Over the weekend the Biden administration notified Congress of an $8 billion arms deal with Israel. The agreement includes air-to-air missiles, 500-pound bombs, and other weapons.
“The President has made clear Israel has a right to defend its citizens, consistent with international law and international humanitarian law, and to deter aggression from Iran and its proxy organizations. We will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense,” a U.S. official told Axios.
According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the U.S. government has already spent at least $17.9 billion on military aid for Israel since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. In August 2024 the Israeli Defense Ministry revealed that the Biden administration had sent the country over 50,000 tons of weapons and equipment.
The announcement comes just weeks after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Over the past month, the Israeli army has made headlines for killing journalists and destroying the only remaining hospitals in Northern Gaza.
In just the first four days of the new year Israel reportedly killed more than 234 Palestinians.
In a recent interview with the New York Times Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed the suggestion that a genocide was taking place and defended the Biden administration’s track record in the region.
“Everyone has to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions from those facts. And my conclusions are clear. I think as well, there is, in the wake of this horrific suffering — the traumatization of the Israeli population, the Palestinian population and many others — there’s also a light that one can see that offers the prospect of a much different and much better future,” said Blinken.
“It doesn’t bring back the lives of those who have been lost,” he continued. It doesn’t bring back the parents of the children in Gaza, or the children for parents in Israel who lost theirs on Oct. 7. But it does offer a different way forward. And we’ve done an extraordinary amount of work to build the foundation for that.”
Blinken also claims that the U.S. is on the verge of finally negotiating a ceasefire between the Israeli government and Hamas and says it could come together within the next two weeks. Donald Trump has publicly declared that there will be “hell to pay” in the Middle East if the Israeli hostages are not released before he returns to The White House on January 20, although it’s unclear what this threat entails.
The new weapons deal was immediately criticized by human rights organizations and Palestine advocates.
“If President Biden is actually the person who approved this new $8 billion arms sale, then he is a war criminal who belongs in a cell at The Hague alongside Netanyahu,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad in a statement. “But if Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan and other aides are making these unconscionable decisions as shadow presidents, then anyone with a conscience in the administration should speak up now about their abuses of power.”
“Biden unblinkingly armed and supported Israel right up to the last day of his administration,” wrote Drop Sites News reporter Murtaza Hussain. “No amount of domestic or international criticism or pressure resulted in even a minor divergence from this policy.”
“Our government has consistently prioritized funding a genocide over everything else,” said Nina Turner. “It’s unacceptable.”
The new weapons deal will have to be approved by the Senate and House, but Congress has consistently supported Israel’s assault on Gaza. In November Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) opposing certain U.S. weapon sales to Israel, but the effort was decisively rejected by the majority of his colleagues.
“All of this death and destruction is being supported by U.S taxpayers. [The U.S.] has provided, in recent times, over $18 billion in military aid to Israel and delivered more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment,” he told reporters prior to the vote. “In other words, as Americans, we are complicit.”
I guess all of us heaved a sigh of relief when Joe Biden beat Trump in 2024 and were lulled into thinking that he would be pretty damn good. In the event, he was so bad that Trump – a convicted felon – won in 2024.
“Ole Biden” is not and has not been running the country. Biden’s handlers have been running the country and siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars to the war in Ukraine and Israel.
Biden is shot and dysfunctional; he has been from the very start … his handlers, the democrats and the MSM concealed his current cognitive state.
And what happened to that Gaza port/pier to deliver humanitarian aid to the civilians in Gaza?
The Biden Administration Declares That A Genocide Is Happening… In Sudan
Caitlin Johnstone
Jan 07, 2025
“The Biden administration, which has been intimately complicit in the genocidal atrocities being perpetrated in Gaza for the last 15 months, has just determined that a genocide is being committed in Sudan.
On Tuesday the Biden administration formally accused the Sudanese paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of committing genocide in the civil war that has been ravaging the country since April 2023, announcing sanctions on the group’s leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa along with seven RSF-affiliated companies.
“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken moralized in a statement regarding the decision, adding, “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence. Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”
Sometimes all you can do is stare wordlessly at the absolute gall of these freaks.
This is after all the same Antony Blinken who just flatly denied that a genocide is taking place in Gaza in his final interviews with the press a few days ago, even as mainstream western human rights institutions like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch unambiguously accuse Israel of committing genocidal crimes of extermination against Palestinians in the enclave.”
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-biden-administration-declares
Real question: US taxpayers have certainly been generous to the Israeli military over the past year, even way beyond the usual US$3.8 billion per year. But if Biden, or whoever, has approved a US$8 billion sale, doesn’t that mean that Israel is supposed to pay some US supplier that amount for an equally valued quantity of US materiel? And if so, how does that disadvantage the taxpayer?
The American commitment to Israel’s “self-defense” has long been there for all to see.
Sinwar may have reckoned that capturing a hundred soldier prisoners would provide protection. He certainly misread that as well as the million a day he was getting via Netanyahu. He’s not the only one as some still advocate exercising the “right to armed resistance”.
Effective strategies can be counter intuitive. Tabling one state may logically be the most direct route to independence.