Sharon Zhang
Truthout / September 25, 2024
Two US agencies said domestic law dictated a suspension of military aid to Israel, but Blinken rebuffed the findings.
Calls have grown for Secretary of State Antony Blinken to resign or be impeached, after a bombshell report revealed that he lied to Congress about internal Biden administration recommendations that the U.S. suspend weapons shipments to Israel over myriad human rights violations — a move that one advocacy group said is “egregiously illegal.”
Muslim and Arab rights groups and commentators said that Blinken’s clear flouting of international and domestic law in order to continue funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza is grounds for him to be removed.
“When a senior American official lies to Congress in the middle of genocide so that the government can keep funding that genocide, he is deliberately flouting the law and prolonging the suffering of millions of innocent people who desperately need our government to stop funding their slaughter,” said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) National Executive Director Nihad Awad.
“He must resign, and the Biden administration must be held accountable for its violation of the law and its complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza,” Awad went on.
Editor-in-chief of Zeteo News, Mehdi Hasan, simply said: “Blinken should be impeached.”
On Tuesday, ProPublica published a report finding that the U.S.’s top two authorities on humanitarian aid had concluded this spring that Israel was deliberately blocking aid from entering Gaza, and delivered those findings to Blinken. This lined up with reports from humanitarian aid organizations working in Gaza that had been raising alarm for months about Israel’s blockade, which was creating a famine and epidemics across the Gaza Strip.
The conclusions, from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, meant that officials were required under U.S. law to stop sending Israel weapons.
Specifically, the refugee bureau recommended that roughly $830 million of taxpayer money slated for Israeli military assistance should be paused. USAID, on the other hand, recommended that the U.S. pause all additional arms sales to Israel, ProPublica reported, with Israel having created “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world” in Gaza.
But on May 10, days after USAID delivered its report — and after a UN agency declared that north Gaza was in a “full-blown famine” — Blinken’s State Department delivered a report to Congress finding that, while Israel may be obstructing aid, there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that arms transfers must be paused.
The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project said the report shows Blinken is openly violating the law.
“Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits sending weapons to any nation blocking aid. We now know Secretary Blinken knew about Israel’s violations and lied to Congress about what he knew to keep sending weapons,” the group wrote. “This is egregiously illegal. There must be repercussions.”
The agencies’ findings came at a critical time in Israel’s genocide. In early May, Israel had just begun its invasion of Rafah — a move the Biden administration had once said would be a “red line” for Israel’s assault. As part of that attack, on what was once the last relatively “safe” harbour for Palestinians in the region, Israel took over Gaza’s southern crossing into Egypt that had been the main pathway for humanitarian aid to enter the region.
Since then, Israel has turned Rafah into a unlivable ghost town and corralled nearly the entire population of Gaza into a narrow strip of desert with extremely sparse infrastructure — and bombed Palestinians there. The closure of the Rafah crossing has seemingly permanently intensified Israel’s aid blockade, with a sharp decline in incoming aid shipments since May and a record low last month of only 69 truckloads per day on average.
Despite this, Blinken has defended his brazen actions from this spring. When asked about the ProPublica findings on CBS, Blinken brushed aside concerns, saying that what he did was “actually pretty typical” for someone in his position.
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labour
