Hamas-Israel war: Rare dissent over US arms for Israel raises troubling questions

Eleven days after killers from Hamas murdered more than 1,400 Israelis in a series of massacres of stomach-turning brutality and Israel responded with devastating air strikes on Gaza, a senior State Department official resigned over Washington’s decision to send more weapons to Israel, a move he said reflected “blind support for one side.”

The official, Josh Paul, worked for 11 years at the State Department’s Bureau of Political and Military Affairs, which handles arms transfers to foreign countries. He rose to a senior position, that of director of congressional and public affairs.

Paul explained his decision in a two-page letter and the points he made raise questions about the US-Israeli relationship that are rarely asked in a country where sympathy for Israel goes back to its foundation 75 years ago. No major speech on Israel by a US president fails to mention that the US was the first to recognise the new state, just 11 minutes after its formation.

Polls after the outbreak of the Hamas-Israeli wars showed that 80 per cent of Americans were siding with Israel. Whether that level of support is stable remains to be seen as graphic images of the death and damage caused by Israeli air strikes on densely populated Gaza will fill US television screens for days to come.

“The response Israel is taking and with it the American support both for that response and for the status quo of the occupation will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and Palestinian people,” his letter said. “This administration’s response – and much of Congress’s as well – is an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and bureaucratic inertia.”

Israel’s immediate response to the Hamas attacks, described by Paul as a “monstrosity of monstrosities”, was airstrikes that levelled dozens of buildings and a complete siege of Gaza, cutting off water, electricity, food and fuel. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it collective punishment.

Strong words in a country where criticism of Israeli policy or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is often conflated with anti-Semitism – as were pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the Middle East, parts of Asia, Europe and the United States condemning Israeli air strikes on Gaza and the country’s occupation of parts of the West Bank.

President Joe Biden flew to Israel 11 days after the October 7 massacre of civilians in villages close to the border with Gaza, pledged America’s support – “Israel, you are not alone. The United States stands with you” – and promised US weapons would continue to give Israel a “qualitative military edge” in the region. 

That edge, dubbed QME in military jargon, makes the US-Israeli relationship truly unique. No other country can count on getting the latest and most sophisticated American military hardware and no other country can be secure in the knowledge that deliveries will continue because they are enshrined in US law. 

The Congressional Research Service spells it out in detail: “In 2008, Congress enacted legislation (that) defines QME as the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors while sustaining minimal damage and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity…”

To make sure the requirement for “sufficient quantity” will be met as Israel pounds Gaza with airstrikes and prepares for a ground offensive, Biden has asked Congress for an additional $14.3 billion for Israel. That request is stuck in Congress because Republican Party infighting has left the House of Representatives, which has the power of the purse, without a speaker. 

A fact sheet by the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, from which Paul resigned last week, notes that maintaining the QME “has helped transform the Israeli Defense Force into one of the world’s most capable and effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide.”

Still, the United States has provided military aid of more than $3 billion year after year for decades preceding the 2008 legislation. No country has received as much US aid overall as Israel.

The logic of continued aid to a relatively rich and successful country is puzzling but rarely questioned. Not only has Israel turned into the region’s military superpower but it also is the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear arsenal, though this is rarely mentioned in debates about nuclear proliferation.  

(Israel does not admit nor deny having nuclear weapons but the Arms Control Association, a widely-respected Washington-based think tank, cites estimates of up to 90 nuclear warheads, with fissile material stockpiles of more than 200.)

Arming Israel to the teeth made sense during the Cold War when Israel served as an American outpost in a region where the Soviet Union had strategic ambitions and close friends. 

As then US Secretary of State Alexander Haig put it at the time: “Israel is the largest US (aircraft) carrier that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one U.S. soldier, and is located in a most critical region for US national security.”

It still is. But today’s geopolitics have changed so much that the United States has dispatched two aircraft carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean to protect what Haig had called a stationary carrier and to prevent the Hamas-Israel conflict from spreading through the region. 

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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