Israel-Gaza war Biden wants progressives to believe he’s reining in Israel. He isn’t. Biden will be remembered as a president who could have restrained Israel but instead made the US complicit in this war- Mohamad Bazzi

"The US is, by far, the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, providing $3.8bn in military aid per year – and it’s all paid for by American taxpayers. (Israel is also the largest aggregate recipient of US foreign aid in the world, having received about $300bn since the Jewish state was founded in 1948.) Last month, after intense lobbying by Biden, Congress approved $26bn in additional support to Israel, which includes $14bn in unconditional military aid. 

Biden and his top aides passed up another opportunity this month to restrict most arms shipments and end US complicity in Israel’s war. On 10 May, the state department sent a long-awaited report to Congress in which the administration must certify that recipients of US weapons are abiding by international law and allowing the transport of humanitarian aid during active conflicts. The administration said it found written assurances from Israeli officials that they would use US arms in accordance with international humanitarian law to be “credible and reliable”. 

The 46-page report was an exercise in bureaucratic double-speak, and it showed how far the Biden administration is willing to contort itself to avoid concluding that Israel violated any international laws, or had intentionally obstructed humanitarian aid into Gaza. Either of those findings would have shown that Israel had violated a new national security memo that Biden issued in February, and required the administration to suspend or restrict most arms shipments to Israel under existing US laws. 

The state department report, which contradicted itself in numerous places, argued that the US could not find hard proof that Israel had used US weapons in specific incidents that might have involved human rights violations. But for months, numerous rights groups and independent monitors have documented Israel’s violations of international law, including its use of starvation as a weapon of war and methodical campaign to obstruct the delivery of food and other aid into Gaza." READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/20/biden-weapons-israel-gaza-war