Above Photo: Gary Cameron / Reuters. U.S. and Israeli officials sign an unprecedented military-spending deal in Washington, D.C., on September 14.
Note: Former US Secretary of State, Supreme Commander of NATO, General Alexander Haig described Israel as “Our unsinkable battleship in the Middle East.” He was describing Israel as a US military base in a region of the world that the United States has sought to dominate for the last 100 years. General George Keegan, Head of Air Force Intelligence, said: “Israel is worth 5 CIAs.” And, in 2010 fifty retired generals wrote President Obama describing “Israel as a Security Asset for the United States”
Why? President Jimmy Carter, often viewed as the human rights president, made it clear with the Carter Doctrine that made US access to Middle East oil a national security issue. The US has played the role of arbiter of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, but it has always put its very heavy thumb on the side of Israel in that dispute; and has protected Israel from UN sanctions whenever the world looks on in astonished anger at Israel’s aggressive abuse of the Palestinian people which includes shock and awe military attacks and constant stealing of Palestinian lands. Aid to Israel is a major part of the weapons industry and under this new deal Israel will be required to buy more weapons from the United States and produce less of their own. There was a time when Baghdad looked like it might become the center of operations for US domination of the Middle East, with the US building a massive foreign policy center for the State Department, military and intelligence agencies along with dozens of military bases throughout Iraq. The Iraq War did not work out as expected for US empire so the country still needs their “unsinkable battleship in the Middle East.” KZ
The two countries just signed a new military-aid deal—the biggest pledge of its kind in American history. It have may seemed inevitable, but the record-setting moment is also rife with irony.
The United States and Israel have made it official: The two countries signed a new 10-year military-assistance deal on Wednesday, representing the single largest pledge of its kind in American history. The pact, laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding, will be worth $38 billion over the course of a decade, an increase of roughly 27 percent on the money pledged in the last agreement, which was signed in 2007. The diplomatic and military alliance between the two countries is longstanding: Even prior to this week, Israel was, according to the Congressional Research Service, “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.” In many ways, Wednesday’s deal seemed predestined.
Yet, it’s also ironic. Barack Obama has a notoriously cold relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—as my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg wrote inThe Atlantic’s April cover story, “Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict “that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so.” Nonetheless, Obama will leave office having out-pledged all of his predecessors in military support to the country Netanyahu now runs.
Voters, however, have more mixed views on this kind of support. While more than 60 percent of Americans were more sympathetic to Israel than the Palestinians in a 2016 Gallup poll, sympathies differed along partisan lines, with around half of Democrats being more sympathetic to Israelis versus nearly 80 percent of Republicans. In a separate Brookings poll, roughly half of Democrats who responded said Israel has too much influence on the United States government. Boycott, divest, and sanction movements, which call on organizations in the United States and abroad to cut their financial ties with Israel, have long been popular on college campuses, although somewhat marginal; this year, however, they got a boost from the Black Lives Matter movement, which included statements against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its recently released policy platform.
All of this creates an odd backdrop for a historic military-spending deal. No matter how bad the relationship between the two countries’ top leaders, no matter who gets elected to the White House, no matter how loudly some voters voice their opposition or how charged the underlying ideological debate: The United States has pragmatic reasons to keep providing large sums of money for Israel’s military.
There are straightforward explanations for why this particular deal got done. Politically, the spending package was partly a response to the nuclear deal that the United States and other world powers finalized with Iran in July of last year, and which Obama hailed as cutting off Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons for more than a decade. Netanyahu was harshly critical of that agreement, which he called a “historic mistake” that would ease sanctions on Iran while leaving it with the ability to one day get the bomb. “Even with the deal in place, and taking the nuclear-weapon capability of Iran off the table at least for the next 10 to 15 years, there are still considerable destabilizing activities that Iranians are pursuing in the region that are not consistent with U.S. or Israeli interests or objectives,” said Melissa Dalton, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The new money is an attempt to pacify Israeli concerns about continued threats from Iran, she added.
It is a foreign-policy deal seemingly immune to the electoral politics around it.
Defenders of the deal would say it’s necessary. Dalton described the uptick in spending as a natural extension of the long-standing relationship between the United States and Israel, “as well as close ties between those countries and their peoples.” She described the “fraught neighborhood” surrounding Israel: war-torn Syria to the northeast, Hezbollah-influenced Lebanon to the north, and an Islamist insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai to the south, all of which help explain the historically high promise of $5 billion in missile funding over the next 10 years. As National Security Advisor Susan Rice said at the signing ceremony for the deal, “This MOU is not just good for Israel, it’s good for the United States. Our security is linked. When allies and partners like Israel are more secure, the United States is more secure.”
While the United States’s new Memorandum of Understanding with Israel is historic in its own right, it’s most remarkable in its apparent inevitability: It is a foreign-policy move seemingly immune to the electoral politics around it. “At the end of the day, we’re electing people to make judgments based on the information and the advice that the receive,” Dalton said. “One of the inputs to that process, certainly, is popular opinion. But I don’t think it should be the sole determinant of foreign policy.” In its own way, that’s a good explanation of why America’s aid to Israel is so big: Military spending does not go up or down in direct relationship to votes or even the news cycle. In this case, it was a record set as if it were on an unstoppable trend line.