Wait, what? We’re talking about Joe Biden? Why? He’s a “lame duck.” No matter who wins the US presidential election on November 5, he’s going home to Delaware on January 20. His chances of asking for, and getting, much from Congress during that two-and-a-half month interregnum are negligible.
But as head of the US government’s executive branch, what he can do is follow the laws, no matter how loudly Congress howls, absent Supreme Court intervention in support of criminal behavior.
He won’t do it now for fear of harming Kamala Harris’s chances versus Donald Trump, but once the votes are in he’s free to follow his conscience … if he still has one after decades in politics, where a conscience is a liability.
The laws I’m speaking of are Section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2378d), which applies to the Secretary of State, and its Department of Defense analog, 10 U.S.C. 362, informally known as the “Leahy Laws.”
Those laws, according to the US State Department Fact Sheet on them, prohibit “the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”
Evidence that Israeli units have committed, and continue to commit, gross violations of human rights in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon isn’t just credible, it’s overwhelming.
Israeli forces have killed at least tens of thousands, and more likely in the 200,000 range, in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and Lebanon, since last October. Most of the dead are non-combatants, many of them children.
Israeli forces have been caught red-handed in numerous atrocities, from bombing hospitals and refugee camps to anally raping male prisoners with metal rods. Israeli politicians openly defend and encourage even that last one.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that Israeli forces are committing gross violations of human rights … and it is therefore illegal for the US government to provide one thin dime of military aid or assistance to those forces. Period.
Why hasn’t Biden already ordered the Secretaries of State and Defense to stop writing checks and shipping weapons to Israel?
Because Israel has a powerful political lobby in the US. Anything less than complete and unquestioning obedience to Benjamin Netanyahu’s every demand is a “third rail” … for politicians who face re-election.
Biden doesn’t face re-election.
And these days, the Israel lobby’s support goes mostly to Republicans. Its main intervention on behalf of Democrats is meddling in primaries to ensure “pro-Israel” Democrats get nominated in “safe” Democratic seats.
At some point, there’s going to have to be one of those “national conversations” over whether it’s really in the interests of the United States to unstintingly support a violent, atrocity-prone, ethno-supremacist regime.
That conversation is unlikely to go Israel’s way. But it has to be started by a figure of national stature who needn’t worry about re-election.
If Biden does possess a conscience, or even just desires a big “legacy” accomplishment, he’ll cut the Israeli regime off come November 6.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY