Israel is the recipient of the largest annual package of Foreign Military Financing, the grant program that allows foreign countries to purchase U.S.-made weapons. The current terms, signed under the Obama administration and implemented by President Donald Trump, give Israel $38 billion in U.S. military aid in the next 10 years, an increase of $8 billion over the previous decade. This includes $5 billion for missile defense.

Israel is one of a handful of countries that can use Foreign Military Financing grants to buy directly from private U.S. weapons corporations, a process with much less U.S. oversight than Foreign Military Sales, where the U.S. government coordinates the purchase of weaponry. And in a unique arrangement, Israel can use about 25 percent of its U.S. military aid to buy equipment made by Israeli companies. (This arrangement will end over the next decade.)

It’s a lucrative deal for U.S. weapons manufacturers. According to a State Department report, the U.S. authorized the shipment of almost $3 million in firearms last year—like the Ruger sniper rifle that killed Obeid. But it’s unclear how much a particular company like Ruger is profiting; the U.S. government does not break down the purchases by manufacturer. The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that in 2011, the Israeli military bought over $27 million worth of equipment in preparation for West Bank protests. The shipments included Ruger rifles and tear-gas canisters.

Foreign Military Financing money is not supposed to flow with no strings attached. In 1998, Congress passed what came to be known as the Leahy Law, authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The legislation bans U.S. military aid and training from going to foreign security units that commit human rights abuses, unless the secretary of state determines that the foreign country is holding members of the unit accountable. The law is rarely exercised. According to a 2017 RAND Corporation study, of 180,000 units and individuals vetted by the U.S. government each year under the Leahy Law, only 0.3 percent are rejected for U.S. assistance, in countries such as Colombia, Honduras and Nigeria.

Outside Bilal Tamimi’s home in Nabi Saleh, U.S.-made tear gas canisters and stun grenades hang on a fence. One such canister killed Mustafa Tamimi, a Nabi Saleh resident, in 2011. (Photo by Faiz Abu Rmeleh)

Because the Leahy Law is narrow—it only bars assistance to particular military units that commit rights violations, rather than the entire foreign army—Palestinian rights advocates working in Washington see enforcement against Israel as an achievable goal that could curb civilian deaths.

“The Leahy Law being implemented would not end violations, but I think it would seriously constrain [them],” says Brad Parker, international advocacy officer and staff attorney at Defense for Children International-Palestine. “Israeli officials would have to scrutinize military decisions and the use of force in a way that would ultimately increase protection for Palestinian civilians.”

The State Department did not answer questions from In These Times about whether any Israeli army units have been barred from receiving U.S. weapons under the Leahy Law or whether the State Department has acted on specific evidence of Israeli soldiers misusing U.S. arms. A State Department official told In These Times in a statement that the department “continues to apply the Leahy Law across the board, including in Israel, as it has for years. … We take seriously any credible information of a gross violation of human rights, and we review alleged violations utilizing standardized criteria worldwide.”

This statement is disputed by Bill Harper, chief of staff to Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), who has emerged as the leading congressional critic of Israeli human rights abuses. “They cannot credibly make the claim that they enforce the law equally,” Harper says. “We enforce it where we want and ignore it where we don’t.”

In a February 2016 letter, Leahy wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry about his concerns that the State Department is not adequately monitoring the use of U.S. military aid to Israel, and asked for an investigation into whether Israel committed extrajudicial executions with U.S. weapons. “There have been a disturbing number of reports of possible gross violations of human rights by security forces in Israel or Egypt—incidents that may have involved recipients, or potential recipients, of U.S. military assistance,” Leahy wrote. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded that Israeli soldiers “are not murderers” and act in a “moral manner.”

In meetings and conversations with the State Department from 2012 to 2015, Mike Coogan, then the legislative coordinator for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, says he brought up a 2009 Human Rights Watch report on U.S.-supplied white phosphorus that killed Palestinians in Gaza. He also communicated with officials about a 2014 Amnesty International report documenting U.S.-made tear gas canisters killing Palestinian protesters.

“State said we’ll look into it and we’ll get back to you,” Coogan says. “But they never got back to us.”

Brad Parker told In These Times that, in meetings about the Leahy Law during the Obama administration’s second term, State Department officials said they do not track where weapons go once they are sent to Israeli units, making it difficult to assess whether the weapons are being misused.

One former U.S. official familiar with how the Leahy Law is implemented (who requested anonymity out of concern about losing their current job, which involves working with State Department officials), says that the State Department doesn’t “have much of a record of understanding where material assistance flows.”

The former official believes that an unwillingness to challenge Israel is one reason the broader lack of monitoring goes unaddressed. “Getting more fidelity on specific instances of assistance to, say, Nigeria or Kenya … raises the defenses of a number of different pockets of support for Israel, who are concerned that our support for Israel will be in question or at risk.”

Support for Israel on Capitol Hill is driven by a multi-pronged machine: the weapons industry, which makes money from U.S. military aid to Israel; donors, who give to pro-Israel politicians, both Democrats and Republicans; Christian evangelicals, who see support for Israel as part of biblical prophecy and make up a large part of the Republican base; and Israel’s lobbyists, who continually push Washington to ramp up support.

The current State Department official interviewed for this story also describes a general reluctance to confront allies: “We never want to deliver bad news to them. ... The implementation of the Leahy Law is where you see the downsides of that.”