Robert Burns/AP Photo
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks to reporters at Israel's Nevatim air base, with an Israeli F-35 fighter jet in the background, April 12, 2021.
Israeli strikes are conducted overwhelmingly by aircraft, most of them imported from the United States and paid for by American taxpayers. In recent days, at least 213 Palestinians have been killed in heavy Israeli airstrikes, including 61 children and 36 women, and more than 1,440 Palestinians have been wounded. Twelve people in Israel, including a child and a soldier, have been killed in the rocket attacks launched from Gaza toward Israel.
The United States’ annual military aid package to Israel plays an outsized role in the destruction and violence now experienced in Palestine. And, despite laws on the books, one of the United States’ most important human rights checks on foreign militaries cannot be enforced in the current U.S. military relationship with Israel, because of the lack of transparency in the U.S.-Israeli military alliance.
The worsening conflict comes as the Biden administration has recently approved $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel. Even more troubling than the sale itself, members of Congress have said they were unaware of the pending sale. The lack of transparency of America’s arms sales to Israel has long been a troubling story and its extent often obscured, even to members of Congress.
The U.S. subsidization of Israeli military capabilities is unique among all of America’s engagements in the world.
In terms of aid and weapons used in the current conflict, U.S.-made bombs and missiles are prominent among the weapons dropping on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have relied on their fleet of fighter jets for the strikes of some 600 targets in the Gaza Strip, while Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system has intercepted rockets fired from Gaza. The particular fighter jets used in these operations include Israel’s F-15 “Baz” aircraft. The United States has provided F-15s to Israel since 1976, and the Baz fleet has been used in many operations, from the Lebanon War of 1982 to the present conflict. Israel has also used its own aircraft for these most recent operations, including the Israeli-manufactured Hermes 450 and Hermes 900 drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The U.S. has supplied Israel with hundreds of advanced fighter jets, among them at least 83 F-15s, 225 F-16s, and 16 F-35s, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
It’s difficult to overstate the impact of U.S. aid on the development of Israel’s armed forces. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II and has one of the most technically advanced militaries in the world. Since the founding of Israel, it has received over $236 billion in U.S. military and economic assistance in 2018 dollars.
But despite its advanced military capabilities, since 2001, Israel has received more than $63 billion in American security assistance, with over 90 percent funded by the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, a grant program that provides money to purchase U.S. arms. During the last two decades, aid to Israel places Israel just behind Afghanistan, which has received some $98 billion in U.S. security assistance since 2001 and where tens of thousands of U.S. troops have been deployed in one of the endless wars that President Biden has promised to end.
The U.S. subsidization of Israeli military capabilities is unique among all of America’s engagements in the world. The U.S. assistance comes in ten-year memoranda of understanding on military aid, which serve as promises of presidential budgetary requests for assistance, although Congress still must appropriate the assistance annually. The most recent memorandum covers 2019 to 2028 and includes $38 billion in military aid ($33 billion in Foreign Military Financing grants and $5 billion for missile defense). The U.S. does not make any comparable written agreement regarding a decade-long future financial commitment for foreign or domestic appropriations.
Israel receives most of the U.S. assistance promised in these memoranda in the form of financial grants of $3.3 billion per year. In addition, the U.S. also provides $500 million for joint U.S.-Israeli research, development, and deployment of missile defense systems, which almost wholly benefit Israel’s military needs. This is despite the fact that Israel has a large GDP and could purchase weapons on its own. U.S. assistance also supports the development of Israel’s domestic weapons industry, while all other countries receiving FMF are required to spend it solely on U.S. weapons.
Multiple overlapping U.S. laws require U.S. security assistance anywhere in the world to meet certain human rights standards, but these are not enforced in the case of Israel. Just as significantly, Israel is the only country in the world for which the United States does not track which weapons go to which military unit. This makes it virtually impossible to enforce Leahy Law requirements that prohibit using funds for assistance to foreign security forces implicated in gross human rights violations.
The failure of the United States to impose any meaningful conditions on its security assistance to Israel means that its security policy is at odds with its professed diplomatic goals. The U.S. Department of State says that it is committed to the long-standing priority of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but its security assistance tells a different story. Ultimately, the U.S., through its unconditional blank-check, ten-year-at-a-time military commitments to Israel, is a co-author of each of Israel’s destructive campaigns in Palestine.
