Sen. Chris Murphy: ‘I Do Support’ Biden’s Decision to Withhold Military Aid to Israel

BASH: “But this week he put conditions on U.S. aid to Israel for the first time. Is he isolating himself from both sides of the Middle East debate? Here with me now to discuss that is Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a critic of the way Israel has been carrying out its war in Gaza. Thank you so much for being here. Do you support what President Biden told Erin Burnett, that he is blocking some military aid to Israel and won’t support them, will block more if in fact Israel goes into Rafah more aggressively?”
MURPHY: “I do support President Biden’s decision, and let me tell you why. President Biden is learning the mistakes of U.S. military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. What we learned in both of those efforts was that you cannot defeat a terrorist ideology, you cannot defeat a terrorist movement with military force alone. In Afghanistan, we spent 20 years there. And, ultimately, we were so cavalier about civilian casualties that we made the Taliban stronger and we ultimately lost that engagement to the Taliban. And so, in Israel, what Joe Biden is telling the Israelis is, ‘We will be partners with you, but you have to understand that the pace of civilian casualties, the amount of humanitarian disaster there is in the long run going to make Hamas stronger, is going to make it more likely that Israel will be attacked again, and is going to make other terrorist organizations that have designs to attack the United States stronger. So we will be partners in this fight, but in the situation of Rafah, we cannot have a military invasion of Rafah that ends up in tens of thousands of additional civilians dying. That would be bad for Israel from a moral and a strategic standpoint.”