By Nadya Tannous
September 16, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House -
"Al-Shabaka"
-
The
Unity Intifada, which erupted following the Israeli
regime’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians
in Sheikh Jarrah, its attack
on worshipers in
the Aqsa mosque complex, and its vicious
assault on Gaza in
May, garnered Palestinians unprecedented support
from activists and policymakers across the world,
and even in the halls of Capitol Hill.
This dramatic shift in
global public and political opinion is critical for
the Palestinian struggle, and it presents an
opportunity to push for policies that hold Israel
accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian
people.
Since Israel’s
establishment in 1948, the U.S. has largely shaped
its relationship to the Middle East through
maintaining security and leverage for Israel and its
supporters. On the one hand, it has done this by
maintaining Israel’s regional military dominance
through continued funding. On the other, it has
brokered “peace” deals between Arab states and
Israel that require Arab governments to support
Israel politically and economically, or, in the
least, to abstain from publicly condemning its
actions.
Since 2001, Israel has
received over $63
billion in security assistance
from the U.S., with over 90 percent of it funded by
the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF)
program.
The FMF, which is
commonly known as “the blank check” to Israel, is
funded by U.S. tax dollars and comes in the form
of weapons grants. In
May 2021, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace reported that,
in the 2021 fiscal year, the Trump administration
requested $3.3 billion in FMF for Israel,
constituting 59 percent of the requested global FMF
budget.
In the upcoming 2022
fiscal year, the Biden administration has requested
to replicate it. The commitment to this level of
funding was specifically instituted through a
10-year Memorandum of Understanding, signed under
former President Barack Obama’s administration. The
report explained further that, “Israel receives more
FMF than all other countries in the world combined.”
Concurrently, the U.S.
has directly pressured Arab nations to capitulate to
Israeli interests through threats to rescind its
military aid packages and financial incentives for
cooperation.
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The first two Arab
states to normalize with Israel under U.S. pressure
were Egypt (1979), now the second-largest recipient
of U.S. military aid,
and Jordan (1994), a country with one of the
strongest and most stable currencies in the world
thanks to longstanding arrangements
with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Previously, the
normalization of relations between Arab nations and
Israel were
an exchange of “land for peace.”
But the 2020 Abraham
Accords serve as a
declaration of alliances, bolstered by weapons
exchange and the promise of military might.
New Era of
US-Brokered Normalization Treaties
Throughout 2020, former
U.S. President Donald Trump ushered in a new era of U.S.-brokered
normalization treaties
between Israel and Arab states, specifically the
United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and
Morocco.
The agreements came at
the same time as Palestinians were witnessing one of
the most
aggressive advances of
the Israeli regime. Indeed, Israel was advancing its
plans to annex Area
C in the Jordan Valley;
it carried out mass
arrests and imprisonment of
Palestinian university students; and it intensified
its ethnic cleansing campaigns in Sheikh Jarrah,
Silwan and other parts of the West Bank.
In this way, the
agreements directly undercut Palestinian demands for
self-determination, and normalize the Israeli
regime’s ongoing
violence against Palestinians.
Regarding the UAE and
Bahrain, the September 2020 Accords were recognized
as a first-rate
arms deal between
two Gulf governments for American weapons.
According to a report
by the Center for International Policy, the U.S.
dominated arms transfers to
the Gulf states from 2015 to 2019, and remains the
top supplier of over two-thirds of states in the
region. As a result of the Accords, the UAE publicly
noted that it was expecting
50 F-35 fighter jets and
18 armed Reaper drone systems as part of the $23.37
billion arms deal approved
by the Trump administration in exchange for
normalization.
While the Sudanese
government agreed to normalize with Israel in
exchange for the U.S. lifting
its sanctions on
the country as part of the U.S. terror list, and
while Morocco normalized in exchange for U.S.
recognition of its sovereignty
over the Western Sahara,
the UAE and Bahrain normalized in order to bolster
their positions vis-à-vis
other regional players.
