President Biden has come under fire from conservatives for withholding critical weapons and munitions aid to Israel during its war with Hamas. While holding back on the congressional-mandated aid, Biden has also signed waivers of sanctions to bypass congressional prohibitions on arms sales to multiple Arab nations that boycott Israel.
Currently, laws in place bar the U.S. from selling weapons to nations that boycott Israel. Those Arab nations now greenlighted for arms sales from the U.S. include Hamas's friends Qatar and Lebanon, The Washington Free Beacon reports.
Publicly, Biden has opposed Israel's offensive in the Rafah community of Gaza where what Israel says are the last four Hamas battalions hidden among hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Many have heeded Israel's urging to leave Rafah, but many civilians remain.
But Biden's line in the sand for Israel aid, coupled with his softer stance toward Israel's enemies, doesn't look like support for the Jewish state.
Scratching his head re: waivers
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota), in an appearance on Washington Watch Monday, said Biden has taken the complex dynamics of the Middle East and made them more difficult than they need to be.
"I know I don't want to over oversimplify geopolitics, particularly in the Middle East. We have friends like Israel. We have enemies like Iran. And we have 'frenemies' – the occasional friends," he described.
"It's complicated for sure, but it shouldn't be complicated when you're looking at Qatar, who's a political and financial supporter of Hamas. Then you look at Lebanon, of course, run by Hezbollah, Hamas's first cousin and an associate with Iran, and you give them the benefit of the doubt.
"[But] then you put an arms embargo on our friend Israel. It's so absurd. It's a head-scratcher intellectually, but it's dangerous when you think about it from a national security standpoint," Cramer told show host Tony Perkins.
The administration said in a notification to Congress that it intended to extend the waiver through April 30, 2025, The Free Beacon reported.
It's not only the waivers that hurt
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in reference to the waivers, called Biden's foreign policy "backwards." Equally damaging for Israel is U.S. foreign aid dollars sent to Gaza, he said.
"We knew the money sent to Gaza would be seized by Hamas, but to make matters worse, the Biden administration blocked munition shipments to Israel. The Biden administration is funding Iran and its terrorist proxies while simultaneously undermining Israel," Cruz said.
Cramer told show host Tony Perkins that while Biden officials cloak every public comment with the administration's desire to "stabilize the region," their actions have the opposite effect.
"This sends a chilling message to our closer Arab friends. Take the UAE as an example, or Jordan or Saudi Arabia, who I think are largely friends. We send very mixed messages to the region. It creates chaos because it projects that weakness. It projects confusion about what exactly is the United States' policy," Cramer said.
The weapons systems Biden is withholding from Israel are the very ones that could shorten the war. In Israel's possession, according to Cramer, they could actually save civilian lives. These weapons systems include "precision missiles, the kits that make dumb bombs into smart bombs, the things that could certainly save the lives of many people in Israel but also civilian lives in Gaza," he stated.
Biden's decisions wreak of election-year politics, said the GOP lawmaker.
"None of it makes sense intellectually, strategically, or tactically. It sure doesn't make any sense spiritually or geopolitically," Cramer shared. "I don't understand it other than he's got this very weird anti-Semitic base that is larger than a lot of people once thought and a bit frightening right here in our own country."
Cramer is a co-sponsor of the Senate's version of The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act passed by the House earlier this month. He's eager for the bill to be taken up in the Senate. Some thought it would be addressed last week, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hasn't called it to the floor yet.
Cramer is hoping a bipartisan effort will create momentum for the bill. He's calling on Senate Democrats to stand against the anti-Israel voices among their colleagues.
"There is a bipartisan coalition [behind the bill], but we have to have Democrats step up and be willing to buck that ever-widening base of anti-Semitism in their own party. We have some, but there are some Democratic senators who are downright hostile to Israel, Chris Van Hollen [of Maryland] being chief among them," Cramer said.
JewishInsider.com earlier this year identified Van Hollen as the emerging leader of a group of progressive senators who had shown themselves to be hostile to Israel's interests.
Another defining trait between red and blue
Cramer says Israel – which he argues is America's closest ally in the Middle East and perhaps the world – could become another defining characteristic between Democrats and Republicans.
"Democrats are irredeemable on a few topics. This is not yet one of them, but this is a moment for them to decide whether or not they'll stand up," he said.
The anti-Israel element among Democrats "is what I would have called a fringe at one point, but it's a little more than fringe these days. They need to say, 'No, our tent's big, but it's not that big,' and take a pro-Israel, pro-America stand," Cramer urged.
