Episode 181 Transcript: Biden's Arms Embargo
How should we think about the decision to withhold certain weapons from Israel?
Hi everyone. So we need to grab our divining rods here . We’re trying to understand President Biden’s recent decision to impose a partial weapons ban on Israel. It was either the greatest betrayal of the Jewish State in its history. Or it was a mild rebuke from a president opposed to Israel’s intent to invade Rafah. The city in southern Gaza is thought to be Hamas’ last big stronghold. But there are also more than a million and a half civilians sheltering there. So is Biden genuinely concerned about Israel’s military strategy? Or is this an effort to appease the American far left? Is this ban going to deal Israel a crushing military defeat? Does it signal a permanent rift in the US-Israel relationship? Is this all really Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault? There are any number of ways we can interpret what’s going on.
There’s a lot of contextual history here, lots of overlapping relationships going back decades. There’s the military relationship between the two countries. The United States’ policy has historically been to ensure what’s called Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge. That is, because the Arab states were always going to have more weapons than tiny Israel, it is essential that Israel have the best weapons to compensate. That’s less true today, since most of those countries are now either at peace with Israel or unable to mount any real kind of military threat. But that guarantee of Qualitative Military Edge still translates into things like the Iron Dome to shoot down incoming rockets, or the latest technology in cyber defense, and, as we’ll see becomes really important, precision guided weapons to help Israel make targeted strikes.
This isn’t the first time the United States has restricted or held weapons to express disfavor. Ronald Reagan held off delivering fighter jets after Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear facility in 1981. A year later he did the same for artillery shells that Israel was using during the invasion of Lebanon.
There’s also the personal relationship between Biden and Netanyahu going back 40 years, when Biden was a junior senator and Netanyahu a junior member of the Israeli government. Netanyahu had a famously bad relationship with President Obama, and he wasn’t much nicer to then-Vice President Biden.
And there’s the even bigger picture of the US-Israel relationship going back the 76 years of Israel’s existence. It’s always had its ups and downs and disagreements and divergences, but the two countries remain intertwined and allied in ways that few other countries enjoy with the United States.
All of this stuff comes into play here. But the immediate cause is Rafah. Biden says that he’s worried that Israel’s efforts to dislodge Hamas will result in high civilian casualties and worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in the Strip. So he put a hold on certain kinds of bombs and issued Israel an ultimatum: you can invade Rafah or you can have these weapons, but you can’t have both.
It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a pretty serious public reprimand. Even the hint that Israel’s most important ally is wavering is a terrifying prospect. It’s a signal that all is not well in the U.S.-Israel relationship at a time of maximum Israeli fear and vulnerability. We have a number of angles to look at here in trying to understand where Biden is coming from.
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Alright, so coming to you from all seven continents — wow! — I’m Jason Harris and this is Jew Oughta Know.
Let’s start with the stipulation that President Biden has been absolutely fantastic on Israel. When he flew to Israel right after October 7, it was probably the most stunning act of solidarity of any president ever. He earned the everlasting gratitude of the Israeli people. If he loses to Trump in November, he could probably win for prime minister. After all, Moses was yet 40 years older than Joe Biden. Jews are cool with old age.
Biden then backed up that visit with real action. He sent aircraft carriers to deter Hezbollah and Iran, along with heaps of weapons necessary for Israel’s defense. There was diplomatic support at the United Nations and billions in financial aid wrangled through Congress. All that has continued. If anyone best demonstrates an understanding of Israel’s unique challenges, vulnerability, trauma, and resolve, it’s been Biden.
All this is what commentators call “the bear hug.” Biden wrapped his arms tight around Israel and supported them to the hilt, defending Israel without hesitation or equivocation. The bear hug is also a strategy to handle Netanyahu. Rather than keep him at a distance like previous presidents, Biden’s bear hug bet that public displays of affection, rather than critiques and complaints, would better influence Netanyahu behind the scenes.
Israelis have taken to the bear hug. Netanyahu not so much. At every turn he’s been defiant, aggressive and stubborn. He’s made of show of dismissing any sense of concern for Biden’s interests or expectations, whether it was humanitarian aid or the invasion of Rafah or controlling his extremist ministers. The result is obvious frustration from both Biden and Netanyahu, along with all the rest of us that have to watch this. And this is all coming to a head as Israel seems to be poised to invade Rafah against the United States’ vocal opposition.
So what did Biden do? Biden imposed a temporary ban on certain kinds of bombs that Israel uses in its airstrikes. He’s held up the transfer to Israel of around 3,500 bombs. Half are 2,000 bombs, the other half 500-pounders. Now, these particular kinds of bombs have been around for decades and lots of countries use them, including the United States. They can be incredibly destructive if dropped indiscriminately. In a dense urban environment like Gaza, you’re talking major civilian casualties. The United States is prohibited from giving countries weapons if they are intended to be used in violation of international law.
