{"id":478052,"date":"2026-06-05T17:45:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T17:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/478052\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T17:45:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T17:45:08","slug":"congress-wants-to-tie-the-united-states-to-israel-with-this-new-legislation-its-a-trap-eli-clifton-and-ian-lustick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/478052\/","title":{"rendered":"Congress wants to tie the United States to Israel with this new legislation. It\u2019s a trap | Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick"},"content":{"rendered":"

Congress is considering legislation<\/a> that would embed Israel\u2019s military deeply within the US military-industrial complex. Stunned by the cratering of public support for Israeli policies in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank and towards Iran, Israel\u2019s advocates are frantically seeking to preserve and even escalate US support for the Jewish state in ways that do not rely on defense of its policies or permit scrutiny of the manipulations involved.<\/p>\n

Politically, this means avoiding public discussion of Israeli policies in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank or Iran and disguising the sources of massive amounts of money pouring into election races to defeat candidates raising questions about US support for Israel<\/a>. The proposed legislation shows what this means bureaucratically.<\/p>\n

News of section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act \u2013 a section that would deeply intertwine the US and Israeli militaries by committing to bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements and an unprecedented integration of the US and Israeli weapons industries \u2013 triggered an immediate backlash led by Representatives Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, to strip the section from the defense budget.<\/p>\n

The origins of this addition to the defense budget tell us much about how Israel\u2019s lobby pursues a foreign country\u2019s interests even as 60% of Americans<\/a> now hold an unfavorable view of Israel.<\/p>\n

In February, the representatives Don Davis, a Democrat from North Carolina, and Ronny Jackson, a Republican from Texas, introduced the United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security (Futures) Act of 2026 alongside companion legislation in the Senate introduced by senators Ted Budd, a Republican from North Carolina, and Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York. Israel\u2019s lobby prominently endorsed and lobbied on the legislation.<\/p>\n

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel thinktank originally incorporated as \u201cEmet\u201d, the Hebrew word for \u201ctruth\u201d, and committed, according to its founding IRS filings, \u201cto provid[ing] education to enhance Israel\u2019s image in North America and the public\u2019s understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations\u201d, advocated for closer integration of US and Israeli militaries and weapons research and development in a December report<\/a>, Beyond the US-Israel MOU: The Case for a Strategic Partnership Agreement.<\/p>\n

Two months later, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies was the only outside validator for the legislation on Davis\u2019s 19 February press release<\/a>. \u201cThe United States\u2013Israel Futures Act builds on decades of successful collaboration by improving cooperation across the public, private, and academic sectors to swiftly develop, test, and field defense technologies that will help safeguard US service members and provide Israel with the means to combat a diverse set of threats from foreign adversarial states and terror groups,\u201d said Tyler Stapleton, senior director of government relations at the FDD. \u201cFDD Action strongly supports the bipartisan United States-Israel Futures Act.\u201d<\/p>\n

On 19 February, Washington\u2019s largest pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), endorsed the legislation, highlighting its \u201ckey provisions\u201d, including \u201cencouraging US-based co-production, joint ventures, and manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry\u201d.<\/p>\n

Aipac also reported<\/a> lobbying on the US-Israel Futures Act on Capitol Hill as well as at the Department of Defense in the first quarter of the year. While neither the House nor Senate legislation made it out of committee, the same legislative architecture and much of the same language appeared in section 224 of the NDAA, buried deep within the 505-page draft legislation.<\/p>\n

In short, Aipac and the FDD were successful in moving their unpopular legislative agendas forward, even as both the House and Senate bills remain stalled in committees.<\/p>\n

Make no mistake, the intent and the consequences of this legislation, dubbed the United States\u2013Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, go far, far beyond the sharing of military technology that traditionally has attracted so much support among Senators and Congress members.<\/p>\n

For the Israel-first theorists whose thinking and position papers guided its formulation, it is the proverbial camel\u2019s nose. By making the United States increasingly dependent on Israeli technology \u2013 in AI, quantum computing, high-powered lasers, cyberwarfare, anti-drone systems, and other advanced fields \u2013 while also transferring America\u2019s most sophisticated technologies to Israeli governments, Israel and its advocates are quietly steering the relationship away from patronage or even partnership and toward something more asymmetrical: a structure designed to harness American power for the aims of \u201cZionism 2.0\u201d.<\/p>\n

That was the vision advanced by David Wurmser, the main author of the Clean Break document \u2013 a 1996 policy paper submitted to Benjamin Netanyahu, which advocated ending the Oslo peace process, casting the US and Israel as engaged in a struggle to defend western civilization, empowering Israel to reshape the political landscape of the Middle East, and overthrowing regimes in the region, beginning with Iraq. Its signatories included Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. All three were highly placed within the George W Bush administration as architects of the American invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n

Wurmser introduced this new \u201cZionism 2.0\u201d framework in a report<\/a> published the same month the US-Israel Futures Act was introduced. Titled Israel 2048: A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power, the report advocates an Israeli security strategy based on \u201cpreventative wars\u201d. US authorization for these wars is to be achieved by forging such an intimate relationship between the Israeli and US militaries that Israel would become \u201cindispensable<\/a>\u201d to the United States, both in the Middle East and in its global struggle to defend \u201cwestern civilization\u201d against Russia, China and an increasingly Islamized Europe.<\/p>\n

Their vision is of \u201cNew Jerusalem\u201d (the US) wedded to \u201cOld Jerusalem\u201d (Israel) on the basis of both having been divinely chosen for the mission of saving civilization from the \u201cred-green\u201d (Marxist-Muslim) alliance.<\/p>\n

For Israel, this means not just ruling all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but dominating the Middle East, launching wars of \u201cprevention\u201d against all potential adversaries (including Turkey, Iran and even Egypt) and, with Britain and France succumbing to the influence of foreign immigrants and the disease of \u201cEuropean secularism\u201d, serving as the US\u2019s most important ally in its global struggle to preserve \u201ccivilization\u201d \u2013 labeled either \u201cJewish-Christian\u201d or \u201cwestern\u201d.<\/p>\n

The extravagance of such ideas clearly marks the origins of the project, exposing the influence of well-funded dark-money groups and thinktanks exerting their influence on behalf of Israel\u2019s government.<\/p>\n

Now is the time to say what section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act really is: not an alliance with a talented and responsible ally that will help keep the US safe, but a trap being set by Israel and its lobby to bind our country to a state that, for all its past promise, has gone rogue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Congress is considering legislation that would embed Israel\u2019s military deeply within the US military-industrial complex. Stunned by the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478053,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-478052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}