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arms sales
'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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Biden's New Weapons Deal With Saudi Arabia's Prince Bonesaw
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
Aug 16, 2024
Perhaps we should be grateful that it took President Biden over four years to fully abandon his campaign pledge to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia, eroding the promise bit by bit before finally announcing at the end of the day on Friday, August 9, that the administration would resume sales of offensive air-to-ground munitions to the Kingdom.
In reality, the ban was merely the last vestige of a long-abandoned policy to isolate and sanction Saudi Arabia for its various, gruesome atrocities and abuses both at home and abroad. In its place, the Biden administration’s courtiers doubled down on their embrace of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), offering up a never-ending basket of concessions and goodies, as the golden ticket for continued U.S. primacy in the Middle East, come what may to everyone and everything else.
What follows will be their rush to the finish line, bestowing on the prince the biggest prize of all — an unprecedented U.S. security guarantee — before the clock runs out on Joe Biden’s presidency.
Cutting off the biggest U.S. weapons purchaser in the world carried well-understood costs of its own, upsetting not only U.S. defense companies deprived of the Saudi cash cow, but also encouraging MBS to retaliate by flaunting closer ties with China and Russia. And so just a few months into the first year of the Biden administration, his national security team walked back the arms embargo, clarifying that they only intended to block “offensive” weapons, not “defensive” ones.
Queries from members of Congress about the distinction between these terms went unanswered. Soon, billions in weapons were flowing, paving the way for a further mending of relations with the Saudi ruler, culminating in the now infamous July 2022 Biden/MBS “fist bump” in Jeddah.
Once the Biden team announced that it too would follow Trump’s lead to make adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords its number one Middle East foreign policy priority, any lingering concerns about rewarding the Kingdom with new military support despite its widespread horrors in Yemen and at home, or fueling its further belligerence in the region, were swept under the desert sands.
Coupled with national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s open admission of his secondary priorities — cheap oil and keeping China out of the region — the only answer to MBS’s “jump” was to ask “how high?” MBS turned to a hardball game of reverse leverage, not only refusing to open his oil spigot to relieve global oil prices ahead of the 2022 November primaries despite Biden’s pleas, but prominently hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping in a multiday red carpet affair, announcing China would build a civilian nuclear plant and support missile development in the country, and refusing to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
And so it was time for the Biden team to bow to MBS’s wishes. The first major concession was to grant the Crown Prince immunity from U.S. prosecution, squashing several lawsuits against him for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the attempted murder of Saad Aljabri, and the targeted harassment and attacks against Al-Jazeera journalist Ghada Oueiss. The next was for the Biden team to secure the ultimate prize in the Saudi bucket list: a NATO Article 5 treaty level U.S. security guarantee for the Kingdom. Efforts by the Biden team to woo the Crown Prince with a mere aerial security umbrella was not sufficient to persuade him; only a bilateral, treaty level guarantee would work, he made clear.
The Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, and the nine months of relentless Israeli bombardment and starvation of Gaza’s civilian population that it precipitated, upended these plans. A humiliated Sullivan, who only days before the cataclysmic assault pronounced that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades now” and boasted that “the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced,” was forced to shelve the plans for a Saudi/Israeli peace agreement.
Even MBS could not dare to openly endorse Israel in the face of near universal Saudi sympathy for Palestinian suffering.
While a largely AIPAC-funded Congress would likely have supported a U.S. security guarantee for Saudi Arabia in exchange for its joining the Abraham Accords, without this, ratification of a treaty level commitment would be a very hard sell. The Biden team is now considering the idea of delinking the security guarantee, as well as poaching China’s development of the civilian nuclear plant, from normalization with Israel in a “less for less” deal.
Under a proposed “Strategic Alliance Agreement” the U.S. would commit to helping defend Saudi Arabia if it were attacked, in exchange for Saudi granting Washington access to Saudi territory and airspace, prohibiting China from building bases in the Kingdom or pursuing security cooperation with it, and signing a parallel “Defense Cooperation Agreement,” to boost weapons sales, intelligence sharing and strategic planning on terrorism and Iran.
Such a move strips away the cover of “regional peace for Israel” as the motivation for the Saudi security guarantee, more nakedly exposing the underlying motivations driving the Biden team: a stale but cemented worldview that U.S. interests require military hegemony in the Middle East, alongside cheap oil and defense industry profits. It’s hard to discount the siren call of personal profiteering for Biden officials, who will no doubt consider multi-million payouts from the UAE and Saudi, even if they’re not as lucrative as the billions in take-home by Trump officials Stephen Mnuchin and Jared Kushner. (Recall also that Secretary Blinken’s WestExec Advisors, whose client list Secretary Blinken has never disclosed, is now partly owned by Teneo, a firm that works for the MBS controlled Saudi public investment fund.)
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East — from the mass slaughters of civilians and perpetual war-footings, encouraging destabilizing bellicosity, entrapping our country in zero-sum military conflicts, and undermining U.S. global standing as a credible force for human rights and democracy — remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
With the clock ticking on the expiration of the Biden term as the Gaza war rages on, it’s doubtful that the administration will be able to deliver any expansion of the Abraham Accords or a security agreement for MBS. It’s not even clear MBS will accept these rewards, saving them for the next round of haggling with a new administration. For now, we’ll just have to hope that “Mr. Bonesaw” will show more sense than the Biden administration and avoid any new wars in the region.
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