Senate Kills Measure to Scrutinize Israeli Human Rights Record as Condition for Aid
Sen. Bernie Sanders forced a vote on the resolution, which would have opened the door for Congress to freeze U.S. aid to Israel.
Prem Thakker
January 16 2024, 8:54 p.m.
On Tuesday, the Senate voted down a resolution that would have set the stage for Congress to place conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel — quashing what has so far been the most serious effort on Capitol Hill to hold the U.S. ally to account for its brutal assault on Gaza.
Introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in December, the resolution would have required the State Department to submit a report to Congress about allegations of Israel committing human rights violations, and whether and how the U.S. played a role and responded to such acts. If the bill had passed and the State Department failed to submit the report within 30 days, U.S. aid to Israel would have been frozen. If the State Department had submitted a report to Congress, however, U.S. aid to Israel could have come to a vote, giving Congress the option to condition, restrict, or terminate security assistance to Israel (or to do nothing at all). Such votes would have required only a simple majority for passage.
When it came to a vote Tuesday evening, the Senate voted 72-11 to table the resolution, effectively killing it.
“It’s frankly historic that this vote took place at all,” said Andrew O’Neill, the legislative director for the political advocacy group Indivisible. “The number of senators willing to take a vote like this even weeks ago, on the face of it, would have been zero.”
DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA - NOVEMBER 7: Civil defense teams and citizens continue search and rescue operations after an airstrike hits the building belonging to the Maslah family during the 32nd day of Israeli attacks in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza on November 7, 2023. (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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Israel’s War on Gaza
Israel receives billions of dollars per year in U.S. aid, making it the largest recipient of American security assistance in the world. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve an additional $14 billion in aid to the country, whose retaliatory war on Gaza has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians.
Sanders’s resolution was based on the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits the American government from providing security assistance to any government “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Section 502B(c) of the law empowers Congress to request information on a country’s human rights practices, which Sanders took advantage of to force this vote.
“The Senators who lent their support to this resolution did so in spite of enormous political pressure,” O’Neill said, noting that, for decades, there has been a bipartisan status quo of not scrutinizing assistance to Israel. “The 502B process had never been used before, and now that tool is on the table. These are lonely votes, but votes that can be the start of something bigger.”
The votes in support for Sanders’s resolution came almost entirely from Democratic senators: Laphonza Butler of California, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and Peter Welch of Vermont. Rand Paul was the only Republican to vote against tabling the resolution.
Van Hollen told The Intercept that it’s important for the Senate to get the information required by the proposed report. “That’s important for transparency and I think taxpayers have a right to know how their funds are being used.”
Speaking with reporters ahead of the vote, Warren said, “Prime Minister Netanyahu needs to understand that he does not get a blank check from the United States Congress.”
She continued: “The Senate has had a role in overseeing our military involvement overseas running back to the drafting of the Constitution. We have a responsibility to stand up now and say that given how Netanyahu and his right-wing war cabinet have prosecuted this war, we have serious questions that we are obligated to ask before we go further.”
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Some Democratic senators who voted to kill the resolution told The Intercept they were concerned about Israeli human rights abuses, but they did not think Sanders’s proposal was the way to address them. Others, mostly Republicans, deflected from questions about Israel’s conduct during the war.
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said he was opposed to the resolution because the timeline for potential congressional action would have conflicted with the aims of Israel’s war. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to be conditioning a military campaign engaged in by an ally,” he said. He added that “there’s no question if there are allegations, they will be the subject of scrutiny and review,” but said he doesn’t think the resolution is the right approach.
Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., explained his opposition to the resolution by pointing out that 502B(c) has never been used in its 50-year history, and that he prefers a measureOpens in a new tab introduced by Van Hollen. That amendment would require weapons received by any country under Biden’s proposal for supplemental aid to Israel and Ukraine to be used in accordance with U.S. law, international humanitarian law, and the law of armed conflict.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who has a record of scrutinizing human rights abuses by U.S. allies, voted against the resolution. He told The Intercept that he supports Israel’s right to defend itself and that he has deep reservations about the way it has conducted its campaign, but he doesn’t support measures “potentially designed to cut off funding for Israel.” The resolution, he said, is a vehicle toward completely cutting off aid to Israel. “I don’t think that’s the right move for Congress at this time,” he said.
Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., told The Intercept that he is “sensitive” to the allegations of human rights abuses by Israel, and that he understands Sanders’s sensitivity to “trying to keep the collateral damage down, and I think everybody would be for that.” Still, he said, he opposed the resolution “because I think it then draws attention away from how it started, and how it has to be litigated, and that’s not easy,” referring to Hamas’s attack on October 7 and Israel’s stated aim of rooting out the organization.
Asked if he thought Israel was doing enough to mitigate civilian casualties, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told The Intercept that “they need to kill every Hamas member and anybody that dies in Gaza is a result of Hamas.” He voted against the resolution.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., referred to Hamas’s attack on Israel as he explained his opposition to the resolution. “To give them respite would be to allow them to do it again,” he told The Intercept. When asked whether Israel is doing enough to protect civilians, Cassidy repeated a frequent Israeli government talking point about Hamas, saying that “when you build your tunnels with your commanders beneath mosques, hospitals, and schools, then you have created an environment where it’s difficult to prevent civilian injury.”
On his way to vote against the resolution, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Intercept that he has been consistent with his position on the issue. “Of course it does,” he said when asked if he’s concerned about the number of casualties in Gaza. Asked if Israel is doing enough to mitigate the casualties, he responded simply: “Good talking to you,” as the Senate elevator doors closed.
