Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, guys.
Introducing Alex Kane, writing at In These Times.
And the article is called Inside Sources Say The State Department Refuses To Trace Whether Israel Is Using U.S. Military Aid Illegally.
A special investigation by Alex Kane.
Indeed it is.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm good.
How about you?
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate your journalism and you making time to come on the show to talk about all of this.
So, yeah, isn't it great sometimes when the actual policies of the American government come right up against all the propaganda about how it's all about democracy and it's all about human rights?
And even look, we have the Leahy Law and other laws like that that say we don't give foreign aid to anyone who would commit war crimes.
We only save people from dictators like that time we saved France from the Nazis and all this kind of stuff.
And yet where the rubber meets the road and the actual implementation of the policy, sometimes they got to figure out a way to ignore something like the Leahy Law, such as in the case of support for Israel, as you report here.
Yeah.
So, you know, my story gets into detail about how the Leahy Law works in practice.
For your listeners who may not know, the Leahy Law, which is named for Senator Patrick Leahy, the author of the law, was passed in the late 1990s.
And it could be a quite powerful law if it's utilized properly.
And I do think Senator Leahy deserves credit for getting this law passed and it has been used in some cases.
But what my article shows is that the Leahy Law is not being followed when it comes to the flow of U.S. military aid to Israel.
And the Leahy Law is supposed to prohibit countries, foreign security units from receiving U.S. assistance if particular units are found to have committed what the State Department calls gross human rights abuses.
And there is a lot of evidence that particular Israeli military units have committed what can only be called gross human rights violations.
And yet there is indication that the U.S. does not enforce the Leahy Law on Israel, nor does the State Department actually even have a mechanism in place to track where U.S. weapons go, which undermines the effectiveness of the Leahy Law.
Because how can you determine if a unit used a U.S. weapon to commit a gross human rights violation if you don't have a mechanism in place to track which unit has that weapon?
So that is the crux of my investigation.
Right.
And so has there ever been such a mechanism for this?
In terms of Israel?
Yeah.
I mean, because we've been arming the Israelis for a long time.
The Leahy Law was passed way back, I forget when.
Late 1990s, 1998.
Okay.
But what you're reporting here is that the State Department has really never had an office somewhere where they judge whether this is being applied in the case of Israel.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's a little more complicated than that.
But the crux of what my article shows is that basically the way that U.S. military aid goes to Israel every year is it goes over $3 billion a year and it's going to begin to increase even more for the next 10 years under the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by Obama and implemented by Trump, which will give Israel $38 billion in military aid over the next 10 years.
But the way that this flows is that at the start of every fiscal year, which is the end of September, the U.S. deposits its money in a lump sum and Israel can draw on this account throughout the year.
And the problem is that the State Department does not have a mechanism to track where this funding goes.
So the State Department will say, we enforce the Leahy Law on all countries, including Israel.
And I imagine that they have internal mechanisms where they sign off on their application of the law.
But when you get to the details, these former and current State Department officials have told me that the State Department doesn't track where U.S. weapons go once it's delivered to Israel.
So the State Department has no idea where these U.S. weapons are showing up.
And I was also told by a current State Department official that the U.S. has not ever enforced the Leahy Law on an Israeli military unit as far as this State Department official knows.
This is one State Department official.
But the State Department would not answer my official questions on the record about whether they have enforced the law.
So as far as I know, according to a current State Department official, the U.S. has never enforced the Leahy Law on a particular Israeli military unit.
In terms of assistance, there's two separate parts of the Leahy Law.
It refers to both training and assistance.
And I'm specifically talking about assistance.
Training is somewhat of a different story.
But the law is supposed to apply, essentially, all other things being equal.
It would apply to the entire IDF, too.
Not just necessarily a particular unit that shot a kid throwing a rock.
But maybe, you know, the IDF, which is helping Israel occupy or colonize, helping civilians move into and colonize the West Bank, which is a war crime itself.
And I guess the meta sense compared to a particular unit that used a U.S. rifle to commit a war crime, as you talk about in here, very importantly.
Well, yeah.
And let's be clear about something.
The Leahy Law actually only applies to particular units.
Oh, really?
OK, I'm sorry.
No, no, no.
No problem.
It's something that sort of gets into the nitty gritty of how the Leahy Law works, why it could be powerful and why there are drawbacks.
But so the Leahy Law only applies to individual units in foreign security forces.
So a unit in the State Department's definition is the smallest sort of site of authority in a foreign unit.