But there are ways of making these bombs much less destructive. These bombs can be fitted with precision-guided kits that enable an air strike to hit a specific target within a few feet, rather than, say, obliterating an entire neighborhood. You can put a delayed fuse on them so that it explodes when it reaches a certain depth underground, instead of where it hits on the surface. So you can blow up a Hamas tunnel while significantly reducing the damage to the buildings above it. These bombs can be dropped at a certain angle, or at a slower speed, or after small bombs have already hit the same spot — all to enable a more precise strike that doesn’t cause the maximum damage. These are all things that Israel does. And if someone is going to conduct air strikes, these are the kinds of precision-guided bombs you want them to use, rather than unguided — or dumb — bombs that simply explode on impact.
This doesn’t mean that every single air strike Israel has conducted was correct, or that the bombs worked as intended every time. This isn’t a blanket justification. And we can be sure that civilians have been killed by these bombs. It’s a tragedy. Even if it’s not illegal under the laws of war, Israel is still responsible for avoiding civilian casualties as best as possible. Recognizing, of course, that Hamas has designed this war to kill as many Palestinians as possible.
Now, Biden knows all this. So his weapons ban is somewhat baffling. Because there are some big downsides to this decision, negatives that make his actions look pretty bad. Let’s take a look.
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Biden’s ban on these bombs is temporary. And the IDF has said it doesn’t need them right now to invade Rafah. And Biden has made clear that this ban is limited to offensive weapons, not defensive ones like missiles for the Iron Dome. There is no threat here to the IDF’s military readiness. If a war breaks out with Hezbollah and Biden maintains an embargo, then things could get dicey. But Biden hasn’t said anything like this. So he knows that Israel doesn’t need these bombs to invade, which is why his embargo starts to look like something else — a lot of something elses, none of them good.
For one, the arms embargo is a huge gift to Israel’s enemies. The left has been accusing Israel all along of indiscriminately targeting civilians, key evidence in their false narrative that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. Biden’s ban seems to signal at least his partial acceptance of this lie. In the weaponization of the genocide charge to demonize Israel, Biden gives it credibility with presidential-level ammunition. Yet he knows that Israel does not deliberately target civilians. He knows that Israel does more than any other army, including the United States, to avoid civilian casualties. He knows that this is impossible in this war setting, and it’s a standard that no other country is held to, not even Biden’s own United States in its recent urban warfare battles. So it’s a huge PR gift to people who are trying to ensure that Israel loses this war to Hamas.
It’s also a gift to the jihadists. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran think they are winning the war to isolate Israel. They can’t defeat it militarily right now, but they can turn it in a pariah state that loses all support, can’t replenish its weapons, and then will be vulnerable to a unified onslaught. Biden’s ban lends credibility to that strategy. It weakens Israel’s deterrence as they’re facing a potential war on the Lebanese border with Hezbollah. Hezbollah is hitting Israel every day now with artillery, rockets, drones — everything they can throw. They’re killing and injuring civilians and soldiers and tens of thousands of Israelis remain evacuated from their towns. Hezbollah is keeping this conflict just hot enough to have Israel on edge, but not so hot that war breaks out. But if it looks like Israel is weakening and losing the support of the United States, Hezbollah might decide they can outlast any war. If Biden is worried about civilian casualties, wait until Haifa, Tel Aviv, Beirut and everywhere in between become the front lines.
And for Hamas, they’re betting that the United States can’t stomach the civilian casualties in Gaza and will force Israel to give up. That’s why Hamas isn’t releasing any hostages: why pay for Israel to leave when the United States will give it to them for free? Biden’s weapons ban makes this look like a winning strategy. It lends credibility to the cynical use of Palestinian human shields. The longer this war takes, and the more civilians who are harmed, the more likely Hamas is to survive.
Then there’s the foreign policy element. What are America’s vulnerable allies supposed to think? Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and others are staring down China. Ukraine and Eastern Europe are looking to Russia. First Biden up and quit Afghanistan, leaving it to the Taliban with disastrous results. Now he’s wavering on another small country’s existential defense. It starts to look like a pattern that puts into doubt America’s commitment to fight against imperial aggression. Again, it’s a gift to authoritarian states eager to see America lose its resolve.
It seems highly doubtful that any of this is what Joe Biden intends with his weapons ban. So then the question is whether he’s doing this for politics.
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President Biden opens himself up the accusation that he’s looking to save Hamas in order to help his re-election campaign. The American left is intractable in its demand that Israel lose this war and they’re stirring up trouble for Biden in an extremely close election. They’re threatening to either stay home or vote for a third-party candidate. A few thousand Arab-American votes in swing state Michigan or youth votes around college campuses, could make the difference.
