What Israel Urgently Needs for Its 76th Birthday

The Jewish state must achieve true independence, especially from the United States of America.

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/israel-independence-day-2024

---

Today is Israel’s Independence Day, and the day is usually filled with great celebrations across the country, just 24 hours after honoring Memorial Day.

Yet on the 76th anniversary of its independence, the State of Israel does not feel all that independent.

For one thing, the Jewish state is far too dependent on the United States for military aid.

While this fairy tale version of the U.S.-Israeli relationship is useful for surface-level arguments to prove America’s “ironclad” support for Israel, it demonstrates an increasingly twisted reality, in which Israel ends up yielding far more value than it receives from the U.S.

This is because almost all military aid to Israel — other than loan guarantees — is comprised of credits that go directly from the Pentagon to U.S. weapons manufacturers.

In return, this U.S. aid undermines Israel’s domestic defense industry, weakens its economy, and compromises the country’s autonomy — giving Washington, D.C. serious leverage over Israel’s diplomatic and military strategies, which is what we have been witnessing on full display since October 7th.

Formal U.S. military aid to Israel, as opposed to loans and cash-on-delivery arms sales, started in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter’s administration offered it to persuade Israel to agree to withdraw from all of Sinai as part of a peace deal with Egypt.

The same deal provided a comparable sum of U.S. military aid and arms to Egypt, for many years the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign military financing after Israel. Interestingly, the aid to Egypt was offered even though the Egyptians displayed zero capacity to deploy military force beyond their own borders — perhaps the aim being to achieve a form of U.S.-brokered parity between Israel and Egypt.

In 2016, just before he left office, then-U.S. President Barack Obama signed the largest aid package in history, committing the U.S. to send Israel $38 billion over a decade starting in 2018 — despite the fact that his two administrations had just spent the previous eight years tarnishing the U.S.-Israeli relationship to the point of spying on pro-Israel members of Congress.

Obama effectively wanted to silence his critics and show that he was a staunch supporter of Israel, even as he was laying the foundation for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s beyond oppressive regime to develop nuclear weapons — which the Iranians could very well use to fulfill their promise to “wipe the Zionist entity off the map.” Obama’s adversary Netanyahu even thanked the U.S. president for this “historic deal.”

In reality, Obama talked the talk about Israeli fears while limiting future Israeli actions, in line with a new American strategic blueprint whereby the interests of traditional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia would be “balanced” with those of Iran, their archnemesis.

This is precisely what we are seeing today: Iran launched a war via Hamas against Israel to halt Israeli-Saudi normalization, and now the U.S. is holding Israel back militarily and diplomatically from dealing a knockout blow to one of Iran’s tentacles (Hamas).

When President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken warn about the dangers of a major Israeli operation in Rafah that would cripple Hamas’ stranglehold on Gaza, they are using “Palestinian civilians” as a smoke screen for the reality that they secretly want Hamas to remain in power in Gaza (and eventually the West Bank) because this is what the Iranian regime wants, notwithstanding their Qatari friends with benefits.

Hence why Biden keeps saying that he wants Israel to be more “precise” in its attacks — yet his administration is withholding precision-guided munitions that would reduce civilian casualties and, at the same time, more quickly eliminate Hamas’ fighters and infrastructure.

All this as America walks around calling Israel its “best friend” and uses empty clichés like, “Sometimes best friends need to tell each other harsh truths.” To be certain, countries are not “best friends” in the same way that you and I can be best friends, and anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea of how the world actually works.

When one country refers to another as its “best friend,” they are really saying that there is a profound economic relationship between the two countries. In the case of Israel and the United States, Obama’s aid package purchased both diplomatic and military influence over Israel, as well as the approval of many Jewish Americans and Jewish American organizations.

Even one well-known regional expert, who served in high security-related positions in the U.S. government, admitted as such, saying: “Aid to Israel is the biggest bargain we have on our books. Ending it would be a disaster for us.”¹

As the price of its dependency, Israel is now being forced to downgrade its own defense industries, since the new terms require that all aid received from Washington, D.C. be spent inside the U.S. In 2018, Israel’s Defense Ministry projected that the new agreement would cost the country $1.3 billion annually in lost revenue and cause the loss of some 22,000 jobs.

