Support and Weapons
Commentary by Ben Norton
Israel would not realistically be able to wage war on Gaza without US support.
Citing a senior Israeli air force official, prominent newspaper Haaretz reported that, “without the Americans’ supply of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, especially the air force, Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war for more than a few months.”
Israel’s Ministry of Defense wrote in August that US arms shipments have been “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”
President Joe Biden has repeatedly emphasized that Israel serves US imperial interests in a highly geostrategic region. In a speech in Tel Aviv in October 2023, Biden stated, “I have long said, if Israel didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.”
Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, an ex US Army general who commanded NATO, similarly boasted that “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”
The United States has protected Israel at the UN Security Council, shielding it from international law by repeatedly vetoing resolutions that called for peace and a ceasefire in Gaza.
Top UN human rights experts have warned that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, demanding an arms embargo.
The onslaught in Gaza has been referred to as “the world’s first livestreamed genocide.”
Scientific experts published an academic article in leading medical journal The Lancet in July estimating that 186,000 or more Palestinians in Gaza will die due to Israel’s war. This is nearly one-tenth of the population of the densely populated strip.
Ignoring rulings by the International Court of Justice, the US government has continued flooding Israel with weapons.
As of July 2024, the Biden administration had given Israel $18 billion in military aid. This is significantly higher than the roughly $4 billion in unconditional military aid that the US government provides to Israel in an average year.
In August, the US State Department approved additional arms packages for Israel worth $20 billion and $3.5 billion.
The Israeli military reported on August 26 that, since October 2023, the United States has sent it more than 600 arms shipments.
The US “operation has delivered over 50,000 tons of military equipment to Israel via 500 flights and 107 sea shipments.” Israel’s Ministry of Defense wrote.
It stressed that the US “equipment procured and transported includes armored vehicles, munitions, ammunition, personal protection gear, and medical equipment, which are crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”
The September report in Haaretz, titled “Israeli Air Force Official: Without U.S. Aid, Israel Couldn’t Fight Gaza Beyond a Few Months,” makes it clear that the only reason Israel is able to continue this genocide in Gaza is because Washington is facilitating it.
Before 1967, Israel was sponsored by the European colonial powers, principally the British and French empires. However, following a 1967 war on its Arab neighbors, Haaretz noted, “Israel then switched over its dependence on a foreign power to the United States, which provides the air force with all of its fighter planes and some of its bombs, missiles and intelligence equipment—on top of the development of joint weapons systems for all three layers of air defense.”
It was the British empire that had helped to create Israel in the first place. In the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the Crown gave its blessing to Zionist settlers to establish a colonialist Jewish state in Palestine, because it assumed they would be loyal proxies of the British empire.
The founding father of the Zionist colonialist movement, Theodor Herzl, had written a letter in 1902 to the genocidal British colonizer Cecil Rhodes, praising him as a “visionary” and boasting that the Zionist project was “something colonial.”
Just as the United States absorbed parts of the British empire after World War II, Washington also inherited the Israeli colonial project and became its imperial protector.
As a senator in 1986, Joe Biden boasted on the floor of Congress, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region; the United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.”
Biden added, “I think it’s about time we stop, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel. There is no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make.”
In 2022, as US president, Biden reiterated that, “if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.” He then repeated the same phrase in a 2023 press conference in Israel.
For his part, Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made no secret of the fact that his regime’s goal is the colonization of all of historic Palestine.
In September, Netanyahu appeared with a map that completely erased the West Bank.
Israeli minister and security cabinet member Avi Dichter, a member of Netanyahu’s ultra-conservative Likud party, boasted in 2023, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” (The Nakba refers to the mass ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, upon which Israel was founded in 1948.)
Ben Norton is an investigative journalist and analyst, and is the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report. He lived in and reported from Latin America for several years, and is now based in Beijing, China.
Source: geopoliticaleconomy.com, September 4, 2024