Now, this faction is unappeasable because no one can give them what they want, which is for Israel to no longer exist. Holding back a few thousand bombs isn’t going to achieve that. Polls show that a majority of Americans back the United States’ support for Israel — 20 percent even think the U.S. isn’t doing enough. But the percentage opposed to this support is also moving upwards from about a third to about 40 percent. Still, the war ranks at the bottom of what Americans consider the most important issues to vote on in the upcoming election. But what’s wild here is that Trump actually edges out Biden in the question of who people trust to best handle the war. This can’t be coming from people opposed to America’s support but from the people who support it and want to see it increase. It seems that Biden isn’t even getting enough credit for what he’s already done for Israel.
So it seems like a huge risk for Biden to alienate more voters by looking like he’s curtailing Israel’s ability to fight Hamas. Does he really gain more far left votes than lose elsewhere by handing PR victories to the jihadists? If people already think Trump would do a better job on Israel, well, this is just going to harden that perception.
There’s a deeper history here. For decades the governing principle of Israel’s relations with the United States was to ensure that it was bipartisan. Although the two countries are extremely close, there are still the ups and downs of competing interests, different politics, different policies, different cultural contexts, and so on. It was vital for Israel and its supporters in the United States that support for Israel does not become either a Democratic Party or Republican Party cause.
Netanyahu blew that up years ago. He didn’t appreciate the opposition to him and his right-wing base from Democrats and liberal American Jews. So he decided he didn’t need them; that there were plenty more evangelical Christians and the Republican Party whom he could turn to. Which he did, icing out huge swaths of American Jewry, the Democratic Party, and, of course, the Democratic Party’s major politicians like Obama and Biden.
Well that strategy only works when the Republicans are in power. In the process Netanyahu alienated everyone else, especially the majority of American Jews who support both Israel and the Democrats. That political strategy continues to pay off in bad blood and his antagonism continues. So now we have the Republican Party more or less unified behind support for Israel, while the left actively wants to see Israel lose to a terrorist group and the Democratic Party wavers. It’s a potential disaster. Still, it’s to Biden’s credit that he has maintained his overwhelming support for Israel. As does Congress. Just after he announced his weapons ban, Biden sent an additional $1 billion of military assistance.
Whatever his motivations, this is still a policy with a lot of negative repercussions. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens sums it up. The cutoff of weapons helps Hamas. It prolongs the war instead of ending it. It diminishes Israel’s deterrent power and is thus a recipe for wider war. There are unintended foreign policy consequences in which Israel starts to elsewhere for friendships, such as China. And it’s a political gift to Donald Trump. Stephens writes, “[A]n arms cutoff that weakens Israel as it faces enemies on multiple fronts is unworthy of a president whose clear and stalwart support for the Jewish state at its lowest moment was — and should remain — his finest hour.”
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So we have all these bad outcomes and negative signals. But these don’t necessarily speak to Biden’s intent. If instead we look at this through the lens of Rafah, then different ideas emerge. This ban isn’t Biden throwing some light switch, suddenly reversing himself on supporting Israel. Biden has made clear that this ban is about the expected invasion of Rafah, not Israel’s overall fight against Hamas. He’s signaling his dissatisfaction with Israel’s war efforts.
Now, there are two really good reasons to invade Rafah. The first is that it’s thought to be Hamas’ last stronghold, where its four remaining battalions of thousands of fighters are holed up and still conducting war. It’s also where many of the hostages might be held. The second reason is that Rafah sits on the border with Egypt. It’s Hamas’ portal to the outside world, its central hub for smuggling weapons into the Strip from Egypt. Zillions of tunnels run underneath the border, ensuring a steady supply of guns, cash, and other resources. Egypt was supposed to destroy them years ago but has generally looked the other way as a lucrative opportunity for corrupt military officers. It’s very embarrassing. So cutting off Rafah from Egypt and destroying those tunnels is crucial to starving Hamas of weapons.
But it’s not clear that Hamas is all still there in Rafah. There is now fierce fighting in several spots throughout Gaza, in places that the IDF had previously cleared but then pulled out. This tells us that Hamas is still able to move its fighters around through the tunnel system. Israel has waited so long to go into Rafah that it gave Hamas the time to prepare, get out, and scatter.
The United States opposes the Rafah operation on three grounds. The US claims that Israel does not have a good enough plan to protect Rafah’s civilians as the IDF moves into the city. The loss of life is simply going to be too great. Biden also insists that to justify such damage Israel must have a postwar vision that makes the military’s goals achievable. As in, who is going to control Gaza when the military leaves? And the third objection is that Hamas might not even be there in great numbers any more. If that’s the case, why invade?
