Iran’s Attack Complicates Efforts to Condition U.S. Military Aid to Israel

The Iranian attack on Israel over the weekend is likely to complicate efforts by progressives in Washington to condition certain types of military aid to Israel over the spiraling humanitarian crisis caused by the war in Gaza. 

In a letter sent on Sunday night, more than 100 Republicans and Democrats urged Mike Johnson, the speaker of the U.S.House of Representatives, to hold a vote on a multibillion-dollar military aid package for Israel as soon as Monday evening. 

The $95 billion dollar bill, which also includes military aid for Ukraine as well as Taiwan, was passed by the Senate in February and contains $14 billion in security assistance for Israel. It has since stalled in the House over Republican reservations about providing further military aid to Ukraine. 

Overnight on Saturday, Tehran launched a volley of more than 300 drones and missiles in an unprecedented attack on Israel, which came in response to an Israeli airstrike on the Syrian capital, Damascus, at the beginning of April, which killed seven senior commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

Israeli officials said that 99 percent of the drones and missiles launched from Iran were successfully intercepted, with an injured 7-year-old girl being the only known casualty. 

After decades of shadow war across the Middle East and beyond, the attack marks the first time that Tehran has struck Israel directly and risks pushing an already volatile region to the brink. 

Amid a nesting doll of regional wars, Iran’s attack underscored the grave threats to Israel’s security even as it wages its own unsparing war in Gaza, and it will complicate—if perhaps only temporarily—the political calculus for those looking to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel. 

Before Saturday’s attack, a growing chorus of Democrats and progressives in Washington were calling for the Biden administration to subject U.S. security assistance to greater scrutiny in the wake of an Israeli strike on a World Central Kitchen aid convoy that killed seven humanitarian aid workers. 

In the wake of the strike, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has a long record of strongly supporting Israel, joined 39 Democratic lawmakers in signing a letter to the Biden administration calling for arms transfers to Israel to be withheld until a full investigation is conducted. The letter also described the recent U.S. transfer to Israel of 2,000-lb. bombs, which are capable of destroying a whole city block, as “unjustifiable” in light of the “​​ever-worsening humanitarian crisis.” 

Pelosi—along with two other House Democrats who joined the letter calling for a rethink of U.S. military aid to Israel, Reps. Sara Jacobs and Jahana Hayes—also signed Sunday’s missive to Speaker Mike Johnson calling for a vote on the multibillion-dollar supplemental aid package to Israel. 

A spokesperson for Pelosi described the former speaker’s position as “fully consistent,” adding, “She signed the April 5 letter to call for a pause on offensive weapons transfers until there was an independent investigation into the attack on the World Central Kitchen heroes, steps the Administration has taken and is taking. So it’s fully compatible with the April 14 letter urging the House to take up and pass the Senate supplemental.”

Spokespeople for Jacobs and Hayes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Calls to condition military aid to Israel may only be temporarily dampened, said Matt Duss, a former foreign-policy advisor to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders who now leads the Center for International Policy, a progressive think tank in Washington. 

“This is a position that has been gaining support in the party for a long time, one now supported by a majority of Democratic voters,” he said in a message to Foreign Policy. “The Gaza catastrophe has made it more salient, but it’s not just about Gaza, it’s about whether we’re actually going to enforce our own laws governing military aid.”

Israel’s strike on the World Central Kitchen convoy, which an Israel Defense Forces investigation found to be a “serious violation” of its procedures, appeared to be a tipping point for U.S. President Joe Biden, who, in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few days after the strike, said that his administration’s policy going forward would be determined by Israel’s efforts to mitigate civilian harm and humanitarian suffering. Yet administration officials have not publicly outlined how their policy might change should Israel fail to satisfy U.S. demands—a fact that seems to be causing frustration among some Democrats. 

“I haven’t seen any more definition as to what policy changes would be made,” Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who has been increasingly outspoken about the need to condition the sale of offensive weapons to Israel, said last week before the Iranian attack occurred.

Regarded by Washington as a highly strategic democratic partner in the Middle East, Israel has been the No. 1 recipient of U.S. security assistance since World War II.

The majority of the military aid provided to Israel each year is foreign military financing to the tune of $3.3 billion, under a 10-year memorandum of understanding—the third of its kind—that the Obama administration signed in 2016. A further $500 million is allocated to funding Israel’s multilayered missile defense programs, such as the Iron Dome and Arrow, which were integral in fending off the onslaught of Iranian missiles and drones over the weekend. 

