Nothing about American arms policy toward Israel makes sense
President Biden tried to use military aid to pressure Israel, and instead found himself in a political void — one Israel has exploited time and again
A protestor holds a sign reading “Stop Arming Israel” at a Los Angeles, California, rally against the war. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images
Eric Alterman June 4, 2024
Editor’s note, June 19, 2024: The U.S. and Israel clashed earlier this week after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused President Joe Biden’s administration of “withholding weapons” from Israel; the U.S. envoy to Israel, Amos Hochstein, reportedly responded to Netanyahu that his comments were “unproductive,” and “more importantly, completely untrue.”
When push comes to shove, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear he will do what he wants, regardless of the consequences.
By withholding a recent shipment of ammunition to Israel, Biden let Netanyahu know that he really, really did not want Israel to invade the crowded city of Rafah. And Netanyahu showed willingness to pay lip service to that goal, and even slightly delay or adjust his original plans. But after it was revealed that U.S.-made bombs were used in a shocking late May strike that resulted in the deaths of dozens of displaced Palestinian civilians in Gaza — one of two attacks to cause mass casualties carried out in the city after the International Court of Justice’s ordered Israel to halt its military offensive there — it’s less clear than ever what Biden expected to accomplish by withholding just a single shipment of munitions, while continuing to support a dramatic expansion of military aid to Israel at large.
Even Sen. Ben Cardin, the Democratic Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, told Politico that Biden’s actions were not well understood —“certainly not by Israel, certainly not by the public and certainly not here.”
In fact, Biden’s approach is quite straightforward.
He has never really wanted to interfere with the massive number of weapons the U.S. regularly supplies to Israel, currently to the tune of $3.8 billion a year, nor the $15 billion contained in the April supplemental bill passed by Congress at the administration’s behest. The holdup of the weapons in question was meant only as a signal — to Netanyahu, to Biden’s party, and to the rest of the world — that his willingness to be treated like a pawn by Israel’s leader is not limitless, although, so far, it’s been pretty close.
Biden’s failure to communicate this policy has left a predictable political void — and, just as predictably, his critics and opponents have lept to fill that void with a myriad of purposeful lies and prevarications.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board referred, angrily, to this minor move as an “Biden’s Israel Arms Embargo.” Republican senators included Mitch McConnell, J.D. Vance and Mitt Romney insisted that it’s none of the president’s business what Israel does with the weapons the U.S. supplies to it. The Republican House leadership passed a bill, with a smattering of nervous Democratic support, that would demand that Biden send the weapons.
To demonstrate their lack of seriousness, the bill’s authors included a clause that would cut off funding for the Defense Department, the State Department and the National Security Council until the said arms were safely in Israeli hands. That bill’s sponsors knew it would never see the light of day in the Senate; their goal is simply to reinforce the narrative that only Republicans can be depended upon to allow Israel to defend itself.
In a more sensible universe, the controversy inspired by Biden’s decision would lead to a meaningful examination of the oddness of the U.S. arms sales to Israel, now in their seventh decade. They are, after all, evidence of one the most extraordinary relationships between two nations in the history of great power diplomacy.
Since facing a U.S. arms embargo for the first decade or so of its existence, Israel has become, by far, the foreign country to receive the most U.S. military aid. What’s more, Israel receives this aid, as the historian Jerome Slater puts it, “earlier than other countries, with fewer limitations on how to use the funds and minimal bureaucratic oversight.”
The first president to lift what had originally been an arms embargo on direct U.S. weapons sales to Israel — imposed by President Harry Truman during the 1948 war — was John F. Kennedy. He agreed, in August 1962, to supply Israel with U.S.-manufactured “Hawk” surface-to-air mobile missiles as part of an unsuccessful attempt to bribe Israeli authorities to discontinue their efforts to build a secret nuclear weapons facility in Dimona. (Israeli officials vociferously denied the facility’s existence — but the CIA had hard evidence, including of the role French scientists played in helping to set it up).
Soon after Kennedy’s assassination in November, 1963, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, told an Israeli diplomat, “You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one.” Johnson continued to provide Israel with weapons, without tying that assistance to demands about the country’s by then extensive nuclear weapons program — the existence of which Israel, a non-signatory to the 190-member nuclear non-proliferation treaty, has still never confirmed.
Once Johnson opened the spigot of U.S. military aid to Israel, the threat of withdrawing it became a useful political tool.
Henry Kissinger used the threat of an arms cutoff during the 1973 war, to try to scare Israel into greater flexibility once it (finally) won the war — a war that Kissinger, according to the memoirs of the slain Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, had secretly encouraged Egypt to begin. (Israel was sufficiently concerned that its war cabinet actually began to discuss using its nuclear weapons it has, again, never admitted to having.) Nixon finally overruled his secretary of state and instructed the Pentagon to begin a massive weapons airlift. He did this despite his prediction to Kissinger that after Israel won the war, the Israelis would be “even more impossible to deal with than before.”
Since then, a system has developed that gives Israel an entirely unique standing: Alone among nations that purchase U.S. weaponry under what is called the Foreign Military Financing program, Israel enjoys a remarkable series of conditions for the aid it receives.
It qualifies for something called “cash flow financing,” which means it gets the weapons without having to pay for them up front, like every other nation that participates in the program. Israel is also allowed to use some of its FMF funds to buy weapons from Israeli companies rather than from U.S. weapons manufacturers, thereby contradicting the entire purpose of the FMF program, which is to aid U.S. weapons sales abroad. When Israel orders its weapons, it does so directly, with an expedited Congressional review, also alone among FMF recipients.
And that money that Israelis didn’t have to pay up front? Well, Congress tends to waive Israel’s obligation to repay any of the loans it receives.
In other words, we frequently just give Israel the money it uses to buy weapons — not only from the U.S., but also from themselves.
But wait, there’s more. There’s the joint missile defense development program that created the Iron Dome system, for which the U.S. pays, and which Congress tends to replace free-of-charge. The U.S. is also legally compelled to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge,” a term which ensures that Israel always enjoys better military technology than any of its neighbors.
The upshot of all of the above is this: If Biden really wanted to demand that Israel follow U.S. priorities in Gaza, all he would have to do is follow U.S. law. According to a law authored by former Senator Patrick Leahy, the U.S. government is prohibited from providing “aid to any unit of a foreign security force if the secretary of state has ‘credible information’ the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights: murder, rape, torture, forced disappearance or other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty and personal security’” But as Leahy himself notes, no president has ever enforced this law with regard to Israel — and Biden is not about to start, even though the U.S. State Department recently concluded that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel is in violation of this law.
The truth is that, so long as the pro-Israel lobby largely defines the meaning of the words “pro-Israel” in Congress and across the executive branch, the extremely unusual arms sales relationship the U.S. has with Israel will likely persist. That lobby’s willingness to spend tens of millions of dollars to try to determine the outcomes, not merely of elections, but also of both party’s Congressional primaries is designed to strike fear into the hearts of any candidate who might otherwise ask, aloud, just what the heck is going on with these policies.
In the meantime, the Biden administration has also pushed Congress to sell Israel up to 50 new F-15 fighter jets, for $18 billion. As of last October, the U.S. had 599 “active” cases of foreign military sales for Israel, meaning sales that had been approved by the administration and notified to Congress — a number that we know has increased substantially during the course of war. The State Department has valued the totality of these pre-war sales at just under $24 billion. So, when Netanyahu has blustered that Israel “will stand alone” if it has to in its war with Hamas, well, don’t believe him. He’s going to stand with pretty much the full backing of the U.S., regardless of how Biden may or may not feel about it.
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