The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel has evacuated almost a million civilians from Rafah in the last two weeks. 300-400,000 people remain, which suggests that the IDF does in fact have the ability to evacuate people without loss of life. The IDF now controls 30-40 percent of the city. They have encountered fighting from Hamas, which tells us that the group is still in Rafah, though it’s still unclear at what strength. And the IDF has now taken over most of the Philadelphi Corridor, the narrow strip of land separating Gaza from Egypt. They’ve been destroying tunnels as quickly as they can uncover them.
For President Biden, the biggest obstacle here remains Netanyahu. And a lot of Israelis agree with him.
Haviv Rettig Gur is an Israeli journalist. He writes, “I have too much self-respect as an Israeli to blame our incompetence and political frailty on Joe Biden.” He offers a blistering critique of the current government. “We are led by simpering cowards who couldn’t take Gaza in seven months, couldn’t make a show of humanitarian concern, because it is right and it gives political cover to our allies.” He criticizes Biden’s critics. “Biden has hamstrung us? How? He’s threatened to bomb us? To send troops against us? To sanction us?”
Rettig Gur argues that an Israel led by Ariel Sharon or Yitzhak Rabin, two of the countries’ greatest generals who ended up as prime ministers, would have taken Gaza in a month. At this point Israel would be deep into a reconstruction and deradicalization effort with a massive and visible humanitarian aid program. But it’s not, because Netanyahu is afraid of Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir is the leader of the ultranationalist wing that is threatening to bolt Netanyahu’s coalition if the prime minister agrees to anything short of reoccupying Gaza. So Netanyahu is dragging out any decision on a strategic plan, not wanting to tip the political scales in any direction that would see him lose power.
The price of this is the alienation of not only his opposition but also members of his own government. Yoav Gallant, the Minister of Defense, is demanding that Netanyahu make a decision by completely rejecting Israeli re-occupation of Gaza. That’s the key demand of Ben-Gvir’s faction, but the IDF and the security establishment are declaring their total opposition to Israeli military or civilian control over Gaza. They argue for the Palestinian Authority under an international coalition that can govern Gaza as the IDF clears out Hamas and leaves.
Gallant says that Netanyahu’s indecision is eroding Israel’s military gains, reducing the pressure on Hamas, and harming the ability to negotiate for a release of the hostages. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are in the streets expressing the same frustration. So, it seems, is Joe Biden.
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Look, I don’t like Biden’s weapons ban, however temporary it is. I don’t like the symbolism, I don’t like the potential consequences, and I don’t like what it suggests about rifts in the US-Israel relationship. But I don’t have doubts about how fantastic Biden has been for Israel since October. That earns him enormous gratitude and some leeway. And Netanyahu sure doesn’t make things easy.
If we zoom out here, we can see that this weapons ban reflects both American and Israeli anxieties. What worries America about this war is that it risks solidifying the ultra-right’s hold on Israeli society, such as its anti-democratic tendencies, hatred of the Palestinians, and antagonism towards the West. The United States wants Israel to look and act like a fellow liberal democracy, even one facing an existential crisis such as jihadism. Israel wants the United States to understand that they live in an unforgiving neighborhood, that they face unique vulnerabilities not faced by other democracies, and that the US remain committed to joining Israel in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Everyone has a point here.
Biden yesterday called for a permanent cease-fire, but he did what nobody on the left does and connected it with the release of the Israeli hostages. Biden seems to get that this isn’t about Rafah or about a few bombs. Absolutely no one in Israel is talking about a cease-fire unless the hostages are freed.
A few days ago an IDF commando raid in Gaza found the bodies of four hostages missing since October 7. Ron Benjamin, Itzhak Gelerenter, and Amit Buskila were thought to have been alive, but all three were killed inside Israel, their bodies kidnapped into Gaza. The fourth body recovered was Shani Louk, 22 years old, who has been one of the most prominent faces of the hostages. Her half-naked body was filmed being abused and paraded through Gaza in the back of a pickup truck. A picture taken at the scene recent won the Associated Press a prestigious photography award, to much controversy. Unlike the others, Shani has been assumed dead since October after fragments of her skull were found inside Israel. At long last there is now closure. All four have now been properly buried according to Jewish custom. Their bodies were found inside a Hamas tunnel.
The IDF counts 125 hostages inside Gaza, of whom they know that 37 are dead. This is your reminder to keep your eye on the hostages. This is the whole ballgame for Israelis right now. No one seems to have a brilliant idea for how to get them all back.
As always, I’m at jewoughtaknow.com and my email is jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list, which gets you a weekly newsletter with short commentaries from me. Thanks for listening everyone, Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish People Live.
© Jason Harris 2024