One year of U.S. imperialism’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide

An Israeli soldier prepares U.S.-supplied ammunition by a mobile artillery tank in the north of Israel, near the border with Lebanon. | Ohad Zwigenberg / AP

One year ago, as Israel launched its massive war on Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the U.S. government was fully aware its ally was embarking on a campaign that would end up with Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders charged with war crimes. And yet, as the whole world has seen, that advance knowledge did nothing to deter the Biden administration from arming and aiding the genocide that has been perpetrated since.

A series of emails between staffers in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House from Oct. 11 to 14, 2023, have leaked, exposing conversations concerning what was about to unfold. They were published by Reuters late on Friday.

After reading an assessment from the International Committee of the Red Cross about the human cost of what Israel planned for Gaza—mass evacuations, bombings, denial of aid—Dana Stroul, then the U.S. Deputy Asst. Sec. of Defense for the Middle East, told President Joe Biden’s senior aides on Oct. 13, 2023, that she was “chilled to the bone.”

Writing directly to Biden’s top advisor Brett McGurk, Stroul said that the Red Cross “is not ready to say this in public, but is raising private alarm that Israel is close to committing war crimes.” She noted the impossibility of evacuating one million civilians from Gaza, as Israel was then ordering.

“Our assessment is that there’s simply no way to have this scale of a displacement without creating a humanitarian catastrophe,” Paula Tufro, a senior White House aide put in charge of formulating a humanitarian response to the war, wrote in another email. It would take “months” to put in place the infrastructure needed to provide “basic services” like food, water, and shelter to more than a million people, she said.

Tufro pleaded with the White House to pressure Israel to slow down its offensive. “We need GOI [Government of Israel] to pump the brakes in pushing people south,” Tufro wrote.

Of course, Netanyahu hit the gas instead, and U.S. imperialism kept filling up his tank.

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 41,909 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel in the past 365 days. Another 97,303 have been wounded. The majority in both categories have been women and children.

Those are the victims that have been counted; thousands more are missing or entombed beneath rubble. Calculations based on a study in The Lancet medical journal estimate the true death toll from death and disease caused by the war could be as high as 335,500 by now – or 14% of Gaza’s population. A further two million people have been driven by their homes—about 90% of Gaza’s population.

Aside from the still-growing ranks of the dead and displaced, how else can we quantify the genocide, and especially the role of U.S. imperialism in it?

Researchers with the Institute for Middle East Understanding and Brown University have been keeping count of the costs of Israel’s war—both human and financial. Peace activists in the U.S. should arm themselves with some of these calculations when talking with their co-workers, neighbors, and elected officials about the need to fight for and win a ceasefire.

• $107 in taxes – that’s the average cost that the median American taxpayer has spent individually in the past year to fund the weapons the Israeli military has used to kill Palestinian civilians.
• $18 billion – the amount of money appropriated by the U.S. Congress for weapons for Israel since Oct. 7. (Compare that to the $9.2 billion spent on the Environmental Protection Agency in the middle of the climate crisis.)
• $4.86 billion – the amount the U.S. has spent bombing Yemen in support of Israel’s war.
• $20 billion – the extra money for Israel announced by the Biden administration in August, which is on top of the $18 billion sent by Congress already. A vote in the U.S. Senate is expected in November.
• 600 weapons deliveries from the U.S. to Israel from October 2023 to August 2024. On average, that means a fresh shipment every 12 hours.
• 50,000 tons of weapons – the volume shipped to Israel since October 2023.
• Essentially 100% – the percentage of munitions used by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza that were supplied by the U.S.
• 75,000 tons of bombs – dropped by Israel on Gaza, equal to five Hiroshima atomic bombs and more than the U.S. dropped on Nazi Germany during all of World War II.

That’s just for one year of genocide and war, but the arms have been flowing from the U.S. to Israel for more than six decades.

For the 66 years from 1959 to 2024, the U.S. has provided Israel with at least a quarter of a trillion inflation-adjusted dollars ($251.2 billion) in aid. Billions more have been spent on U.S. weapons and military deployments on behalf of or in support of Israel.

Now, Netanyahu and his far-right cabinet have extended their war against Palestine into Lebanon and are aiming their guns toward Iran with regime change in mind.

As the numbers above show, Israel is completely dependent on the U.S. It would be incapable of carrying out its campaigns of aggression without U.S. help. The Biden administration could end the genocide tomorrow if it wanted to—simply by stopping the arms shipments. Netanyahu’s behavior would change immediately if there were no bombs, ammunition, or shells being pumped in.

But the shipments and the endless spending won’t stop unless the American people force them to, and that’s because U.S. imperialism needs Israel as its most reliable ally and military base in the Middle East, a strategic geographic crossroads and still one of the world’s biggest sources of oil and gas.

Even if the U.S. ruling class may not want the wider war Netanyahu is pushing, it also is driven by imperial self-interest to sustain and maintain a heavily-armed Israel to serve as a proxy against Iran and an outpost of U.S. power in the region.

That is the most influential factor for why the Biden administration, and every other administration, continues funding and arming Israel— a factor far more important than the actions of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., as powerful as the latter may be.

The Palestinian people—and now the Lebanese people—have paid and continue to pay the price of this war with their lives, homes, and futures. The American people have paid for it with our tax dollars.

By not altering course when it comes to their blank-check policy of support for Israel, the Biden administration (and the Kamala Harris presidential campaign) are leaving an opening for Netanyahu’s favored candidate, Donald Trump, to win the election on Nov. 5. If that happens, our already limited democracy will also pay the price for U.S. imperialist complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

As with all news analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.

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CONTRIBUTOR

C.J. Atkins

C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People's World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left.