They say Israel is a liability for America. History suggests otherwise.
The conversation almost always turns to a single number: The United States currently provides Israel roughly $3.8 billion annually — but the strategic relationship is far larger.
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This is a guest essay by Matt Field, who writes the newsletter, “That Jew.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
History has a way of revealing the true value of alliances long after the arguments about them have faded.
In recent months, as tensions with Iran have escalated, a familiar claim has resurfaced in public debate: that the United States acts primarily because of Israel, and that the alliance benefits only one side.
The historical record tells a more complicated story.
On a June evening in 1981, eight Israeli fighter jets flew across hostile airspace and destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor before it could become operational. At the time, the strike was widely condemned. The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 487 criticizing the attack, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s administration publicly rebuked Israel and temporarily suspended delivery of F-16 fighter jets.
But 10 years later, when American forces fought Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, U.S. defense officials looked back on the strike differently. Former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney later sent Israeli Air Force commander David Ivry a signed satellite photo thanking him for the “outstanding job” on Iraq’s nuclear program, writing that the operation had made the coalition’s task during Desert Storm easier.
What had looked to many observers like a reckless Israeli action turned out, in hindsight, to have removed a threat the United States might otherwise have confronted under far worse circumstances. And it was not the first time the alliance between the United States and Israel produced strategic benefits that became clear only years later.
The Osirak strike was not an isolated episode. Israel has often encountered threats years before they became crises for the West. That pattern can be traced back to the Cold War.
During the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel fought armies heavily armed and trained by the Soviet Union. Egyptian and Syrian forces operated Soviet radar systems, surface-to-air missile batteries, MiG fighter aircraft, and other advanced equipment designed to counter Western technology. When Israeli forces defeated those armies, they captured large quantities of that equipment intact.
Rather than destroy it, Israel quietly shared access to some of those systems with the United States. American defense planners were suddenly able to examine Soviet military technology directly instead of studying it from afar. Of course, the insights proved valuable. Engineers and intelligence analysts gained information about radar systems, missile guidance technologies, and electronic warfare capabilities during one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.
A year before the Six-Day War, another remarkable episode unfolded. In 1966, an Iraqi pilot named Munir Redfa defected to Israel with his Soviet-built MiG-21 fighter jet. At the time the aircraft was the backbone of Soviet-aligned air forces across much of the world. Western analysts had studied the MiG-21 for years but had never examined one up close. Now an intact aircraft sat on an Israeli air base.
Israel later allowed the United States to evaluate the aircraft through a classified program known as “Have Doughnut.” American pilots and engineers studied its performance and limitations at a time when U.S. forces were encountering Soviet-designed aircraft in Vietnam. Long before foreign aid to Israel became a political talking point, the alliance was already producing concrete intelligence and military advantages for the United States.
Great powers rarely face the world alone.
Throughout modern history, the United States has relied on alliances to extend its reach, gather intelligence, and deter adversaries without carrying the full burden of every conflict by itself. American partnerships in Europe and Asia, from NATO to security arrangements with countries such as Japan and South Korea, are built on the same logic.
Strong allies share risks, confront threats early, and provide capabilities that the United States would otherwise have to deploy on its own. Seen in that context, the partnership between the United States and Israel is not unusual. What is unusual is how often the strategic value of the alliance becomes fully visible only with time.
This principle can be seen in other parts of the world as well. In recent years the United States and its allies have supported Ukraine in resisting Russian aggression partly because doing so strengthens European security without requiring direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia. Supporting capable partners who confront threats early can reduce the likelihood that those threats eventually demand a much larger response.
The destruction of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 was one example of this dynamic. It was not the last.
In September 2007, Israeli aircraft carried out another strike deep inside hostile territory. The target was a covert nuclear reactor under construction in Syria at a remote desert site known as Al-Kibar. Intelligence later revealed that the facility had been built with assistance from North Korea and was nearing operational capability. The strike destroyed the reactor before it could become active.
