The Biden Administration's Compliance Decision Is a Disgrace

As Oxfam and Human Rights Watch documented at length, Israeli assurances are neither credible nor reliable.

The Biden administration takes a page out of the Mike Pompeo playbook:

The U.S. has deemed Israel in compliance with U.S. President Joe Biden's national security memorandum stipulating that recipients of U.S. weapons must be in compliance with international law, nor may they block the provision of humanitarian assistance.

This is very much like what Pompeo did as Trump’s Secretary of State when he certified that the Saudis and the UAE were taking action to reduce civilian harm in Yemen. Everyone could see that Pompeo was lying, and there was plenty of evidence that the Saudi coalition was recklessly bombing civilian targets, but the certification allowed the weapons to keep flowing. In this case, the only difference is that the Biden administration first asked the Israeli government to provide assurances that they would abide by international law and then took their word for it when they gave the assurances.

No one paying attention to how Israel has waged this war can take these promises seriously. There is overwhelming evidence that the Israeli military has not been complying with international law in how it conducts its operations and how it uses U.S.-made weapons. There are numerous reports confirming that Israel has been impeding and blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid. 14 major NGOs have said that Israel is not in compliance. As Oxfam and Human Rights Watch documented at length, Israeli assurances are neither credible nor reliable. The Biden administration’s claim of Israeli compliance is nonsense.

Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees International commented on the news:

Yet on the same day [as the UNSCR], @SecBlinken determines inexplicably that Israel's behavior is in compliance with US law on civilian protection and humanitarian access. Whatever good the UN Resolution does is offset by this. Just mystifyingly incoherent policy.

The administration’s policy may be only too coherent, but that isn’t good news. As soon as the Security Council passed the resolution today, the State Department was quick to assert (incorrectly) that it was non-binding. Administration officials have gone out of their way to emphasize how little importance they attach to the resolution’s passage, and that is probably the only reason that the U.S. abstained and allowed it to pass. “Nothing has changed about our policy. Nothing,” John Kirby said earlier today. It is something that the U.S. didn’t veto the measure, but if the message to Israel is that the resolution doesn’t require them to do anything the administration is working against what the Council is trying to do.

It was always more likely than not that the Biden administration’s NSM (National Security Memorandum)-20 process was a meaningless rubber-stamp exercise. Sarah Harrison warned last month that “it isn’t obvious how, in the context of Israel, this policy avoids being another performative measure, creating additional processes that keep policymakers and lawyers in the bureaucracy busy while maintaining the status quo with respect to arms transfers.” As we can see, this is exactly what happened.

The U.S. asks its client to promise that it won’t block aid and commit war crimes, the client gives the U.S. the boilerplate answer that checks the appropriate boxes, and then the U.S. keeps funneling weapons to the client so it can block aid and commit more war crimes. It lets the administration pretend that it respects international law and it keeps the client supplied with arms. Everyone wins, except for the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims being killed, maimed, and starved as a result.

Like everything else about the administration’s handling of this war, this latest action is a disgrace.