On July 18, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) voted against the U.S. defense appropriations bill. She also voted against an amendment to the bill submitted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would have cut $500 million from funds for Israel’s Iron Dome, the air defense system designed to shoot down short-range rockets.
AOC’s vote on both did not affect the outcome – MTG’s amendment failed, having received only 6 votes, while the defense spending bill passed, 221 to 209. Nonetheless, AOC’s opposition to MTG’s amendment provoked significant outcry among progressives, particularly when she defended her rejection of the amendment on X the following day:
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of US munitions being used in Gaza… What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue. I have long stated that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war is constructive to its end… I remain focused on cutting the flow of US munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.
Many prominent human rights and Palestine advocates denounced her explanation in the replies, pointing out the incongruity between her charge that Israel is committing genocide and her determination to continue funding it. The virulent reaction generated its own round of media coverage, especially after her Bronx office was vandalized, and amplified the progressives’ disappointment with their rising star.
AOC’s post highlighted a flawed logic that many American politicians continue to deploy: the idea that it is both moral and possible to distinguish between defensive and offensive weapons. A similar logic was used by the Biden administration regarding support for Saudi Arabia during its bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. In February 2021, President Joe Biden declared that he was “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” Instead, Washington would only provide defensive munitions, ostensibly to help protect Saudi cities from Ansar Allah’s missiles.
In both cases, a Democratic politician depicted their actions as reflecting a responsible middle path, neither enabling aggressive behavior nor abandoning a U.S. strategic partner. They may think this helps them to appear reasonable and primarily concerned with the welfare of civilian victims of military conflict.
Yet by boosting Saudi Arabia and Israel’s ability to “defend” themselves, American politicians — from a centrist like Biden to an ostensible progressive like AOC — are enabling the aggressive behavior that they allegedly wish to curtail. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel are effectively encouraged to act more aggressively knowing they are protected, thanks to the United States, from costly retaliation.
Especially in the case of Israel, decades of virtually unconditional U.S. support have disincentivized any previous willingness on its part to compromise or seek peace. This is the moral hazard of Washington support whether in the form of a guaranteed supply of U.S. weaponry, or vetoes at the UN Security Council. Knowing that one will not face consequences for bad behavior tends to inspire more of it.
And yet this evident truism has not inspired a change in U.S. policy. For decades until at least the October 7 Hamas attack, successive administrations claimed that the only way to convince Israel to accept a two-state solution was to provide the weapons that would make it feel militarily invincible against any and all of its neighbors, otherwise as known as ensuring its “qualitative military edge,” or QME.
The Iron Dome, which was built with nearly $1.7 billion in U.S. funding and now depends on hundreds of millions of dollars more worth of key U.S.-provided parts to continue operating, offers an example. When it came online in 2011, one of the rationales for U.S. support was that it would actually help protect Palestinian lives as well as Israelis, ostensibly because, if fewer Israelis were killed by Palestinian rockets, Israel’s retaliation would be less severe.
Hellbound and Down 