This is part two of three essays examining the Gaza Pier, and the pasts and present futures of imperial theft, by many names. The first part “Land Grab by Sea” can be found here.
I choose my words carefully: we’ve jointly developed some of the most sophisticated weapons on Earth, that help protect both our countries. And we also help keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.
Benjamin Netanyahu[1]
People often talk about the importance of boots on the ground, but we have eight million sets of boots on the ground in the heart of this difficult area.
Naftali Bennett[2]
Mission Accomplished
On July 18, 2024, US Central Command (CENTCOM) announced that the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system (JLOTS)–the floating/crashing/breaking/massacre-facilitating “humanitarian” pier on Gaza’s shores–mission had concluded. The US Department of Defense (DOD) circulated:
“In the coming days, CENTCOM will work with USAID to deliver the remaining aid commodities, currently afloat, to the port of Ashdod, in Israel, for onward distribution to Gaza, and will provide coordination and liaison support for humanitarian aid delivery as a request of USAID when appropriate,” [Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina] Singh said.
Singh said the mission was successful.
This mission, perhaps, the overarching aims of propping up and prolonging the logistics, the financing, of Forever Wars. It’s not a stretch for the mind’s eye to recall George W. Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln (a naval ship belonging to the US Navy) in May 2003, clinging to the podium with the enormous MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner as background. Or, his message to US troops at Camp As Sayliyah, Qatar regarding Afghanistan one month later: “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished.”
Yet, the lived implications of these declarations are sobering. For example, The Lancet estimates that from March 2003-June 2006, Iraqi casualty figures include 601,027 violent deaths out of 654,965 excess deaths. The Watson Institute’s “Costs of War” project estimates that throughout “The Longest War”–otherwise known as the US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan–over 70,000 Afghani and Pakistani civilians were killed (October 2001-August 2021).
These figures prompt a deeper examination of the definition and thresholds of violence and excess. As US-led and funded brutality persists across the Middle East, the challenge lies in clearly delineating these notions, as the thresholds for culpability are ever-shifting (and belligerently ignored or contorted).
Violence, if we attempt to quantify, is a ‘conservative estimate’ of four indirect deaths per one direct death; a June 19, 2024 body count across Gaza totaling 37,396. A ‘not-implausible’ estimate, then, of 186,000 or (many) more massacred by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).
But we know that the genocidal rampage has not ceased since late June’s publication (al-nakba al-mustamirra, 76 years and counting). Quite contrary, hundreds of Palestinians have since been burned alive in tents and hospital compounds, bombed in schools-as-safe-zones, tortured in prisons and sodomized to death, targeted for assassination…amidst the terror of ongoing evacuation orders, biological warfare, ecocide and man-made starvation and dehydration. By August 15, 2024, it “passes” 40,000 (passive voice, a political choice). When we listen to and center the testimony of Palestinians, we know that a complete annihilation of land and life is well underway, and we know this decimation of space/time/body/earth cannot and must not be quantified by Zionist settler colonial calculations.
Excessive, if we consider the purported “successful delivery” of 20 million pounds of humanitarian aid-by-pier for those across Gaza:
With collaboration from 12 nations, international partners, USAID, and the United Nations, the temporary pier successfully delivered nearly 20 million pounds of aid, which is the highest volume of humanitarian assistance the U.S. military has ever delivered into the Middle East,” Singh said. “The temporary pier achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.”
Going forward, Singh said, the U.S. military will play an advisory role, at least for the short term, in the continued delivery of aid, which is expected to go through Ashdod and then over ground routes into Gaza.
There are deaths by US-manufactured GBU-39s (Boeing), Joint Direct Attack Munitions (Boeing), Paveways and GBU-28 ‘bunker busters’ (Raytheon), and there are deaths suffered each day, every mealtime, by families and collectives of caregivers unable to provide for starved children and beloveds. Say the UN experts from Geneva, “We declare that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza.” Say the skeletal frames of kids on display–as testimony, as last resort, as something we consume and scroll past–no aid is reaching us, you have stolen our softness, our life.