So in Israel, that would be a particular army unit.
And they kind of cycle in and out of various sites in the West Bank and throughout Israel.
And so, you know, you break it down by unit.
And the reason why I say that that might be powerful is that there's no political will in the United States to cut off the whole entire Israeli army.
But human rights advocates have tried to use the Leahy Law to cut off U.S. military aid flows to particular army units that are known to be particularly problematic or that they have evidence of particular human rights violations.
So it's sort of a scalpel effect rather than a full hammer.
On the other hand, you know, human rights advocates have also tried to make the claim that what's called the Foreign Assistance Act, which would apply to the entire Israeli military, bars U.S. assistance from going to countries with a consistent pattern of human rights violations.
You know, they've made that argument.
I, you know, obviously it hasn't happened.
The U.S. continues to give arms to the Israeli army.
So there is that, but there are differences between how each law applies to units in the Israeli military versus the entire army.
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And now, so can you talk a little bit about the people that you profile in your piece?
Yeah, yeah.
So the piece opens up by looking at the case of Sabat Obed.
And he was a 22 year old from Salfit, which is in the central to Northern occupied West Bank.
And Sabat was a protester, a former Palestinian prisoner who went down to a village called Nabi Saleh, which is kind of now famous worldwide because it has held weekly unarmed protest marches against Israeli settlement land confiscation.
And the Tamimi family, which is sort of at the heart of these protests in Nabi Saleh, are very camera friendly, charismatic people.
And Ahed Tamimi, the 17 year old girl who slapped Israeli soldiers from Nabi Saleh.
But so Sabat one day in May was joining a protest in Nabi Saleh in solidarity with the Palestinian prisoner hunger strike.
They were striking for better conditions within the Israeli prisons.
And so Sabat sort of at the sort of end of the protest was one of a group of young men who were throwing stones at two Israeli soldiers who were sort of shooting rubber bullets and then eventually live ammunition from a sniper rifle at them.
And all the witnesses I've spoken to say that, you know, the soldiers were never in any grave danger that would legitimize the use of lethal force.
As they did that day.
And, you know, they were throwing stones hundreds of feet away.
These are soldiers who are heavily armed and protected.
And at some point in the afternoon, Sabat sort of threw a stone and headed back towards where others were standing.
And an Israeli sniper shot him in the stomach.
And about, you know, half an hour to an hour later, he was declared dead.
And so through identification by human rights experts in B'Tselem and others, we know that the rifle that they used was a Ruger sniper rifle, which is manufactured by Sturm, Ruger and Company, which is an American weapons company headquartered in Connecticut.
And they sell these snipers to Israel.
The Israeli army uses them, which is a gun where you can shoot live ammunition at protesters.
And they have killed a number of Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom who were throwing stones at soldiers over the past decade or so.
Yeah, man.
And it's still going on.
And in fact, I'm not sure I know this is a little bit outside the purview of your article, but could you talk a little bit about what's been going on in the West Bank in the last week or two here?
Because I think people have been killed on both sides and things have been escalating.
Usually Gaza is dominating the news with the killings and the protests going on there.
Yeah.
So, you know, the sort of overall context, of course, for this is that Israel has implemented a 51 year military occupation of the West Bank in Gaza and Jerusalem since 1967.
And in the West Bank, what that means is, you know, lots of checkpoints, lots of long lines at checkpoints.
Israel has also built illegal settlements on Palestinian land that, as you noted, are violations of the Geneva Conventions.
And so in the past couple of weeks, there has been somewhat of an escalation.
And I use that term escalation, I would say in quotes, because for Palestinians, the violence of the military occupation, you know, ebbs and flows, but it's always there.
And so the reason why the past two weeks you've seen the West Bank in the headlines is because Israelis are getting hurt or killed.
And that's why people have started to pay attention.
So it's a really asymmetrical sort of media coverage of what's going on.
So just to sort of clear up what has been going on, Palestinian armed militants carried out a number of attacks on Israeli settlers and Israeli soldiers.
In the first attack about two weeks ago, someone, a Palestinian militant, drove by a group of Israelis who were in the West Bank and opened fire on them, injuring a family, a husband and a wife.
The wife was pregnant and the man and the wife survived.
Unfortunately, the baby had to be delivered prematurely and the baby passed away.
That was followed by an attack on soldiers where a Palestinian militant killed two soldiers, two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint.
