Peloni: As a strong independent Israel makes for an even stronger, more independent America. This was true in the past, and it will be true in the future. The leash which holds Israel at bay restrains its ability to not only act in ways which benefit and protect the Israeli people, but which would benefit and protect the American people as well. Recall that if not for an unrestrained Israel in 1981, America would have been facing a nuclear Iraq when it chose to face down Saddam Hussein in 1990.
Harry Liberman
PM Menachem Begin meets with Ambassador Samuel Lewis shortly after his appointment on June 21, 1977. Screengrab via Youtube
For over half a century, the foreign policy establishments in both Washington and Jerusalem have maintained a polite geopolitical fiction: that Israel is a strategic charity case, permanently indebted to the United States for its survival. This narrative is a calculated lie. Israel was never “saved” by America. Historically, the inverse is truer. When Israel stood on the precipice of total, landscape-altering victories, Washington systematically used its leverage to halt operations mid-battle to protect its own diplomatic equities.
The pattern began at Israel’s birth. In 1948, as five Arab militaries invaded the nascent state, the United States imposed a strict arms embargo. If any forces were sustained by outside empires, it was the Arab coalitions.
In 1948, Transjordan’s Arab Legion was financed, armed, and led by British officers under Sir John Bagot Glubb. By the 1960s and 1970s, it was massive infusions of Soviet hardware, surface-to-air missiles, and thousands of active Soviet military advisors that shielded Cairo and Damascus from total capitulation. Israel won its survival not because of Washington, but in direct combat against superpower-backed adversaries.
When the U.S. finally did engage strategically, its aid arrived not as an altruistic shield, but as an operational leash. Consider three critical historical flashpoints where Washington used supply lines to abort definitive Israeli victories:
First, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israeli forces successfully crossed the Suez Canal and fully encircled Egypt’s Third Army. Israel was hours away from forcing an unconditional surrender. Henry Kissinger and the Nixon administration, terrified that a total Egyptian collapse would humiliate Moscow and derail U.S. plans to pull Cairo into the American sphere, threatened to cut off all emergency military resupplies and back United Nations sanctions. Israel was forced to freeze its lines.
Second, during the 1982 Siege of Beirut, as Israeli forces trapped Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership, President Ronald Reagan grew deeply concerned over global media optics. In an infamous phone call on August 12, 1982, Reagan explicitly demanded a halt to the bombardments, calling it a “holocaust.” The intense political leverage forced Israel to halt its assault and agree to a diplomatic evacuation that allowed Arafat and thousands of fighters to escape to Tunisia, setting the stage for decades of future conflict in the Levant.
Third, during the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein launched 42 Scud missiles into Tel Aviv and Haifa, Israel prepared a massive retaliatory campaign. President George H.W. Bush explicitly denied Israel the necessary military Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) codes to fly through Iraqi airspace safely, threatening to sever strategic ties if Israel defended its own citizens.
Perhaps no leader captured the indignity of this dynamic better than Prime Minister Menachem Begin. In December 1981, following American outrage over Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, U.S. Ambassador Samuel Lewis delivered a harsh reprimand from the Reagan administration. Begin’s response remains a masterclass in sovereign defiance:
“Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we 14-year-old boys who, if they don’t behave, get their fingers smacked? … The people of Israel have lived 3,700 years without a memorandum of understanding with America, and it will continue to live without it for another 3,700 years.”
Decades later, Ariel Sharon echoed this sentiment when he warned a press conference in October 2001 against American attempts to appease foreign regimes at Israel’s expense: “Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies sacrificed Czechoslovakia for a temporary solution. Israel will not be Czechoslovakia. Israel will defend itself.”
The “aid” Washington provides has never been a blank check for security; it is a geopolitical dog leash designed to yank Jerusalem back whenever it attempts to act in its own existential self-interest.
This annual $3.8 billion Foreign Military Financing (FMF) package is routinely framed as American taxpayer generosity. In reality, it is a highly sophisticated circular finance mechanism that legally mandates Israel to act as a captive consumer base for the American military-industrial complex, while Washington absorbs Israeli technological breakthroughs for pennies on the dollar.
Under the current 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed in 2016, Israel is entirely banned from spending any U.S. aid dollars on its own domestic defense industries. This completely phased out the old “Off-Shore Procurement” loophole, which previously allowed Israel to spend a percentage of the funds locally.
Today, 100 percent of the $3.8 billion is legally funneled directly back into U.S. corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon.
In exchange for this circular capital, the United States extracts a massive financial and strategic dividend: free multi-million dollar R&D upgrades. When Israel purchases an American platform like the F-35 (the customized F-35I Adir), Israeli aerospace engineers integrate proprietary electronic warfare systems, advanced command software, and structural adaptations to survive dense anti-air environments. This invaluable, combat-tested data and software modifications are handed back to U.S. defense contractors. The U.S. military integrates these Israeli-funded breakthroughs back into its own global fleet without spending a single dollar of American R&D capital.
Furthermore, Washington enforces co-development capture. For joint programs like the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow missile defense systems, Israel provided the core engineering genius. However, the U.S. conditioned its financial backing on securing co-production rights. Today, companies like Raytheon manufacture over 50 percent of Iron Dome components inside the United States, creating thousands of American jobs and ensuring Washington retains export veto power over Israeli technology.
Israel provides the U.S. with a permanent, unsinkable strategic aircraft carrier in the world’s most volatile region—without requiring a single American soldier to deploy or die defending it. If the U.S. military had to replicate Israel’s operational intelligence network from scratch, it would cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
To achieve true strategic autonomy, Israel must implement a structured, five-year economic decoupling plan to phase out the $3.8 billion FMF package entirely, reducing the aid by $760 million annually.
