An increasing number of prominent Democrats are suggesting that the United States begin conditioning military aid to Israel in an effort to shift of its current government.
The U.S. currently gives Israel over $3.8 billion in military aid every year.
This week Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen (D) told The Guardian that conditioning could prevent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from further annexing portions of the West Bank or compel his government to crack down on settler violence against Palestinians.
“President Biden should get more personally engaged in addressing these issues. We should make it clear, for example, that US military assistance is not to be used to aid and abet settler violence, and not to be used for the purpose of expanding settlements or protecting those who are erecting illegal outposts,” said Van Hollen.
The Senator wants the Biden administration to look at 1997’s “Leahy Law,” which prohibits the United States from sending assistance to foreign militaries that carry out human rights abuses. Van Hollen recently returned from Israel and the illegally-occupied West Bank, where he says he witnessed Israel engaging in a “land grab” of Palestinian territory.
“When you see it first-hand it underscores how alarming the situation is now with this ultra-rightwing Netanyahu government that includes known racists like [Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben-Gvir and [Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel] Smotrich, and clearly shows that they’re determined to totally take over the West Bank,” he said.
Furthermore, in his new book, Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East, former White House official Steven Simon goes beyond calls for conditioning aid and questions whether the relationship with Israel continues to serve any strategic interest for the United States.
Simon, who served as the U.S. National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa under the Obama administration, tells Haaretz that, “Israel has the enviable power to go its own way while still extracting resources from the United States.” He says that Netanyahu, “might be viewed by historians as strategically great for Israel because he succeeded in achieving independence from the United States while at the same time manipulating American domestic politics. That’s not nothing.”
There has also been a spate of recent op-eds where establishment journalists broach the issue of cutting aid, including the New York Times’ Tom Friedman and Nick Kristof. Kristof’s piece (which is titled “With Israel, It’s Time to Start Discussing the Unmentionable”) relies on interviews from a number of former diplomats connected to the U.S./Israel relationship.
“Israel can afford it, and it would be healthier for the relationship if Israel stood on its own two feet,” two-time ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told him.
“Under the right conditions and in a galaxy far, far away, with U.S.-Israeli relations on even if not better keel, there would be advantages to both to see military aid phased out over time,” says former State Department Middle East analyst Aaron David Miller.
“Israel’s economy is strong enough that it does not need aid; security assistance distorts Israel’s economy and creates a false sense of dependency,” says former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, “Aid provides the U.S. with no leverage or influence over Israeli decisions to use force; because we sit by quietly while Israel pursues policies we oppose, we are seen as ‘enablers’ of Israel’s occupation.”
Polling shows that Democratic voters firmly support cutting military aid. A 2019 Data for Progress survey found that 46% of Americans support conditioning aid to Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. That number was 65% among Democrats. A 2021 Chicago Council Survey ended up with similar results. 50% supported conditioning aid with 62% of Democrats backing such restrictions.
Despite the increasing calls for a reassessment of policy, the leadership of the Democratic party shows no signs of budging on the issue. The only candidate to consistently bring up the issue on the 2020 campaign trail was Vermont’s Bernie Sanders. While running for president, Biden called the idea a “gigantic mistake.”
Rep. Betty McCollum’s H.R.3103 would block Israel from using U.S. taxpayer dollars to detain Palestinian children, destroy Palestinian homes, or expand its policies of annexation. However, it only has 28 co-sponsors and still lacks a Senate companion bill.
Pro-Israel lobbying groups have spent millions pushing Democrats that staunchly oppose cutting aid. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) are currently leading a delegation of 24 House Democrats to Israel on a trip organized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
“With this trip, House Democrats reaffirm our commitment to the special relationship between the United States and Israel, one anchored in our shared democratic values and mutual geopolitical interests,” said Jeffries in a statement.
This week it was also revealed that Home Depot co-founder and GOP mega-donor Bernie Marcus had donated $1 million to AIPAC’s United Democracy Project (UDP), the SuperPac that the group has used to intervene in Democratic primaries. UDP now has nearly $9 million a little over a year from the national election.
“An increasing number of prominent Democrats are suggesting that the United States begin conditioning military aid to Israel in an effort to shift of its current government.”
Not gonna work. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/end-american-aid-israel
“End U.S. Aid to Israel – America’s manipulation of the Jewish state is endangering Israel and American Jews”
The Zionists see the writing on the wall and they are prepared to forgo aid because they would rather have no aid if having aid means they have to pay attention to the kvetching of U.S. human rights activists.
