U.S. MUST AVOID DANGER OF INVOLVEMENT IN A MIDDLE EAST WAR
By
Allan C.Brownfeld
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There
is great danger that the U.S. will be drawn into a Middle East war that
does not serve our national interest or the cause of world peace. It
may also involve us in assisting policies which we have warned against,
and probably violate international law.
U.S.
officials are concerned that massive U.S. aid to Israel—-which has
totaled more than $200 billion since Israel’s creation, more than aid
given to any other country——violate laws prohibiting American military
assistance to foreign powers that have committed gross human rights
violations or blocked the movement of humanitarian aid.
The
Biden administration acknowledges that Israel may have violated
humanitarian law using American weapons. In May, the White House paused
the shipment of thousands of weapons to Israel, including controversial
2,000 pound bombs. Amid concerns over Israel’s plans to expand military
operations in Gaza, where more than 42,000 people have already been
killed, the majority of them women and children. Now, in addition,
several thousand civilians have thus far been killed in Lebanon. The
Biden administration subsequently resumed the shipment of weapons,
sending 500-pound munitions.
Many
U.S. allies——including Britain, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain
and Belgium—-have restricted military equipment transfers to Israel
because of legal and political concerns about their potential use to
commit war crimes.
Now,
the Biden administration has announced that it is sending a THAAD or
Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antmissile system to Israel along
with U.S. troops needed to operate it. THAAD is one of the most
advanced U.S. missile defense systems. It fires interceptors to destroy
incoming missiles. Each interceptor is estimated to cost tens of
millions of dollars and a standard battery contains 48 interceptors.
There
is great danger that having U.S. military personnel in Israel, firing
missiles at other countries, will involve the U..S. in a war without
Congress ever declaring war, as the Constitution mandates. Beyond
this, the government of Israel is acting in contradiction to U.S.
policy. For more than 50 years Israel, in violation of international
law, has occupied the West Bank. Both Republican and Democratic
administrations have called for a “two state solution.” This would
involve the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank. Instead,
Israel’s government is building settlements throughout the West Bank and
members of the Netanyahu government call for annexing the territory and
expelling its indigenous Palestinian residents. In the West Bank,
Israeli settlers have full legal rights. Palestinians have almost
none. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Israeli human
rights group B’Tselem have categorized this as “apartheid.”
More
and more Jewish Americans are lamenting that while Israel proclaims
itself a “Jewish” state, it had abandoned Jewish moral and ethical
values when it comes to its treatment of Palestinians, and the Biden
administration has remained silent. Peter Beinart, an editor of Jewish
Currents, notes that, “Through his unwavering backing of Israel, Mr.
Biden has effectively supported its unequal treatment and oppression of
Palestinians—-especially in Gaza—-and undermined the ethical rationale
for his presidency…Israel’s political system is explicitly based on
religion and ethnicity. Its controversial 2018 nation-state bill
declares that ‘’Jews alone can excercise national self-determination.
Most of the Palestinians under Israeli control —-those in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip—-can’t become citizens of the state that dominates their
lives. A minority of Palestinians who live within Israel’s 1967 borders
do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote. But when Arab Israeli
politicians advanced a bill that would have made legal equality between
Arab and Jewish citizens a foundation of Israeli law in 2018, the
speaker of Israel’s Parliament refused to allow a vote on it because it
would ‘gnaw at the foundation of the state.’”
Beinart
laments that, “When it comes to Israel, Mr. Biden hasn’t supported
equality under the law. The war in Gaza has made that contradiction
impossible to ignore. It is most glaring when Biden expresses deep
empathy for Israeli suffering but relative indifference to the far
larger number of dead Palestinians, or when his administration seems to
distinguish even between American citizens , showing more concern for
those murdered by Hamas than those killed by Israel’s military.”
Peace
in the Middle East was a real possibility before Prime Minister
Netanyahu’s extremist government came to power. Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf states said they would recognize Israel and make peace as soon as
steps were taken to create a Palestinian state on the West Bank, which
is what U.S. policy supported. Instead, Netanyahu and the extremists he
named to his Cabinet rejected the creation of a Palestinian state and,
instead, hope to annex the West Bank and remove the Palestinians.
Terrorism by Israeli settlers against the West Bank’s indigenous
population is growing. The U.S. remains largely silent.
The
danger of us getting involved in a Middle East War is growing as
American troops will be in Israel firing weapons at Israel’s
adversaries, at the same time that Israel rejects U.S. policy advice and
is in violation of international law. War by accident is a real
possibility and completely ignores the Constitutional path by which we
are to to war.
Unfortunately,
Congress has abdicated its constitutionally mandated role in declaring
war. During the administration of Lyndon Johnson, at a time when ever
increasing numbers of American troops were being dispatched to Vietnam,
then Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach told the Congress that
in popular terms the U.S. was “clearly at war” but defended the
administration’s refusal to seek a formal declaration to justify U.S.
action.
Testifying
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Katzenbach said that
Congress had “authorized President Johnson to take all necessary steps ,
including the use of the armed forces to assist any member of protocol
states of the Southeast Asia collective defense treaty requesting
assistance in defense of its freedom.”
The
last time Congress declared war was after Pearl Harbor. Since then, we
have gone to war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places
without a congressional declaration. Now, American military officers in
Israel are ready to fire advanced American weapons against Israel’s
various adversaries. This is not how the authors of the Constitution
wanted America to go to war. Where all of this will end is impossible
to know.
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Allan
C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of
ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.