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But as Peter Beinart, a former editor of this magazine, pointed out in a 2019 essay for The Forward, Bush’s imposition of limits on Israel was no departure. Throughout the Cold War, presidents we “think of as pro-Israel routinely used American aid to influence Israeli policy.” When Israel, during the Suez crisis, considered annexing Egyptian territory, President Dwight Eisenhower compelled its retreat by threatening to cut off all U.S. aid. Two decades later, President Gerald Ford compelled another retreat, this time from a portion of Sinai, by backing up Biden-like language (a “reassessment” of “our relations with Israel”) with a muscular holdup of aid. Jimmy Carter threatened a cutoff of arms shipments unless Israel stopped using American armored personnel carriers in Lebanon, and Ronald Reagan interrupted for six years the sale of cluster bombs because Israel was using them in Lebanon.

Since 1992, though, even presidents who’ve been very critical of Netanyahu, like Barack Obama, have been bullied by the Israeli lobby out of placing any limits on how Israel spends the nearly four billion American tax dollars it receives every year. But the bogeyman of the American Israel Political Action Committee, or AIPAC, has always been less fearsome than generally thought, and though it continues to be well funded, its influence over Congress has lately diminished. A Democratic letter circulating on Capitol Hill last week calling on Biden to halt weapons transfers was signed, yes, by Squad members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib—but it was also signed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Even Biden showed himself willing to impose limits of a sort in December when he blocked the sale of 20,000 assault rifles to Israel for fear they’d be used by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank; such attacks have doubled since October 7. The sky did not fall. And speaking of the sky, any suspension of weapons shipments would not affect the $500 million that the U.S. contributes annually to Israel’s Iron Dome and other defensive antimissile systems because that would require an act of Congress that Biden couldn’t swing even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. Maintaining support for purely defensive systems is a necessary bulwark against violent attacks from Iran’s proxies in the region, including Hamas.