On May 8, as Israel escalated its brutal assault on Rafah, President Joe Biden announced that he had “paused” a delivery of several thousand 500-pound and 2,000-pound bombs, and threatened to withhold more arms shipments if Israel went ahead with its full-scale invasion of the southern Gaza city.
The announcement elicited an outcry from Israeli officials (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted “Hamas [loves] Biden”). Criticism also came from various Republicans, staunch anti-Palestinian Democrats, and pro-Israel donors. House Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to prohibit the Biden Administration from withholding military aid to Israel.
Unfortunately, Biden’s move comes too late for the 35,000 Palestinians who have already been killed in Gaza, mainly by American weapons.
What’s more, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted report stating that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that U.S. weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law,Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”
By this absurd conclusion, the Biden Administration has given itself a green light to keep sending weapons and enabling Israel’s war crimes.
In any event, as retired U.S. Colonel Joe Buccino told the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the U.S. weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Buccino said, and “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are . . . concerned about this.”
Because of this, the paused shipment should be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the United States has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.
During the Second World War, the United States proudly called itself the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight Nazi Germany. Today, the United States is the "Arsenal of Genocide," providing 70 percent of the imported weapons that Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its population.
As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people, including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, which are currently produced by Lockheed Martin. Israel’s 224 F-16 fighter jets have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.
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Israel also has eighty-six Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and thirty-nine of Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s—the most wastefully expensive fighter-bombers ever—with another thirty-six on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the United States and in allied countries, including Israel. In 2018, Israel became the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of U.S. arms export control laws, reportedly using them to bomb Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Sudan.
When these fleets of U.S.-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s fifth major assault on the Gaza Strip since 2008, the United States began rushing in new weapons. By December 1, 2023, it had delivered 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.
The U.S. government supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel reportedly used in Gaza in 2009.
General Dynamics is the largest U.S. bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs except for the GBU-39. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.
Little more than half of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza since October 2023 have been “precision,” because, as targeting officers explained to +972 magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes—obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.
In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new, state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers scheduled to be delivered in late 2025 at a price of more than $220 million each.
In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that includes about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the U.S. monopoly on supplying those weapons. That lucrative monopoly is clearly more important to members of Congress than fully funding Head Start or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund compared to weapons and wars.
The United States has a long and horrific record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he said it in 1967.
Many of the huge U.S. factories that produce all of these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their states. As then-President Eisenhower warned in his public farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
So, in addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students occupying college campuses across our country are right to call on their institutions to divest from weapon manufacturers, as well as from Israeli companies.
The corporate media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and called upon the school to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands—without police violence or attempts to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from U.S. institutions, including Brown University, Northwestern University, The Evergreen State College, Rutgers University, and the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
While decades of even deadlier U.S. war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people to the need to rise up against the U.S. war machine.
The gradual expulsion and displacement of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the role of the United States in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.
Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness, which has inflicted so much death, pain, and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long.