WASHINGTON—Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., the only senator ever to have lived in Israel, but long before its current right-wing nationalist regime took power, will try again to cut off U.S. military aid to that nation. He’s pushing for votes on November 20 on two aid cutoff resolutions.
As usual, Sanders has the support of J Street, the progressive pro-peace and pro-democracy Jewish-American group which now declares it has supplanted the notoriously right-wing “Israel lobby,” AIPAC, as the speaker for most U.S. Jews. AIPAC, funded by right-wing Republican big givers, staunchly supports the Israeli right—even when the right’s not in power–and Israel’s war on Gaza.
Sanders has tried twice before to cut off the aid, arguing both times that Israel’s war on Gaza is not only an international humanitarian disaster but a violation of U.S. law. He failed both times.
The Democratic Biden administration has drawn several “lines in the sand” against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime. Netanyahu, an open Donald Trump supporter, has crossed those lines with impunity.
Biden is increasingly nettled but unwilling to cut off military aid. Vice President Kamala Harris gave Netanyahu a steaming private lecture about violating humanitarian aid law, then informed the press. But in the recent presidential campaign—which she lost to bombastic pro-Israel Trump—Harris shied away from advocating a military aid cutoff.
That law, approved during the Kennedy administration, says the U.S. must withhold military aid to any ally which uses U.S. arms, aid, weapons, and other assistance in violation of international law. He’s making the same argument now, even more forcefully than before.
Stop violating the law
“The United States government must stop blatantly violating the law with regard to arms sales to Israel,” the senator wrote in a November 18 Washington Post op-ed. “The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear: The United States cannot provide weapons to any country that violates internationally recognized human rights.”
The Foreign Assistance Act also cuts off U.S. military aid to any nation that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly,” delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid, he added.
Right-winger Netanyahu’s government is breaking both laws, Sanders argues.
And Israel’s using U.S.-supplied one-ton bombs, drones, planes, and ammo, bought with $18 billion, so far, in U.S. military aid to Israel—money which goes to U.S. military contractors. That’s yielded “more than 50,000 tons” of weapons and warplanes, Sanders says.
Sanders declares Netanyahu’s rightist nationalist Israeli government unleashed the Israeli military to turn Gaza into a smoking ruin, starving its people, depriving them of water, power, and medicines, killing more than 43,000 Gazans, injuring at least 103,000, creating more than two million refugees and 17,000 orphans.
And Israeli warplanes, bought with U.S. aid and built by U.S. military contractors, bomb and strafe hospitals, schools, and columns of refugees in what the Israelis themselves term “safe” corridors.
The Israeli attack on Gaza continues a long war on Palestinians that goes back to when the British took control of Palestine, starting in 1922.
More recently, Netanyahu unleashed right-wing nationalist settlers on the Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied West Bank, while its army and police stood by and did nothing. Netanyahu also sent Israeli warplanes to bomb southern Lebanon, to destroy another pro-Palestinian fighting force, Hezbollah.
That bombing, up to and including the Lebanese capital of Beirut, has killed more than a thousand Lebanese civilians. Like the dead Gazans, most are women and children.
Both Sanders and J Street say enough is enough.
“As I have said many times, Israel clearly had a right to respond to the horrific Hamas terrorist attack,” Sanders wrote in his op-ed. Netanyahu is not just waging war on Hamas, but engaging in “all-out war against the Palestinian people.
Driven from homes
“During the last year, millions of desperately poor people in Gaza have been driven from their homes, forced to evacuate again and again with nothing more than the clothes on their backs,” Sanders said. “Families have been herded into so-called safe zones, only to face continued bombardment.
“The children of Gaza have suffered a level of physical and emotional trauma that is almost beyond comprehension and that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
“As horrific as the situation in Gaza has been over the past year, it is getting unimaginably worse. Humanitarian aid workers on the ground report tens of thousands of children now experience malnutrition and starvation because of Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid.” Those curbs break U.S. law, too.
“Infuriatingly and bewilderingly, however, the Biden administration said it cannot see any violation of our laws,” Sanders said.
Sanders and J Street both declare the public supports a cease-fire and a U.S. role in negotiating Israeli-Palestinian peace. In its latest surveys, in September, the non-partisan Pew Research Center reported that 61% of respondents want the U.S. to play a minor (37%) or major role in ending the war. The rest are evenly split between saying the U.S. should stay out of it and those with no opinion.
That end-the-war majority covers both political parties, though Republicans are more likely to say the U.S. should stay out of trying to settle the conflict.
J Street adds that not only does the war violate U.S. and international law, but it also violates Jewish values, proclaimed In the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.
“Parents in Gaza are going days without food in order to feed their children. Doctors are operating without anesthetics or antibiotics. It’s a painful violation of our Jewish values,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote in a “contact your senator” mass e-mail.
“Setting a 30-day deadline, the administration demanded a tenfold increase in aid trucks, that aid crossings be kept consistently open, and outlined a series of steps to get aid workers in, ensure they are safe, and allow families to return to their homes where possible.
“Since then, there has been distressingly little progress. Last week, the U.S. said Netanyahu earned a ‘fail’ grade. This week, the world’s leading aid agencies reported not a single benchmark had been met. Israel’s own figures bear it out.”
“Because of its immoral actions, Israel is less secure and increasingly isolated” and “becoming a pariah nation condemned by governments around the world, international institutions and humanitarian organizations,” said Sanders. He cited examples, most of them from Europe and the United Nations.
Netanyahu has turned a deaf ear to Biden, the Europeans, U.S. opinion, and Sanders. A check of White House statements of policy discloses no stand on Sanders’s latest anti-arms aid resolutions.
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