The Big Lie: That
Israel Is a Strategic Asset For the United States
By Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr.
Ambassador Chas W.
Freeman, Jr. at the Nixon Center. (Staff photo Delinda Hanley)
Is Israel a strategic asset or liability for the
United States? Interesting question. We must thank the Nixon Center for asking
it. In my view, there are many reasons for Americans to wish the Jewish state
well. Under certain circumstances, strategic advantage for the United States is
not one of them. If we were to reverse the question, however, and to ask
whether the United States is a strategic asset or liability for Israel, there
would be no doubt about the answer.
American taxpayers fund between 20 and 25
percent of Israel's defense budget (depending on how you calculate this).
Twenty-six percent of the $3 billion in military aid we grant to the Jewish
state each year is spent in Israel on Israeli defense products. Uniquely,
Israeli companies are treated like American companies for purposes of U.S.
defense procurement. Thanks to congressional earmarks, we also often pay half
the costs of special Israeli research and development projects, even when—as in
the case of defense against very short-range unguided missiles—the technology
being developed is essentially irrelevant to our own military requirements. In
short, in many ways, American taxpayers fund jobs in Israel's military
industries that could have gone to our own workers and companies. Meanwhile, Israel
gets pretty much whatever it wants in terms of our top-of-the-line weapons
systems, and we pick up the tab.
Identifiable U.S. government subsidies to Israel
total over $140 billion since 1949. This makes Israel by far the largest
recipient of American giveaways since World War II. The total would be much
higher if aid to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and support for Palestinians in
refugee camps and the occupied territories were included. These programs have
complex purposes but are justified in large measure in terms of their
contribution to the security of the Jewish state.
Per capita income in Israel is now about
$37,000—on par with the UK. Israel is nonetheless the largest recipient of U.S.
foreign assistance, accounting for well over a fifth of it. Annual U.S.
government transfers run at well over $500 per Israeli, not counting the costs
of tax breaks for private donations and loans that aren't available to any
other foreign country.
These military and economic benefits are not the
end of the story. The American government also works hard to shield Israel from
the international political and legal consequences of its policies and actions
in the occupied territories, against its neighbors, or—most recently—on the
high seas. The nearly 40 vetoes the United States has cast to protect Israel in
the U.N. Security Council are the tip of the iceberg. We have blocked a vastly
larger number of potentially damaging reactions to Israeli behavior by the
international community. The political costs to the United States internationally
of having to spend our political capital in this way are huge.
Where Israel has no diplomatic relations, U.S.
diplomats routinely make its case for it. As I know from personal experience
(having been thanked by the then government of Israel for my successful efforts
on Israel's behalf in Africa), the U.S. government has been a consistent
promoter and often the funder of various forms of Israeli programs of
cooperation with other countries. It matters also that America—along with a
very few other countries—has remained morally committed to the Jewish
experiment with a state in the Middle East. Many more Jews live in America than
in Israel. Resolute American support should be an important offset to the
disquiet about current trends that has led over 20 percent of Israelis to
emigrate, many of them to the United States, where Jews enjoy unprecedented
security and prosperity.
Clearly, Israel gets a great deal from us. Yet
it's pretty much taboo in the United States to ask what's in it for Americans.
I can't imagine why. Still, the question I've been asked to address today is
just that: what's in it—and not in it—for us to do all these things for Israel?
We need to begin by recognizing that our relationship
with Israel has never been driven by strategic reasoning. It began with
President Truman overruling his strategic and military advisers in deference to
personal sentiment and political expediency. We had an arms embargo on Israel
until Lyndon Johnson dropped it in 1964 in explicit return for Jewish financial
support for his campaign against Barry Goldwater. In 1973, for reasons peculiar
to the Cold War, we had to come to the rescue of Israel as it battled Egypt.
The resulting Arab oil embargo cost us dearly. And then there's all the time
we've put into the perpetually ineffectual and now long defunct "peace
process."