And after that, Israel ramped up its own violence in the occupied West Bank using lethal force on Palestinian protesters who were confronting them as they invaded, putting Ramallah, a sort of key city in the West Bank, on lockdown, huge army raids, lots of confrontations with Palestinian youth, and essentially putting Palestinian life on hold where people couldn't get in and out of various cities.
So that is sort of the summary of what has been going on for the past two weeks.
I saw a headline this morning saying that they have, I'm not exactly sure how this works in their Knesset, their parliament there, but on the first reading, I guess that means in committee or something, they have passed a law about the expulsion of relatives of Palestinians involved in violence against Israeli soldiers or civilians to another part of the West Bank, I guess.
I thought their policy already was bulldoze their house, which is basically expulsion.
I guess they're saying they'll exile them from one town to another, one village to another inside the West Bank or something like that as punishment.
If their relatives do something?
Yeah, that's being debated right now.
Actually, as far as I know right now, my sense is that this bill probably won't be passed fully, in part because the Israeli security establishment knows that this bill is actually unworkable for many reasons.
But yes, a right-wing Israeli party has put forward this bill to expel the families of Palestinians involved in attacks against Israelis.
The reason why it's unworkable is, how do you monitor whether someone, the Israeli army doesn't have the manpower to adequately monitor whether someone who is expelled on one day doesn't return back to their city on another day?
It's essentially unimplementable.
Also, it's a war crime as well.
It's collective punishment.
It's illegal under international law.
It just wouldn't work.
This is political posturing.
I don't expect it to pass, but it is a measure of the right wing of the Israeli Knesset trying to act like they're doing something to end the violence.
Anything but ending a very brutal military occupation that only breeds this kind of violence.
It just seems like this thing is stuck on a perpetual status quo of expanding settlements and retaliatory violence, and then further retaliatory violence back the other way, and this kind of thing, as you're describing.
Of course, the past three presidents have made what seem like essentially half-hearted measures to force a two-state solution that's not going anywhere.
Now you have Trump and the, what do they call it, the deal of a century?
Yes.
That his orthodox, Jewish, extremely Zionist and very settler-connected emissary, whatever the exact title is, he's got his ambassador and his emissary and his son-in-law who are working on this thing to create some sort of, I don't know what solution.
Do you understand so far what are the outlines?
I know they haven't debuted the whole thing, but they basically seem to be saying that they're going to just stick this settlement onto the Palestinians with some money, and so they'll take it.
But what do you know of it?
To be clear, we don't know what Trump's so-called deal of the century actually includes.
There have been a lot of leaks in the past year.
I don't know what the veracity of all of these different leaks are, but it's safe to say that it has no shot of actually being a fair solution for Palestinians, and that it would be heavily weighted towards what the Israelis want.
The reason why we know that is because the Trump administration's policy towards the Palestinians over the past two years has been all punitive, and they've put Trump and Netanyahu extremely close.
And the Trump administration has taken a number of steps that sort of indicate the type of deal that will be released.
For instance, in 2017, when Trump announced the moving of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, essentially blessing Israeli control over Jerusalem, that was an indication that the Trump administration has no interest in offering the Palestinians a viable state with East Jerusalem as its capital, as the Palestinians have demanded, and as is only fair for a viable state.
You need a capital like Jerusalem that's big enough, that's central enough, that's at the heart of economic Palestinian life, or has been before policies post-intifada.
You need that type of capital.
But Israel has repeatedly said they will never give up control over the eastern part of Jerusalem.
And the Trump administration has signaled that they back Israel on that.
And Trump has repeatedly said, we've taken Jerusalem off the table with the embassy move.
Palestinians believe him, and they know that Trump has backed Netanyahu on what a solution to Jerusalem will be.
So that's one indication.
Another indication is the Trump administration's attack on Palestinian refugees.
So they've cut all U.S. funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, which has put the U.N. agency, which is really a lifeline for many Palestinian refugees, in danger.
And they've also indicated that they want to change the definition of what a Palestinian refugee is.
Under this U.N. definition that is used, Palestinian refugees do not give up their status as generations go on.
So if you live in a refugee camp in Lebanon, your grandfather was expelled by Israel in 1948, and you are also a refugee because you do not have a home.
You are stateless, and you are in Lebanon or Jordan, or even within Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank.
You are considered a refugee by the United Nations for the reason that there has been no solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis.
And they do not have a state to go to.
And they have demanded their right to return to the lands that they were kicked out from, some of which is in Israel.
