You’re Paying for That War in Gaza

Of all the ways to frame
America’s role in the latest war between Israelis and Palestinians,
the most bizarre might be the Bloomberg headline “Will
the U.S. Get Involved in Israel-Gaza Conflict?” What do you
mean will, folks? The U.S. has been deeply involved with
this war from the beginning, because the U.S. is underwriting
it.

Sen. Rand Paul has been
pushing a bill to eliminate America’s aid to the
Palestinian Authority. I have seen no comparable attempt, though,
to remove the much more substantial assistance that the U.S. gives
to Israel: more than $3 billion a year, almost all of it for
military purposes—about a fourth of Jerusalem’s military budget.
Bloomberg’s video segment acknowledges the aid, yet somehow the
site’s editors came up with that headline, instead of, say, “The
IDF’s Biggest Benefactor Mulls What to Do Next.”

You can read a detailed breakdown of where that aid goes in the
Congressional Research Service’s April report on
the subject. Some critics of Israel’s actions in Gaza might be
tempted to parse the document for which sorts of assistance they
approve of and which they don’t, distinguishing a defensive project
like Iron Dome
from the weapons currently killing civilians. But money is
fungible, and every sheqel that Washington donates to an
anti-rocket system frees up a sheqel to be spent elsewhere. The
most relevant figure is the total amount.

You hear two sets of arguments for the aid packages. The first
is the one you’d expect: With some exceptions, which we’ll note in
a moment, people who back Israeli policy tend to want America to
fund it. The second comes from the folks who feel the
aid gives Washington leverage that it can use to work for
peace. America’s checks do give D.C. a greater ability to
insert itself into the conflict, a fact that has led
a number of Israel’s supporters as well as its critics to call
for ending American aid. (Needless to say, that doesn’t mean they’d
want the money to stop while the war is in progress.) Despite that
power, Washington’s ability to tamp down the tensions has been,
shall we say,
rather limited. As my colleague Shikha Dalmia wrote
a few years ago, “If money could buy peace, Israelis and
Palestinians would now be holding hands and singing kumbaya.”
Instead we’ve been subsidizing war.

I have my
own notions about what a just peace in the Levant would
entail. But I have no illusions about Washington’s willingness or
ability to impose such ideas, and I know that positive developments
that last are most likely to emerge from the actions of people who
actually live in the region. The best thing we can do to encourage
that is to pull our fingers—and our funds—out of the conflict.