Stop The 'Flood' of U.S. Weapons into the Gaza War

The administration’s feeble protests about the conduct of the war are meaningless when they continue to supply Israel with the arms that they are using to devastate Gaza.

The delivery of U.S.-made weapons to Israel over the last five months has been massive:

The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing.

The large number of sales underscores how deeply involved the U.S. has been in fueling Israel’s military campaign and how dependent Israel has been on U.S. arms to wage such an intense and destructive war. The U.S. always has considerable leverage with the clients that it arms, and this shows that it has had even more than usual with Israel in recent months. The report adds:

“That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official and current president of Refugees International.

The fact that the Biden administration has quietly rushed so many weapons to Israel to enable its atrocious war confirms what critics have been saying for months. The administration’s feeble protests about the conduct of the war are meaningless when they continue to supply Israel with the arms that they are using to devastate Gaza. They could have chosen to withhold some or all of these weapons in light of the extensive evidence of Israeli military’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians, but they sent them knowing that these weapons were likely to be used to kill and maim civilians in violation of international law.

The U.S. was under no obligation to provide Israel with any of these weapons. The U.S. is not required to pour weapons into Israel’s wars. The choice to do this at such a rapid clip was the president’s, and it was the wrong choice. Until he makes a different one, everything else that he and his officials say is irrelevant.

The Biden administration often likes to deflect criticisms of its support by hiding behind Israeli sovereignty, as if they have no influence over the government that they have been arming to the teeth. Konyndyk had a good answer to that at the end of the report:

“The U.S. cannot maintain that, on the one hand, Israel is a sovereign state that’s making its own decisions and we’re not going to second guess them, and, on the other hand, transfer this level of armament in such a short time and somehow act as if we are not directly involved,” he said.

Because the U.S. has been supplying Israel with so many weapons in this war, our government has the right to pressure their government about how it conducts the war. More than that, our government has an obligation under our own laws to make sure that these weapons aren’t being used to commit war crimes and harm civilians.

Unquestioning U.S. support for the war has made everything far worse. Delivering what the report calls a “flood” of weapons to Israel made this war even more devastating and deadly than it would have been, and it has encouraged the Israeli government in its most destructive and reckless impulses. The U.S. bears significant responsibility for the campaign that has laid waste to Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people, and it is imperative that the U.S. stop providing Israel with the means to commit more atrocities.