza since the October 2023 start of the war. Israel has understandably been keen that its mortal enemy not benefit from aid flows. Still, the scale of civilian suffering in Gaza must be weighed against this concern. And in that humanitarian context, Israeli restrictions on aid convoys entering into Gaza have often been excessive.
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Yet Biden would have been far better placed to pressure Israel to enable ground-based aid access into Gaza rather than invent this pier gimmick. But as with his stance on Israeli military operations in Rafah, where the president cut U.S. support for Israel and demanded an obviously Hamas-favorable unilateral ceasefire (rather than push for Israeli tactical changes), Biden’s pier proposal put political theatrics before reality.
Put simply, Biden has repeatedly decided that it’s more important to send political signals to voters in Michigan than it is to cut deals that balance Palestinian civilian needs with Israeli security needs. Or, put another way, the grownups do not appear to be in charge, and Biden instead appears to be auditioning for a new season of the British political sitcom The Thick of It.