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arms sales
Biden Greenlights 'Racist' and 'Sociopathic' $8B Arms Sale to Israel
Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza
Jan 04, 2025
The administration of US President Joe Biden announced on Saturday an arms sale to Israel valued at $8 billion, just ahead of President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House.
Biden has repeatedly rejected calls to suspend military backing for Israel because of the number of civilians killed during the war in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 45,000 people in Gaza, primarily women and children.
The sale includes medium-range air-to-air missiles, 155mm projectile artillery shells for long-range targeting, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 500-pound bombs, and more.
Human rights groups, former State Department officials, and Democratic lawmakers have urged the Biden administration to halt arms sales to Israel, citing violations of US laws, including the Leahy Law, as well as international laws and human rights.
The Leahy Law, named after former Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the US to withhold military assistance from foreign military or law enforcement units if there is credible evidence of human rights violations.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s most significant Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called Biden’s new $8 billion arms deal “racist” and “sociopathic.”
Multiple human rights organizations and international bodies have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes.
The US is, by far, the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.
CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said on Saturday:
“We strongly condemn the Biden administration for its unbelievable and criminal decision to send another $8 billion worth of American weapons to the government of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu instead of using American leverage to force an end to the genocide in Gaza.
“Only racists who do not view people of color as equally human, and sociopaths who delight in funding mass slaughter, could send Netanyahu even more bombs while his government openly kidnaps doctors, destroys hospitals, and exterminates the last survivors in northern Gaza.
“If President Biden is actually the person who approved this new $8 billion arms sale, then he is a war criminal who belongs in a cell at The Hague alongside Netanyahu. But if Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan, and other aides are making these unconscionable decisions as shadow presidents, then anyone with a conscience in the administration should speak up now about their abuses of power.”
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US accounted for 69% of Israel's imports of major conventional arms between 2019 and 2023.
On the other hand, incoming President-elect Donald Trump has also pledged unwavering support for Israel and has never committed to supporting an independent Palestinian state.
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'Rank Dishonesty': Internal Docs Detail How Blinken Rejected Calls to Cut Off US Arms to Israel
"The Biden administration is not only complicit in genocide. It's knowingly complicit," said one analyst.
Sep 24, 2024
When the U.S. State Department, headed by Antony Blinken, told Congress earlier this year that "we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance," it was directly contradicting the internal findings of its own experts and those of USAID.
Blinken's decision to publicly reject conclusions by other U.S. officials despite the compelling evidence they marshaled highlighted "a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel," ProPublicareported Tuesday in a detailed story examining internal communications and other private documents.
Under U.S. law—specifically Section 620I of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act—the federal government is barred from approving arms transfers to any country that "prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance."
Blinken's official denial that Israel is restricting the flow of U.S. humanitarian aid allows the Biden administration to maintain that its weapons transfers are lawful.
ProPublica obtained emails showing that, prior to Blinken's statement to Congress denying that Israel was impeding the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid, the head of the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration had "determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel."
USAID, headed by the prominent liberal interventionist Samantha Power—who authored a book on American leaders' failure to act in the face of genocide—separately concluded in both a report and a 17-page memo to Blinken that Israel deliberately restricted U.S. humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza, which is now facing famine, the reemergence of polio, and other crises.
"The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine," ProPublica reported Tuesday. "The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel's behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country."
USAID sent its memo to Blinken less than a month before the U.S. State Department told Congress that, contrary to the findings of administration experts as well as scores of outside groups, the Israeli military was not restricting U.S. humanitarian aid.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote that the new ProPublica reporting underscores that "the Biden administration is not only complicit in genocide. It's knowingly complicit."
Filmmaker Alex Gibney accused Blinken of "rank dishonesty on Gaza."
"Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would be immoral. It would also be illegal."
ProPublica's reporting also details the role Jack Lew, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, played in ensuring that U.S. weapons continued to flow to the Israeli military. In March, the investigative outlet noted, Lew "sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians."
While Lew conceded that "other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement" of humanitarian assistance, he argued that on the whole "Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede" aid provided or backed by the U.S.
That statement, according to United Nations figures and assessments by aid organizations on the ground, has proven to be false.
Last week, a coalition of humanitarian groups estimated that Israel's siege is blocking 83% of food aid from reaching the Gaza Strip, where most of the population is hungry and at growing risk of starvation.
An update released Monday by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) notes that 46% of "humanitarian movements have been either denied or impeded in August, making it the most challenging month for humanitarian access since January 2024."
