The United States has just signed a new 10-year agreement to provide Israel with $3.8 billion a year in military aid — the most munificent sum ever given to any country. Presumably, Israel will use this aid to maintain its superiority in technology, weapons systems and combat methods in the face of arms buildups elsewhere in the region.
In a Washington Post op-ed piece last week, former Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak blasted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that $38 billion over 10 years was “far less than what could have been obtained before the prime minister chose to blatantly interfere with U.S. politics.”
Echoing Barak’s criticism, Brig. Gen. (reserves) Eival Gilady, who played a key role in maintaining Israel’s military relationship with the U.S for several years, said that Israel could have secured a more generous aid package had it agreed to negotiate earlier, and he accused Netanyahu of misleading the Israeli public as to the restrictive conditions of the agreement.
Gilady pointed out that for the past 30 years, the U.S. aid agreements permitted Israel to spend 26.3 percent of the funds in Israel, but that this proviso has been removed from the new aid package. “Converting hundreds of millions of dollars into billions of shekels every year and spending them in local industries enabled us to develop technology, and to a large degree enabled us to turn Israel into a high-tech power . . . Netanyahu was forced to give up this important component of the American aid, worth some three billion shekels ($800 million) a year, which will now have to come from the national budget.”
Gilady’s remarks reveal an obvious truth that is generally overlooked, namely, that the so-called “shortfall” in American military aid “will now have to come from the national budget.” Since money is fungible, $38 billion will be freed up for other uses. And since the Israeli government has spent billions of dollars building and expanding illegal settlements and infrastructure in the West Bank, it is logical to assume that even more of that $38 billion will be spent to confiscate yet more Palestinian land.
For decades, the U.S. has been on record in favor of a negotiated two-state solution. But the reality is that virtually everything our government has done through the years has underwritten the Israeli occupation of Palestine: the continued appropriation and colonization of Palestinian land and the oppressive military rule of the Palestinian population. Students of history no less than students of human behavior are smart enough to pay attention to the profile of action — not to the profile of rhetoric.
While our government may wish for a two-state solution that would end the conflict, its stake in keeping Israel a client state of the U.S. serves key American interests and far outweighs any American commitment to a two-state solution. Were that not the case, the entire aid package would have been linked to a significant change of course on the part of the Netanyahu government in dealing with the Palestinians. Nation states do what serves their self-interest. It has ever been thus.
In The Israeli Mind: How the Israeli National Character Shapes Our World (St. Martin’s Press, 2015), Israeli-American psychologist Alon Gratch concludes that since each side is invested in its own narrative of victimhood, and since most Israelis and most Palestinians are unable or unwilling to see the situation through each other’s eyes, they are partners in a deadly pas de deux and incapable on their own of honest negotiation and peacemaking. The only hope for a breakthrough, says Gratch, is in a change of policy on the part of the U.S. government or the American Jewish community. And since he sees no realistic possibility of a change in U.S. policy, it will be up to a newly enlightened American Jewish community willing to speak hard truths to our Israeli cousins and to follow rhetoric with action.
In the absence of such an admittedly unlikely development, we will see much of the $38 billion of American taxpayer dollars poured into the settlement enterprise, leading to either a binational state with a Jewish minority or, more likely, to an apartheid state with a permanent, disenfranchised Palestinian underclass — a repugnant scenario that ought to occupy the minds of Jews as we prepare for our season of self-scrutiny, The Days of Awe.
Dov Taylor is Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Solel, Highland Park, Ill., and Rabbi at Chavurat Ki-tov: A Gathering for Jewish Life and Learning in Woodstock.