U.S. President Joe Biden has asked for an additional $14 billion in new military aid for Israel, a request that lawmakers are now considering. Yet as Palestinian civilian deaths rise and disagreements grow between the U.S. and Israeli governments on the methods and outcomes of the fighting, passage of a massive amount of military support further tying the United States to Israel’s prosecution of the war must not be treated as a rubber-stamp exercise.
As negotiations continue this week on an emergency funding package that includes military assistance to Israel alongside aid for Ukraine and humanitarian relief, lawmakers must ask some tough questions of the Biden administration and the Israeli government.
First, does Israel actually have financial need? Even if Israel is seeking additional arms for legitimate security purposes, such a desire for additional weapons does not by itself establish a fiscal imperative for U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill. While some senior lawmakers no doubt have memories of an Israeli economy working earnestly to catch up with older states, recent decades have seen Israel become a comparatively wealthy nation.
According to 2022 World Bank figures, Israel has a per capita GDP higher than that of each of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia—and more than 12 times that of Ukraine, the other recipient of military aid in the request before Congress. Due diligence requires that lawmakers seek evidence that Israel cannot reasonably pay for necessary additional arms itself.
Additionally, lawmakers should ask whether Israel—already the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid—has used tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military support to date in a way that enhances rather than harms its security. In addition to supplying Israel with decades of arms and assistance, the U.S. Congress has repeatedly and rightly condemned Hamas’s horrific Oct. 7 attack and atrocities against Israel, and expressed support for its ally’s right and duty to protect its people. Yet, as multiple reports have now made clear, Israel’s failure to prevent Hamas’s brutal attack was not due to lack of weapons or resources—it was a failure of the Israeli government to detect the assault and deploy its forces accordingly.
Not only did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government ignore the dire situation in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli security personnel who warned of Hamas’s plans, they also prioritized sending military forces to the West Bank, where the far-right settlers who make up a substantial part of Netanyahu’s supporter base were intensifying government-backed harassment of Palestinian communities.
Israel nearly doubled the number of its battalions in the West Bank in the months before Oct. 7. That left Israel’s south poorly defended prior to the attacks, with Israeli experts themselves blaming the slow response to the Hamas attack on the fact that so many troops were in the West Bank.
Even amid the current war and the emergence of horrific new details of Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis in the south, the Netanyahu government advanced a budget earlier this month that would allocate the equivalent of tens of millions of new dollars to fund illegal settlement projects in the West Bank. Money is fungible, and U.S. workers are owed an explanation as to why they should backfill gaps in Israeli military funding that were caused, in part, by settlement activity that only exacerbates a wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Israeli government’s unending project of settlement expansion and Palestinian displacement raises another critical question: Will Israel use U.S.-funded weapons in accordance with both U.S. and international law?
While the more than 15,000 Palestinians estimated to have been killed in Gaza no doubt include some number of Hamas combatants, the overwhelming number are civilians—and an estimated more than half or even two-thirds of them were women and children. Such figures are prima facie evidence that Israel has not adhered to its obligation under international law to take all reasonable precautions to avoid civilian losses and damage to civilian infrastructure.
In fact, Israeli researchers have reported that the Israeli military intentionally and systematically targets civilian infrastructure, routinely attacking sites with little or no known military activity, but which were known to house families. Hamas’s undoubted war crimes, including its continued holding of hostages and rocket launches into Israel, do not relieve Israel of its own obligations under the laws of war.
Moreover, well-documented public statements and writing by Israeli government and military officials calling for the permanent mass transfer of civilians or the broad destruction of structures in the territory is worrying evidence of an intention to commit some of the most serious violations of the laws of armed conflict and human rights.
Despite these concerns, the Biden administration has shown distressing resistance to enforcing conditions on aid—a number of which already exist under U.S. law—to ensure that U.S.-funded and -supplied arms are used exclusively for permitted purposes.
Rather than continuing to give vague assurances that the administration will continue pressing Israel to follow international law—requests that Israel’s government has clearly ignored—lawmakers should ask Biden for specific commitments related to the enforcement of laws enacted to prevent U.S. arms from being misused, such as the Arms Export Control Act and Leahy Law.
With dozens—if not hundreds—of lives lost daily, and families on either side of the Gaza fence fearing for their loved ones, Congress has a responsibility to ensure that the steps it takes make a just and secure end to this war more likely, rather than funding actions that harm human security, regional stability, and international order with American taxpayer dollars.