According to CENTCOM, aid initially slated to enter Gaza via the ‘temporary’ pier (nicknamed, “Trident”) will now be transported by US vessels sailing from Cyprus to the Port of Ashdod, and then trucked into northern Gaza via the Beit Hanoun/Erez border crossing: “U.S. officials have said no U.S. boots will be on the ground in Gaza.” Headlines read: Famine stalks enclave. But the real act of predation means parcels parachuted into Shati refugee camp–killing five, injuring dozens. Predation, the settlers’ organizations (dubbed, “extremists”, on whose spectrum?) like Mother’s March, Tzav 9, and Torat Lechima–receiving hundreds of thousands of tax-deductible dollars (via Givechak and JGive) as incentive to continue blocking fuel and aid from entering the Kerem Abu Salem border. The predator massacres Nadi Sallout (August 7, 2024) and seven other World Central Kitchen team members (April 2, 2024). And never to be diminished, the more than 165 journalists covering the atrocity, such as Ismail al-Ghoul[3] and Rami al-Rifi, also slain by the IOF. No boots on the ground are required, when the occupier’s Finance Minister declares ‘it may be justified and moral’ to starve the two million enduring Palestinians in Gaza.
JLOTS as Architecture of Forever War
Every major media outlet is presently alarming us to the ‘precipice of an all-out regional war’, but, as we process the barrage of news–we must demand, where, exactly is this precipice? Where has one war ended, and another begun? Perhaps this seems impossible to parse, because we are locked into cycles of manufacturing-consent-for–funding–fanning flames of Forever War; as the Rumsfeldian known-unknowns perennially rear their heads at opportune moments to further line shareholders’ pockets–more formally: the Fiscal Year 2025 US Department of Defense’s $849.8 billion budget needs a sinkhole somewhere. And that somewhere thrives on a commemorative date, and requires a formula for bordering, ordering, and fear mongering. For those keeping a calendar:
George W. Bush (May 2003): “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 – and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men – the shock troops of a hateful ideology – gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the “beginning of the end of America.” By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation’s resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed. (Applause.).”
Benjamin Netanyahu (July 2024): “For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together. Because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win. They lose. And my friends, I came to assure you today of one thing: we will win. Ladies and gentlemen, like December 7th, 1941, and September 11th, 2001, October 7th is a day that will forever live in infamy.”
It is always worth recalling that the Zionist settler colonial project seeking to obliterate Palestinians and their land for more than one hundred years would be impossible without tacit support–materially, financially, ideologically–from US imperial stakeholders. As Israel’s principle financier, the US government’s receipts of complicity in not only the current genocide–but across generations of dispossession, exploitation, extortion, and slaughter throughout Palestine–implicate every American taxpayer and profiteer-as-politician in this atrocity.
While momentarily, the Pentagon has paused Trident JLOTS in Gaza, it’s important to situate this fleeting operation within the larger picture of CENTCOM and the IOF’s collusion to orchestrate widespread devastation through precision campaigns while worsening the forced starvation of 2.4 million people across Gaza. The “Joint” in Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore means that the US Marines, Navy and Army forces all subsume responsibility for each exercise; meaning every rung of the Department of Defense–including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defense, and their boss–the President of the United States–are culpable for all damages inflicted by their operations. Under the guise of “humanitarian aid” facilitation, consent may be manufactured for these structures with ambiguous terminology: “prefabricated ports” and “floating causeways” as obfuscating their actual intentions and impacts. When instead, we should demand–what is the cause, what is the cost, and what are the short and long term repercussions of their construction?
Permanence, Temporariness, Ceaselessness
The pier’s dismantling is but a blip in calamitous US intervention and the ways the reproduction of exceptionalism destroys lifeworlds; amphibious warfare proves elemental to US empire building–some of the earliest operations date to landings in the Bahamas during the Battle of Nassau (March 1776), the Asiatic Squadron’s assaults in Korea, the Philippines, and Guam, and the evolution of the Fleet Marine Forces during and proceeding World War II.
We can consider this history through the very language of military strategy; which of course an essay this short could not possibly fully contain. But to draw from the 2007 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (a DC-based ‘defense think-tank’) which provided an overview for US military logistics from the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall through today:
[The] US global military posture can thus be envisioned as an interconnected set of components: forward-based forces and the permanent and temporary overseas bases and facilities that house them; forward-deployed forces and the permanent and temporary overseas bases and facilities that support them; global attack forces based on US territory or in space that are capable of immediate employment over intercontinental ranges; a strategic mobility and logistics infrastructure that links together and supports all US forward-based, forward-deployed, global attack, and surge forces; those forcible entry and rapid base construction forces consistent with the overall strategic access environment; and a global command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) network.
