TOPSHOT - Palestinians evacuate the area following an Israeli airstrike on the Sousi mosque in Gaza ... [+]
The Biden administration’s policy on supplying arms to Israel is a walking contradiction.
On the one hand, the Netanyahu government has killed over 34,000 people, many of them children; dropped 2,000 pound “dumb” bombs on civilian apartment complexes; blocked the delivery of food, water and medical supplies; and possibly buried victims killed by its actions in mass graves.
Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice has said that it is plausible that Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. The truth is that whether one calls it genocide, or war crimes, or a disproportionate response to the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023, this conduct must be stopped.
In the midst of all of this, Biden administration officials continue to reassure us that they are doing everything in their power to get Israel to observe U.S. law on the use of U.S.-supplied weapons, as well as to limit civilian casualties. Meanwhile, they continue to send billions of dollars in weapons to a government that has shown indifference to the humanitarian crisis its attacks have provoked.
One possible hook for a change in policy is the administration’s release of National Security Memorandum-20 (NSM-20), which calls upon U.S. arms recipients to sign a piece of paper committing them to follow U.S. law in their use of U.S. weapons. It also has a provision for the State Department to investigate whether a recipient is in fact following U.S. law on issues like human rights and allowing the free flow of humanitarian aid.
NSM-20 is a strange document for several reasons. First, it appears that it was not issued primarily to strengthen the application of U.S. law to U.S. arms clients, but rather to preempt Congress from debating an amendment by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that would have covered much of the same ground. The release of NSM-20 appeared to be more of a tactical political move than a genuine attempt to hold Israel or any other nation accountable for using U.S. arms to commit extreme human rights abuses. If the president wants to condition or stop arms transfers to Israel because of its crimes in Gaza, he can do so tomorrow, without the need to justify it under the terms of NSM-20.
Under NSM-20, the adminstration is obliged to report on Israel’s use of U.S. weapons in Gaza. The report is due on May 8th, but don’t hold your breath waiting for an objective assessment that would set the stage from conditioning or cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel. It seems as if the Biden administration has already pre-judged the case. At the end of March, before the required investigation of Israel’s use of U.S. weapons in Gaza, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “We have not found them [Israel] to be in violation of international humanitarian law, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance.”
Into this breach has come an independent task force, a sort of shadow State Department, that has done a detailed analysis of Israel’s use of U.S.arms since the start of the latest war in Gaza.
If they had their way, staffers at the Biden State Department would have been glad to do this job themselves, but their desires to align U.S. actions with U.S.and international law have been firmly rebuffed by the Biden administration’s leadership team. And my former colleague Annelle Sheline, who resigned from the department’s human rights bureau over continued U.S. support for Israel’s attacks on Gaza, has pointed out that many of her former colleagues share her views but are reluctant to resign given economic and family support issues.
One of the members of the independent task force is Josh Paul, who resigned from State after determining that the administration had no intention of holding Israel to the letter of the law.
The Task Force describes NSM-20 as follows:
“NSM-20 requires the Secretary of State to obtain assurances from nations that receive appropriated U.S. security assistance that the recipient country will use any such defense articles in accordance with U.S law, international humanitarian law and, as applicable, other international law; and that, in any area of armed conflict where the recipient country uses such defense articles, consistent with applicable international law, it will facilitate and not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance and United States Government-supported international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance.”
Who was on the independent task force, and what did they find? The group includes co-chairs Josh Paul, the former Director of Congressional & Public Affairs in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs in the U.S. Department of State and Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Other members include Charles Blaha, Charles O. Blaha was the Director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights (DRL/SHR), Wes J. Bryant, a retired master sergeant and former special operations joint terminal attack controller (JTAC) in the elite special warfare branch of the U.S. Air Force, Luigi Daniele, a Senior Lecturer in Law at Nottingham Law School (Nottingham Trent University), and Adil Haque, Professor of Law and Judge Jon O. Newman Scholar at Rutgers Law School.
The primary findings of the task force’s report were that Israel’s actions in Gaza involve a “systematic disregard for fundamental principles of international law” that “raise[s] grave concerns regarding the [Biden] Administration’s compliance with both U.S. and international law.” The task force backs up its judgments with a series of specific examples, including the following:
“An 31 October 2023 IDF airstrike on a six-story apartment building near the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza that killed at least 106 civilians, including 54 children.”
The authors make clear that their report is meant to be more than just an abstract exercise. Rather, it has submitted it to the Biden administration “with the objective of informing the work of the Departments of State and Defense as they prepare the reports to Congress to be submitted under NSM-20.”
Let’s hope the Biden administration changes its current practice of expressing rhetorical anguish over the Netanyahu government’s indiscriminate attacks on the people of Gaza while continuing to enable those attacks by sending a steady flow of weaponry to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). If the administration uses the work of the independent task force as a model, it should follow up by cutting off military supplies to Israel until it stops the killing in Gaza and agrees to a long-term ceasefire.
The least the administration can do now is reverse course and use all the tools at its disposal to stop the mass slaughter that is still happening there. Hopefully the new task force report will help prod them to do so.
