[News] Israel Used U.S. Weapons to Destroy U.S. Assets and Aid Projects in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

theintercept.com
<https://theintercept.com/2022/05/19/israel-gaza-us-weapons-aid-projects/>
Israel Used U.S. Weapons to Destroy U.S. Assets and Aid Projects in Gaza
Daniel Boguslaw - May 19, 2022
------------------------------
[image: image.png]

*Last May,* in an assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, Israel deployed
hundreds of bombs, missiles, and shells, killing over 240 Palestinians and
wounding more than 1,900 others. More than half of the dead were civilians,
according
<https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/48-percent-of-gaza-war-casualties-associated-with-terror-groups-intel-report-671725>
to the Israeli think tank Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information
Center, despite Israeli claims that it only targets combatants from Hamas
and other Palestinian militant groups.

At the end of the 11-day assault, tens of thousands of Gazans were
displaced from damaged homes, already struggling in a region with a 50
percent unemployment rate, toxic water, and crumbling infrastructure.
Thousands of housing units, hundreds of schools, and 19 health care
facilities
<https://theintercept.com/2021/05/21/gaza-bombing-hospital-israel/> were
damaged.

Compounding the devastating toll on Palestinian civilians, weapons made and
funded by the U.S. were used to destroy American humanitarian projects and
businesses, documents and reporting reviewed by The Intercept show. The
destruction reached multiple hospitals and water treatment facilities
supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development; dozens of
schools operated by the State Department-funded United Nations Relief and
Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA; and a
Coca-Cola plant built by a U.S. citizen.

“The vast majority of ammunition used by Israel is manufactured or
subsidized by the U.S.,” Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Democracy for
the Arab World Now, or DAWN, told The Intercept. “It’s fair to say that
every Israeli munition is subsidized by the U.S. one way or another, by
U.S. tax dollars.”

Impoverished in no small part thanks to a decade-and-a-half-long Israeli
blockade, Gaza relies heavily on foreign aid to avert the worst
humanitarian outcomes. The State Department had just renewed
<https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/united-states-announces-restoration-us-150-million-support-palestine>
a lapsed funding commitment to the UNRWA, contributing $150 million to
support more than half a million Palestinians with schools and health care
facilities. According to documents compiled from the United Nations, the
Palestinian Authority, and human rights groups, more than 100 UNRWA
facilities in Gaza were damaged in the 11-day bombing campaign in May 2021,
requiring over $1 million in repairs. Dozens more schools administered by
the Palestinian Authority suffered similar damage.

It was hardly the first time that U.S.-funded weapons had been used to
destroy aid projects the United States supports. In 2014, during an earlier
Israeli attack on Gaza, a Hellfire missile manufactured and paid for by the
United States targeted
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/in-deaths-of-civilians-in-gaza-us-weapons-sales-to-israel-come-under-scrutiny/2014/08/23/4f6565e7-da0f-4ecb-b005-5b2202463d1f_story.html>
a UNRWA school, killing 10 civilians. The massacre drew widespread
condemnation, even eliciting a rare rebuke from the Obama administration,
whose press secretary decried
<https://time.com/3065174/gaza-school-un-white-house-israel/> it as
“totally indefensible.” What remained unspoken then was the fact that both
the missile and the school were funded by the U.S. government.

“A major reason for the perpetuation of the Israeli occupation … is the
extraordinary military, diplomatic, and political support given to it,
largely without conditions, by the United States.”

The State Department was not the only federal agency whose funds supported
aid projects that U.S. weaponry destroyed. Documents and news reports
reviewed by The Intercept show that more than a dozen factories in East
Gaza’s industrial zone, built with funding from USAID, along with several
USAID-funded projects for providing water, hygiene, and sanitation, were
struck as well.

In Khan Yunis, Rafa, and Beit Lahia, wastewater treatment infrastructure
<https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/3505_0.pdf> and
water reservoirs funded by USAID, which the U.S. government spent millions
to construct, were destroyed by aerial attacks that affected more than
300,000 civilians. Ninety-seven percent of the water in Gaza is
contaminated, resulting in a widespread public health crisis
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/12/gaza-undrinkable-water-slowly-poisoning-people>,
rendered even worse by the destruction of U.S.-funded water infrastructure.

