The United States is by far Israel's closest, most important security partner. Washington provides the Israelis $3.8 billion in military aid every year under a memorandum of understanding crafted during the Obama administration, money that comes with no strings attached. Since Israel's founding in 1948, total U.S. aid has reached nearly $159 billion—approximately 78 percent, or $124 billion, of that sum was earmarked for military assistance.
Before the Israel-Hamas war erupted on Oct. 7, even the thought of conditioning U.S. aid to Israel was a non-starter. Yet today, after nearly two months of conflict in which more than 15,000 Gazans have been killed and more than half of northern Gaza's buildings have been damaged, conditionality is now considered by some—particularly in the Democratic Party—as an option worth considering.
While the Biden administration and members of Congress have supported Israel's campaign to wipe out Hamas in Gaza, concern is growing that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are operating in a way that is, if not indiscriminate, then more lethal than it needs to be. On Nov. 8, the majority of the Senate Democratic caucus wrote a letter to President Joe Biden requesting information on how the administration is ensuring that Israel is complying with international humanitarian law. This isn't a letter the White House can shove aside; Biden has requested $14 billion in additional military aid for Israel as part of his $106 billion national security supplemental, so concerns about Israel's conduct in Gaza are highly relevant if the White House wants to persuade lawmakers in his own party to support the package.
On the question of tying Israel aid to certain benchmarks, Democratic lawmakers are divided. Some, like Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Ben Cardin, don't want any restrictions whatsoever and are troubled why anyone would bring it up at a time when Israel is conducting its biggest land war since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Senator Bernie Sanders takes the opposite view: conditions are not only morally justified but a crucial component in eventually bringing Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table for comprehensive peace talks. "The blank check approach must end," Sanders wrote in The New York Times last week. "The United States must make clear that while we are friends of Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of decency."
The vocal progressive lawmaker isn't the only one making this case. Senator Chris Murphy, a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, doesn't see anything particularly controversial about attaching rules and expectations to future aid packages. "We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with U.S. law and international law," he said on television over the weekend.
Murphy has a point. Qualifying U.S. security aid to other countries isn't unusual, let alone unprecedented. To take one example: the so-called Leahy Law prohibits U.S. security support to a country's security forces if they are found to be violating international humanitarian law. The Arms Export Control Act states that the U.S. can only export weapons to foreign countries for internal security purposes, or self-defense, and prevents those weapons from being released if the country on the receiving end is "in substantial violation" of those conditions. The Foreign Assistance Act codified that no assistance can be provided to a country "which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights."
Specific countries have been targeted as well. Egypt, a country that has gobbled up over $50 billion in U.S. military aid since 1978, has a small portion of its annual assistance held back until the secretary of state determines that Cairo is meeting its international human rights obligations. Immediately after taking office, Biden placed a unilateral ban on offensive weapons systems to Saudi Arabia over Riyadh's indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen (although some critics would take exception to the notion that the Biden administration is actually following through with its own policy).
Israel, isn't Egypt or Saudi Arabia. One is a democracy; the other two are highly repressive states with autocratic governments who imprison dissidents for the most meaningless offenses and have next to no accountability measures when their security forces ruff up or kill ordinary citizens. Israeli politicians get booted out of office when they do a poor job; Egyptian and Saudi politicians aren't so much politicians as they are permanent members of the bureaucracy immune to the whims of the people they ostensibly represent. The IDF have rules and procedures built-in and modified over decades; the Egyptian and Saudi militaries, in contrast, have rules that are shrouded in secrecy (if they have rules at all).
Ultimately, whether the U.S. conditions aid to Israel will be up to the high-powered folks writing and implementing the laws. There are legitimate arguments on both sides of the debate, all of which will be hashed out as Congress works on Biden's overall supplemental request.
But we should stop pretending that U.S. foreign aid to a friendly country, ally or not, is an entitlement.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
