Is it time to end United States aid to Israel?

Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s visit to Washington was a success for all parties. The House Democrats’ anti-Israel left enacted their “apartheid” theatrics for a larger audience than usual.

This invited the House Republicans to propose a motion denying that Israel was not, as Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal had claimed earlier in the week, a “racist state”.

That allowed the Democrats to whip all but ten of their Representatives behind the vote, with Jayapal withdrawing her remarks and voting with the resolution.

This dispelled the impression that their party is drifting into casual hostility to Israel, and endorsed Joe Biden’s burblings about his “deep-rooted and long-lasting” love for Israel even as his diplomats strain to indulge Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

President Herzog meeting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Photo: Getty Images)

All of which helped Herzog in his effort to present Israel as a stable and reliable ally rather than a madhouse where the government is paralysed by the effects of its own recklessness. Americans don’t want to see that. They already have enough of it at home.

When politics is primarily performed for the media, “optics” are everything. Meanwhile, reality still exists, and keeps changing. There is no doubt that the optics of the US-Israel alliance are popular. But does it still reflect reality?

American politicians habitually assert that the US has always been Israel’s best friend. This goes down well with American Jews, but it is false. President Truman may have jumped to recognise the new Jewish state in 1948, but his own State Department advised against it.

The US backed Nasser’s Egypt against Israel in the Suez Crisis, a choice Eisenhower regretted.

It was the French, not the Americans, who gave Israel its nuclear capacity. Israel became a US ally in the 1960s, first under the Kennedy presidency, and then after 1967. Aid began in 1979, under the Carter presidency, to encourage Menachem Begin to make peace with Egypt.

This was Cold War politics. The Cold War ended in 1991. Three decades later, the United States is leaving the Middle East. Israel, once a weak client state, is now a regional superpower. The US government sends $4 billion a year in “military aid” to Israel. Almost all of it has to be spent on American weapons.

The aid is an indirect subsidy to the US defence industry. Every now and then, someone asks whether US aid to Israel is still an American interest. Usually, they are libertarians who object to “big government” on principle, or are on the Democrats’ “anti-Zionist” left. More recently, they are on the Republicans’ isolationist right.

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Joe Biden (Photo: Getty Images)

It is highly unusual, however, for pro-Israel American Jews to question the wisdom of aid. It is even more unusual for them to reverse the question, and ask if it’s still in Israel’s interest. It is unheard of for them to ask if it is in the interest of the third party to the aid deal, American Jews.

This is what Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz asked last week in their Tablet essay “End US Aid to Israel”. The benefits for the US are obvious. Aid is a “lucrative backdoor subsidy to US arms makers”. It gives Congress and the White House a “tool to leverage influence over a key strategic ally”.

It turns the world’s fourth-most powerful military into “an adjunct of American power”.

Siegel and Leibowitz argue that the benefits for Israel are now outweighed by the costs. Israeli politicians value the optics of American support, but aid stifles Israel’s defence industry and gives the US a veto over Israel’s tech sector.

Aid currently tethers Israel to America’s “Iran-centric foreign policy” — a policy, the authors argue, which threatens Israel’s survival.

Finally, the authors argue, aid harms the American Jews who are among its loudest supporters. It’s not just that aid “transforms Israel into a scapegoat for every lunatic conspiracy theorist in America”.

Aid distorts the self-understanding of American Jews and the functioning of their institutions.

Instead of seeing Israel “through the prism of a commitment that is as old as civilisation itself”, American Jews “have been herded into understanding Israel through the narrow prism of a 60-year-old political deal that has passed its sell-by date”.

They would do better to “focus on observance and learning their people’s history” than on “pimping for Lockheed Martin”.

Siegel and Leibowitz’s analysis is hard to dispute, and their case is all the more important because it comes from within the tent. There are no friends in politics, only interests. Few interests are permanent. No relationship is special.