In short, various positionings are integral to US military expansion while supporting strategic allies and facilitating unfettered flows of capital; “chokehold” bases and assorted architectures of enclosure make manifold elastic borders while continuously breeding a uniquely violent constellation of American-conceived carcerality. The report details the current era as an American “Leasehold Empire,” whereby the US negotiates “leasehold” overseas basing structures for a global network of expeditionary (as opposed to garrison) basing postures:
The key difference between this new expeditionary posture and earlier ones is the degree to which interdependent joint operations now characterize US plans and execution. As the US armed forces assume this new Joint Expeditionary Posture, designed first and foremost to afford US joint expeditionary forces global freedom of action, the entire US military is restructuring its forces and operating patterns to better support rotational forward deployments and surge operations from the United States and its territories.
Neither military analyst nor war historian, a comprehensive chronology of the United States amphibious training bases (ex: Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune[4]), Main Operating Bases (ex: US Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM)), and Forward Operating Bases (ex: Abu Ghraib), is far beyond this piece’s scope. Though briefly, a 2005 publication by the Joint Chiefs of Staff establishes joint doctrine for JLOTS operations and explicates organizational command while providing a glossary for the verbiage of colonization. As illustrated in a 2009 edition of Army Logistician, JLOTS are a “key enabler to many combatant command operation plans.” Exercise missions, such as Pacific Strike 2008, prepared the 3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division for combat in Iraq. Their words: JLOTS is a key enabler to many combatant command operation plans. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the Army Transportation Corps encodes:
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, 2003. 24th Trans Bn conducted LOTS at Kuwaiti Naval Base (KNB) to offload ammunition ships. COL Veditz, Commander of the 7th Trans Group, attached the TSV, LSV-4 and LSV-6 to CJFLCC as theater assets to shuttle preposition stocks from Qatar to KNB [Kuwait Naval Base] and [the Port of] au Shuaiba. This saved the cost of using MSC vessels and AMC aircraft. LT-1974 cleared the port of Um Qsar [Iraq].
Immense amounts of bodies and labor are required to execute a JLOTS operation, from the very-much onshore designing, manufacturing, loading, staging and handling of equipment, to transporting vessels across seas and anchoring materials as needed. This is to say, many boots are required across vast tracts of land and sea; this, as political theater to enact swift, efficient “responses” to compounding crises, whereby CENTCOM and allied actors can masquerade as benevolent mediators while aggressively prolonging military campaigns. At their core, JLOTS prove essential to colonial conquest; cost-saving logistics that grease the circuits of weapons sales, distribution, and deployment that amount to mass destruction and concurrent profit maximalization for munitions contractors. Prevention of fuel, medicine, water, and food entering Gaza is central to the occupier’s playbook. As the catastrophe in Gaza only worsens by the day, it is necessary to account for forthcoming infrastructural and logistical endeavors expediting the transfer of arms, specifically–the architectures and armaments bankrolled by the United States government and other government and nongovernmental actors co-signing this genocide.
In the third installment of this series on the Gaza Pier, an examination of FogBow and the Maritime Humanitarian Aid Foundation will further connect the project’s failures, along with those who seek to profit most from this ceaseless genocide.
Footnotes
[1] “Netanyahu’s 2024 Address to Congress” (July 25, 2024) https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-25/ty-article/full-text-netanyahus-2024-address-to-congress/00000190-e6c0-d469-a39d-e6d7117d0000
[2] Naftali Bennett, “2017 Fathom Interview with Naftali Bennett,” Fathom Journal,
https://fathomjournal.org/my-stability-plan-is-only-partial-self-determination-but-will-allow-the-palestinians-to-thrive-naftali-bennetts-bottom-up-peace-plan/
[3] Maha Hussaini on X (August 1, 2024): “I am not ashamed to stand in front of the camera and say I am hungry. Many children ask me for something to eat, not knowing that, like them, I can’t sleep because of hunger.” – Palestinian journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, assassinated by Israel in #Gaza, 31 July 2024
[4] It should be noted that Camp Lejeune, occupying Indigenous Lumbee, Neusiok, and Coree lands, has poisoned the waterways for decades. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH): “Camp Lejeune is a U.S. Marine Corps base that covers about 233 square miles in Onslow County, North Carolina. It was established in the early 1940s and is the site of six major Marine Corps commands and two U.S. Navy commands, including reconnaissance, intelligence, infantry, artillery, and amphibious units. In the early 1980s, the Marine Corps discovered that the drinking-water systems that supplied two areas of housing at Camp Lejeune (Tarawa Terrace and Hadnot Point) were contaminated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The major contaminants of concern were identified as the solvents trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE)” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK215292/). This is part of a bigger conversation about US imperial plunder irrevocably damaging Indigenous and racialized communities across the continent, as well as life-altering environmental/political/cultural harms reproduced globally.