Yes, to aid to Ukraine and Israel

No, to aid to Gaza and illegal immigrants

The editors of the Washington Post argue that the case for aid to Ukraine and Israel is strong. I agree. But the cases are separate and therefore the two aid packages should be voted on separately.

The Post’s editors cite commonalities in the cases for aiding Ukraine and Israel. Such commonalities exist. But that’s no excuse for lumping the aid packages together. One can support aid to Israel and oppose aid to Ukraine — as many members of Congress do. It’s also possible to support aid to Ukraine and oppose it for Israel.

If there isn’t enough popular support for aiding Ukraine to bring about passage of a standalone aid bill, then throwing in an Israeli aid package to win more votes for assisting Ukraine seems like an end-run around democracy.

Accordingly, I think it’s wrong to lump these two separate packages together. Nonetheless, because I strongly favor aid to both Israel and Ukraine, I would vote for a bill that lumped them together.

It wouldn’t bother me if that bill provided far more aid to Ukraine than to Israel, as Joe Biden’s $100 billion aid package does (by a factor of more than four). Ukraine is in a sustained war with the massive military of a huge state. Israel faces neither comparably formidable opponents nor the prospect of fighting them non-stop for years.

Nor should it matter that Ukraine’s government is corrupt. All governments are corrupt, including ours. Ukraine’s is more corrupt than most European democracies, but so what?

The test for aiding a nation being attacked unjustly by an adversary of America shouldn’t be whether the government of the nation under attack is corrupt. It should be whether it’s in our interest to back that nation. If it is, as I believe, then corruption is irrelevant. If it isn’t, corruption is a make-weight argument — and a poor excuse.

But shouldn’t nations we aid be “accountable” for the money we provide? Yes. But accountability in this context shouldn’t mean folks with eye-shades pouring over accounts. Accountability should be viewed in terms of the bang we’re getting for our bucks.

In the case of Ukraine, we’re getting an enormous bang. Thanks in part to our assistance and that of other NATO countries, Ukraine has fought off a massive invasion that nearly everyone believed would succeed. Ukraine is regaining lost territory and, more importantly from a U.S. perspective, degrading the military of an adversary (and in my view, enemy) of America while humiliating that enemy’s president.

That’s money very well spent. I doubt there are many items of comparable magnitude in the budget that are yielding as good a return.

Finally, the fact that some of the Ukraine aid money in Biden’s package would be for non-military use — e.g. to pay pensions for retired government workers— isn’t a deal-breaker for me. Ukraine needs to hold its civil society together during this war and money is fungible anyway — whether in Ukraine or Iran.

But this doesn’t mean I support Biden’s $100 billion aid package. I don’t.

The problem is that the package goes beyond aiding Israel and Ukraine. As Sen. Tom Cotton points out, the package includes $3.5 billion to address the “potential needs of Gazans.” This money has more than just the potential to end up addressing the needs of Hamas.

And by the way, anyone who believes that Gaza residents don’t support Hamas’ terrorism should watch the rabid anti-Israel demonstrations taking place around the world. If Palestinian ex-pats and their descendants hate Israel this much, imagine how most of those who live in the hell hole of Gaza in a rabidly Israel and Jew-hating environment must feel.

Cotton also objects that Biden’s package includes $4.7 billion for housing, transportation, and “services” for illegal immigrants in the United States. Illegal immigrants who need housing, transportation, and services should be deported, not housed and transported within the U.S.. Congress shouldn’t allocate more taxpayer dollars to support their stay here.

Cotton says Biden’s package is “dead on arrival” in the Senate — and it deserves to be. However, I hope Congress finds a way to provide aid to Israel and Ukraine in something like the amounts ($60 billion and $14 billion, respectively) in the Biden package.