The $760 million annual shortfall represents less than 0.15 percent of Israel’s roughly $500+ billion GDP—a gap easily covered by allocating a fraction of its natural economic growth directly into defense.
By lifting the restrictions imposed by the MOU, Israel can allow its domestic defense giants—such as IMI, IAI, Rafael, and Elbit—to aggressively compete for international contracts without needing American ITAR approval for purely Israeli-developed tech. By reshoring the manufacturing of basic kinetic components and tapping into its natural-gas-backed sovereign wealth fund, Israel ensures that no future U.S. administration can force an arbitrary ceasefire by withholding supply shipments mid-war.
Stripping away the shackles of U.S. aid will require an economic adjustment, but it will ultimately unfetter Israeli sovereignty.
For a nation that won its independence while the West stood by, breaking the leash of foreign dependency is not an economic risk—it is the final, non-negotiable step toward true security.
Some “people ” will try and make counter arguments suggesting Israel needs America ! Not true !
For example : “Without the 1973 U.S. airlift (Operation Nickel Grass), Israel would have been destroyed. Washington literally saved Israel.”
This is a chronological distortion. Operation Nickel Grass did not begin until October 14, 1973. By October 10—four days before the first American cargo plane landed—the Israeli Air Force and ground forces had already decisively halted the Syrian advance in the Golan Heights and pushed the Syrian military back past the 1967 purple line. On the Southern front, IDF forces had already halted the Egyptian advance and were preparing the counter-offensive across the Suez Canal. The American airlift was critical for replenishing depleted ammunition stocks for a prolonged conflict, but the existential turning point of the war was achieved entirely by Israeli forces before a single American asset arrived. Furthermore, the U.S. delayed the airlift for a week to use Israel’s desperation as diplomatic leverage.
“If Israel rejects U.S. aid, it will lose access to top-tier American platforms like the F-35, leaving it technologically vulnerable.”
Ending the FMF voucher program does not mean ending bilateral trade. Nations like Singapore, Australia, and Japan purchase top-tier American military hardware using their own sovereign cash, completely free from FMF constraints. By transitioning to a direct-purchase cash customer, Israel would actually gain more leverage. It could demand fewer restrictions on modifying American airframes with proprietary Israeli avionics and electronic warfare systems, which the U.S. currently tries to limit to protect its own proprietary tech monopolies.
“Israel cannot easily replace American production capacity for iron-bomb kits, artillery shells, and interceptors during a multi-front war.”
This is precisely the dependency the five-year decoupling plan corrects. The current lack of domestic capacity is an artificial symptom of the 2016 MOU, which banned Israel from spending aid money locally and forced the closure of domestic assembly lines. If Israel shifts 0.15% of its GDP to subsidize the reshoring of munitions plants in the Negev, it can achieve manufacturing self-sufficiency for kinetic items within 36 months. Upfront capital investments in automated domestic munitions factories are far cheaper over a five-year horizon than the geopolitical cost of allowing Washington to dictate battlefield stop-lines.
“The U.S. gives Israel crucial diplomatic coverage via its UN Security Council veto. Breaking the financial tie destroys the diplomatic shield.”
The United States does not exercise its UN veto out of financial charity : It does so because a sanctioned or delegitimized Israel damages America’s own regional architecture and credibility. Furthermore, a financially independent Israel with absolute strategic autonomy would no longer be paralyzed by the threat of U.S. diplomatic abandonment. If Washington chooses to withdraw its veto, Israel is fully capable of cultivating transactional diplomatic alignments with other global powers—such as India, Eastern European blocs, or specific East Asian nations—who highly value Israeli cyber, agricultural, and defense technology without appending moralizing strings to their foreign policy.
Ultimately, Washington’s foreign policy elite can cling to their gilded leash all they want, but they are misreading the map. America isn’t the superpower managing a tiny Middle Eastern client state; America is merely the West Wing of Jerusalem.
After all, the global court of public opinion already treats them as twins separated at birth. The international community hates Washington and Jerusalem with identical, burning passion—and for the exact same offenses. Both nations stand guilty of the ultimate modern heresies: a stubborn devotion to rugged individualism, an unapologetic embrace of free-market capitalism, and a fanatical insistence on personal agency.
It turns out you can’t weave the foundational values of the Torah directly into the fabric of the American Constitution without sharing the inheritance.
So let the critics rage at the “special relationship.” If the rest of the world is going to lump America and Israel together anyway for the crime of believing in freedom, Israel might as well start acting like the older brother and cut off Washington’s allowance.
John Adams often reflected on the profound historical and moral impact of the Jewish people. His 1808 letter highlights the foundational role of Hebrew civilization—particularly the preservation of monotheism and foundational ethics—in shaping the moral fabric of the Western world. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
The specific quote below from Adams is frequently cited to explore the intersection of Jewish heritage, moral law, and the development of modern civilization. It is often discussed alongside similar historical observations, such as Mark Twain’s essay on the historical prominence and exceptional legacy of the Jewish people. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
“I will insist the Hebrews have [contributed] more to civilize men than any other nation. If I was an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations … They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews. They have given religion to three-quarters of the globe and have influenced the affairs of mankind more and more happily than any other nation, ancient or modern.”
– John Adams, Second President of the United States
(From a letter to F. A. Van der Kemp [Feb. 16, 1808] Pennsylvania Historical Society)
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