Biden (maybe) wants Israel to stop using US bulldozers for ethnic cleansing

On Sunday, Israeli media reported a freeze in certain bulldozer shipments from the United States to Israel. The prominent English-language website Ynet News, for example, went with the sensational headline: “D9 bulldozer shipment stalled by US embargo, leaving Israeli soldiers exposed.” To be sure, there is nothing more tragic than “exposed” soldiers belonging to a genocidal army.

According to the article, 134 bulldozers “ordered and paid for” by the Israeli military are currently “awaiting export approval from the US State Department” but their shipment has been stymied by internal US opposition and an apparent decision by President Joe Biden’s administration to freeze deliveries “for several months”. The D9 model is manufactured by the US firm Caterpillar Inc.

Some observers have taken this move to mean that the Bidenites are registering their displeasure with the Israeli war crime of ethnic cleansing. But if you’re going to be against ethnic cleansing, why not go all the way and be against genocide too?

Indeed, a shortage of new bulldozers will have precisely zero bearing on Israel’s ability to continue waging genocide in Gaza, where officially more than 43,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered over the past 13 months but the real death toll is undoubtedly many times higher.

Ynet noted that the machines are used “primarily for flattening structures in the Gaza Strip” but they are “also needed” in southern Lebanon, where Israel’s latest terrorist operations have also killed thousands. The Israeli army’s existing arsenal of D9 dozers is reportedly in need of maintenance, hence the replacement order – the moratorium on delivery of which “will likely delay another significant operation by [Israel’s military] that remains incomplete: establishing a one-kilometer-wide [0.6-mile-wide] buffer zone between the Gaza Strip [and Israel] involving the leveling of hundreds of Palestinian buildings and agricultural lands”.

Not only is there the troubling issue of the “exposed” soldiers then; there is also the annoying interruption to Israel’s scorched-earth plan.

In addition to “leveling” civilian infrastructure and wiping out agriculture, bulldozers have served other handy purposes in Gaza. There was that time in September, for instance, that the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights documented the shooting by Israeli soldiers of 17-year-old Majed Fida Abu Zina, a resident of Gaza’s Far’a refugee camp, who was “left to bleed for approximately an hour and a half”, after which the Israeli army “brought in a bulldozer and began desecrating the boy’s body, tearing open his abdomen and exposing his internal organs before dragging and throwing him on al-Far’a hill”.

Incidentally, Israel’s bulldozing of human beings has not been restricted to Palestinians. In 2003, 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a 36-tonne Caterpillar bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah, where she was protesting against Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes. Call it Caterpillateral damage.

And Rafah, as it so happens, was central to the story the last time the Biden administration made noises about suspending shipments of lethal materials to Israel. In May, Biden announced he would no longer be supplying offensive weapons to the Israeli army in the event of an all-out assault on the southern Gaza city, reasoning that “civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs.”

Well, yeah – that’s how genocide works. And suspending a couple of bomb shipments here and there ultimately does absolutely nothing to put a dent in mass killings. Ditto for denying the Israelis their D9 dozer replacements.

These extremely isolated cases of moratoria on weapons transfers impact Israeli military behaviour even less given that they are accompanied by a continuous flood of billions upon billions of dollars in US military aid to Israel and other free-flowing weaponry.

Recall that in April, just weeks before Biden issued his warning re: Rafah, the US Congress OK’d no less than $26bn in supplemental wartime aid to Israel – which was authorised on top of all of the billions of dollars Israel already receives annually from its trusty American partner in crime.

And as Al Jazeera reported in August, the Biden administration had just “approved sending $20bn worth of arms to Israel, even as the US publicly calls for restraint in the war on Gaza”.

Of course, the mixed messaging is fully exploited by Israel’s psychopathic government, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which invokes every perceived slight by the fundamentally obsequious US as alleged evidence that even Israel’s best friends are somehow now anti-Israel.

As per the Ynet dispatch, the temporary freeze in D9 bulldozer shipments is simply another case of Israel getting the “cold shoulder… from Washington” – a state of affairs that “could pose a risk to [Israeli] soldiers” in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

And yet the “cold shoulder” has not and will not prevent Israel from literally and metaphorically bulldozing Gaza to death while raining made-in-the-USA apocalyptic destruction from the sky.

Forget the Israeli soldiers left “exposed” by the reported US freeze on bulldozer shipments. The population of Gaza is fully exposed to genocide – and international opposition to this most sinister reality is being bulldozed as we speak.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.