U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed an order on Saturday that will expedite the shipment of $4 billion in military aid to Israel — a direct and deliberate contrast to President Joe Biden’s policy of withholding some arms.
In a press statement, Rubio said:
I have signed a declaration to use emergency authorities to expedite the delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel. The decision to reverse the Biden Administration’s partial arms embargo, which wrongly withheld a number of weapons and ammunition from Israel, is yet another sign that Israel has no greater ally in the White House than President Trump.
Since taking office, the Trump Administration has approved nearly $12 billion in major FMS [foreign military sales] sales to Israel. This important decision coincides with President Trump’s repeal of a Biden-era memorandum which had imposed baseless and politicized conditions on military assistance to Israel at a time when our close ally was fighting a war of survival on multiple fronts against Iran and terror proxies.
The Trump Administration will continue to use all available tools to fulfill America’s long-standing commitment to Israel’s security, including means to counter security threats.
Last month, heavy precision-guided bombs that Biden denied to Israel were delivered, to coincide with Rubio’s first visit to the region as Secretary of State.
As Breitbart News reported, the Biden administration also “slow-walked” arms that it had officially approved for sale to Israel, but tried not to deliver, in order to pressure the Israeli government.
The result was that Israel was often forced to move more slowly against Hamas than it otherwise would have done, and to send Israeli soldiers into booby-trapped buildings that it might otherwise have bombed from the air instead.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
