The Wild Reed: Protesting Weapons Manufacturer and Genocide Enabler General Dynamics

The world’s fifth largest weapons manufacturer, General Dynamics, supplies (via U.S. government arms sales) artillery ammunition and bombs to the far-right Israeli government for its ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza.

Yesterday, Saturday, September 14, I participated in a protest outside of General Dynamics’ Bloomington, MN offices. We gathered both to protest the corporation’s role in genocide and to call on the State of Minnesota to divest our tax dollars from General Dynamics.

General Dynamics’ supply of weapons to Israel has led to protests at facilities in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Lincoln, Nebraska; Saco, Maine; New London, Connecticut; and Garland, Texas. As in Minnesota, citizens in Maine are calling for an end to state subsidies to the company. Protesters at the New London demonstration compared General Dynamics’ deployment of an Ohio-class submarine to the feature film Oppenheimer. Twenty-three protesters were arrested at the Garland demonstration, in which women wearing hijabs say they were forcibly unveiled by police.

Yesterday’s rally and march in Bloomington, MN was organized by Minnesota Peace Action Coalition and endorsed by MN Free Palestine Coalition, Anti-War Committee, Students For Palestine Normandale, and Women Against Military Madness.

Following is an excerpt from an August 26 Responsible Statecraft article by Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, “an independent grassroots think tank that promotes the meaningful reform of U.S. foreign policy to break the cycle of endless war and serve the most pressing economic, social, and political needs of working-class Americans.”

In his article, entitled “Gaza Breakdown: 20 Times Israel Used U.S. Arms in Likely War Crimes,” Semler makes the case that “if the Biden administration is truly concerned about the loss of innocent Palestinian life in Gaza, it can stop Israel’s atrocities by denying it the tools it needs to commit them.”

The Biden administration recently approved five major arms sales to Israel for F-15 fighter aircraft, tank ammunition, tactical vehicles, air-to-air missiles, mortar rounds, and related equipment for each. Though technically sales, most if not all of this matériel is paid for by U.S. taxpayers – Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves for it effectively as a gift card to buy U.S.-made weapons.

The total value of the five weapons sales exceeds $20.3 billion.

More extraordinary than the price tag of these arms deals is that the White House made them public. Prior to last week’s announcements, it had disclosed just two arms sales to Israel. By March, the Biden administration had already greenlit more than 100 separate weapons deals for Israel, or about one every 36 hours, on average. The administration presumably kept the value of each arms deal “under threshold” to avoid having to notify Congress.

From 2017 to 2019, the U.S. had approved thousands of below-threshold arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates worth a total of $11.2 billion. Exploiting this loophole helped the Trump administration avoid scrutiny of its enabling of a devastating and indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. The Biden administration appears to be following the same playbook for the destruction it is enabling in Gaza.

The White House isn’t shy about publicizing arms transfers to other countries. For example, it has been very transparent about the military aid it sent Ukraine since February 2022. Biden promotes arming Ukraine as industrial policy, marketing the military aid as a boon for domestic manufacturing and jobs. The Pentagon not only itemizes what specific matériel the U.S. sends to Ukraine, but also shows on a map where in the U.S. those weapons and equipment are made.

By contrast, nearly all the publicly available information on U.S. arms transfers to Israel comes from leaks reported by the media. The Biden administration says very little about the weapons it delivers to Israel or how the Israeli military uses them.

. . . [I]nformation gathering and fact finding [relating to how Israel uses the weapons supplied to it by the U.S.] is extremely difficult. Israel restricts U.N. and NGO access to Gaza and doesn’t cooperate with investigations into misuse of U.S.-supplied arms. Members of the press are routinely denied access or attacked: Since October 2023, 116 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israeli airstrikes or sniper fire in Gaza, representing 86 percent of all those killed worldwide, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Prolonged communication blackouts are commonplace in Gaza.

Israel’s military campaign relies on U.S. weapons, and so U.S. matériel is involved in nearly every facet of Israel’s campaign. For example, Israel uses U.S.-made aircraft like the F-35, F-16, and F-15 to drop U.S.-made bombs, including the MK-84 (2,000 pounds), MK-83 (1,000 pounds), MK-82 (500 pounds), and 250-pound “small diameter” bombs, which can be fitted with U.S.-made Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits.

The vast majority of bombs Israel drops on Gaza are U.S.-made. The U.S. even provides Israel with jet fuel. The U.S. has sent so many arms to Israel since October 7 that the Pentagon has struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver the matériel.

Israel’s campaign is historically destructive. In the three weeks after October 7, Israel dropped an average of 6,000 bombs on Gaza per week. By comparison, U.S. and coalition forces dropped on average 488 bombs per week on ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) between August 2014 and March 2019. OIR caused immense civilian harm – particularly in densely-populated areas like Mosul and Raqqa – but the scale of death and destruction doesn’t come close to what Israel has done in Gaza.

A former high-ranking officer in the Israeli military told Haaretz that Israeli forces could have made as much progress as they have so far in Gaza with one-tenth of the destruction. This “unusually wasteful” and “reckless” conduct “reflects an absolute assumption that the U.S. will continue to arm and finance it,” he is quoted as saying.

What’s more, according to reporting, Israel has used an Artificial Intelligence program called “Lavender” to generate an unprecedented number of bombing targets with minimal human oversight. The AI program is coded with instructions that appear inconsistent with international law and is deployed with little to no human oversight.

The Biden administration acknowledges that Israel likely broke human rights law with U.S.-supplied weapons, but claims it doesn’t have enough evidence to link U.S.-supplied weapons to specific violations that would warrant cutting off military aid to Israel. As national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CBS, “We do not have enough information to reach definitive conclusions about particular incidents or to make legal determinations, but we do have enough information to have concern. . . . Our hearts break about the loss of innocent Palestinian life.”

None of that is believable. . . . [T]here is more than enough available information. If the Biden administration is truly concerned about the loss of innocent Palestinian life in Gaza, it can stop Israel’s atrocities by denying it the tools it needs to commit them.