At the time, the operation received relatively little international attention. But years later investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that the destroyed building had very likely been a nuclear reactor that should have been declared under international safeguards.
The significance of that strike became even clearer as events unfolded.
Beginning in 2011, Syria descended into a catastrophic civil war that fractured the country and produced one of the most volatile conflict zones in the world. Militias, extremist groups, and foreign powers became entangled in the fighting. Had that reactor survived long enough to become operational, the Middle East might have faced the prospect of nuclear infrastructure sitting in the middle of a collapsing state.
In both Iraq and Syria, Israel acted against emerging nuclear programs years before those threats matured into broader crises. Threats that appear regional in the Middle East rarely remain regional for long.
The pattern continued in the struggle against Iran.
In early 2018, Israeli intelligence agents carried out one of the most remarkable espionage operations in recent history.
Inside a warehouse district in Tehran, Iranian authorities had stored thousands of documents related to their nuclear weapons research. Over the course of a single night, Israeli operatives broke into the facility and removed tens of thousands of pages of documents along with a vast digital archive. The material provided Western analysts with unprecedented insight into Iran’s past nuclear weapons work and the structure of the country’s weapons development program.
The episode illustrated another dimension of the alliance. Israel operates close to Iranian networks, Hezbollah operatives, and other regional actors that Western intelligence services often struggle to penetrate directly. Information gathered in those environments frequently becomes part of a broader intelligence relationship that benefits the United States and its partners.
Geography helps explain why this pattern appears so often.
Israel sits at the intersection of several of the most volatile fault lines in modern geopolitics. To its north in Lebanon lies Hezbollah, one of the most heavily armed non-state actors in the world. To its northeast, Syria remains fractured after years of civil war. Across the region operates Iran’s network of militias and proxy forces stretching from Lebanon, through Iraq and Syria, to Yemen.
In this environment, Israel frequently encounters emerging threats before they reach the broader Western security agenda, but the alliance is not only about intelligence and military strikes; it also involves technological cooperation.
Over the past decade, Israeli missile defense systems such as Iron Dome have intercepted thousands of rockets fired toward civilian areas. Those interceptions generate valuable operational data on radar tracking, missile trajectories, and interception techniques.
The United States and Israel jointly fund and develop several missile defense systems, including Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and the Arrow system. These programs are not simply transfers of American assistance. They represent cooperative defense development that produces technology, research, and operational knowledge used by both countries.
Yet when the U.S.–Israel relationship is debated publicly, these decades of strategic cooperation are rarely the focus. The conversation almost always turns to a single number: The United States currently provides Israel roughly $3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing, along with approximately $500 million for cooperative missile defense programs.
Presented without context, the figure can sound enormous. In reality, it represents a very small share of U.S. federal spending. Much of the funding must also be spent on American-manufactured defense equipment. Seen in this broader context, the assistance provided to Israel looks less like a one-sided subsidy and more like a component of a long-standing strategic partnership.
In moments of geopolitical tension another claim often appears alongside debates about aid: the suggestion that Israel somehow controls American policy or drags the United States into conflicts against its will.
History offers a simpler explanation: The United States and Israel frequently act in parallel because they face many of the same adversaries and security threats. For more than half a century, the alliance has repeatedly produced intelligence, military insight, technological cooperation, and strategic advantages that became clear only with time.
Critics often ask what Israel costs the United States.
History suggests a more important question: What would the United States have paid without Israel?
And the haters will reply, as they constantly do, about a single accidental event 60 years ago: The USS Liberty. That has been thoroughly investigated, was an accident of "friendly fire," and yet the haters are still posting about it with lies in order to "prove" Israel hates America and is working against American interests. Note there was not a single suspicious word about Kuwait accidentally shooting down three USA jets last week.
"Israel sits at the intersection of several of the most volatile fault lines in modern geopolitics." THAT is a decided understatement. The US has much larger international concerns than Israel but their particular region demands an almost supernatural level of attention which benefits BOTH countries. Regardless, the Jew haters will STILL despise Israel irrationally kinda like TDS with Trump.