Biden Keeps Fueling the Atrocious War in Gaza

 

As long as the U.S. supplies the Israeli government with the means to devastate what is left of Gaza, everything else that the president and administration officials say is irrelevant theater.

by Daniel Larison 

Posted onApril 2, 2024

There is a man-made famine in Gaza, and the U.S. keeps arming the government that caused it:

The Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

As long as the U.S. supplies the Israeli government with the means to devastate what is left of Gaza, everything else that the president and administration officials say is irrelevant theater. Their “concerns” count for nothing when they actively fuel the conflagration. The one thing that might stop the slaughter is to cut off the supply of weapons that have enabled Netanyahu to wage this atrocious war, and that is the one thing that this administration won’t threaten.

Even if halting arms shipments didn’t stop the war entirely, it would make it harder for Netanyahu to continue the campaign and it would put his government under more pressure. It is also the right and required thing to do. The U.S. is obligated under its own laws to halt arms transfers to governments that restrict the delivery of humanitarian aid, and there is no question that the Israeli government has been severely restricting aid deliveries for the duration of this conflict. Josh Paul, the State Department official who resigned in protest last year, calls the administration’s approval of weapons transfers an “abrogation of moral responsibility, and an assault on the rule of law as we know it, at both the domestic and international levels.” Withholding military assistance from a state that is deliberately starving people is the absolute least that the U.S. can do, and the president can’t even do that.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2024/04/02/biden-keeps-fueling-the-atrocious-war-in-gaza/