With Congress gone fishing, Israel must fend for itself

Photo: AP Images

W

hen members of Congress break bread at their Thanksgiving tables and chow down on turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, nations at risk such as Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan will have to suffice with crumbs.

Congress left for its holiday recess without passing or even holding serious debate on President Biden’s proposed package of $106 billion in military aid to help Israel pummel Hamas, assist Ukraine in fending off Russia, or deter an increasingly aggressive China from threatening Taiwan.

To be fair, elected officials were preoccupied with extending the debt ceiling, giving America two more months of breathing room for keeping the government open until the next debt ceiling crisis hits.

Also, the House of Representatives, with its slim and rebellious Republican majority, did pass a freestanding $14.3 billion military aid package to Israel, although they attached a kill switch to the measure by conditioning that aid on equivalent cuts to funding for IRS tax enforcement, a stipulation that Senate Democrats will never accept.

For now, Israel is on tenterhooks.

In a news conference that has turned into a Motzaei Shabbos ritual, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had to squint into his rearview mirror to find ways of thanking the Biden administration for the military assistance it’s proffered to date, noting the two warships and submarine the commander in chief dispatched, and the resupply of some spent munitions.

In wartime, however, it’s “what have you done for me lately” that counts.

If Congress can’t get its act together when they return to Washington, Israel will have to pivot to plan B, which means diverting funds from social programs and coalition agreements to the war budget. Some of those decisions will be politically unpopular and could harm the economy even more than the war already has.

The chances of Congress getting its act together are slim, especially after a week in which individual members debased themselves, acting more like professional wrestlers than people suited to the hallowed halls of the Capitol.

During a Senate committee hearing, Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) challenged Teamsters Union president Sean O’Brien to a fight. It wouldn’t have replaced the Burr-Hamilton duel in the nation’s history books, but it was inappropriate. Mullin and O’Brien have feuded on social media. Senator Mullin accuses unions of coercing workers to become union members, while O’Brien blames employers for pressuring workers not to unionize. Mullin is a martial arts expert, but O’Brien isn’t the proverbial 98-pound weakling either. At age 46, Mullin is too young to have a firsthand recollection that some people have disappeared after challenging the Teamsters’ leadership. Just ask Jimmy Hoffa, who hasn’t been seen since 1975.

On the House side, the scandal of the week involved an alleged “kidney punch” that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy delivered to Rep. Tim Burchett in a Capitol basement hallway. Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, was instrumental in the successful effort to oust McCarthy from his leadership post.

The Battles to Come

With elected officials behaving like high school bullies, it will be interesting to see how Congress fares in the next Gallup poll.

Gallup has surveyed Congressional favorability ratings every month since 1974, a year before Hoffa ate his last supper at the Machus Red Fox, an Italian restaurant in a Detroit suburb. In its October 2023 poll, just 13 percent of Americans surveyed gave Congress a favorable rating, with 84 percent rating it unfavorably.

Surely America faces serious problems, which would be challenging enough to solve even if one party held the White House and a sizable Congressional majority.

The national debt is just one contentious issue. Now nearing $34 trillion, the sum rises by a whopping $5 billion every day and has been piling up for decades. While Republicans try to paint the Democrats as big spenders, both parties have had their turns in power and have shown themselves to be equally guilty of lacking the wisdom and political will to trim spending and raise taxes to cover the government’s obligations.

In the last fiscal year, the US paid some $680 billion in interest payments on that debt. Thanks to the Federal Reserve Board, which has hiked interest rates to curb inflation, the government is on target to shell out $1 trillion in the next fiscal year on interest alone. That’s more than it spends on health care and almost as much as it spends on national defense. To put this in perspective, until 1990, the entire US government budget never exceeded $1 trillion.

So, on one hand, it’s not surprising that Congress would balk at the Biden administration’s request to tack on another $106 billion to an already daunting deficit. On the other hand, nations with a dependency on US military aid, such as Israel, must read the handwriting on the wall and figure out how to pay their own way.

Just as Republicans conditioned military aid to Israel upon budget cuts elsewhere, Democrats seem intent on playing the same game, but on different terms.

Late last week, a group of Senate Democrats, led by Bernie Sanders (an independent who caucuses with them) met to discuss conditioning America’s annual $3.8 billion military aid package on Israel “improving its behavior.”

This could mean anything from pressuring Israel to reduce its aerial attacks on terrorist targets, extending humanitarian aid to Gaza above and beyond what the Netanyahu government is prepared to do, and even insisting that Israel commit to entering talks with the Palestinian Authority on a two-state solution the minute Israel lays down its arms against Hamas.

For now, this is all talk, and the Biden administration has signaled its opposition to attaching conditions to military aid to Israel, at least for now.

With Israel facing enemies from without and within, it can’t afford to take orders from the US on existential military and political issues. When a man named Binyamin Netanyahu served in his first term as prime minister, he cut a deal with President Clinton to wean Israel from US economic aid for ten years from 1997 to 2007. It is imperative that Bibi, or whoever may succeed him, wean Israel from its dependence on US military aid, and the conditions that come attached to that.

The political battles in Washington will continue nonstop, and those who keep insisting that Israel enjoys bipartisan support in Congress are only misleading themselves. Even if support from mainstream Republicans and Democrats is still solid, America is badly polarized, and power is split almost evenly between the two major parties. In a tied Congress, a handful of radicals on either side of the aisle can make life miserable for Israel.

What members of the Biden administration and Congress don’t understand is that Israelis absorbed much more than kidney punches or martial arts holds on Simchas Torah. While Washington fights over debt limits, Israel is battling for its survival against a cruel and merciless jihadist enemy. No one who lives 6,000 miles away has any right to pressure Israelis to trade security for promises that can be broken and guarantees that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 987)