Why not cut to the chase? The U.S. bears considerable responsibility for the endless occupation, and it need to do the right thing: unilaterally recognize the Palestinian state on 67 borders and let the chips fall where they may.
My deep thanks to Senator Van Hollen for his integrity and courage.
The US must borrow those billions that it gives to Israel. It makes the US look like a vassal state paying tribute to some empire. The “cost” to Israel is mere millions in campaign “donations”.
When Israel starts to lose Tom Friedman! Martin Indyk! David Aaron Miller! it matters.
Yes, Israel can probably stand on its own economically. (Unless it has to subsidize more and more ultra-Orthodox men who spend their days studying Torah and don’t work.)
But it needs the US politically and diplomatically. That’s what all that money stands for. Stop writing the checks, and the rest of the world will see that Israel is no longer immune to criticism.
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“Polling shows that Democratic voters firmly support cutting military aid. A 2019 Data for Progress survey found that 46% of Americans support conditioning aid to Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. That number was 65% among Democrats. A 2021 Chicago Council Survey ended up with similar results. 50% supported conditioning aid with 62% of Democrats backing such restrictions.”
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Senator Van Hollen is a decent person and, full disclosure, I live in Maryland and I have voted for him regularly. His recent mission to Palestine was useful if for no other reason than that it allows him to speak with evermore gravity about the systemic oppression facing the Palestinian people living under Israeli apartheid and Occupation. MAD respect!
As to polling … polling also shows that a majority of Americans favor sensible gun control and universal background checks. Not happening any time soon.
A majority of Americans also supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2016. Did not happen.
A majority of Americans also support a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. Has not happened. (Yet)
A majority of Americans support mail-in voting, progressive immigration reform, Social Security financial contribution changes and tax increases for the rich, etc.
The University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation (PPC) currently lists 150 issues on which vast bipartisan majorities of citizens exist. Yet movement on these issues, that is, bringing them to fruition in terms of passing legislation with accompanying budgets, remains frustratingly out of reach.
A 2020 report by the PPC stated: “…in a recent survey of Americans, only one in ten said their country “is run for the benefit of all the people” while nine in ten said the country is “pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.”
And so it is, IMO, with US governmental support for Israel.
I can imagine that if 99% of the American people wanted to terminate all aid, not just military, to Israel Congress would still act to thwart the will of the people. Why? The short, pathetic answer was articulated for us by none other than Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (who calls Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz Congress’ “cardinal” on all issues Israel-Zionist) when she said: “I have said that if the Capitol crumbled to the ground the one thing that would remain is our aid, and I would not even call it aid, it is cooperation with Israel”.
There we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. The people’s will has been severed from the legislative process as it pertains to Israel. Professional Zionism has worked the electoral processes into a model of special interest craftsmanship, streamlining and clarifying its core issues for easy consumption by eager candidates and grateful officeholders at the local, state and Federal levels. Nice work!
(Cont.)
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Indeed, the operational handbook used by organized Zionism might serve as a near-perfect negative revealing those aspects of contemporary American governance that are most in need of remedying.
Professional Zionism relies on the systemic dysfunctions of American governance to accomplish its political goals.
Any good AIPAC lobbyist will swiftly reply to such an observation by saying that everything the Israel Lobby does is “legal” or “within the law” or done not by Israel alone, but also “by many other special interests.” Which, sadly, is all true but misses the point. Slavery was “legal” in the US for more than 200 years. Denying the franchise to women was also “legal”. Even white, bemedaled, male veterans of the Revolutionary War did not “legally” have the vote at first. Legal is not necessarily moral, and therein lies the catch.
Perhaps reflecting the people’s understanding that money-in-politics is at the heart of what ails the country’s representative functions it is interesting to note another issue that a “very large bipartisan majority of Americans agree on – 61% of the people and even 61% of Republicans – is a Constitutional amendment to allow government greater freedom to regulate campaign financing (thus overturning the Citizens United decision.)”
Imagine the change in special interest politics if Citizens was overturned, perhaps permitting private wealth to remain legal in politics but banned in perpetuity from elections. The late Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia infamously said relative to the decision in Citizens: Money is speech. Which, if true, means the poor are mute.
So while it is good to conduct polls and be aware of their results it is perhaps futile to expect that the mere weight of numbers is a concrete indication of likely change. Systemic change is what is called for and Thomas Jefferson spoke to this very point when he said:
We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
Political Zionism is a close friend and enabler of our barbarous ancestors and the people have taken note.
Question for Any Zionist: Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to suggest that American interests, both domestic and international, are regularly complicated, thwarted or worse owing to the US government’s commitments to Israel?
View here 416 Palestine posters on the theme of Elections