Just one week ago, the world watched in horror as Hamas terrorists and supporters stormed into southern Israel to slaughter, rape, mutilate, and kidnap innocent Israeli civilians, as well as any Americans they found along the way. Now, we must prepare ourselves for what comes next.
Contrary to the propaganda spawned by Hamas supporters in America and around the world, the Iran-backed group is not a band of freedom fighters. It is a bunch of savages whose explicit, stated goal is to drive every Jew out of the region and replace Israel with an Islamic fundamentalist state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. No one can be expected to coexist with, much less empower, people dedicated to their annihilation. Any nation facing this kind of threat has every right to degrade and destroy the enemy. This is what Israel must do to Hamas, and America must help its ally until the job is done.
Israel is not asking for a single American soldier. They are not asking America to conduct air strikes. And they are not asking us to preemptively start a war with Iran, as some others are suggesting us to do. What Israel has asked for, and what we have already committed to providing in a situation such as this, is the military resupply necessary to defeat their enemies.
Because we knew the threats our ally faced, and because we knew that Israel’s needs in the case of a conflict would grow faster than Congress’ ability to respond, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) and I passed the U.S.-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2020, which became law in 2021. This authorized $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants and $500 million in missile defense funds for the Jewish state every year through 2028. It also authorized pulling forward future FMF grants in emergencies.
Nor is that all. There is the War Reserve Stocks Allies-Israel (WRSA-I), created by President Ronald Reagan in 1984: an American arms depot in Israel that the executive branch is allowed to transfer to the Israeli government in a crisis.
The administration also has the authority under the Foreign Assistance Act to transfer up to $500 million worth of excess U.S. defense articles to Israel, and the Jewish state can tap into $4.9 billion in existing U.S. loan guarantees to offset increased defense spending.
Finally, President Biden can call on other countries that have received American weapons and equipment to transfer those assets to Israel while the U.S. backfills their inventories, much as he has done for Ukraine.
The combination of all these mechanisms gives the Biden administration roughly $24 billion in immediately available emergency assistance, with no congressional action required. This is why an executive branch spokesperson has said that “right now, we can continue to support – with the authorities in the appropriations we have – Israel.”
Eventually, Congress will have to authorize supplemental aid to replenish these various funds and stockpiles. And a protracted ground operation to eradicate Hamas, not to mention a potential multi-front conflict involving additional terrorist groups, like Hezbollah, will create needs not covered by current U.S. law. But the inability of Congress to approve additional aid is no impediment to getting Israel all the help they need right now.
I urge the Biden administration to resist the temptation to link continued support for Israel with other policy matters – specifically support for Ukraine, which, unlike support for Israel, has a substantial and growing number of skeptics, and even opponents, in Congress.
While I have supported aid to Ukraine, I know that linking these two matters would slow the legislative process and create needless division over what should be a bipartisan foreign policy commitment. Moreover, I know that any division or doubt about America’s support for Israel would dangerously encourage Israel’s enemies to escalate.
Israel isn’t engaged in a fight with an enemy that simply seeks to take land. They are confronting an enemy that seeks to eliminate the Jewish state and is willing to slaughter Jews and sacrifice Palestinian civilians to achieve that goal. We cannot allow partisan politics to delay us or prevent us from providing Israel the military assistance they will need to wipe this terrorist group out.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010. This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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