4 March—As part of the spoils of victory in Europe that ended World War II, stipulated in the Potsdam Agreement, the victorious Allies split Germany into west and east sectors, generally for geographical proximity. Simply put, the good guys—United States, Great Britain, France—got the west and Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union (a wicked but necessary ally in the war) got the east. A (but not the only) problem was that Berlin, Germany’s capital city, while also divided among the four allies of necessity, was in the east. (Potsdam, by the way, is adjacent to Berlin.)

Thus the Soviets had easy access to East Berlin (and West Berlin, for that matter) but land and water access to West Berlin for the good guys was a minimum of 200 miles through essentially hostile territory. In June 1948, because the Soviets had problems with the new currency just introduced by the western Allies, they cut off road, rail, and canal access to Berlin. That was the notorious Berlin Blockade.

But the good guys stood firm and cleverly organized the celebrated humanitarian Berlin Airlift, which carried supplies such as food and fuel to the people of West Berlin. The embarrassed Soviets lifted the blockade just shy of a year later; but the Allies, not trusting the Soviets, continued the air drops until the end of September 1949.

(Seventeen American and eight British aircraft crashed during the operation; there were 101 fatalities, mostly due to non-flying accidents.)

That takes us to the Gaza Airlift. The bad guys this time are—surprise!—the Israelis, or so the real bad guys and frustrated—and generally incompetent—politicians would have us believe.

Al Jazeera reports Jeremy Konyndyk’s bilious bitching, for instance. He was a disaster relief official for Barack Obama and Joe Biden and now runs Refugees International: “You only resort to [airdrops] when there is something on the ground blocking you from using better forms of transportation. You have to ask, why is this necessary? Well, it’s necessary because over the last nearly five months, the Israeli military offensive has made it virtually impossible for normal humanitarian operations to exist in Gaza.

“They could be opening more border crossings—they have refused to do that. And they’ve made it very difficult for humanitarian groups to operate within Gaza.

“So this resort to air strikes is a reflection of how impossible the Israeli government has made it to conduct normal and frankly more effective humanitarian operations inside Gaza.”

Konyndyk obviously doesn’t care that Israel is defending itself against an enemy sworn to destroy it. So whatever the Israelis do is entirely understandable and justified—or at least justifiable.

For its part, Israel claims that it isn’t limiting the delivery of aid to Gaza; and it has blamed the United Nations for failing to distribute aid to those in need—or worse, diverting aid to Hamas. Hamas, for its part, has demonstrated its ruthless disregard for all things honorable and decent. For the record, moreover, in the 75 years of its existence, Israel has been far, far more humanitarian, humane, credible, trustworthy, and reasonable than any of its neighbors.

And as for the United Nations, don’t forget that UNRWA workers helped Hamas stage the attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel on 7 October and ignited the war in Gaza, causing the United States to stop funding the terrorist-supporting self-proclaimed human-development agency . . .