By now you may have heard about the ruckus in the House of Representatives about two weeks ago over funding for the Israeli anti-missile “Iron Dome” program, which eventually passed, after protests from the Democrats’ “progressive” (sometimes) wing disrupted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to slip $1 billion in funding for the Dome into an “emergency” bill designed to avoid a government shutdown courtesy of the now-standard “the worse the better” budget tactics Republicans have pursuing ever since 1994.
Since that time, the New York Times has published two opinion pieces on the dispute, one from the all-too-predictable Bret Stephens, A Foul Play by Progressives Over Israel’s Iron Dome and one by Robert Wexler, president of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace in Washington, D.C., and a former Democratic representative of Florida, For Progressives, Iron Dome Isn’t the Issue. It’s Israel Itself. The Times Catie Edmondson also chimed in with relatively straight coverage of the collision, House approves $1 billion for the Iron Dome as Democrats feud over Israel.. But here’s the thing: none of these pieces so much as mention what strikes me as a pretty salient issue: why the hell is the U.S. funding the Iron Dome in the first place?
It is standard among “non-progressive” American politicians to say “I defend the right of Israel to defend itself.” Yeah, well, so do I, and I also defend the right of Iran to defend itself. And I don’t see why the U.S. should have to pay for either.
The U.S. currently sends Israel about $3 billion in cash for defense purposes, with the proviso, hated by Israel, that the money must be spent on U.S. ordnance. As I and others have pointed out, this is really just American pork barrel, distributed by grateful congressfolk across the country to the defense contractors in their district. Any time you let congressfolk do both Israel and themselves a favor at the same time, well, they’re going to do it.
But we don’t need to do it. Israel is a very wealthy country, with a per capita GDP of $42, 570, close to both Japan ($44, 585) and South Korea ($47,027). Contrary to popular belief, it is not an ally of the United States, and we have no treaty obligations with Israel. Way back in 2014, Eli Lake, whom I would describe unreservedly as a “friend of Israel,” wrote an article for the Daily Beast, citing arguments from other “friends of Israel” that it was time to end the defense subsidy, which they saw, sensibly enough, as a juicy target for non-friends of Israel like me.
The Iron Dome money, which has been going separately to Israel for years, is “special” because the Iron Dome project was created by Israel itself, and thus the cash does get spent in Israel, although Congress, a little frustrated, eventually insisted that Israel agree to have some of the work done in the U.S.
Naturally, both Stephens and Wexler insist that if Congress doesn’t fund the Iron Dome, countless women and children will die. But this is nonsense. It would be nice if, somewhere in the New York Times, this fact could be noted.
Afterwords
It would also be nice if the “progressive” argument against funding the Iron Dome could be couched in a framework other than “Israel Bad, Palestinians Good!”, simply flipping the traditional “Israel Good, Palestinians Bad!” arguments from the Israeli lobby.
It is also “interesting” that no one in the “liberal media”, so far as I can ascertain, after an admittedly non-intensive search, has bothered to discuss the reasons for the decision of the Democratic leadership to slip the funding into the emergency bill. I previously noted the “interesting” story of how then Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) slipped $3 billion in private school funding into an appropriations bill to appease Orthodox Jewish schools in the Big Apple (scroll down to the heading I Guess We Just Better “Passover” This One).
I discussed the virtues and vices of leading Democratic “progressive” Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in Uh, so I guess it was just LARGELY about the Benjamins, springing off a very brave article published in, yes, the New York Times by Nathan Thrall, which dared to explore the issue of “Jewish money”, specifically as it affects the stance of the Democratic Party towards Israel. “Brave” isn’t the word for it! Omar and her comrades have more than a point about U.S. policy being unreasonably biased in favor of Israel—to the actual detriment of both, though few can recognize it—but one could wish that Democratic “progressives” could, just once, get past the notion that anyone who carries a Kalashnikov is a saint.
Our compulsive defense of Israel, entirely unnecessary to defend her existence, damages our relations with Muslim states, corrupts our own politics, and encourages anti-Semitism in Europe and in the U.S. as a form of cultural “revenge”. Israel is corrupted because it doesn’t have to play by the rules. “No one can judge Israel”, said Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu. What he “meant” was “Israel doesn’t have to play by the rules, because the U.S. will back us up, no matter what we do.”
