In the period since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the United States has appropriated more than $20 billion in military aid to Israel, on top of the roughly $3.8 billion in annual baseline aid that has been standing US policy for decades. The Israeli military response in Gaza has, by the count of multiple international organizations including the United Nations, the Red Cross, and the World Health Organization, killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Most of Gaza’s housing stock has been destroyed. The northern half of the territory is largely uninhabitable. Famine conditions have been formally declared by the IPC, the body the United States itself relies on for global food-security assessments, across multiple districts.
The reporting on the situation comes from sources that are very hard to dismiss. The Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of Israel, and even portions of Israeli press itself, including Haaretz, have documented the humanitarian numbers consistently. The US State Department’s own annual human rights report, published this spring, included unusually direct language about civilian casualties and restrictions on aid delivery. Senior US military officials, speaking on background to multiple outlets, have expressed concern that the conduct of the campaign is creating conditions for long-term insurgency rather than ending the threat from Hamas. None of this is foreign propaganda. It is what mainstream US-aligned reporting and US-government documents are now saying.
Now here is the thing that has to be said carefully and clearly. Israel was attacked in a brutal terrorist atrocity on October 7. The country has every right to defend itself, to pursue Hamas, and to be supported by its long-standing ally the United States in doing so. That is not the question. The question is whether the way US aid is currently being used aligns with the values that most Americans, including the patriotic ones, would say they hold. The country we tell ourselves we are does not finance famine. The country we tell ourselves we are does not pay for tens of thousands of children to be killed in pursuit of a military objective. If those things are happening on our dime, then either our self-image is wrong or our policy is wrong. Both possibilities are worth examining.
There is a version of pro-Israel policy that is also pro-civilian, pro-aid, pro-honest-conversation-with-the-Israeli-government, and pro-actually-defeating-Hamas in a way that produces a livable region in five years. That version exists. It is what most US Jewish organizations have actually been calling for since 2024, including the ADL and J Street, even when they disagree on tactics. It is also what most senior US military thinkers have been saying. The current direction does not look like that version. The current direction looks like signing checks and not asking what they pay for.
You do not have to be anti-Israel to be uneasy about where US aid is currently going. You do not have to be pro-Hamas to think that thirty thousand dead children is a moral catastrophe a country that puts “In God We Trust” on its money should not be financing. The hardest part of being an American who actually loves this country is staying honest when the country is doing something that is hard to defend. Right now, this is one of those moments. The question of what we are funding in Gaza, and what conditions we should attach to it, is a fair one to put to anyone running for federal office. Their answer will tell you something about who they really are.