Growing Calls in Congress for Foreign-aid Package to Israel

Following the attack on Israel by Hamas, members of Congress want to repeat their damaging practice of doling out massive amounts of aid to foreign countries, this time to Israel — even though it contradicts the United States’ constitutional and traditional foreign policy of non-interventionism.

On October 7, the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas invaded Israel, brutally killing and kidnapping innocent civilians. The Israel Defense Forces countered the attack, and the war between the two sides is currently ongoing.

As is typical whenever an overseas incident happens, there are loud calls in Congress to send foreign aid to Israel. For example, a bipartisan group of congressmen have introduced legislation to send $2 billion to Israel, while the Biden administration has already unilaterally sent aid. Furthermore, globalists in Congress and the White House are advocating tying funding for Israel to Ukraine or other funding.

However, foreign aid is not one of the enumerated powers delegated to Congress under Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution. The federal government’s powers are “few and defined,” as James Madison wrote in The Federalist, No. 45, and it cannot lawfully take any action not expressly authorized in the Constitution — including doling out foreign aid, regardless of the country it’s being given to.

Furthermore, U.S. foreign aid has often been used for unintended, destructive purposes. Among many other examples, U.S. foreign aid to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Act during World War II contributed to its development of nuclear weapons afterward; and U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen and opposition forces in Syria, Iraq, and Libya directly benefited radical Islamic terrorist movements. In fact, U.S. foreign aid may even have funded Hamas’ war effort.

In the 1980s, Israel (and, indirectly, the United States) actually assisted and encouraged Hamas’ rise as a counterweight to the secularist, communist-leaning Palestine Liberation Organization. In 2009, U.S. Representative Ron Paul stated:

So, we first, indirectly and directly through Israel, helped establish Hamas. Then we have an election where Hamas becomes dominant, then we have to kill them. It just doesn’t make sense. During the 80s, we were allied with Osama bin Laden, and we were contending with the Soviets. It was at that time our CIA thought it was good if we radicalize the Muslim world. So, we finance the Madrassas school to radicalize the Muslims in order to compete with the Soviets. There is too much blowback.”

According to The Intercept in 2018:

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat[.]

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

These examples illustrate blowback — the unforeseen, damaging long-term consequences of interventionism and foreign aid.

Notably, some conservative Israelis oppose U.S. foreign aid to Israel. In a 2013 interview with The New American, Moshe Feiglin, at the time deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), stated, “I’m totally against this [U.S. foreign] aid [to Israel]…. This aid is not in our favor, not economically, not militarily, not in any way. This aid serves psychological purposes, not anything else. We are talking about 1.5 percent of our income, of what Israel is producing — we can definitely deal without it.”

More recently, Israeli journalist and columnist Caroline Glick published an article calling for the end of U.S. aid to Israel, arguing, “there are good reasons for the IDF to oppose U.S. aid.” Among other reasons, she stated that U.S. aid “comes attached to strategic goals which, while perhaps reasonable for the U.S., are often bad for Israel.”

U.S. foreign aid — whether to Israel, Ukraine, or any other country — is unconstitutional and often detrimentally undermines U.S. national interests. Congress must return to constitutional adherence by refusing to dole out foreign aid, pursue a non-interventionist foreign policy, and focus on more pressing matters at home, such as on securing the U.S. southern border.

To urge your U.S. representative and senators to oppose and abolish foreign aid to Israel and all other countries, visit The John Birch Society’s legislative alert here.