Moshe Gafni, a former chairman of the Israeli legislature’s financial committee, warned of the deal’s “severe ramifications for the delicate fabric of the State of Israel, harming its security.” A separate assessment in 2020 by an Israeli think tank concluded that “anywhere between several thousand and 20,000 of the 80,000 jobs in the defense industries in Israel will be lost.”²

Israel has also become dangerously reliant on U.S. military technology. The result of this enforced dependency, according to retired IDF Major General Gershon Hacohen, is stunting the IDF.

“Israel is so addicted to advanced U.S. platforms, and the U.S. weaponry they deliver, that we’ve stopped thinking creatively in terms of operational concepts,” he said in 2016 — two years before the new agreement went into effect.³

In Israeli culture, there is the predominance of “frier” mentality — being a “sucker” essentially — and thus one man’s bargain is the other side that got screwed in a deal. Right now the U.S. is badly screwing Israel with the current military aid package, which runs through 2028.

“The alternative to this unequal relationship based on dependence is a more forthrightly transactional relationship, which would allow Israel to benefit economically, diplomatically, and strategically,” wrote columnists Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz. “It might also, we believe, diminish the current American infatuation with treating the Jewish state as a moral allegory in U.S. political psychodramas, rather than as a tiny country in the Middle East with its own local challenges and considerable advantages to offer the highest bidder.”⁴

It goes without being said that the U.S.-Israeli military alliance, intelligence sharing, bilateral trade, and other mutual affinities between the countries should remain intact. But giving Israel more independence with regard to military aid would be far greater for Israel and ultimately the Jewish People, and it would challenge the U.S. to be a better, more accountable partner both to Israel and its other allies.

Or, in the words of retired General Hacohen: “Once we are not economically dependent on them, the partnership can flourish on its own merits.”

These lack of merits have been especially felt during this Israel-Hamas war, as the interests of Biden’s administration and Israel have become increasingly disjointed and unaligned.

More than seven months into the Israel-Hamas war, the Biden administration’s top priority is to secure a hostage deal, which sounds stupendous on the surface. This would create a weeks-long truce, but Washington’s goal is for that pause to be turned permanent. What appears less clear, though, is how pushing for this ceasefire squares with Israel’s justifiable goal of eliminating the threat of Hamas in Gaza.

There is an international effort to support the re-deployment of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces in the Gaza Strip, to effectively replace Hamas, yet the Palestinian Authority is the weakest since its founding 30 years ago, especially in the eyes of Palestinians who are beyond fed up with its corruption and mismanagement.

And I am old enough to remember when Hamas violently excommunicated the Palestinian Authority from Gaza as the former rose to power in 2006, murdering political opponents and refusing to hold elections since then.

While much of the post-war Gaza plan is still being crafted, stakeholders have been clear that it will be conditioned on Israel agreeing to a time-bound pathway to a Palestinian state — a sort of “land for (fake) peace” arrangement that much of the Israeli public has had enough of, after several unfruitful attempts at a true, lasting peace prior, largely from the Palestinian side.

In the meantime, the U.S. appears to be laying the groundwork for declaring that Israel has already weakened Hamas sufficiently to justify an end to the war — and the Biden administration has been withholding weapons shipments to stake its claim, even though only the Israelis (and not the Americans) will have to live with whatever consequences arise from the decision to downgrade, instead of defeat, Hamas in Gaza.

As Israel unglamorously commemorates its 76th birthday, the Jewish state would be wise to think long and hard about how it will not be pigeon-holed in this low-leverage situation again.

---

1. “End U.S. Aid to Israel.” Tablet.

2. “Israel’s Defense Industry and US Security Aid.” INSS.

3. “Ex-Israeli General: US Aid Harms and Corrupts.” Defense News.

4. “End U.S. Aid to Israel.” Tablet.