ISRAEL USING U.S. AID TO DESTROY PALESTINIAN HOMES
Putting conditions on U.S. aid to Israel has become a controversial topic — but it was the norm in Washington just a few decades ago.
by Alex Kane
SINCE 2015, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., has been the leading congressional critic of Israel’s military detention of Palestinian children, introducing multiple pieces of legislation that would bar Israel from using U.S. military aid to arrest Palestinian youth.
By targeting Israel’s detention of Palestinian children — just one aspect of Israel’s military occupation, but one that involved a highly vulnerable population — McCollum was attempting to make her bills appeal to the widest swath of Democrats possible. For most others in her party, the check the U.S. wrote to Israel every year was not up for debate.
McCollum is now planning to introduce legislation on Thursday that would bar U.S. aid from subsidizing a wider array of Israeli occupation tactics, an indication of just how far the debate over U.S. aid to Israel has come in the past six years.
“There is nothing out of the ordinary about conditioning aid. … All taxpayer funds provided by Congress to foreign governments in the form of aid are subject to conditions in a myriad of generally applicable laws, yet the $3.8 billion provided to Israel by the State Department has no country-specific conditions despite Israel’s systemic violations of Palestinian human rights,” McCollum told The Intercept. “I don’t want $1 of U.S. aid to Israel paying for the military detention and abuse of Palestinian children, the demolition of Palestinian homes, or the annexation of Palestinian land.”
McCollum’s bill is the result of years of work by Palestinian rights activists to cut or condition aid to Israel. These calls have been fueled by reports of U.S.-made weapons being used to kill Palestinian civilians, whether with Hellfire missiles fired by Israeli fighter jets on homes in Gaza or with U.S.-made rifles used to gun down Palestinian protesters. Human rights organizations have documented the Israeli military’s repeated use of bulldozers produced by the Illinois-based Caterpillar company to demolish Palestinian homes.
The legislation has been endorsed by more than 20 groups, including mainstays in the Palestinian rights movement like the Adalah Justice Project and Jewish Voice for Peace Action, as well as the liberal pro-Israel group Americans for Peace Now and the progressive Justice Democrats, which focuses on launching primaries against establishment Democrats.
Fifty-three percent of Democratic voters told Gallup this year that they support increasing pressure on Israel — an increase of 10 points since 2018 — yet most Democrats in the House and Senate do not support conditioning aid, and the bill faces steep odds of even getting a hearing in the House Foreign Affairs and Appropriations committees. Still, it’s the most significant effort yet by progressive Democrats to broach what was once an unthinkable red line: changing the nature of U.S. military aid to Israel so that U.S. aid is banned from furthering Israeli human rights abuses. It’s a remarkable development in an institution long thought to be a permanent stronghold for the pro-Israel lobby.
“The movement in Congress is unprecedented,” said Raed Jarrar, a Palestinian American analyst and the former advocacy director for American Muslims for Palestine. “I never dreamed that we would have bills banning the U.S. government from funding Israeli activities that are in violation of U.S. law or international law.”
Broader political dynamics — the combination of Israel’s hard-right direction, its apartheid system in the occupied territories, and Barack Obama’s clashes with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed by the Trump-Netanyahu alliance — have created space for this discussion to come to the fore.
Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, speaks via video to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee during the Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 2019. Photo: Michael Brochstein/LightRocket via Getty Images
These developments have also pushed groups closer to the Democratic mainstream to advocate for restrictions on how U.S. aid can be used by Israel. J Street, a liberal group that supports U.S. aid to Israel but opposes Israel’s military occupation, is backing McCollum’s bill — the first time the group backs one of her efforts to ensure that U.S. military aid to Israel comes with strings attached.
In addition to encouraging congressional support for McCollum’s bill, the group, whose annual conference will begin on April 18, will lobby members of Congress to introduce language to the foreign appropriations bill to restrict U.S. military aid from furthering policies of annexation or the exercise of permanent military control over a territory under occupation. While J Street’s language does not single out Israel, the group sees it as prohibiting U.S. aid from supporting those Israeli actions.
The lobbying marks a significant shift for a group seen as the most influential liberal Jewish group working on Israel in Washington. J Street’s endorsement or opposition to legislation around Israel carries significant weight in the Democratic caucus, and Palestinian rights advocates — and even some within J Street — have often criticized the group for standing in the way of legislative efforts to condition U.S. aid to Israel.
“We believe that every dollar of our current security assistance to Israel should go towards measures that address Israel’s actual security needs — and that none of that money or the equipment bought with it should be used in connection with the demolition of Palestinian communities, settlement expansion or other actions that facilitate de facto annexation in the occupied West Bank,” said Dylan Williams, J Street’s senior vice president of policy and strategy who leads the government affairs team. “Policies like that trample on Palestinian rights and undermine Israel’s own long-term future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.”
J Street’s position is in stark contrast to that of other pro-Israel groups. In March, as part of its virtual national council meeting, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, lobbied members of Congress to sign on to a letter authored by Reps. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, and Ted Deutch, D-Fla., that criticizes efforts to condition aid to Israel.
“The Democratic Party has been clear in its opposition to putting additional conditions on military assistance to Israel. … While there are a few Democrats who want additional conditions, the party has spoken clearly and unambiguously against such efforts,” said Rachel Rosen, spokesperson for the lobby group Democratic Majority for Israel, which has spent heavily against lawmakers and candidates who have been critical of Israel.