Democratic leaders are paving the way for the sale of weapons, which the Israel Defense Forces can use to make precision strikes against Palestinians.
Democrats who have been critical of Israel’s strikes on Gaza, such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, said the weapons sale is a done deal and will not be unwound.
“That arms sale was already noticed a long time ago. That has gone through a whole vetting process already,” said Menendez, a longtime supporter of Israel who opposed the Iran nuclear deal but has been critical of the recent strikes.
“That’s the normal process. This is not an unusual process. This is the regular process, regular order on arms sales,” he added.
Opponents of the sale are scrambling for options to respond amid a rapidly closing window for Congress to block the deal.
Most arms sales are subject to a 30-day congressional review period where lawmakers can block a deal if they want. But some close allies, including Israel, are afforded a 15-day review period.
The administration notified lawmakers on 5th May that it had approved selling Israel US735 million weapons, mostly of Boeing-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions that can turn so-called dumb bombs into precision-guided missiles.
House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairwoman Betty McCollum and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders are increasingly pushing to place more conditions on or revisit the US$3.8 billion in military aid the United States sends Israel annually.
Party elders, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer are supporting US aid to Israel amid rising criticism of that country’s policies by progressives. They say Israel has a right to defend itself and that the US should provide support.
“Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It does not believe that Israel has the right to exist,” Hoyer told reporters on Tuesday. “It is a complicated situation, but I share the president’s view that Israel has the right to defend itself.”
Religious tensions first boiled over at multiple sites in Israel earlier this month when Israeli police raided Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam, leaving hundreds of Palestinians wounded.
Hamas has since fired more than 3,000 rockets at Israel — most intercepted by the Iron Dome, a defense system supported by the US and the Israeli government has responded with scores of aerial bombings in Gaza. The number of Palestinian civilians killed and injured vastly exceeds the number of reported Israeli civilian casualties thus far.
President Biden hasn’t publicly demanded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree to a cease-fire, but the White House said the president expressed support for a cease-fire when the two leaders spoke Monday.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi largely echoed Biden in a Tuesday statement that called for a cease-fire. But in one notable difference that reflects the pressures she’s facing from progressives in her caucus, she called a cease-fire necessary, a word Biden did not use.
“It is in the US national security interest to support security in Israel. Hamas exploited a volatile situation to initiate hostilities against Israel, launching more than 3,000 rockets, and as always, Israel has a right to defend herself,” Pelosi said.
“Now, after more than a week of hostilities, it has become even more apparent that a ceasefire is necessary,” she added. “There must be a serious effort on the part of both parties to end the violence and respect the rights of both the Israeli and Palestinian people.”
Neither Biden nor Pelosi called for an immediate cease-fire, as many liberals are doing. The two also did not call on Israel to change its course, as liberals in the party have demanded.
After news reports about the precision-guided munitions deal, progressive fumed. Rep. Ilhan Omar said it would be “appalling” for the sale to move forward; while Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress, tweeted that there should be “no more weapons to kill children and families.”
On Monday night, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks convened an emergency virtual meeting of Democrats on the panel to discuss both the arms deal specifically and the crisis in Gaza generally. At the meeting, Meeks told lawmakers he planned to send a letter to the Biden administration seeking a delay in the sale.
But by Tuesday afternoon, Meeks said he dropped the effort after administration officials agreed to brief lawmakers on the sale and the administration’s broader strategy to resolve the crisis.
Apart from arms sales, the United State supports Israel with US$3.8 billion in security assistance annually, as set in a 10-year memorandum of understanding that was signed by the Obama administration in 2016 and entered into force in 2018. The United States is supposed to provide US$3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing funds and US$500 million in missile defense assistance each year of the deal.
Even before the current conflict, McCollum proposed a bill that would bar US funding to Israel from being used to support military detention, interrogation, abuse or ill-treatment of Palestinian children, property seizures and forcible evictions in the occupied Palestinian territories or the deployment of personnel or equipment to annex territory in the West Bank.
Sanders, for his part, tweeted Sunday that we must also take a hard look at nearly US$4 billion a year in military aid to Israel. “It is illegal for US aid to support human rights violations,” he added.
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