Voters want an arms embargo on Israel but Kamala Harris doesn’t
Polygraph | Newsletter n°263 | 28 August 2024
*Thank you, Spookspice2, for becoming Polygraph’s latest paid subscriber!
*New article from me in Responsible Statecraft: “Gaza breakdown: 20 times Israel used US arms in likely war crimes” (article link; tweet thread).
Situation
Kamala Harris didn’t endorse an arms embargo on Israel at the DNC. Not that anyone was expecting her to — earlier this month, Harris’ national security advisor wrote that Harris “does not support an arms embargo on Israel. She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.”
Twenty times Israel used US weapons to break international law in Gaza
Protecting civilians in Gaza and upholding international law are impossible without an arms embargo on Israel.
My latest article in Responsible Statecraft lists 20 attacks in which Israeli forces used US weapons to commit apparent war crimes. Each case listed meets four conditions: 1) there’s sufficient evidence that the attack likely or certainly violated international law; 2) there’s sufficient forensic evidence that a US-made weapon was likely or certainly used in the attack; 3) the attack occurred after Oct 7; 4) the weapon used in the attack is one of the types supplied by the Biden-Harris administration since Oct 7.
The Biden-Harris administration has repeatedly claimed that it doesn’t have enough evidence to link U.S.-supplied weapons to specific violations that would justify cutting off military aid to Israel. As my report shows, there is more than enough information out there.
Twenty incidents is nowhere near an exhaustive account. At the same time, it’s a mind-blowing amount: After all, attacks had to meet a very high threshold to make the list, there’s little transparency into the arms the US sends Israel, and Israel restricts media and NGO access to Gaza to document potential violations. Keep in mind that forensic investigations are hard to do even in permissive environments.
So why are protecting civilians in Gaza and upholding international law impossible without an arms embargo? Because US military aid to Israel shapes Israel’s behavior. Yes, it allows Netanyahu to continue rejecting ceasefire deals, but the effect is broader than that. From the article:
In the three weeks after October 7, Israel dropped an average of 6,000 bombs on Gaza per week. By comparison, U.S. and coalition forces dropped on average 488 bombs per week on ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) between August 2014 and March 2019. OIR caused immense civilian harm — particularly in densely-populated areas like Mosul and Raqqa — but the scale of death and destruction doesn’t come close to what Israel has done in Gaza.
A former high-ranking officer in the Israeli military told Haaretz that Israeli forces could have made as much progress as they have so far in Gaza with one-tenth of the destruction. This “unusually wasteful” and “reckless” conduct “reflects an absolute assumption that the U.S. will continue to arm and finance it,” he is quoted as saying.
And what happened after the Biden-Harris administration supplied Israel with more 250-pound GBU-39 bombs so it’d drop fewer less-precise 2,000-pound bombs? Israel used the more precise munitions to more precisely target civilians. A case study from the article:
May 26, 2024: An Israeli airstrike on a displacement camp in Rafah filled with makeshift tents killed at least 46 people — including 23 women, children and older adults — and injured more than 240 others. The tail of a U.S.-made GBU-39 bomb was recovered at the site of the attack. The “81873” on the munition fragment is the identifier code the U.S. government assigned to Woodward, a Colorado-based manufacturer that supplies bomb parts, including the GBU-39. The State Department refused to acknowledge that this was a U.S.-made weapon. Israeli forces claimed munitions stored at the camp caused most of the devastation, but there is no evidence of a weapons cache present.
^A recovered GBU-39 munition fragment. (Source)
Read the room, Kamala
More than 60 percent of all voters and nearly 80 percent of Democrats say the US shouldn’t send arms to Israel, according to a June CBS News/YouGov poll. Half as many Democrats say the US should arm Israel now than said so in October.
^Nearly 8 in 10 Democrats say the US should not send weapons to Israel. One line in this graph shows Democrat voters’ opposition to sending Israel weapons increasing from 53% in October to 68% in April to 77% in June. The other line shows support for the US sending Israel weapons decreasing from 47% to 32% to 23%. Data: CBS News Poll from October 2023, April 2024, and June 2024.
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The bipartisan war party was on full display at the DNC convention. I think Jungian psychoanalyst Hollis helped me see us a little better. He said our default settings are fear and lethargy.
It explains why the military lobby is so damned effective getting a $1 trillion a year+ for perpetual war. Our dear friend fear gets played out in Congress by regular human beings unwilling to look less tough than other paid off Congressmen.
And the lethargy makes sense when you see a poll that says mo st Americans want an arms embargo on Israel but...