The philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” was  raised by the 13^th cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Thomas Aquinas. A metaphor for wast­ing time debat­ing top­ics of no prac­ti­cal val­ue, it sums up what efforts to resolve Gaza will be unless the U.S. actu­al­ly makes “changes in policy”.

Con­sid­er that it took six months into the war to reach this point last week: “There are signs that the two coun­tries (the U.S. and Israel), for all the recent dra­ma, might be start­ing to shift from polit­i­cal the­ater to mature statesmanship.”
Sev­en more aid work­ers (bring­ing the toll to more than 200), 33,000 Gazans and more than 90 jour­nal­ists had to die so that adults sup­pos­ed­ly capa­ble of run­ning coun­tries could pos­ture, pose and play­act before get­ting down to business.
Doesn’t any­one involved in pol­i­cy-mak­ing have at least a pass­ing acquain­tance with recent history?
The U.S. admin­is­tra­tion sig­nalled its “dis­plea­sure” with the foot­work  of its dance part­ner Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu by final­ly abstain­ing, rather than the usu­al Pavlov­ian response of a veto, on UN Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil Res­o­lu­tion 2728 (2024).
Almost imme­di­ate­ly after­ward, a State Depart­ment spokesman declared 2728 “non-bind­ing”, and there­fore has “no impact at all on Israel and Israel’s abil­i­ty to con­tin­ue to go after Hamas.”. U.S. ally South Korea backed that up by not­ing that it did not explic­it­ly include the word “decide” (the head of a pin if ever there was one) and was not adopt­ed under Chap­ter VII.
A lead­ing expert on such mat­ters dis­agreed, and not­ed that “as is well estab­lished, the Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil can adopt legal­ly bind­ing res­o­lu­tion” with­out such nitpicks.
Netanyahu couldn’t give a damn either way, not least because the cur­rent U.S.-Israel-UN dance makes the marathon ones por­trayed in the film “They Shoot Horse Don’t They?” look like Chopin’s “Minute Waltz”.
Israel accept­ed Res­o­lu­tion 242 as bind­ing in 1967, but has still not ful­ly  met the require­ment that its  forces with­draw from ter­ri­to­ries occu­pied in the Six Day war, which include the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
                     TWO TO TANGO
In the face of the inter­na­tion­al out­rage over the drone bomb­ing of three clear­ly marked aid vehi­cles on an Israeli mil­i­tary-approved route —which, it is worth not­ing, only spurt­ed forth because most of the vic­tims were West­ern­ers — Netanyahu offered a metaphor­i­cal shrug: “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in the last day there was a trag­ic case of our forces unin­ten­tion­al­ly hit­ting inno­cent peo­ple in the Gaza Strip. It hap­pens in war.” It took the implied threat of a recon­sid­er­a­tion of con­tin­ued arms sup­ply deals to get him as far as a rit­u­al offer­ing that Israel “deeply regrets the trag­ic incident.”
But then again, he has an his­tor­i­cal dance part­ner prece­dent for glib­ness where con­tri­tion is appro­pri­ate. When Iraq fell into a parox­ysm of dis­or­der and loot­ing after the U.S. inva­sion, then U.S. Defence Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld dis­missed it as: “Stuff hap­pens.”
The wreck­age of the World Cen­tral Kitchen vehi­cles was still smol­der­ing when the U.S. reit­er­at­ed that arms deliv­er­ies agreed upon but not ful­filled would go ahead.
By com­par­i­son, with­in days  of Israel’s accu­sa­tion that a dozen out of more than 12,000 UNWRA staffers were (alleged­ly) involved in the Octo­ber 7 Hamas attack on south­ern Israel, 17 coun­tries and the Euro­pean Union sus­pend­ed fund­ing for the agency, which is wide­ly held to be essen­tial for aid deliv­ery in Gaza. This despite the fact the UN quick­ly launched an inves­ti­ga­tion and fired the accused.
                        OUT OF STEP
A mem­o­ran­dum signed by Pres­i­dent Biden in Feb­ru­ary states that coun­tries receiv­ing U.S. mil­i­tary aid must “facil­i­tate and not arbi­trar­i­ly deny, restrict, or oth­er­wise impede, direct­ly or indi­rect­ly, the trans­port or deliv­ery of Unit­ed States human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance”, or U.S.-supported inter­na­tion­al efforts to pro­vide aid.
In March Sarah Yager, Wash­ing­ton direc­tor at Human Rights Watch not­ed that: “Giv­en ongo­ing hos­til­i­ties in Gaza, the Israeli government’s assur­ances to the Biden admin­is­tra­tion that it is meet­ing US legal require­ments are not credible.”
Accord­ing to the author­i­ta­tive Israeli dai­ly paper Haaretz, the strike “was launched because of  sus­pi­cion that a ter­ror­ist was trav­el­ling with the convoy”.
Hamas has made itself deserv­ing of lit­er­al anni­hi­la­tion. Oblit­er­at­ing aid work­ers in clear­ly marked vehi­cles on a “sus­pi­cion” there might be a Hamas gun­man with them, is well out of step with Israel’s insis­tence that its forces are dis­ci­plined and act with­in the rules of war, however.
The only “angels” in Gaza are aid work­ers, and unless Wash­ing­ton makes good on its threat of “changes in pol­i­cy”, the only dance that mat­ters in Gaza will be the “Danse Macabre”, which is already in full swing, and it’s not philosophical.

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