In his State of the Union speech on Thursday, Joe Biden declared that the US military will build a floating pier off the coast of Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid to 2.3 million Palestinians facing widespread famine under Israel’s brutal war and siege of the territory. The US president’s announcement followed a week of intermittent airdrops of food by US forces – a token amount of aid, woefully inadequate to the needs of a starving population.
It could take the Pentagon 30 to 60 days to set up a temporary port, which would involve deploying hundreds of US troops on ships near the Gaza coast. By then, thousands of Palestinians could starve to death; the UN recently warned that more than 575,000 people are confronting “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation”, especially in northern Gaza.
There are more efficient and faster ways to get assistance to Gazans: Biden can pressure Israel to allow the entry of hundreds of aid trucks that are needed in the territory each day. Instead, Biden and his administration are complicit in prolonging a war in which a US ally has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians and is intentionally starving the population into submission.
For months, Biden has gone out of his way to avoid using the most effective leverage he has over the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu: that the US can cut off the supply of bombs that Israel drops on Gaza. The extent of US weapons shipments to Israel became clearer this week, after the Washington Post reported that the Biden administration had quietly approved more than 100 foreign military sales to Israel since the 7 October attacks by Hamas. The US has provided tens of thousands of bombs and other munitions to help Israel carry out one of the most destructive bombing campaigns in modern history.
Israel’s war would not be sustainable without this level of US military support, coupled with Washington’s diplomatic cover at the UN and other international bodies. And providing a trickle of humanitarian aid to starving Gazans – who are also being killed in large numbers with US weapons – won’t absolve the Biden administration of complicity in potential Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. (The Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court prohibit using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war, and consider it a war crime.)
The US is also going out of its way to avoid transparency in its arms shipments to Israel, hoping that the secrecy will help Biden avoid criticism of his effectively unconditional support for Netanyahu’s government. The 100 or so recent military sales to Israel were rushed by the Biden administration without any public debate or review by Congress under rules which allow the executive branch to approve individual military transactions that fall below a specific dollar amount without publicly notifying US legislators. The administration recently told members of Congress about the sales in a classified briefing, without releasing details of the weapons sent to Israel or their value.
Under the Arms Export Control Act, the executive branch must publicly inform Congress of sales to US allies that exceed $25m for “major defense equipment”, or $100m for other “defense articles”, including bombs and missiles. But the administration can get around these requirements by breaking up large transactions into smaller ones.
Even when the Biden administration is required to submit weapons sales for congressional review because they exceed the threshold amounts, it has invoked an emergency authority that allows it to bypass Congress entirely. In December, the state department approved the sale of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition, worth more than $106m, to the Israel military without approval from Congress. Later that month, the administration again used its emergency powers to finalize the transfer of $147.5m in artillery shells and related equipment to Israel.
Biden and his aides are taking a page from Donald Trump’s playbook to avoid congressional oversight of military sales to US allies. An investigation by the state department’s inspector general found that, between 2017 and 2019, the Trump administration broke up $11.2bn in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into 4,221 individual arms transfers so it could avoid reaching the thresholds that require notifying Congress of pending deals.
Despite the Biden administration’s effort to keep the scope of its weapons shipments to Israel a secret since October, US officials leaked some details: Washington has provided drones, thousands of munitions for Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, 58,000 artillery shells, and at least 23,000 precision guided bombs and missiles. According to the state department, the US and Israel currently have nearly 600 active cases of potential military sales or transfers worth more than $23bn – although it could take years to finalize some of these deals, which include new warplanes and helicopters.
As Biden continues supplying Israel with weapons, the US is culpable for the slaughter and catastrophe in Gaza. Even as UN and humanitarian officials sound the alarm about the risk of widespread famine, Israel continues to block large portions of the food and other aid mobilized by the international community from reaching Gaza. In the most blatant example of Biden’s inability or refusal to force Israeli officials to allow more aid, Israel’s extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has blocked a large US shipment of flour from leaving the Israeli port of Ashdod for nearly a month. UN officials say the flour is enough to feed 1.1 million Gazans for a month.
Apparently, Biden can rush tens of thousands of bombs and missiles to Israel, but he can’t convince an Israeli minister to release a shipment of US flour – one which Netanyahu promised to facilitate during a call with Biden on 19 January. It’s the latest example of how Netanyahu and his hardline government have consistently humiliated Biden since the start of the Gaza war.
Ironically, the Israeli government’s refusal to allow the US flour shipment and other aid from reaching Gaza – and Biden’s attempts to get around that intransigence with airdrops and a maritime operation – could provide the Biden administration with a legal justification to stop US weapons shipments. One section of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 prohibits the US government from providing security assistance or arms to a country that is blocking the provision of US humanitarian aid.
Yet Biden and his aides have shown no interest in applying a law which says the US should not be sending bombs to a foreign government that is preventing food and other aid from reaching civilians facing mass starvation.
In late January, the International court of justice issued an interim judgement in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide. The court ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide by its troops in Gaza, and to allow more assistance into the besieged territory. Human Rights Watch and other humanitarian groups found that Israel has failed to comply with the court’s ruling as it continues to obstruct delivery of food, fuel and other aid into Gaza.
Biden has the means to prevent Israel from continuing its war in Gaza, but he has shown no interest in using that leverage. He has refused to withhold arms shipments, or to compel Netanyahu to accept a permanent truce. Instead, Biden has vetoed three UN security council resolutions calling for a ceasefire.
He also allowed himself to be humiliated – and portrayed as powerless – by Netanyahu and his extremist allies. After all, the world’s most powerful leader hasn’t been able to persuade the Israeli government to release a US flour shipment from one of its ports.
Biden’s passivity and complicity about mass death in Gaza will be a moral stain on his legacy.
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Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University
