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Congress wants to let Israel nix US weapon sales

A new bill would mandate the president to consult the Israeli government "for information regarding Israel’s qualitative military edge” before the selling weapons to other Middle Eastern countries.

Earlier this month, Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL) introduced a bill with potentially far-reaching and unprecedented implications for Israel’s ability to nix US weapons sales to the Middle East. 

H.R.8494, the Guaranteeing Israel’s QME Act of 2020, would mandate the president “to consult with appropriate officials of the Government of Israel for information regarding Israel’s qualitative military edge” before the proposed sale or export of weapons to other Middle Eastern countries.

Although the bill would not give Israel the official ability to veto US weapons sales decisions, it would nevertheless provide it with a formal mechanism to throw a monkey wrench into those plans and make it more difficult for a president to override Israeli concerns. 

If enacted into law, this bill would broaden the already existing US statutory commitment to Israel’s qualitative military edge, which was surreptitiously enacted into law in 2008 after former Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) snuck a last-minute amendment into a non-germane bill, the Naval Vessel Transfer Authority.

That bill mandated the president to certify that proposed weapons sales to the Middle East “will not adversely affect Israel’s qualitative military edge,” which is defined in law as Israel’s

“Ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or non-state actors.”

Until this point, this determination has been made solely by the United States; Schneider’s bill would essentially make it a joint US-Israeli determination. 

Engel’s last gift to Israel?

Schneider is a self-described stalwart advocate for Israel who authored a resolution passed by the House last year condemning the BDS movement.

Currently, 18 Representatives, including Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), the Middle East Subcommittee Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), who seeks to replace outgoing House Foreign Affairs Chair Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), are cosponsors of the bill.

Schneider’s introduction of the bill appears to be motivated by a combination of electioneering and genuine concern among pro-Israel Democrats that President Trump’s free-wheeling weapons sales to authoritarian regimes in the region could actually endanger Israel’s qualitative military edge.

With limited legislative days left in the current congressional session, which will be dominated by the Senate’s controversial attempt to confirm a Supreme Court nominee and by negotiations to pass an already overdue 2021 budget, there is almost no chance of Congress passing the bill.

However, Congress has often rammed through pro-Israel bills before and passing it through committee for a quick floor vote could be Engel’s final legislative gift to Israel before his enforced retirement, so the possibility cannot be completely discounted.

More likely, Schneider’s bill is an act of virtue signaling designed to convince the shrinking percentage of pro-Israel Democrats that the party can outdo Trump in its commitment to Israel.

Conflict over weapon sales

However, while the bill is nominally bipartisan, only three Republicans are cosponsors, pointing to the simmering conflict between Democrats and the Trump administration on weapons sales to the Middle East.

A large part of this quarrel stems from the Trump administration’s determination to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia to prosecute its devastating war against Yemen. Although Democratic opposition to US complicity in the Saudi-led coalition began during the Obama administration, it escalated under Trump and picked up enough Republican support to result last year in an unprecedented invocation of the Wars Power Resolution to end US participation in the war against Yemen. 

Congress also passed a rare joint resolution last year to block a proposed sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. However, Trump vetoed both acts and made use of a loophole in the Arms Export Control Act to keep the spigot of weapons flowing with minimal congressional oversight. And today’s inaugural session of the US-Saudi Strategic Dialogue between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan appears designed to reinforce these US weapons sales despite congressional objections.

Even last month’s signing of the so-called Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel on the one hand, and Bahrain and the UAE on the other, has done little to calm, and much to exacerbate, the anxieties of pro-Israel Democratic Members of Congress that the Trump administration is eroding Israel’s qualitative military edge.

Schneider led a group of Democratic Representatives calling on Trump to “carefully scrutinize any proposed sale of advanced military technology like the F-35” to the UAE. And last week, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent the Trump administration a long and detailed list of questions about the proposed sale of F-35 fighter jets to the UAE, most of which focused on its potential to erode Israel’s qualitative military edge.