While there have been increasing calls to condition the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel, support for missile defense remains widespread, as the country has faced continual rocket attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon since the Hamas attack that started the current war on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Politically, Iron Dome funding is never going to be on the table, and I understand that—that is a very popular provision,” said Ari Tolany, the director of the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy. 

Biden, a longtime staunch supporter of Israel, is unlikely to put any significant restrictions on security assistance to the country, reiterating his “ironclad” commitment to its security in light of the attacks by Iran. 

But those advocating for the administration to bring greater pressure to bear on the Israeli government point to a number of steps that the administration could take to help curb the toll exacted on civilians in Gaza without undermining Israel’s defensive capabilities. One is to use the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act, which calls on the president to halt arms sales to a country known to be holding up U.S. humanitarian assistance.

“It does seem that the Netanyahu government has been in violation of the terms of the humanitarian aid corridors act,” said Van Hollen, who said the State Department’s reasoning for not invoking the act in briefings to senators was “completely unsatisfactory” and based on a “cramped” reading of the law. 

Presidents can override the law if they find a pressing need to continue to supply military aid, as then-President Bill Clinton did in the 1990s when he waived restrictions on Turkey despite that country’s obstruction of humanitarian aid to Armenia. Doing so allows the president to publicly call out aid obstructions while maintaining weapons supplies. 

Continuing to supply Israel with military aid while it throttles humanitarian assistance into Gaza without invoking the act at all “sends a clear political signal that Israel’s conduct in both Gaza and the West Bank is not a red line,” Tolany said. 

Another step that the administration could take would be to limit the transfer of certain offensive munitions to Israel, such as the 2,000-lb. so-called “bunker buster” bombs, hundreds of which have been used in Gaza.

“If we stop replacing them for a time, with the understanding that if a war broke out with Hezbollah things could change, the Israeli targeting decisions would change,” said a Senate aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

Though U.S. law includes extensive provisions to pause military aid to a country or military unit on humanitarian and human rights grounds, it offers significant latitude to the executive branch, said the Senate aide.

For arms transfers worth more than $25 million, the administration must formally notify Congress of the sale—although the administration has approved more than 100 separate sales of lethal aid in packages that fall below the threshold required to notify lawmakers. 

An informal notification process ahead of an arms transfer is intended to give the four leaders of the House and Senate foreign relations committees the opportunity to quietly raise any concerns about the deal—without their objections spilling into the public eye. 

Lawmakers have used this process as an opportunity to extract concessions or secure greater oversight, Tolany said. This can significantly delay but not scupper a deal entirely.

To fully block an arms transfer, it would require a resolution of disapproval passed by the House and Senate and a supermajority of support to override a likely presidential veto—something that no Congress has ever managed to do for an military aid arms transfer.

“It takes just a huge amount for Congress to overrule the president’s will,” the Senate aide said. 

There is precedent for a U.S. president to withhold military aid to Israel. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan placed a temporary hold on the export of F-16 fighter jets and cluster munitions to Israel over its conduct during the war in Lebanon. In 1991, Secretary of State James Baker threatened to withhold $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to help Israel resettle Jews from the former Soviet Union if it continued to build settlements in the occupied territories. 

And last year, the Biden administration blocked the transfer of almost 30,000 rifles intended for use by the Israeli police over concerns that they could fall into the hands of extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Critics have argued that Israel is not held to the same standard as other countries when it comes to scrutinizing the involvement of U.S. military aid in human rights abuses. For most recipients of U.S. security assistance, military or security service units that receive the aid are screened in a process known as Leahy vetting and prohibited from receiving U.S. support if there is “credible information” they have been involved in human rights abuses. 

For countries that receive significant amounts of aid—Ukraine, Israel, and Egypt—the secretary of state provides the countries with lists of military units that are prohibited from receiving the aid, while an internal State Department forum monitors for any allegations of human rights violations. Since 2020, more than a dozen incidents of alleged abuses by Israeli forces have been reviewed by the State Department, according to the Guardian, but none have been upheld. 

“It’s not that the laws aren’t there, it’s just that there is no willingness to enforce them,” said Josh Paul, a former senior State Department official who resigned from the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in late October over U.S. military assistance to Israel.