So we know that the Trump administration is also cracking down on refugees.
They've showed their hand on Jerusalem.
And so for Palestinians, the deal of the century is looking like an Israeli-imposed solution that will lock them into apartheid-like solutions and not a viable state.
Yeah, well, and it really is the, I guess, I mean, they already, I'm not sure all the legal technicalities, but they have already annexed East Jerusalem as compared to the rest of the West Bank.
They always even refer to it like it's a whole separate territory, even though it's on the West Bank.
They always say Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, that kind of thing.
And I know that ever since 67, there is, because they took control of Jerusalem, or I guess West Jerusalem back in 48 and East Jerusalem since 67.
But the people of East, the Palestinians of East Jerusalem have a separate legal status compared to the rest of the occupied West Bank.
But I don't, but it's supposedly more protection inside the Israeli state, but does it really amount to that?
Well, you know, it's all relative.
And, you know, sort of depending on where you live as a Palestinian depends on how much, how many rights you have vis-a-vis Israel with Gaza and refugees being at the bottom of the totem pole.
So Palestinians in Jerusalem are what's called, you know, they have Israeli ID cards, but they don't have Israeli citizenship.
They are not citizens of Israel, but they do enjoy some of the same rights that Palestinian citizens of Israel do.
Meaning they get to vote for their mayor and stuff like that, basically.
They get to vote for their mayor.
They get to vote in mayoral elections, although actually most Palestinians boycott them because they don't want to be seen as giving legitimacy to what they view as an illegal occupation.
But yes, they can vote, but they cannot vote for the Knesset, which also obviously the Knesset's policies impact them.
So that's one of the sort of differences in sort of the different, differences in status between them and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
I mean, Jerusalemites also bear, are under military occupation and bear a lot of things that Palestinian citizens of Israel do not, like illegal settlements and Israeli settlers coming into their neighborhoods and evicting them and taking up their own homes, for instance.
But on the other hand, Israeli Jerusalemites do have a lot more freedom of movement.
They go into Israel proper and out and the West Bank and out, although they have to maintain what Israel calls the center of life in Jerusalem or else their ID cards will be stripped and they will no longer be allowed to live in Jerusalem.
So there's a lot of legal intricacies that determine the status of Palestinians, which really depends on where they live.
Yeah, man, that's crazy.
And then, so I guess as you're saying, with the moving of the embassy there, it's important, but that's still really symbolic.
And then with Trump saying he's taken the East Jerusalem issue off the table, that's an indication, but it's not actually a thing yet.
It's an indication of what the proposal is going to be.
But also it really is, I'm not sure who coined this phrase, but what they call it's just establishing facts on the ground.
Like they can end up, if it takes them another 60 years to finish completely taking East Jerusalem away from the Palestinians who live there, then that's okay too.
They can just, if they have to do it that way.
And so there's still important steps in terms of establishing what's what and what is set to become, what's set to change soon.
And of course, which is extremely important because you have all those holy sites there where if the Muslim populations lose complete control of East Jerusalem, that's going to cause major problems throughout the lands from Nigeria to the Philippines, man.
Right, yeah.
And when Israel takes measures that change the status quo on Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is the third holiest Islamic religious site, Palestinians get very upset and they protest.
We saw that in the summer of 2017 when Israel installed metal detectors outside of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which upset many Palestinians because they saw it as a step towards taking more control of their holy site.
And they boycotted and they held mass prayer protests and they got Israel to back down.
So it was just an example of the volatility of Jerusalem as an issue and the Trump administration has not helped things at all.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for your time on the show, Alex.
I sure appreciate it.
You know what?
Let me ask you real fast.
Did you get much reaction to this in D.C. at all?
Anything happen?
Because you are making an important legal point in a sense here in this journalism.
Yeah.
You know, I think people appreciate the article.
People who are in the know in D.C. appreciate the article.
I have not heard anything sort of official coming out of it.
We will see.
Seems like there's a basis for some interest group to, you know, issue a court challenge or some kind of thing like that.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Possibly.
Yeah.
You know.
All right.
Well, listen.
I'll continue watching the story and hopefully action will be taken.
Yeah, absolutely.
Agree with that.
And really appreciate your great work and your time on the show, Alex.
Thank you so much.
All right, you guys.
That's Alex Kane writing at In These Times.
Inside sources say the State Department refuses to trace whether Israel is using U.S. military aid illegally.and requests to join the private Reddit group.
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