Stop the ‘Flood’ of US Weapons Into the Gaza War

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.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.