“A major reason for the perpetuation of the Israeli occupation, and the
deaths and suffering which accompany it, is the extraordinary military,
diplomatic, and political support given to it, largely without conditions,
by the United States,” said Michael Lynk, the recently departed U.N.
special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian
territories. “This American military assistance is provided,
notwithstanding the fact that congressional laws governing U.S. weapons
exports state that recipient countries cannot be engaged in consistent
patterns of gross human rights violations.”

[image: 30 May 2021, Palestinian Territories, Gaza City: A general view of
an exploded Israeli shell inside a damaged classroom of a school that was
hit during the recent Israeli airstrikes on the Zeitoun neighbourhood in
Gaza City. Israel and the Palestinian Hamas Islamist movement have so far
been keeping to an agreed ceasefire that went into effect on 21 May after
11 days of deadly confrontations. Photo: Mohammed Talatene/dpa (Photo by
Mohammed Talatene/picture alliance via Getty Images)]

An exploded shell inside a damaged classroom hit during Israeli airstrikes
on the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City on May 30, 2021.

Photo: Mohammed Talatene/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

*While Israel is* the largest recipient of U.S. military aid, it is subject
to virtually no checks in operation ensuring that U.S. weapons are not used
to commit war crimes, destroy U.S.-funded projects, or damage the property
of U.S. citizens in Gaza. Statutes that govern how aid to the Palestinian
territories can be disbursed, however, are stringent. The audits
<https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2020-01/8-294-20-009-N.pdf>
ensuring that there are no ties between U.S. funding and Hamas cost
millions of dollars, sometimes exceeding the cost of the very aid projects
being audited.

Since 1948, the United States has provided
<https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf> Israel with over $150 billion
in assistance, receiving in exchange a foothold in a region of massive
strategic importance. The current model exists under a memorandum of
understanding that President Barack Obama signed in 2016, committing to $38
billion in aid between 2019 and 2028 with an open-door policy for
additional aid — like the billion dollars
<https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/article-700995> Congress gave
Israel in March for its Iron Dome missile defense system.

The aid system also provides cash-flow financing, a system resembling
layaway, that allows Israel to purchase weapons in the present using money
from the future. And it contains an offshore procurement exemption —
offered to no other country — that allows Israel to spend U.S. tax dollars
on its own weapons industry without disclosing how it spent the money to
Congress or the American public. And of course, the United States maintains
its own stockpiled weapons in Israel, available for use by the Israel
Defense Forces — despite Israel’s status as one of the largest arms
exporters in the world. In two instances
<https://breakingdefense.com/2022/01/israel-wants-us-to-bolster-its-weapons-stockpile-in-israel-sources/>,
Israel tapped into the U.S. stockpile to wage campaigns against Hamas and
the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The end result is an Israeli arsenal almost entirely composed of weapons
made or subsidized by the U.S.

*As bombs fell* on the Gaza Strip last May, the smell of roasting nuts and
sizzling potatoes was replaced with the overwhelming stench of burned
plastic. A potato chip factory and the Maatouq ice cream factory, which
once produced snacks in the hope of instilling a glimmer of joy in the
blockaded strip, were completely destroyed in the bombing.

Many of the companies established in Gaza’s industrial zone did so under
the pretext that the Israeli military would not bomb the commercial
site. Financed by USAID and fired on by U.S.-funded weapons, the area was
thought to be protected under the auspices of the Oslo Accords, which
created special economic zones intended to supplant conflict with mutually
beneficial free trade.

Also impacted were the Foamco mattress factory — the main producer of
mattresses for Gaza — the Abu Iskandar plastic factory, the Clever
detergent factory, the Siksik plastic pipes factory, and the Al-Wadi food
plant, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in damage. The factories
employed 1,500 Palestinians and were severely impacted by the shelling in
the early morning hours on May 17 and 18, 2021.

