The Biden Administration should do more than urge Israel’s leaders to minimize civilian casualties. It should veto any further military funding from Congress unless the bills include specific safeguards to prevent excessive violence and unnecessary loss of life. Better yet, the US should redirect military aid to Israel toward humanitarian aid for all people dislocated or injured in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel in the current conflict.
Congress is about to approve billions of dollars more for arms for a Netanyahu government whose cabinet members openly advocate ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza. As one of many examples, in June, before the current conflict in Gaza, Israel National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said this to Israeli settlers encroaching on West Bank land: “I give you my full and complete backing, but I want much more from the settlement here, there needs to be a full settlement here, not only here, but in all the hills around us.
“The Land of Israel must be settled and at the same time as the settlement of the Land a military operation must be launched. [We must] demolish buildings, eliminate terrorists, not one or two, but tens and hundreds, and if necessary even thousands, because at the end of the day, this is the only way we will hold on here, strengthen control and restore security to the residents, and above all we will fulfill our great mission. The Land of Israel is for the people of Israel, we are backing you, run to the hills, settle down. We love you.” (Here’s another account of the speech: Israel’s Ben-Gvir calls for assassination of ‘thousands’ of Palestinians – TRT World)
A Nov. 30 Washington Post article detailing suppression of concerns by international aid agencies about “mass forced displacement” and human rights violations quotes two other senior Israeli leaders making similar comments advocating for ethnic cleansing: “Simcha Rothman, a prominent member of the Israeli parliament, suggested earlier this week that Gazans should be resettled in other parts of the world, alleging they were being held in Gaza by the United Nations ‘for political reasons in order to hurt the state of Israel.’
“Earlier this month Israeli agriculture minister Avi Dichter said: ‘We’re rolling out Nakba 2023,’ using the Palestinian term, Arabic for ‘catastrophe,’ for the mass expulsion of Palestinians during the months before and after the 1948 war that created Israel.”
Many Americans do not want to be associated with the thugs running Israel today and don’t want any more military aid going to them. Instead, the US should funnel money into humanitarian aid and, when the military situation stabilizes, help to develop a peaceful settlement.
Sending Israel more aid now is a lose-lose proposition – Hill
“A month into the Israeli military’s onslaught on Gaza, the suffering is tremendous. More than 14,000 in Gaza have died, most of them children and women. In October, a human rights group recorded an average of 100 children dying there — the equivalent of five Uvaldes — every day.
“Into that hell, President Biden is proposing that the U.S. send more weapons. The U.S. already sends Israel more than $3.8 billion a year in military aid. He has proposed an additional $14 billion as part of a staggering $105 billion military package he’s asked Congress to pass.
“The kind of mass destruction we’re seeing in Gaza is unimaginable to most of us in the United States. But we see suffering here too — in the form of homelessness, the opioid epidemic and increasingly common catastrophic weather events. Plenty of us feel the struggle of affording necessities like housing, heat, health care and child care. The weapons and military aid that Biden and many in Congress want to send to Israel also represent resources that are desperately needed to address problems like these.”
US sends ‘bunker buster’ bombs to Israel for war on Gaza, report says – Al Jazeera/WSJ
Documents expose Israeli conspiracy to facilitate October 7 attack – WSWS
The WSWS may, or may not, be pushing the implications of the NYT’s story too far — that Israel purposely ignored its own intelligence reports to facilitate a Hamas attack in a premeditated plan to justify responding with the destruction of Gaza. The NYT findings, however, do leave the Netanyahu government facing an unsavory dichotomy: BB’s government was either 1) grossly negligent in defending Israel, or 2) intentionally conspiring to justify genocide. Either way, the consequences involved mass killing and loss of life that could have been averted.