Meanwhile, U.S. arms are still flowing to the Israeli military as it continues to assail Gaza and expand its attacks on Lebanon.
Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department announced the approval of $165 million in weapons sales to Israel, a decision that came less than 30 days after the Biden administration signed off on a sprawling $20 billion sale of U.S. arms.
The latter transfer is the target of a resolution of disapproval announced last week by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said in a floor speech that Israel's restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza amount to a "clear violation of U.S. and international law."
"Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would be immoral. It would also be illegal," Sanders said. "The sales would reward Netanyahu's extremist government even as it flouts U.S. policy goals at every turn and drags the United States closer to a regional war."
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'Complicit in War Crimes': UK Official Resigns Over Arms Sales to Israel
Mark Smith, a diplomat, is the first known U.K. official to resign over Gaza.
Aug 19, 2024
A British diplomat on Friday resigned in protest of the United Kingdom's arm sales to Israel, saying that there is "no justification" for the sales and that Israel has committed war crimes.
Mark Smith, who was a second secretary at the U.K. embassy in Dublin, had a previous official role working on arms export licensing assessments for the Middle East, he said. He is the first known British official to resign over the war in Gaza.
He sent an email to a long list of fellow officials in the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO). Iraqi-British journalist Hind Hassan obtained the email and published it on social media.
"It is with sadness that I resign after a long career in the diplomatic service; however, I can no longer carry out my duties in the knowledge that this department may be complicit in war crimes," says the email, which was later verified by other sources.
"There is no justification for the U.K.'s continued arms sales to Israel yet somehow it continues," it says.
Full resignation letter from FCDO British diplomat Mark Smith: pic.twitter.com/k9y7varCHC
— Hind Hassan (@HindHassanNews) August 16, 2024
In an interview with BBC Radio 4 on Monday, Smith said that "anybody who has a kind of basic understanding of these things can see that there are war crimes being committed" and it was "not once, not twice, not a few times, but quite flagrantly and openly and regularly."
At least a dozen officials in the United States have resigned over the Biden administration's handling of the war in Gaza that began last year. Last month, twelve of them issued a joint statement calling out the U.S.' "undeniable complicity" in the killings and forced starvation of Palestinians.
More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7, according to the Gaza health ministry. In late October, Craig Mokhiber, a top U.N. official in New York, resigned his position over the U.N.'s response to Israel's assault on Gaza. Another estimate put the likely death toll much higher. More than 1,100 Israelis were killed by Hamas and allied groups on October 7.
However, no British officials had made a similar move until Smith on Friday.
Since 2008, the U.K. has granted export licenses for $727 million in arms sales to Israel, largely for aircraft and radar systems; U.K. parts are also used in U.S.-manufactured F-35 combat aircraft destined for Israel, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade.
The U.K. government recently "played down" its supply of weapons to Israel, saying it was "relatively small" at $53 million in 2022, the BBCreported. That's just a fraction of the weapons transfers to Israel made by the U.S., which approved another $20 billion worth last week.
The U.K. government, led by the center-left Labour Party since last month, is conducting a review of its weapons sales policy to Israel to determine if it's in compliance with international law. Foreign Secretary David Lammy reportedly ordered the review on his first day in office and has raised the possibility of cutting off sales of offensive weapons to Israel, while allowing the sale of defensive weapons to continue.
Led by the Conservative Party for the first nine months, the U.K. was in lockstep with the U.S. on the assault on Gaza but has taken steps that show a bit of divergence since Labour took power. The government has reestablished funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and announced that it would not, despite an earlier pledge, challenge the International Criminal Courts plan of seeking arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders.
In response to Smith's resignation, an FCDO spokesperson told the BBC that the department was committed to upholding international law and "will not export items if they be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law."
The Middle East Eyereported that the FCDO promised officials in the department a "listening session" after Smith's email was sent. Smith criticized the organization for not listening to repeated pleas for a change of course on weapons sales to Israel.
"I have raised this at every level in the organization, including through an official whistle blowing investigation and received nothing more than 'thank you we have noted your concern'," Smith wrote in the email.
British newspapers reported that Smith was a "junior" diplomat but Hassan wrote on social media that this was in an attempt to undermine him.
"For one, he is a mid-level diplomat: Second secretaries can often have a decade of experience, if not more," she said.
"Furthermore the point of focus should be that Mark Smith is experienced in arms licensing; he knows what he's talking about when it comes to arms sales and governments," she added.
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