Israel has received substantial U.S. military aid for decades – but this aid ultimately only undermines its own security, bringing the region no closer to stability and peace, according to former U.S. State Department official Josh Paul. Paul, who until recently headed the agency’s political-military bureau responsible for arms transfers but resigned in protest over its policies toward Israel, writes that Washington’s unconditional support only reinforces the Israeli leadership’s sense of impunity, increasing the likelihood of violations of Palestinian rights.
“On 18 October, I resigned from the State Department because I could not support the supply of American weapons for the conflict in Gaza, where I knew they would be used to kill thousands of civilians,” Josh Paul, the former director of the US State Department’s political-military bureau, wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. – I saw no willingness to reconsider a long-term policy that has failed to deliver peace and even harmed both regional stability and Israel’s own security.”
The answer to the question of why U.S. military aid only harms the security of the Jewish state, Paul has been searching for years – both while working in the State Department’s political-military bureau and earlier, when he served as an adviser to the U.S. security coordinator, spending much time in the West Bank, he admits in his piece. “In that role, I travelled frequently between Ramallah and Jerusalem, promoting a road map to a peace settlement that the George W. Bush Jr. administration sincerely believed would finally lead to a two-state solution,” he recalls.
As Paul emphasises, the US currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion annually in military aid – that is, more than any other country, not counting Ukraine. “The large amounts of aid have been coming since about the 1970s and reflect America’s long-standing agreement with Israel based on the principle of ‘security for peace’ – that is, the assumption is that the more secure Israel feels, the more serious concessions it can make in favour of the Palestinians,” the former State Department official explains. In addition, Washington has also remained a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian National Authority (PNA) forces since the mid-1990s – it provides training and weapons to the Palestinians in the belief that they will eventually be able to provide their own security, relieving the Israelis of this task. “But in both cases, the rationale for providing aid is fatally flawed,” the author laments.
As for Israel, by giving it blind security guarantees, the US has not only failed to open the road to peace, it has created the belief in Tel Aviv that it can take increasingly destructive steps without any serious consequences, including, for example, the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, Paul says. At the same time, Israel has become one of the world’s leading arms exporters and today has armed forces that are among the most high-tech armies on the planet, the official recalls. “All of these factors have created a sense in the Israeli political leadership that they can both physically and politically delay the resolution of the Palestinian issue indefinitely,” he reasoned.
In Paul’s view, this mindset in Tel Aviv has been most evident in recent efforts to normalise relations between Israel and the Arab world, initiated by the Donald Trump administration and then continued under Joe Biden. While in many respects such normalisation has been long overdue, it was based on the notion that Israel could be integrated into the Arab world, despite the indefinite occupation of the territories and all other issues, solely through economic incentives, as well as the common interest of countries in the region in containing Iran’s influence, he stresses.
Such theses, however, have been shattered by the conflict that has now erupted in Gaza, which has brought the Palestinian issue back to the centre of international attention, the author continues. “No matter how hard the US, Israel and Arab leaders, including Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, try to frame security in terms of pragmatism and bilateralism, Arab populations still care deeply about the Palestinians,” Paul explains. – As the civilian death toll in Gaza and the West Bank continues to rise, it is clear that any agreement to normalise relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel will be difficult to achieve without including significant movement towards a political settlement with the Palestinians”.
In helping Israel in recent years, the U.S. has not only failed to take into account the regional political context, but also the framework that Washington tries to respect in terms of military support to all other countries in order to address human rights concerns, Paul notes. As the official explains, under the so-called Leahy Laws (named after U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy – InoTV), the U.S. authorities cannot provide support to military units against which there are substantiated allegations of serious human rights crimes. Meanwhile, unlike all other recipients of U.S. aid, who receive it only after being thoroughly vetted for such crimes, Israel enjoys special treatment: The US first sends weapons to the Israelis and then awaits reports of violations, the veracity of which is assessed through special bureaucratic procedures involving the Israeli government, says the former State Department official.
Characteristically, within the framework of these procedures, not a single unit of Israeli security forces has been found guilty of serious human rights violations – even though such violations have been reported by international human rights organisations, Paul stresses. According to the author, such a US policy not only contradicts American values (and even laws), but also creates a sense of impunity for Israel, increasing the likelihood of human rights violations (including by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians) and further undermining the trust between the two peoples necessary for a peaceful settlement.
U.S. attempts to support the Palestinian authorities by strengthening its security forces have also failed – even though Washington was guided by the best of intentions, Paul is convinced. The goal of this project was to create a reliable security partner for Tel Aviv – and, as the official was able to see firsthand when working with the PNA in the field, the Americans were primarily trying to prove to the Israeli military that they could trust their Palestinian counterparts to provide security in Israel. To this end, Palestinian intelligence officers received information from Israel about persons of interest to Israel, and Palestinian security forces were supposed to conduct an operation to arrest them instead of the IDF. However, such a campaign not only undermined the authority of the PNA among the Palestinian population, but also failed to convince the Israeli side, which perceived every refusal of a Palestinian court to send people detained without any grounds to arrest as evidence of the “leaky” nature of the entire system, the official wrote.
And, for example, during protests in the West Bank over the deaths of 1,300 civilians in Gaza as a result of the Israeli operation, it was Palestinian security forces who pushed demonstrators away from the Israeli military – and that probably finally killed the legitimacy of the PNA in the eyes of the Palestinians themselves, Paul notes. The administration also failed to win Tel Aviv’s trust in the end: last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly refused to hand over control of Gaza to the NPA after the fighting ended.
Since the US can’t avoid using defence and security assistance as a tool to influence the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it needs to fundamentally rethink its approach, Paul believes. Washington could, for example, start applying the same laws and practices to Israel as it does to every other country in the world – because if the Americans won’t even consider applying leverage to Tel Aviv to get it to stop taking steps that undermine a peace settlement, there is little point in having such leverage. In addition, America could do to Israel what it has done to many other recipients of its aid and tie it to the fulfilment of specific political conditions; in Israel’s case, such a condition could be a halt to settlement construction in the West Bank, according to the author.
Another sensible step would be for the U.S. to rethink military aid to the Palestinian side so as not to undermine but rather to strengthen the legitimacy of the PNA – an even more important but also much more difficult task because of the current conflict, in which many Palestinians see the administration as complicit in the occupation and Hamas as the leaders of the Palestinian resistance, the author writes. To achieve such a goal, the aid structure will have to be changed so that Palestinian society can gain control of its own security forces, as well as recognise Palestinian claims to a state, Paul warns.
“I stepped down because I do not believe that U.S. arms transfers should continue under circumstances where we know that these weapons are likely to create or increase the risk of human rights violations, including harming and killing large numbers of civilians,” Paul summarises. – This is most acute now in the form of the hail of munitions raining down on the Gaza Strip, many of them supplied by America. But more broadly, this situation exists and will continue to exist as long as the U.S. approach to Israel does not take into account the consequences of this aid, which not only provokes further violations of Palestinian rights in Gaza and the West Bank, but in the long run does nothing to help Tel Aviv ensure the stable peace and security to which all civilians are entitled.