Al Ahli Arab Hospital, which received a $900,000
<https://anglicanjournal.com/living-stones-of-al-ahli-arab-hospital-build-a-ministry-of-healing-witness-in-gaza/>
grant from USAID to build a surgery center, was also damaged, as was Beit
Hanoun Hospital, another recipient
<https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-203418/> of USAID funding.

In a highly symbolic display of just how far Israel’s disregard for U.S.
material interests in Gaza extends, a Coca-Cola factory — long a hallmark
of America’s global reach — served as yet another casualty of shelling
<https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/124652> during the May onslaught.

“Coca-Cola is also a shareholder, not just a licensor, and I am a
shareholder as a U.S. citizen, so this affected many U.S. citizens,” Zahi
Khouri, the factory’s owner, told The Intercept. “We had thousands of
pallets burned, and there was damage to the logistics area. There was
damage in the industrial estate, but what was also damaged was the
investment
<https://www.mercycorps.org/press-room/releases/coca-cola-company-contributes-200000-mercy-corps-humanitarian-effort-gaza>
of Coca-Cola in a project through Mercy Corps where we built a water
purification station for a refugee camp.”

According to the U.S. State Department
<https://www.state.gov/reports/2020-investment-climate-statements/west-bank-and-gaza/>,
Coca-Cola’s 15 percent stake in the company operating the plant represents
the single largest private U.S. investment in Palestine.

[image: Palestinian firefighters douse a huge fire at the Foamco mattress
factory east of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, on May 17, 2021. (Photo
by MAHMUD HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)]

Palestinian firefighters douse a huge fire at the Foamco mattress factory
in the northern Gaza Strip on May 17, 2021.

Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images

*While mechanisms for* punishing war crimes perpetrated with U.S. support
are selectively enforced against many other countries, the lack of scrutiny
over the Israel Defense Forces’ use of American weapons is glaring. Amid
last May’s onslaught, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
detailed
<https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/05/12/bringing-assistance-to-israel-in-line-with-rights-and-u.s.-laws-pub-84503>
a number of U.S. laws violated by Israel’s attacks. These included the Foreign
Assistance Act
<https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Foreign%20Assistance%20Act%20Of%201961.pdf>,
which stipulates that aid cannot be provided to a country “which engages in
a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized
human rights”; the Arms Export Control Act
<https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-1061/pdf/COMPS-1061.pdf>, which
bans U.S. military assistance to countries using weapons for reasons other
than “legitimate self-defense”; and the Leahy laws
<https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PP410_INVEST_v2.1.pdf>,
named after outgoing U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., which ban weapons
sales to military units that have committed “a gross violation of human
rights.”

With Leahy’s impending retirement, a Senate all too content to take
campaign contributions from defense contractors and Israel lobby groups
stands to lose one of its few outspoken defenders of human rights
<https://theintercept.com/2021/11/17/patrick-leahy-retirement-human-rights/>.
After decades fighting to preserve and enhance his self-titled law and
continued efforts
<https://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/patrick-leahy-senate-israel-egypt-state-221366>
to investigate Israeli war crimes, Leahy now holds the powerful position of
chair of the Appropriations Committee, overseeing much of the spending his
politically aligned colleagues have singled out for critique.

In May 2021, as last year’s bombing campaign drew to a close, Sen. Bernie
Sanders, I-Vt., and several progressive members of the House of
Representatives introduced
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/us/politics/bernie-sanders-israel-arms-sale.html>
resolutions to block a $735 million weapons package that included the same
type of precision-guided bombs that Israel was already using to shell Gaza.

“I believe that the United States must help lead the way to a peaceful and
prosperous future for both Israelis and Palestinians,” Sanders said at the
time. “We need to take a hard look at whether the sale of these weapons is
actually helping do that or whether it is simply fueling conflict.”

But the White House demurred. “We have seen reports of a move toward a
potential cease-fire. That is clearly encouraging,” said then-White House
press secretary Jen Psaki. The Biden administration approved the sale.

This May, Israel launched another bombing campaign on Gaza.
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