In addition to pushing
for nuclear deals that will neutralize Iran, the UAE
and Bahrain seek to challenge Iran through proxy
military confrontation, which requires enhancing
their military arsenals.
Bahrain, for one, has clearly
articulated that
it expects to be consulted by the Biden
administration ahead of any nuclear negotiations.
This arms deal also permits the
UAE to stockpile munitions for
its military assault and weapons-racketeering in
Libya, and for its participation in the Saudi-led
attack on Yemen.
At $10 billion,
the arms deals ushered in by the Abraham Accords
have been the largest in the UAE’s history, and
suggest a stockpiling of munitions for future
military actions.
Meanwhile, Gulf support
for the Palestinians has wavered, as regional donors
have moved from neither condemning, nor seeking to
obstruct, Israel’s aspirations to now facilitating
them.
Indeed, the UAE has
recently financed the purchase of properties across
East Jerusalem, through Palestinian individuals, and
then sold
them to Israeli settlers.
This period of normalization has been politically
costly for Palestinians and, with the UAE and
Bahrain entering their first year since
normalization, their deepening relationship with
Israel and their privileged relationship to the U.S.
will surely impede Palestinian resistance against
Israeli apartheid, settler-colonialism, and military
occupation.
US Legislative
Responses
In the U.S., the
Abraham Accords have generated a variety of
responses on the legislative level. In November
2020, Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL) proposed H.R.
8494,
“Guaranteeing Israel’s Qualitative Military
Edge,” co-sponsored by 19 other representatives.
The Qualitative
Military Edge (QME) agreement
ensures Israel’s military advantage in the region in
both military technologies and weaponry as the
preferred partner of the U.S., and as a proxy state
for U.S. interests. It is a long-standing U.S.
practice, enshrined in U.S. legislation since 2008,
and enforced at the discretion of Congress. The bill
was most significant, however, because it proposed
that Israel, not the U.S. Congress, would hold the
deciding power over US weapons deals across the
Middle East.
Schneider’s bill was
brought forward in the clamor of anxieties about the
integrity of Israel’s QME in light of U.S. weapons
sales to the Gulf states. This concern was largely
rooted in the belief that a bolstering of weapons
stockpiles among Arab partners could threaten
Israel’s security in the region, despite the
provisions outlined in the Abraham Accords which
stipulate that Arab states would never supersede
Israel militarily.
These U.S.-brokered
normalization agreements ultimately contribute to
Israel’s QME by allowing it to fortify the region
against a perceived common enemy: Iran. Thus, in the
U.S.- and Saudi-led military front against Iran,
Bahrain, the UAE and Israel find
themselves on the same side.
Yet, despite the
guidelines laid out in the Abraham Accords, in
November 2020, members of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, led by chairman Robert Menendez
(D-NJ), introduced a joint
resolution against the weapons sale and
invoked Israel’s
QME.
In the House, Rep.
Ilhan Omar (D-MN) also protested the pending weapons
deal under the Accords with stronger wording to ban
the sale altogether, though she cited
the UAE’s human rights violations,
and not Israel’s QME, as a reason for the ban.
It is important to
contextualize Schneider’s bill both in
comparison to Omar and
Menendez’s separate resolutions, and against the
backdrop of the Leahy
Law.
The 1977 law, named
after Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), prohibits
U.S. arms sales and military aid to
foreign states’ security forces that commit gross
human rights violations. Accordingly, there is legal
precedent in the U.S. for
conditioning aid based on a state’s human rights
violations through
the Foreign Assistance Act,
while Schneider’s proposed bill enables them.
Salih Booker of the
Center for International Policy points out that Israel
is the only country in the world for which the
U.S. does not track which
weapons go to which military unit, making it
virtually impossible to enforce the Leahy Law when
it comes to Israel.
