Out of the $35 billion the US government spends on foreign aid annually, $5.9 billion — 17% — goes for military funding. And out of that, Israel receives $3.1 billion, followed by Egypt with $1.3 billion, Iraq gets $300 million, Jordan $300 million, and Pakistan $280 million.
This enormous contribution to one of the smaller countries on the planet has been cited by soft and hard core anti-Israel media over the years, starting the year after those payments began, in 1979. You may recall the Camp David Accords, which were signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 17, 1978, later concluding with a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, for which Sadat and Begin received the shared 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. That agreement came with a price tag, signed by then President Jimmy Carter:
The United States committed to paying billions of dollars in permanent annual subsidies to the governments of both Israel and Egypt, given as a mixture of grants and aid packages committed to purchasing US materiel. From 1979 on, Egypt has received military aid to the tune of $1.3 billion annually, and Israel $3 billion annually. It’s an American obligation, which facilitated the US domination in the Middle East, and which could not have been achieved without Egypt and Israel in America’s corner.
The left-leaning media, from CNN to the various blogs, have a small bash each time the CBO releases those annual reports, which those media outlets celebrate with graphics showing how tiny Israel is getting more than everybody else put together in military aid. For Israel, it’s the cost of doing business with a major Western democracy where the media are free to issue shallow, vindictive reports in the guise of an analysis. But here’s what the US would have to give up, should it ever be foolish enough to decide to cut those $3.1 billion each year:
1. The bulk of the aid money to Israel stays in America, where Israel uses it to shop for military equipment. Stop the aid and thousands of American military industrial complex employees are out of a job, probably collecting close to the same amount in unemployment and early retirement benefits.
2. Keeping up those payments help the US keep Israel on a leash: it can’t sell its top hardware to the Chinese — who are salivating at the prospect of laying their hands on Israeli military technology. With Israel as a free agent, selling its aircraft and electronics and whatnot without limit — some major US companies could start seeing their stocks dropping.
3. Cutting off the promised funds would hardly be a tickle to Israel’s economy, which hovers around $300 billion in annual GDP. But it would certainly send a message to any future country signing a deal with the US that it does not honor its agreements. In a world where China and Russia are quickly reasserting themselves as second bananas, that option is just not tenable.