Last week the Biden administration notified Congress that it intends to sell $8 billion in arms to Israel. The proposed sale, which needs approval from House and Senate committees, includes drones, 500-pound warheads and Hellfire AGM-114 missiles.
There is something breathtaking about watching President Joe Biden scramble to send yet another arms package to Israel in his final weeks in office.
Biden has objected to illegal Israeli settlement activity, but he has a long track record of supporting Israel unconditionally.
Biden is a lame-duck president, with a limited ability to effect change, but foreign policy is an area in which he’s still able to leave his final imprint on the world. And in some respects, he is exceptionally free: He is unshackled from the political dilemmas of splitting the Democratic caucus over a shift in Israel policy; he is unburdened by re-election calculations. Yet in this moment, Biden has still chosen not to change course but instead to hand over even more lethal weaponry to a state that a growing number of human rights organizations, human rights experts and genocide scholars have described as perpetrating genocide in Gaza.
Biden’s devotion to sending even more weapons into Israel as one of his final acts underscores how much of his policy outlook on Israel — which has been more hawkish than that of many in his party — appears to be based on an unwavering conviction that Israel is the best vehicle for U.S. interests in the Middle East. And it cements how much his complicity in a civilian death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands ought to be a central part of how he is remembered.
Biden has objected to illegal Israeli settlement activity, but he has a long track record of supporting Israel unconditionally when it comes to providing the country with arms and helping it achieve military dominance in the Middle East. As Alex Ward, then a journalist for Vox, wrote in 2021, “There were few voices in Congress during Biden’s many decades there who were more ardently pro-Israel than he was.”
A key insight into Biden’s rationale for supporting Israel comes from his fiery remarks on the Senate floor in 1986, when he said that “naked self-interest” ought to guide the U.S. attitude toward Israel. “It is the best $3 billion investment we make,” Biden said about the annual U.S. aid package to Israel. “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” The statement doesn’t telegraph a commitment to the people of Israel; rather, it implies that Israel is incidentally the best strategic beachhead for advancing U.S. interests in a region of acute economic importance.
Biden’s commitment to fighting for that beachhead has long been fierce, and it has involved a disregard for human rights violations. In fact, Biden once reportedly shocked former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at their meeting days after the start of the 1982 Lebanon war with his cavalier language about killing civilians to defend Israel. Here’s a summary of the episode, via Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books:
In Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No, sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war … This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.’
Biden’s commitment to aiding Israel with military aid, intelligence, regional support and diplomatic cover at the United Nations, even after Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, war crimes transgressed international law, is in line with an unyielding and careerlong commitment to supporting Israel no matter what. His insistence that he has done everything in his power to secure a ceasefire insults the intelligence of the public. If Biden wanted to apply pressure to Israel, he’d use the vast leverage the United States has over Israel: refuse to support the country with vast resources as long as it continues to cross supposed red lines the Biden administration has drawn. He also would have objected to the defunding of UNRWA, the chief organization for distributing food and aid in Gaza, which relies heavily on U.S. funding.
Biden’s dogged support of and participation in the brutalization of Gaza should fundamentally shape our understanding of Biden’s legacy. What does it mean for a purportedly progressive party to support what human rights observers are deeming a genocide? If Democrats want to regain any kind of credibility on standing for justice or human dignity, they ought to turn their back on this as swiftly as possible.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico.