As devastating natural disasters cause mass destruction across the southeastern United States, politicians and leaders are more concerned with arming Israel to the teeth than preparing and rebuilding their own communities.
An aerial view of damaged houses are seen after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Horseshoe Beach, Florida, on September 28, 2024. (Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)
Last week, Hurricane Helene battered the southeastern United States after the storm ravaged the Caribbean and parts of Central America. Making first landfall in the Florida panhandle before raging across another eleven states, the hurricane caused extreme levels of devastation as it tore through Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia with torrential rainfall that caused major flooding.
With upward of 230 confirmed deaths and many still unaccounted for, including workers at a Tennessee plastic factory who were forced to work through the hurricane, the damage and loss from Helene has made it one of the deadliest hurricanes of the century in the United States. As if Helene’s devastation weren’t enough, another similarly powerful storm, Hurricane Milton, is currently barreling down a similar path.
Yet on the same day that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced a $9 billion shortfall in funding desperately needed to address the damages from Helene, Israel publicized that it had secured another $8.7 billion aid package from the United States to “significantly strengthen critical systems such as [the] Iron Dome and David’s Sling while supporting the continued development of an advanced high-powered laser defense system.” This latest aid package does not include the nearly $18 billion provided to Israel in military aid since October 2023, on top of the additional $20 billion that was approved this August.
It was not until October, amid fierce backlash, that the government announced a onetime assistance package of $750 to victims of Helene, a meager amount for victims and survivors relative to the losses they have incurred.
On that same eventful Thursday, the Tennessee National Guard stated that it will be sending more than seven hundred soldiers to the Middle East in the coming days as part of a yearlong task force deployment to the region while the state suffered from unprecedented levels of devastation, a move that has caused widespread anger. In addition to the troop deployment in the Middle East, which will bring the total known number of US soldiers in the region to around 43,000, “squadrons of F-15E, F-16, and F-22 fighter jets and A-10 attack aircraft” will be sent to “double the airpower on hand” in a clear act of dangerous escalation in the region.
Rather than concentrating its resources and efforts on rescuing lives at home and aid in the reconstruction of the areas most impacted by this natural disaster, the US government’s priority is to support the Israeli government in its ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the expansion of maximal civilian destruction into Lebanon. The policy failures exposed during the current hurricane response are a stark reminder of when George W. Bush’s administration expanded funding for the invasion of Iraq, yet wouldn’t protect its own citizens suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham — whose state suffered massive human and infrastructural losses — drove this point further on Fox News. Speaking to Sean Hannity on October 3, the senator spared no opportunity to blame the government’s terrible response to the hurricane on the usual right-wing scapegoats: immigrants and the port workers who went on strike days before the crisis the southeast faces.
Then Senator Graham shifted the conversation on South Carolina mid-sentence to highlight the need to send more weapons to Israel and Ukraine:
But look what’s [sic] going on in Israel. Our friends in Israel are surrounded by people that want to kill them, destroy them, a second holocaust in the making. . . . They’re running out of ammunition in Israel. We have to help our friends to keep the war over there from coming here. . . . They have been slow-walking weapons in Ukraine. Ukrainians have been doing all the fighting. The border is broken; they care more about illegal immigrants, it seems to be. And this needs to stop.
Similar statements were made by Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn, who took time off from blaming the catastrophic response to the natural disaster in her home state on “illegal aliens” to tweet about the death of eight Israeli soldiers invading Lebanon, recycling the incessant call from US politicians to “fully support Israel’s right to defend itself.” Arming proxies and pariah states like Israel to fight America’s bloody forever wars abroad is of greater importance to the political establishment than supporting its own people at home — even during times of great crisis and mass suffering.
The government’s prime concerns over supporting Israel were reaffirmed at the highest level when President Joe Biden dedicated his opening remarks during an Interagency Briefing on Response to Hurricane Helene on October 1 to defending Israel, with the president affirming that the “United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel.”
While the United States arms and funds Israel’s extermination campaigns and regional wars, its own citizens at home suffer the immense toll of climate-induced natural disasters. As bodies continue to be recovered and the costs of the hurricane only rise, sending weapons to Israel also guarantees more death and destruction across Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and potentially Iran.
The cycle of death on both fronts can be put to an end by imposing an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel and redistributing those resources to safeguard communities most impacted by and most vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters. With another historic Category 5 hurricane set to strike in the coming days parts of the Florida Peninsula that are still reeling from Helene, the need to address the ongoing climate catastrophe by investing in the preservation of life over profiteering from death is dire. As Jewish Voice for Peace remarked on X/Twitter, “Every dollar that the US spends on genocide in Palestine cannot be used to protect our own communities.”