The threat of
conditioning U.S. aid to Israel preceding the 1994
Madrid Conference,
where former Secretary of State James Baker
temporarily withheld loan guarantees to Israel to
prevent use of the money for settlement building, is
the only historical example of U.S.-conditioned aid
to Israel. To be sure, it was the Palestinians who
made this possible through the First Intifada.
As of the summer of
2021, Schneider’s bill has not been brought back to
the floor, but developments have been made on the
heels of Menendez’s November 2020 resolution. In
January 2021, Biden announced that he would review
all Trump-era weapons sales,
but in April, mentioned that the U.S. would, as
promised, go forward with “a broader UAE deal worth
$23 billion.”
There has been
continuous debate between Bahrain, the UAE, Israel
and the Biden administration on whether or not the
sale of F-35s will actually go through, yet the
strategies adopted by Menendez and the Biden
administration are not concerned with the UAE’s
human rights record; they are concerned with the
bedrock of U.S. regional priorities: maintaining
Israel’s QME.
Indeed, U.S.
aid powers the Israeli Air Force,
providing billions of dollars’ worth
of fuel under the
government-to-government Foreign Military Sales
(FMS) program. Since 2015, the U.S. has spent
over $5.4 billion on
aviation fuel, diesel fuel, unleaded gasoline and
aerial refueling aircraft. The U.S. is scheduled to
send the $3.3 billion in FMF funds to Israel
throughout 2021, which Congress approved on a
bipartisan basis.
On top of this, the
U.S. is set to send an additional
$500 million for
joint U.S.-Israeli research, development and
deployment of missile defense systems. In June 2021,
Israel was also forecasted to ask U.S. Congress for
another $1 billion to restock
the Iron Dome and
to upgrade the system, putting the FMF at $4.3
billion.
Fundamentally, Israel
will continue to lie at the center of U.S. interests
in the Middle East, and the U.S. will continue to
hold Israel’s military actions to different
standards than any other country.
After a Transformative
Moment
The Biden
administration has not differed from Trump’s with
regards to fulfilling the U.S.’ unconditional
support for Israel, which is in alignment with the
Obama administration’s 10-Year Memorandum of
Understanding.
The Biden
administration has been committed to supporting
Israel’s ongoing colonial expansion. This became
clear when Washington failed
to condemn Israel’s
blatant ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and war
crimes against
Palestinians in Gaza in May.
On May 5, Congress was
notified of the $735 million commercial sale of
precision-guided weapons to Israel, initiating a
15-day period when members of Congress may object.
Between May 5 and May
20, the Israeli regime bombarded Gaza, killing 243
Palestinians. Israelis also carried out brutal
attacks on Palestinians throughout
the West Bank and Jerusalem and formed
lynch mobs against
Palestinians in the 1948 territories, while Israeli
forces stood by.
Following the assault
on Gaza, and at the end of the 15-day period,
lawmakers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida
Tlaib (D-MI), Mark Pocan (D-WI), and Bernie Sanders
(D-VT) proposed
a senate joint resolution and a
house joint resolution to
halt the sale.
On May 13,
Representatives Mark Pocan, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna
Pressley, Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez publicly expressed
support for the Palestinian people
in Congress, calling for an end to funding Israeli
military aggression. Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez described
Israel as an “apartheid state” and
even newcomer Representative Marie Newman (D-IL) called
on the State Department to
condemn the ethnic
cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah as
a violation of international law.
On April 15,
Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) submitted H.R.2590,
titled “Defending the Human Rights of Palestinian
Children and Families Living Under Israeli Military
Occupation Act,” which is an expanded version of the
same bill
she previously introduced.
It was co-sponsored
by 28 representatives.
McCollum’s bill aims to
ensure that U.S. funding is not
used to sustain Israel’s
military judicial system, forced displacement of
Palestinians through home demolitions and evictions and
illegal annexations of Palestinian land.
Days later, Senators
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) openly
confirmed their willingness
to restrict U.S. aid to Israel, or
to withhold money from any Israeli institution or
military branch responsible for human rights abuses.
