Dear <Representative or Senator>,
We write to ask you to oppose the inclusion of the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” in the National Defense Authorization Act.
Perhaps mindful of growing public skepticism about US military support for Israel, advocates of continuing and even deepening the US-Israel military relationship have inserted the “Cooperation Initiative” into the NDAA. This would bolster American-Israeli military and technological integration while shielding it from political oversight and making it harder to undo.
The US “defense” budget is already bloated. It allows our government to pursue reckless, counterproductive, and unconstitutional foreign wars while fostering an even greater appetite for them. The US-Israel initiative is especially dangerous because of Israel’s record of reckless violence. Therefore, the Jewish-Palestinian Alliance of Oregon (JPAO) opposes this initiative and strongly encourages you to oppose it as well.
What do we mean by Israel’s reckless violence?
Israel’s post-Oct. 7, 2023 assault on Gaza demonstrated a flagrant disregard for civilian casualties. Thousands of civilian homes and hundreds of institutions including schools and hospitals were destroyed. Noncombatant journalists and health workers were targeted. (Israel’s claims to the contrary are not supported by the evidence.) The International Criminal Court charged Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many esteemed genocide scholars, including Professor Omer Bartov of Brown University, an Israeli-American Holocaust historian, concluded that Israel was committing genocide.
Despite the supposed ceasefire, the killing continues, humanitarian aid is restricted, and access to medical care such as chemotherapy and dialysis is limited. Gaza remains an open-air prison, whose inmates are only with rare exceptions permitted to leave. In the Occupied West Bank, violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinian residents, tolerated or encouraged by members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, ignored or abetted by Israeli Defense Forces, has dramatically increased. IDF soldiers have targeted and killed American journalists and peacekeepers in the West Bank. None of this is new. In 2021, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem declared: “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.” Since then Israeli violence against ordinary Palestinians has spiraled out of control.
Moreover, taking advantage of its military superiority, Israel tried to do to Hezbollah what it did to Hamas, assassinating leaders and bombing indiscriminately. Israel encouraged the United States to attack Iran on the basis of faulty intelligence and false claims that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon. Israel’s aggressive military actions are destabilizing the entire Middle East. With an attitude of might makes right, Israel myopically refuses to even imagine the possibility of negotiation, conflict resolution, and peaceful coexistence. Not only would deeper military integration between our country and Israel reinforce this myopia; it would also reinforce our own.
The proposed “Cooperation Initiative” would cement American engagement in morally indefensible and politically destabilizing violence when we need greater skepticism and scrutiny of our overseas military commitments. It would bypass congressional debate over appropriations. And it would bypass the Leahy Laws, which prohibit financial assistance to a foreign security force that commits “gross” violations of human rights.
A New Policy, “a nonprofit and non-partisan lobbying and political organization dedicated to forging a new U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine that improves the lives of Americans and people across the Middle East,” strongly opposes the proposed initiative because its true purpose is to avoid scrutiny and transparency. “This approach exposes sensitive U.S. capabilities to counterintelligence risk, normalizes technologies developed in contexts of occupation and civilian harm, … and aims to hide continuing U.S. military support to Israel from Congressional and public transparency.”
We agree, and we urge you to reject this dangerous and disturbing proposal.
for the Jewish-Palestinian Alliance of Oregon:
[JPAO Signatures]