Why Biden’s Threat to Suspend Arms to Israel Is A Scam

(Photo by MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images)

President Joe Biden’s pledge to cut off arms to Israel won’t stop its Rafah offensive, won’t save Palestinian lives, and doesn’t meaningfully address the concerns raised by the student protestors. What it has done is sent the news media into a frenzy of hyperbole about the supposed gravity of the president’s remarks.

“If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons,” Biden said in a CNN interview last Wednesday. The statement was confusingly vague — Which weapons specifically? And aren’t the Israelis already in Rafah? But Biden was immediately rewarded with sensational news headlines epitomized by a three-alarm emoji viral post from Axios reporter (and many are saying White House stooge) Barak Ravid.

With college protests over the Israel-Hamas war sweeping across the country and a presidential election looming, it’s obvious why Biden might want people to think his warning will influence Israel and protect Palestinian civilian lives in Rafah, where over one million have sought shelter in the last major urban enclave of Gaza. But the significance of his pledge has been wildly overstated, for the following reasons (which I elaborate on below): 

• Israel doesn’t need the U.S. weapons to fight in Rafah, 

• The arms suspension would take months to be felt,

• The deadliest part of the war (for civilians) is already over, and

• Israel is already attacking Rafah and has been doing so for weeks.

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Israel Isn’t Wanting for Weapons

As to the first point, Israel has made clear that it already has the weapons it needs to conduct military operations in Rafah.

“The IDF [Israeli Defense Force] has armaments for the missions it is planning, including missions in Rafah,” said IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari at a press conference on Thursday following Biden’s remarks. “We have what we need.”

In fact, since Hamas’s October 7 attack, I can’t find a single example of the IDF saying they’re running out of weapons needed to fight the war. This is not surprising given the over $3 billion per year in military aid the U.S. provides Israel, including via secret weapons stockpiles the U.S. military maintains in the country (see: War Reserve Stockpile Allies-Israel, or WSRA-I, which I reported on here.)

All of this is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to brashly respond to Biden’s warning that Israel would be able to “stand alone” without U.S. support. In fact, Netanyahu has cracked that the effect of the United States not providing “precision” weapons is to increase the prospects of civilian casualties.

Arms Assistance Isn’t Amazon Two-Day Delivery

Even if the Biden administration canceled every arms export to Israel — far beyond what he actually promised, but let’s pretend — their absence would take weeks or even months to affect Israel’s supply of weapons. That’s because foreign military assistance involves a logistics process far more complex than Amazon two-day delivery. As a result, it takes an average of 18 months to award a foreign military sales contract. The lumbering process is so slow the Pentagon convened a “Tiger Team” to help speed up arms exports to Israel, as I reported in December.

Israel doesn’t wait on its American shipments today to fight tomorrow. 

There is symbolic significance that Biden is (finally) willing to use U.S. leverage over Israel, but other than the missile defense systems used to protect Israel against Iran’s ballistic missile attack last month, Israel doesn’t need America to fight, and the Biden administration has made it clear that they won’t deny Israel “defensive” weapons of the sort used to shoot down the Iranian missiles.

This Phase of Israel’s War Doesn’t Need the Arms Biden Said He’d Suspend

Biden has said that his administration is “not going to supply the weapons and artillery” to Israel should it invade Rafah, and has reportedly already held up a shipment of 2,000-pound as well as 500-pound bombs. Early on in the war, such a move might have signaled to Israel the U.S.’s displeasure with its military conduct. But that phase of the war, in which Israel conducted wholesale attacks on high-rise apartment buildings and other civilian infrastructure, is largely over. By Israel’s own thinking regarding its military objectives, an additional offensive in Rafah likely wouldn’t involve the same kind of tactics. It would more likely involve block-by-block fighting involving infantry and tanks, where long-range weapons are much less important. If Israel were going to move into Rafah city itself, it wouldn’t repeat its Gaza City and other urban attacks of the north. 

Thus the reality for Joey come-lately is that the most intense phase of the conflict, involving airpower (fighter jets that drop the bombs Biden is threatening to suspend), has already occurred. Israel’s second phase was a shift to more targeted attacks using drones, artillery, and infantry to root out Hamas fighters and attack the underground tunnel network. 

A move into Rafah city — Israel has already “invaded” Gaza and even Rafah state — wouldn’t involve the type of weapons Biden has said he would suspend, and as the Israelis have alluded to, complaining about larger weapons being used (2,000 lb. bombs) while denying smaller ones makes no sense in terms of preserving Palestinian lives. More civilians are dying right now because of the humanitarian disaster created by the war.

Israel Is Already Fighting in Rafah

To me, the most ridiculous part of Biden’s pledge is his insistence that Israel isn’t already at war in Rafah, which it has been for weeks and even months. While administration officials usually take care to include qualifiers like that it opposes a “full-scale” invasion of Rafah (whatever that means), Biden forgot to read the fine print during his CNN interview, veering into falsehood.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone into Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons,” Biden said in the interview [emphasis mine].

“Israel has regularly carried out airstrikes on Rafah since the start of the war,” as the Associated Press observed on the occasion of one such airstrike last month that reportedly killed 22 people. And Israeli ground troops are already in the eastern part of Rafah state, controlling Rafah crossing, fighting Hamas fighters, and head hunting Hamas leadership.

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By setting expectations for a D-day style massive ground invasion, the Biden administration can pat itself on the back when the unlikely catastrophe doesn’t come to pass, leaving the impression that it caused that to happen.

There’s little reason to think Israel is interested in some World War II style ground war (or that it is even needed, given the nature of the Hamas fighters). For Israel, putting its soldiers into harm's way in Rafah city is a scenario in which the gains don't outweigh the potential losses, in men and materiel. 

For all the speculation about a Rafah "invasion" and Netanyahu's intentions and political machinations, the Israelis are continuing to fight their war. The fixation on some upcoming invasion is now more than two months old. In the meantime, Israel has continued to fight, claiming this week to have killed 14,000 Hamas fighters and to have destroyed 80 percent of Hamas' fighting battalions. Rooting out the last 20 percent — if these numbers are to be believed — requires a different tactic than the initial blitz. Israel has already made those adjustments. It’s not that bombs and artillery won’t be used in Rafah (they already are), it’s more that the intensity of the first few weeks is over and the nature of the depleted Hamas enemy changes Israel’s military conduct.

A complete suspension of all U.S. arms transfers to Israel could eventually impact Israel’s ability to fight — over the long term. But for such a suspension to have any effect, Biden would have had to do it months ago. And that’s the sleight of hand: getting the American people to look at what Biden’s doing now so they don’t look at what he hasn’t done this past seven months.

— Edited by William M. Arkin