Biden Keeps Fueling the Atrocious War in Gaza

As long as the U.S. supplies the Israeli government with the means to devastate what is left of Gaza, everything else that the president and administration officials say is irrelevant theater.

There is a man-made famine in Gaza, and the U.S. keeps arming the government that caused it:

The Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

As long as the U.S. supplies the Israeli government with the means to devastate what is left of Gaza, everything else that the president and administration officials say is irrelevant theater. Their “concerns” count for nothing when they actively fuel the conflagration. The one thing that might stop the slaughter is to cut off the supply of weapons that have enabled Netanyahu to wage this atrocious war, and that is the one thing that this administration won’t threaten.

Even if halting arms shipments didn’t stop the war entirely, it would make it harder for Netanyahu to continue the campaign and it would put his government under more pressure. It is also the right and required thing to do. The U.S. is obligated under its own laws to halt arms transfers to governments that restrict the delivery of humanitarian aid, and there is no question that the Israeli government has been severely restricting aid deliveries for the duration of this conflict. Josh Paul, the State Department official who resigned in protest last year, calls the administration’s approval of weapons transfers an “abrogation of moral responsibility, and an assault on the rule of law as we know it, at both the domestic and international levels.” Withholding military assistance from a state that is deliberately starving people is the absolute least that the U.S. can do, and the president can’t even do that.

There are some in Congress that aren’t putting up with this. Sen. Bernie Sanders appropriately denounced the latest transfer as “obscene.” Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said, “Until the Netanyahu government allows more assistance into Gaza, to help people who are literally starving to death, we should not be sending more bombs.” There is a growing number of members of Congress that support a ceasefire, and the president is facing increasing opposition from within his own party as he flouts the law by sending more weapons. Unfortunately, there is not as much opposition as there should be, and it did not appear soon enough to put pressure on the president to change course early on.

The U.S. is in a unique position to halt or at least limit the carnage that it has been helping to cause, but instead our government chooses to stoke the conflict with thousands more bombs. We know that these bombs will be used to kill mostly civilians. That is how the Israeli military has been using U.S.-made weapons throughout this campaign. That is what happens when 2,000-pound bombs are dropped in densely-populated areas, and the Israeli military has been using bombs like these in Gaza from the start. According to the report, there are 1,800 of those bombs included in the transfer, and another 500 of the 500-pound bombs. Transferring more of these weapons to this government now deepens U.S. complicity in the crimes that will be committed with them.