I was a first year graduate student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when I first learned that a large percent of our "foreign assistance" is in the form of military assistance, mostly to the Middle East. The year was 1989, and I was 26 years old, and had just recently spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso. I was a liberal Democrat, I was highly educated, and had spent time in both Europe and Africa. But I still didn't know some of the details of where and how we spend money that we call foreign assistance. My notes from my class with Professor Russ Middleton are in storage, but I was able to find a source to show the point that he made thirty years ago. The website Foreignassistance.gov shows you categories by country and region of what we provide as "assistance".
In the Middle East and North Africa, half of the money we give as assistance is military. It is true that we should rethink our military assistance to Israel. But we also give military assistance to Arab countries surrounding Israel.
Our geopolitics of oil extraction has meant that US oil companies decided that the United States needed to support authoritarian leaders in Arab countries - leaders who would be willing to sell our oil companies money at very low cost. As a result, the United States has needed to give military assistance to those countries, many of which are not democracies. (I reccomend reading chapter 8 in Robert Keohane's book "After Hegemony" which outlines our interference in the governments of Arab countries).
You can refine this data by country and see how much we give to both Israel and Arab countries. You can see where the money is allocated. It is somewhat heartbreaking to see that we gave money to Gaza to build all the infrastructure and hospitals that Israel is bombing. Of course, we gave Israel the money they used to bomb and destroy the infrastructure we helped build.
We should question our military assistance in Israel. But we should also question our military spending to all the countries in the region.
We cannot expect peace in the Middle East when we sell weapons to all sides of the conflict. The only people who benefit from that crazy mess are the weapons manufacturers who profit when the United States gives money so other countries can buy weapons from United States weapons manufacturers.
I respect the students protesting what is happening in Gaza. But I would ask them to look further and consider disinvesting in more weapons manufacturers - not just those who supply weapons to Israel. Because those same manufacturers profit by selling weapons to Arab countries.
I'll conclude by repeating some statements I made on twitter:
1) What Hamas did was horrific.
2) What Israel is currently doing in Gaza is horrific.
3) Because of the Holocaust, the United States must support Israel's security as a nation state and support its right to exist.
4) The United States made the complicated situation in the Mideast much worse because of our need for oil from Arab countries.
When I lived in Minneapolis, I had a few "problems" because I stood in solidarity with Muslim Somali-Americans. But I also stand in solidarity with Jewish people and the country of Israel. That does not mean I approve of what the Israeli Military is doing or that I approve of the current right wing government in Israel. But I also grew up learning about the Holocaust and the genocide of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.
Namaste.