WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – Zionist prime minister Naftali Bennett thanked U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday after the House of Representatives approved $1bn to support the Zionist regime’s so-called Iron Dome missile system.
The supplemental funding was included in a $1.5 trillion Omnibus Appropriations Agreement that was passed by the House, agreed by lawmakers scrambling to avert a government shutdown.
The massive 2,741-page appropriations agreement also gave the regime $3.8bn in annual military assistance in keeping with a 10 year Memorandum of Understanding between the two allies.
“Thank you to the U.S. Congress for your overwhelming commitment to Israel’s security & for passing the critical security package,” Bennett said in a tweet on Thursday.
Benny Gantz, the occupying regime’s war minister, also thanked Biden and House majority leader Steny Hoyer for helping maintain what he called the regime’s “military superiority in the region”.
The bill also included the Zionist regime’s Normalization Act, which aims to promote the so-called Abraham Accords that the regime has signed with a number of Arab countries, which Palestinians have slammed as traitors.
Critics say that funding for the regime’s Iron Dome system amounts to funding for a “brutal occupation.”
“Why are U.S. taxpayers still subsidizing the region’s … only nuclear power?” Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, wrote in a tweet.
“What happened to Israel ‘defending itself by itself’?” he asked.
In an article published last September, Elgindy also debunked the claim that the Iron Dome had saved Palestinian lives, saying “while Iron Dome may have saved Israeli lives, there is no evidence that it has done anything to save Palestinian lives or minimize the scale of destruction on the Palestinian side — and it may actually have done the opposite.”
The funding for the occupying regime’s Iron Dome had faced strong opposition from progressive House Democrats, who cited the regime’s human rights abuses against Palestinians to object to the provision of $1 billion in Iron Dome funding in the funding bill.
Jewish Voice for Peace Action, a progressive activist organization, said at the time that “it is long past time for the U.S. to end the bloated blank check that funds and enables Israel’s human rights abuses.”
Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have in the past denounced the U.S. funding for the system, citing the regime’s continued aggression against Palestinians.