Still the U.S.-Israel relationship has had
strategic consequences. There is no reason to doubt the consistent testimony of
the architects of major acts of anti-American terrorism about what motivates
them to attack us. In the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is credited with
masterminding the 9/11 attacks, their purpose was to focus "the American
people...on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel
against the Palestinian people...." As Osama bin Laden, purporting to
speak for the world's Muslims, has said again and again: "we have...stated
many times, for more than two-and-a-half-decades, that the cause of our disagreement
with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of
Palestine...." Some substantial portion of the many lives and the
trillions of dollars we have so far expended in our escalating conflict with
the Islamic world must be apportioned to the costs of our relationship with
Israel.
It's useful to recall what we generally expect
allies and strategic partners to do for us. In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in
the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power
beyond their borders. They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and
Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations. They help
recruit others to our coalitions. They coordinate their foreign aid with ours.
Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with "host nation
support" that reduces the costs of our military operations from and
through their territory. They store weapons for our troops', rather than their
own troops', use. They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them.
Israel does none of things and shows no interest
in doing them. Perhaps it can't. It is so estranged from everyone else in the
Middle East that no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate
in or transit it. Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American
power projection. It has no allies other than us. It has developed no friends.
Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation
of many others.
Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to
living on the American military dole. The notion that Israeli taxpayers might
help defray the expense of U.S. military or foreign assistance operations, even
those undertaken at Israel's behest, would be greeted with astonishment in
Israel and incredulity on Capitol Hill.
Military aid to Israel is sometimes justified by
the notion of Israel as a test bed for new weapons systems and operational
concepts. But no one can identify a program of military R & D in Israel
that was initially proposed by our men and women in uniform. All originated
with Israel or members of Congress acting on its behalf. Moreover, what Israel
makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other
major arms markets. It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account
when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only
under duress.
Our relationship with Israel has never been driven by
strategic reasoning.
Meanwhile, it's been decades since Israel's air
force faced another in the air. It has come to specialize in bombing civilian
infrastructure and militias with no air defenses. There is not much for the
U.S. Air Force to learn from that. Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no
real naval threat. Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and
humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study.
Israel's army, however, has had lessons to
impart. Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques
of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired
U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan.
Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic
guns. These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute
anyone they view as suspicious. Such risk-free means of culling hostile
populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military
operation, but I hope not. I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they
embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify.
It is sometimes said that, to its credit, Israel
does not ask the United States to fight its battles for it; it just wants the
money and weapons to fight them on its own. Leave aside the question of whether
Israel's battles are or should be America's. It is no longer true that Israel
does not ask us to fight for it. The fact that American apologists for Israel
were the most energetic promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq does not, of
course, prove that Israel was the instigator of that grievous misadventure. But
the very same people are now urging an American military assault on Iran
explicitly to protect Israel and preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle
East. Their advocacy is fully coordinated with the government of Israel. No one
in the region wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Israel is the only country
pressing Americans to go to war over this.
Finally, the need to protect Israel from
mounting international indignation about its behavior continues to do grave
damage to our global and regional standing. It has severely impaired our ties
with the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. These costs to our international
influence, credibility, and leadership are, I think, far more serious than the
economic and other burdens of the relationship.
Against this background, it's remarkable that
something as fatuous as the notion of Israel as a strategic asset could have
become the unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the United States. Perhaps
it's just that as someone once said; "people... will more easily fall
victim to a big lie than a small one." Be that as it may, the United
States and Israel have a lot invested in our relationship. Basing our
cooperation on a thesis and narratives that will not withstand scrutiny is
dangerous. It is especially risky in the context of current fiscal pressures in
the United States. These seem certain soon to force major revisions of both
current levels of American defense spending and global strategy, in the Middle
East as well as elsewhere. They also place federally-funded programs in Israel
in direct competition with similar programs here at home. To flourish over the
long term, Israel's relations with the United States need to be grounded in
reality, not myth, and in peace, not war.
Chas W. Freeman, Jr., former U.S. ambassador to
Saudi Arabia and principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African
affairs, delivered these remarks at a July 20, 2010 Nixon Center debate with
Robert Satloff, executive director of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for
Near East Policy, on the topic, "Is Israel a Strategic Asset or Liability
for the United States?"
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