On Thursday, August 16, the US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns signed an agreement in Jerusalem promising Israel $30 billion in military grants over the next ten years. This amounts to a 25 percent increase in US military aid to Israel. The agreement now awaits the approval of the US Congress. For some time, Israel has been receiving annually around $3 billion in aid. The US also allows Israel to spend 26.3 percent of its military grants on its own Israeli arms industry, rather than merely receiving US-made arms.
No other recipients of American military aid are permitted such a privilege. In July, for example, the Bush administration offered to sell $20 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. The average American may fail to notice the distinction between such arms sales to the Gulf and the outright gifts to Israel.
The substantial increase in military support for Israel will undoubtedly face criticism here and abroad. US taxpayers are being asked to donate $30 billion in weapons to Israel (almost $8 billion of which we end up buying for them from their own companies!) at a time when our own nation's financial resources are stretched thin. According to a June 28, 2007 Congressional Research Service report, the US has spent $611 billion on the "war on terror" ($567 billion of that in Iraq alone) since September 11, 2001. As a result of the financial drain, our own economy, schools, and health care programs are currently in shambles.
Israel has been accused, moreover, of using US weapons to commit routine human rights violations against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, in disregard of the US Arms Export Control Act and Foreign Assistance Act. The Israeli army has stated that all the weapons it uses "are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards." Following Israel's bombing campaign against Lebanon last summer, however, the US State Department carried out an investigation of whether Israel's use of American cluster munitions in Lebanon violated US restrictions regarding their use.
One thousand Lebanese civilians were killed last summer, 400 of them children. Cluster bombs played a part in those casualties. A typical cluster bomb weighs between 900-950 pounds and consists of a canister designed to open in mid-air and disperse some 200-400 submunitions or bomblets. The bomblets are usually brightly colored cylinders, the size of a soda can. On impact, they usually explode and can pierce armor, fragment into shrapnel pieces, and start fires.
They have a particularly deadly record of killing and maiming civilians both during and after an attack. They can kill every living thing within an area as large as two to four football fields. Up to 4 million bomblets (made in USA) were dropped on Lebanon last summer, and around 1 million of those failed to explode. They have contaminated an estimated area of 35 million square meters, only 24 percent of which has yet been de-mined. And they continue to kill. Since August 12, 2006 (when the hostilities ended), casualties from cluster bombs in Lebanon total 30 dead and 194 wounded. Of those 224 casualties, 170 were civilians. Seven of the dead were under the age of 18.
The unexploded cluster bomblets pose a threat to Lebanese agriculture as well. Lands amounting to 35 percent of the citrus sector and another 35 percent of the olive sector have been rendered off-limits, due to the danger presented by the unexploded bomblets.
Aware of such hazards posed by US-made munitions, the Reagan Administration had banned transfers of cluster bombs to Israel from 1982-88. In response to last year's disaster in Lebanon, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed legislation at the end of June 2007, that would effectively ban their export anywhere. This legislation, if approved by the Congress, would translate into law some of the key recommendations of the Senate's recent Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act (S. 594 and H.R. 1755). Bishop Thomas Wenski, Chairman of the Committee on International Policy of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has voiced the Church's support of this legislation. On May 1, 2007, he wrote:
Catholic moral teaching on just war insists that noncombatant immunity be respected and that the use of force be discriminate. The indiscriminate nature of failed cluster bomb "duds" makes them akin to landmines. Cluster munitions pose serious risks to civilians in conflict and post-conflict situations… The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops stands with the Holy See in its call to address the harmful effects of cluster munitions. This commitment flows from the Church's teaching on the protection of human life and dignity… The Conference supports restrictions on the use or export of existing, inaccurate stockpiles of cluster munitions. Additionally, we support restricting the use of these weapons in civilian areas.
At the signing of the new agreement for the $30 billion military grant to Israel, Undersecretary of State Burns called it "an investment in peace." In light of Israel's recent track record in the use of US-made cluster munitions, that remains to be seen.