23andMe is not doing well. Its stock is on the verge of being delisted. It shut down its in-house drug-development unit last month, only the latest in several rounds of layoffs. Last week, the entire board of directors quit, save for Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder and the company’s CEO. Amid this downward spiral, Wojcicki has said she’ll consider selling 23andMe—which means the DNA of 23andMe’s 15 million customers would be up for sale, too.
23andMe’s trove of genetic data might be its most valuable asset. For about two decades now, since human-genome analysis became quick and common, the A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s of DNA have allowed long-lost relatives to connect, revealed family secrets, and helped police catch serial killers. Some people’s genomes contain clues to what’s making them sick, or even, occasionally, how their disease should be treated. For most of us, though, consumer tests don’t have much to offer beyond a snapshot of our ancestors’ roots and confirmation of the traits we already know about. (Yes, 23andMe, my eyes are blue.) 23andMe is floundering in part because it hasn’t managed to prove the value of collecting all that sensitive, personal information. And potential buyers may have very different ideas about how to use the company’s DNA data to raise the company’s bottom line. This should concern anyone who has used the service.
DNA might contain health information, but unlike a doctor’s office, 23andMe is not bound by the health-privacy law HIPAA. And the company’s privacy policies make clear that in the event of a merger or an acquisition, customer information is a salable asset. 23andMe promises to ask its customers’ permission before using their data for research or targeted advertising, but that doesn’t mean the next boss will do the same. It says so right there in the fine print: The company reserves the right to update its policies at any time. A spokesperson acknowledged to me this week that the company can’t fully guarantee the sanctity of customer data, but said in a statement that “any scenario which impacts our customer's data would need to be carefully considered. We take the privacy and trust of our customers very seriously, and would strive to maintain commitments outlined in our Privacy Statement.”
Certain parties might take an obvious interest in the secrets of Americans’ genomes. Insurers, for example, would probably like to know about any genetic predispositions that might make you more expensive to them. In the United States, a 2008 law called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act protects against discrimination by employers and health insurers on the basis of genetic data, but gaps in it exempt providers of life, disability, and long-term-care insurance from such restrictions. That means that if you have, say, a genetic marker that can be correlated with a heart condition, a life insurer could find that out and legally deny you a policy—even if you never actually develop that condition. Law-enforcement agencies rely on DNA data to solve many difficult cases, and although 23andMe says it requires a warrant to share data, some other companies have granted broad access to police. You don’t have to commit a crime to be affected: Because we share large chunks of our genome with relatives, your DNA could be used to implicate a close family member or even a third cousin whom you’ve never met. Information about your ethnicity can also be sensitive, and that’s encoded in your genome, too. That’s all part of why, in 2020, the U.S. military advised its personnel against using consumer tests.
Read: Big Pharma would like your DNA
Spelling out all the potential consequences of an unknown party accessing your DNA is impossible, because scientists’ understanding of the genome is still evolving. Imagine drugmakers trolling your genome to find out what ailments you’re at risk for and then targeting you with ads for drugs to treat them. “There’s a lot of ways that this data might be misused or used in a way that the consumers couldn’t anticipate when they first bought 23andMe,” Suzanne Bernstein, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told me. And unlike a password that can be changed after it leaks, once your DNA is out in the wild, it’s out there for good.
Some states, such as California, give consumers additional genetic-privacy rights and might allow DNA data to be deleted ahead of a sale. The 23andMe spokesperson told me that “customers have the ability to download their data and delete their personal accounts.” Companies are also required to notify customers of any changes to terms of service and give them a chance to opt out, though typically such changes take effect automatically after a certain amount of time, whether or not you’ve read through the fine print.
Consumers have assumed this risk without getting much in return. When the first draft of the human genome was unveiled, it was billed as a panacea, hiding within its code secrets that would help each and every one of us unlock a personalized health plan. But most diseases, it turns out, can't be pinned on a single gene. And most people have a boring genome, free of red-flag mutations, which means DNA data just aren’t that useful to them—at least not in this form. And if a DNA test reveals elevated risk for a more common health condition, such as diabetes and heart disease, you probably already know the interventions: eating well, exercising often, getting a solid eight hours of sleep. (To an insurer, though, even a modicum of risk might make someone an unattractive candidate for coverage.) That’s likely a big part of why 23andMe’s sales have slipped. There are only so many people who want to know about their Swedish ancestry, and that, it turns out, is consumer DNA testing’s biggest sell.
Read: DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest
Wojcicki has pulled 23andMe back from the brink before, after the Food and Drug Administration ordered the company to stop selling its health tests in 2013 until they could be proved safe and effective. In recent months, Wojcicki has explored a variety of options to save the company, including splitting it to separate the cash-burning drug business from the consumer side. Wojcicki has still expressed interest in trying to take the company private herself, but the board rejected her initial offer. 23andMe has until November 4 to raise its shares to at least $1, or be delisted. As that date approaches, a sale looks more and more likely—whether to Wojcicki or someone else.
The risk of DNA data being misused has existed since DNA tests first became available. When customers opt in to participate in drug-development research, third parties already get access to their de-identified DNA data, which can in some cases be linked back to people’s identities after all. Plus, 23andMe has failed to protect its customers’ information in the past—it just agreed to pay $30 million to settle a lawsuit resulting from an October 2023 data breach. But for nearly two decades, the company had an incentive to keep its customers’ data private: 23andMe is a consumer-facing business, and to sell kits, it also needed to win trust. Whoever buys the company’s data may not operate under the same constraints.