In recent weeks a number of stories have broken revealing key details about the Biden administration’s foreign policy support for Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
At the end of September, we had a bombshell report from Brett Murphy at ProPublica revealing that Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected two reports showing that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. Later, in a “carefully worded” statement Blinken told Congress that,
We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.
Days later, Politico reported that White House officials had informed the Israeli government that they would support the country ramping up its attacks on Lebanon. The assurances came while the administration publicly called for diplomacy in the region.
Then we had a Reuters report showing that the U.S. government had early concerns about Israel potentially committing war crimes in Gaza. Here’s a part of the story:
After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arabic-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email. Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200.
As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes.
“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote.
At the time, emergency workers were struggling to save people buried under rubble from Israel airstrikes and the world’s sympathies were beginning to shift from murdered Israelis to besieged Palestinian civilians.
Addressing State Department leaders, Russo urged quick action to shift the administration’s public stance of unqualified support for Israel and its military operation in Gaza. “If this course is not quickly reversed by not only messaging, but action, it risks damaging our stance in the region for years to come,” he wrote. Russo resigned in March, citing personal reasons. He declined to comment.
There’s a lot going on in the world, but any of these stories could classify as a big scandal. At the very least, they give us some insight into how frequently government officials lie to the public, reporters, and Congress about their involvement in the region and their perception of what Israel is doing.
Last week I interviewed Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani about the Biden administration’s motivations. Here’s what he said when I asked him why The White House has yet to impose any red lines on Netanyahu’s actions:
…I think it’s quite clear that the U.S. is now fully on board with what I wouldn’t call an Israeli agenda, I would call a joint U.S.-Israeli agenda. An agenda to change the face of the region. And here, again, there’s also, I think, an important geopolitical element that we shouldn’t ignore, which is that the United States is committed to Israel, perhaps for multiple reasons, but an important one is that it sees Israel as a key outpost of U.S. interests in the Middle East.
If you look at it from that perspective, then any Israeli loss weakens the U.S. and any Israeli victory strengthens the U.S. position, not only in the region, but around the world as well..for the U.S., the only serious, real red line is Israeli failure. That is the one thing that the the United States will not accept.
This is a probably a good insight to keep in mind when looking at the recent developments regarding Iran.
After the country’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel, Biden and a vast number of U.S. politicians) said that the U.S. would support Israel’s retaliation, but the President also publicly cautioned against hitting Iran’s nuclear sites.
This week Biden and Netanyahu spoke for the first time in months to discuss the escalating situation, but The White House provided no information about Israel’s plans after the call.
According to an NBC report U.S. military officials have discussed various options for joining Israel in its reprisal attack on Iran.
How much does Israel get from the U.S.?
The previous section of this newsletter points to the fact that State Department spokespeople are consistently tasked with getting in front of reporters and lying, if not playing dumb.
That truth establishes a nice preface for the following exchange, which took place between State Dept. spokesman Matthew Miller and Al Quds’ Said Arikat this week.
Miller was asked about a new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University on U.S. military spending.
The report found that the United States has spent more than $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since the war on Gaza began.
Miler pushed back on the question insisting that the report “conflates a number of things, including direct U.S. military spending to combat the Houthis attacking international shipping, which is included in that number, which is obviously not aid to Israel.”
Here’s Quincy Institute Senior Research Fellow William Hartung speaking to The Intercept about Miller’s claim:
The State Department spokesman is correct that our analysis conflates a number of different drivers of the cost of U.S. military support for Israel and our escalating role in the region. That was the point–to show how much taxpayers are providing in support of a deeply misguided policy to continue arming Israel even as it commits war crimes that some experts believe can plausibly be called a genocide. It was telling that the State Department spokesperson critiqued our estimate–unfairly, we believe–but could not answer the question of how much the U.S. is spending in support of Israel’s Middle East wars. This kind of lack of transparency even as we are on the verge of possible direct involvement in the wars sparked by Israel’s actions since the invasion of Gaza is simply unacceptable.
Back to the exchange. After Miller rejected the findings, the AP’s Matt Lee followed-up with a natural inquiry: if the report overstated the numbers, then how much has Israel gotten?
Miller claimed he didn’t know.
Q: What does the U.S. Government think that it has given Israel since October 7th of last year?
MR MILLER: So we give them $3.3 billion a year and there was additional money that was appropriated in the supplemental.
Q: Yes.
MR MILLER: The reason it’s hard to ask that—answer that question definitively is there are different…
Q: That you don’t want to.
MR MILLER: There—no.
Q: That’s why.
MR MILLER: No, there are…
Q: That’s why it’s hard to answer.
MR MILLER: There are different ways of looking at it.
Q: I know—I know there are. And I’ve been—I’ve been through all of this.
MR MILLER: There’s money that’s appropriated. There’s money that’s allocated and then not actually delivered for years to come.
Q: And look, there are private organizations, educational organizations that have come up with estimates—that have come up with estimates. This building at least, which is in charge of arms transfers, at least many of them, hasn’t seen fit to come up with an update since July of last year.
MR MILLER: Yeah, I just don’t have the update.
Q: Okay.
MR MILLER: I’m just telling you that number—you can look at—you can look at that number and see how it conflates a number of things, including direct U.S. military spending to combat the Houthis attacking international shipping, which is included in that number, which is obviously not aid to Israel.
Q: Yeah, but it can’t be that difficult to separate what has been—what has been given to them post-October 7th in terms of—in terms of…
MR MILLER: Sure.
Q:–in terms of things that were not approved before then under the MOU, stuff that went to them specifically for the Gaza—and now Lebanon.
MR MILLER: So it depends how you look at it. Is it the amount that’s been allocated to them? Is it the amount that’s been delivered to them? Is it an amount that is going to be delivered to them?
Q: I’ll take any of them right now.
MR MILLER: No, I know. That’s the point is when you ask the question, it’s a difficult one. I don’t have the numbers here at my fingertips, obviously. I’m just pointing out that the number that Said referred to grossly overinflates…
Q: Well, someone’s got to have the number someplace. I mean…
Yeah—Matt, the numbers were Brown University’s numbers, not mine and so on. But it doesn’t matter what the actual figure is, but we give them a lot of money. We give them a great deal of leverage. They—we give them obviously a great deal of political coverage in the UN and many other places and so on, and suggests that this huge and lengthy partnership really does not exact any kind of leverage with the Israelis, don’t you question that?
MR MILLER: That’s not what I said. The thing that I said is that we are a sovereign country with our interests; they are a sovereign country with their interests.
Q: Right.
MR MILLER: Right.