Heading into the midterms, almost every American politician asked about Israel faces the same question: Should the United States continue aid to Israel? Or should it be cut, conditioned, or used as leverage to advance American priorities?<\/p>\n
This question comes amid rumors that a forthcoming U.S.-Israel memorandum of understanding will curb U.S. aid to Israel.<\/p>\n
No matter where you fall on this issue, almost everyone seems to agree on the premise that American support for Israel is a donation, and that the only remaining question is how generous the benefactor should be.<\/p>\n
But that premise is wrong. It has been wrong for a long time. And because it is wrong, the debate built on top of it misrepresents to the American people what their money has actually been doing for the past half-century.<\/p>\n
I served as Israel\u2019s minister of defense during the most difficult period in our modern history: the seven-front war that began on October 7, 2023. In that first year of war, I sat across the table from American counterparts to discuss our relationship. And I watched, on the battlefield, what American and Israeli capabilities look like when they are combined against a common enemy.<\/p>\n
Here is what the U.S.-Israel relationship actually is\u2014and what it is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heading into the midterms, almost every American politician asked about Israel faces the same question: Should the United…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-497929","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\/497929","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=497929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}