Whether the Trump administration offered the F-35’s to the UAE as a quid pro quo for signing the Abraham Accords is not known. However, in opposing this weapons deal, pro-Israel Democrats are attempting to have their cake and eat it too. While cheering on Trump’s diplomatic efforts to normalize relations between authoritarian Arab regimes and Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people, they are simultaneously trying to protect and enhance Israel’s military superiority over them. 

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Israel says “Jump!” and Congress says “How high?” with Adelson and Saban looking on approvingly. Backstage the analysts calculate how ready Americans are to sacrifice for another regime change war for Israel.

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BINGO!!
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.highlight-forget-about-jewish-or-democratic-is-israel-even-an-actual-country-1.9224997

“Is Israel even an actual country?”
By Yuli Tamir, Haaretz, Oct. 12/20

EXCERPTS:
“Many people have been wondering recently whether Israel is a democratic country or a Jewish and democratic one. Or has Israel’s democracy been eroded perhaps, turning it into an autocratic country?

“I would like to ask a much simpler question. Is Israel a country? Based on the accepted (and most simplistic) definition, a country is a sovereign political organization that controls a defined territory. Its inhabitants are subject to a common authority and are governed by an independent government with the right to establish diplomatic relations or to declare war against other sovereign countries.

“Israel does not meet these basic conditions. It does not have a defined territory: As long as its northern and eastern borders have not been approved on a final basis, Israel is a political entity whose territory is subject to domestic and external dispute. Secondly, Israel lacks a source of authority accepted by all of its citizens.

“And third, Israel’s political independence is limited and is dependent in large measure on the policy of its ally – the United States. The challenge of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic highlights these three deficiencies.

“Territorial sovereignty”
“When the pandemic erupted Israel, like all other countries in the world, closed its borders. In doing so, it left a substantial portion of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on the other side of the fence – an overt expression of the fact that those territories are not an indivisible part of the country’s sovereign territory. Israel has not included Palestinian residents of the Palestinian Authority and of Gaza in the tally of those infected, has not admitted patients from the territories to hospitals in Israel, and made a clear distinction between residents of the Palestinian area and residents of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. (cont’d)
.

I think America has to answer some questions over its support for Israel the cold war is over. Americans send billions to Israel each year, some of the money comes back to bribe congress and senators in for of campaign contributions! Israel has no natural resources what does America get in return seems very one sided to me.

U.S. Worried About Living Up To Netanyahu Campaign Promises….WASHINGTON—Saying the Likud Party leader had set Israeli citizens’ expectations extremely high in the run up to his reelection Tuesday, top-level sources expressed their worry Wednesday about whether the United States would actually be able to live up to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign promises. “Given the ambitious list of security and spending initiatives that Netanyahu guaranteed Israeli voters on the campaign trail, I think it could be very difficult for the U.S. to come through on all of them; the pressure’s really going to be on America not to disappoint his constituents,”

https://politics.theonion.com/u-s-worried-about-living-up-to-netanyahu-campaign-prom-1819577606

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“That is an indication that although it doesn’t acknowledge it, Israel views itself as in practice having territorial sovereignty only within its pre-Six-Day War 1967 borders. At the same time, Israel has signed a peace agreement with the United Arab Emirates that includes a commitment not to annex the territories in the near future, which underscores recognition of the fact that its sovereign borders, as well the application of Israeli law, remain unresolved.”

“Because since Israel’s founding it has not had a constitution, the battle over Israel’s source of authority has not ended. And because they haven’t gotten used to respecting the state as the supreme source of authority, the groups all feel that any limitation imposed on them is part of an attempt to dictate a new division of authority that places them in an inferior position.

“In such a state of affairs, the government’s sovereignty is being eroded, and it cannot make decisions and enforce them. Defiance of government directives has put the limits of compliance in clearer relief – on the part of secular Israelis in the name of freedom, on the part of the Arabs in the name of tradition and communal identity, and on the part of the ultra-Orthodox in the name of the sanctification of the Almighty.”