Six Questions for Stephen Semler on US Weapons Deliveries to Israel and the Biden Administration’s Complicity in War Crimes in Gaza

The horrifying scope of death and destruction in Gaza "reflects an absolute assumption" by Israeli leaders "the US will continue to arm and finance it," says a former senior IDF officer Semler cites.

The interviewee, who provided the photo to Washington Babylon.

Stephen Semler is the co-founder of the independent foreign policy think tank Security Policy Reform Institute and previously worked for Mercy Corps in Beirut, where he was an analyst for a team that delivered humanitarian aid to Syria. Semler writes Polygraph, which is essential reading – subscribe here – if you track US military policy at home and abroad. His work can also be found in outlets such as The Hill, Jacobin, Outrider, Responsible Statecraft, The Intercept, and The Nation.

I recently asked Semler six questions about US weapons deliveries to Israel and the prospects that Kamala Harris will significantly reshape the Biden administration’s current approach in Palestine, or foreign and military policy more broadly, if she wins the November presidential election. Our interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

1. You wrote an August 26 story for Responsible Statecraft that detailed 20 examples of Israel using US-supplied weapons in Gaza in “likely war crimes.” How did you document those cases? Is 20 close to a full tally or more likely the tip of the iceberg? 

I researched cases that had been previously flagged as possible Israeli war crimes by governments, journalists, or NGOs to see if there was evidence a US-supplied weapon was used in the attack, which was usually indicated by a munitions fragment identified by a forensic expert. The 20 cases I cited in the article took place after October 7, 2023 and appear to be clear-cut war crimes, but I used words such as "possible" and "apparent" to describe them because it's not up to me to make an official declaration about that. In each of the 20 cases, there was substantial information that demonstrated the attack likely or certainly violated international law, and forensic evidence that confirmed the likely or definite use of US-made weaponry of the type delivered to Israel since last October 7 by the Biden-Harris administration. 

Twenty violations is nowhere near an exhaustive account of potential war crimes committed with US weapons. At the same time, it's truly a mind-blowing number considering the lack of transparency surrounding arms transfers to Israel by the US government, Israel’s best efforts to clamp down on reporting into how they're used, the difficulty to conduct forensic investigations even in permissive environments, and the high threshold for an attack to be included on the list I compiled.

2. What other conclusions did you draw from your research for the article?

I think one finding sums up Biden's Israel policy. If you look at the list of incidents, you'll see a sudden uptick beginning this year in possible war crimes committed with a 250-pound “precision-guided” bomb called the GBU-39. The reason behind that was the Biden administration, purportedly out of concern for Palestinian civilians, tried to wean Israeli forces off of using imprecise 2,000-pound bombs by providing them with the GBU-39s, which Israel used to more precisely target civilians.

The horrific bombing of the displacement camp in Rafah in late- May, an attack GBU-39s were used in, was one of the rare incidents the Biden administration expressed "concern" about and the Israeli government bothered to try to explain. Israeli officials said munitions stored in tents at the camp were responsible for the destruction, but there's zero evidence that supports that. Providing smaller munitions allowed the Biden administration to say it was helping to minimize civilian casualties, but it was just continuing to enable them with a different tool.

3. International Criminal Court ICC Prosecutor Karim Asad Ahmad Khan has requested arrest warrants be issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Given what you and others have reported about Israel’s use of American weapons, where does that put the Biden administration – legally and morally – in terms of complicity with war crimes?

The Biden administration’s forceful rebuke of the ICC's decision to issue those arrest warrants speaks to its complicity in the atrocities Netanyahu and Gallant are charged with. Israel was more than capable of taking its pound of flesh in response to October 7 on its own. Much of the destruction in Gaza and the war crimes Israel committed post-October 7 would not have been possible without US support. 

What's more, the endless, unconditional torrent of weapons sent by the US shapes Israeli behavior. A former senior IDF officer has said Israeli forces could've made made the same amount of “progress” achieved thus far in Gaza with one-tenth of the destruction, but the country’s military has displayed “unusually wasteful” conduct, with little-to-no regard for international law, which “reflects an absolute assumption that the US will continue to arm and finance it.” US support for Israel breaks several international laws, including  Common Article 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Article 1 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

A fragment from a Boeing-manufactured Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) used by Israel during an air strike last October in Gaza. JDAMs convert “unguided free-fall bombs into accurate smart munitions,” according to the Pentagon; the one above guided a US-supplied 2,000-pound bomb to the home of the al-Najjar family in Gaza, in an attack that killed 24 civilians. Photo credit: Amnesty International.

4. Is there any way to accurately calculate the combined value of weapons and other forms of US military support for Israel since October 7? 

I can tell you the amount of taxpayer dollars Congress appropriated for the Israeli military this year – $18 billion – but that doesn't fully encapsulate the full amount of money the US is spending to support the country’s armed forces. Pretty much everything we know about what's been delivered to Israel since October 7 comes from leaks, which only discloses a patchwork, not an inventory. There are many costs that accrue in addition to direct military aid: the price of the unauthorized war the US is fighting in the Red Sea against the Houthis, new Pentagon deployments to the region, intelligence support, intercepting Iranian-launched drones and missiles before they reach Israel, beefing up security at bases in Iraq and Syria due to attacks that wouldn't occur had the US not enabled the assault on Gaza. It's an expensive policy.

5. You’ve also written about the Pentagon’s $230 million pier project for Gaza, which the Biden administration supposedly authorized to make sure food was delivered to Palestinians who were left destitute by the Israeli assault. Can you try to briefly summarize and capture the magnitude of that egregious boondoggle?

Biden announced the pier in his March State of the Union address and it was clearly a PR stunt from the beginning. Instead of using the immense leverage he has over Israel to force it to reopen more land crossings, he decided to build the pier, which the administration promised would send 150 trucks of aid per day to people in Gaza. It never came close to hitting the target. In what they thought was a slick way to make it sound like less of a disaster, Biden administration officials began describing the amounts delivered in larger units of measurement. After first speaking about the number of trucks, they shifted to announcing how much food was delivered in metric tons and that became pounds, and if the pier had stayed open longer they probably would have begun talking about ounces.

The pier went from being a PR stunt, which Biden was fine with, to a PR crisis, which he wasn’t. In the end, it was such a clear failure the administration couldn't even use it to play dress-up humanitarianism. More aid reached Gaza before the pier opened than after. Performance-wise, it should've been abandoned long before the media exposed it.

6. Is there any chance Kamala Harris will make a course correction in US policy towards Israel if she wins the presidency in November, or do anything to move away from Washington’s eternal bipartisan consensus on military spending and foreign policy? If Donald Trump wins, is it likely he’d be any better or worse in that regard, or is it pretty much a wash?

Harris has given zero indication her Israel policy will be different from Biden’s. She says she's concerned about civilians in Gaza, wants a ceasefire, and is committed to upholding international law, but none of those things are possible without an arms embargo on Israel, which most voters favor but Harris is against. Biden normalized Trump's truly insane military spending spree, which turned the idea of a $1 trillion Pentagon budget from hyperbole to inevitability. 

In order to change course, Harris or Trump would have to confront the national security state and the military-industrial-congressional complex. I don't think Harris or Trump is interested in having that fight.