Notably, Sanders had
specifically withdrawn
his opposition to
the commercial sale of precision-guided weapons to
Israel by this time.
Moreover, on June 8,
over 100 prominent national organizations submitted
a letter to Biden urging
him to block the sale,
with 73 centrist Democrats calling on him to categorize
Israeli settlements as illegal.
Beyond Capitol Hill, grassroots
movements of Palestinians and
tens of thousands of Palestine
supporters have taken to the streets across
major U.S. cities, protesting the Israeli regime’s
disproportionate use of power, poking holes in the
stale “peace” discourses that distract from Israeli
colonial violence and calling for freedom for the
Palestinian people.
These efforts were
inspired by the unprecedented mobilization
witnessed across
historic Palestine and the
world, and which
unified Palestinians to push back against ethnic
cleansing, settler-colonial violence, apartheid, and
siege, effectively defying
their geographic and political fragmentation.
Campaigns online and
activists on different social
media platforms have
also critiqued the U.S.’ direct contribution to
Israel’s violations of Palestinians’ rights, and
have demanded their political representatives take
action, including rescinding or conditioning the
U.S.’ blank check to Israel.
The tide is clearly
shifting in the U.S. In May, The LA
Times cited an April
Gallup study which
reported a massive surge in support for Palestine
over the past decade: from 1-in-7 U.S. citizens
primarily sympathizing with Palestine, to now
1-in-4.
Additionally, an August
Chicago Council Survey showed
that 50 percent of Americans favor restricting
military aid to Israel in operations that target
Palestinians, as opposed to 45 percent who oppose
it. Democrats overwhelmingly support it at 62
percent.
To be sure, many of
these U.S. citizens are increasingly realizing that
their tax dollars are directly contributing
to the onslaught against
Palestinians.
What Needs to be Done
to Restrict Aid
In order to seize on
this historic moment in the defense of Palestinians’
rights:
- Activists and
lobbyists must pressure policymakers and the
international community to restrict U.S.
military aid to Israel, including through
sanctions. They should support McCollum’s bill,
further legislation conditioning aid to Israel
and should push for legislation that tracks
Israel’s military spending. They should promote
grassroots groups and NGOs already dedicated to
this work, including theUS
Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Adalah
Justice Project, American
Muslims for Palestine
and the American
Friends Service Committee.
- Activists,
lobbyists, and policymakers must support theBoycott,
Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement,
which is part of a larger strategy to hold
accountable corporations
and companies implicated
in arms deals with Israel, including
Raytheon,
Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics,
Northrop Grumman and Elbit Systems. They must
join municipal campaigns and initiatives, such
as Dissenter’s
Divest From Death,
to target these entities and their activities
that contribute to the violation of
Palestinians’ rights and others in the region.
- International
policymakers must promote the growing movement
to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing
violations — whether in the halls of Congress,
at thecorporate
level,
or even at the state
level — through
legislation and partnerships that protect,
praise, and fund them. They must concomitantly
push for legislative efforts that condition aid
based on accountability to human rights.
- S. policymakers
must uplift and support the voices of U.S.
citizens who are calling, and writing letters
to, their representatives demanding anend
to U.S. military support for Israel.
They should also continue to sign petitions in
conjunction with national campaigns working to
protect Palestinians’ rights.
- International
policymakers must oppose and demand therevocation
of anti-BDS laws which
quash and delegitimize criticism of Israel,
especially in the U.S. They must also demand
that the International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance (IHRA) rescind its 2020 redefinition
of anti-Semitism that
includes critique of Israel, a redefinition
which has already been adopted by several
governments. The controversial redefinition threatens
free speech,
and poses a significant challenge to combating
real antisemitism and promoting Palestinian
human rights.
Nadya Tannous is Al-Shabaka’s summer 2021 visiting
U.S. policy fellow. Nadya holds an MSc in refugee
and forced migration studies from the University of
Oxford and a BA in anthropology and global
information and social enterprise studies from UC
Santa Cruz.
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