A month into the Israeli military’s onslaught on Gaza, the suffering is tremendous. More than 14,000 in Gaza have died, most of them children and women. In October, a human rights group recorded an average of 100 children dying there — the equivalent of five Uvaldes — every day.
Into that hell, President Biden is proposing that the U.S. send more weapons. The U.S. already sends Israel more than $3.8 billion a year in military aid. He has proposed an additional $14 billion as part of a staggering $105 billion military package he’s asked Congress to pass.
The kind of mass destruction we’re seeing in Gaza is unimaginable to most of us in the United States. But we see suffering here too — in the form of homelessness, the opioid epidemic and increasingly common catastrophic weather events. Plenty of us feel the struggle of affording necessities like housing, heat, health care and child care.
The weapons and military aid that Biden and many in Congress want to send to Israel also represent resources that are desperately needed to address problems like these.