Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 73: Is military aid to Israel a good deal for America?

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current question: Is military aid to Israel a good deal for America? If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

And another question, a really good one. Why does America support Israel with military aid? A lot of times when people say, why does America support Israel? They're not talking about all that cold strategic sense. They're talking about money. America gives Israel $4 billion a year roughly in military aid and money that is spent on Israeli military defenses. American taxpayers say, by the way, I deeply understand this sentiment.

We don't have universal health care. We're deeply in debt as a country. there's a lot of stuff we can't afford. Why are we giving money to a foreign country? I want to say two things about this. One, the money spent on Israel is deeply useful to America. You might want to cut it. That's your money.

You do what you want with it. But it's very useful to America. Very nearly 100% of it, well into the high 90%, has to be spent in America. These are $4 billion that get to Israel and turn right around and buy American equipment and produce American jobs. what is essentially a federal grant program to certain American manufacturers and certain American companies. The other point is America spends vast sums on foreign military aid and foreign protection of allies.

Huge sums, orders of magnitude more than the $4 billion it gives Israel. It just doesn't spend them in cash. So, for example, the United States spends roughly $60 billion a year on defending Europe. and a great deal of it is in deployments, which means it's not spent back in the American economy. It's spent in Europe. And those deployments are an astonishing thing because it's American blood on the line.

Not just American, the Israelis ask for American help. And they get that American help, but only after they spend 5% of their GDP, that's the amount it was before October 7, 5% of GDP on their own defense. the Israelis pay through the nose for their own defense and then come and ask the Americans for help. America has a lower percentage of GDP spent on defense,

something like 3.5, 3.6%. The Europeans, the Germans, the Poles, the French, the British, on average, some are much better than others, like the Poles, for example, but on average, they spend 1.9% of their GDP on defense. What I just said is the Israelis respect the American taxpayer enough to only ask for help after

spending massively themselves. Whereas the Europeans basically use it as a way to get around having to pay for their own defense. Do you want to cut the $4 billion to Israel? Cut the $4 billion to Israel. Israel, spoiler, will survive.

American companies will actually have slightly less. Israel will buy those things from Israeli companies. They'll buy those products from other places. They'll by the way, maybe even buy those products with Israeli money from American companies. $4 billion a year is not going to change the equation. When you spend money on the Israelis, you get something for it for America.

What am I talking about? The United States has spent many hundreds of millions of dollars since the Obama administration, an Iron Dome, on Israeli missile defense. When the Americans signed the deal with the Israelis to spend those hundreds of millions of dollars, there was a clause in the contract that the United States. Americans would co-own Iron Dome. Essentially, the idea was nobody in America knew how to build Iron Dome. It was this massive breakthrough technology.

The Israelis claimed they could do it. It wasn't clear they could. There were actually assessments in the Pentagon that it might not be possible. The Pentagon basically thought of it as we're outsourcing this to the Israelis as our R&D shop because the American defense industry has undergone decades of consolidation. It used to be dozens of companies. Now it's like four or five. and military systems and contracts are so enormous

that there isn't really competition. Once one lands the contract for the next 30 years, they've got it. And a lot of times when you give a tender to produce a new weapon system to an American company, they can build things nobody else on Earth can build, the F-35, for example. But they can also build a lot of systems that turn out not to work all that well

and take tens of billions of dollars and cost 30 years to try to get to work. The American defense industry is deeply inefficient. You can hand much less money to the Israelis and produce a result that would take much longer for the Americans to produce. On certain kinds of weapon systems and certain kinds of expertise, the Israelis are amazing and cheap if you're the Pentagon. And so on the money spent on Iron Dome,

America can, if it chooses, now deploy Iron Dome to protect American forces in Japan and South Korea. Had you not paid for the systems development, for the R&D in Israel, you wouldn't have that system. You're going to count that as military aid to Israel, or Israel being a useful R&D shop for the Pentagon that's cheaper than handing the same contract to Boeing? And the final point is, you have competitors. The French defense industry can produce fifth generation fighters. Tanks.

Israel demonstrated in 12 days over Iran what American F-35s can do. And what they can do against systems that Iran bought from Russia, against all kinds of air forces that we're trying to track those F-35s. The whole world understood after those 12 days over Iran what American systems can do. And nothing American salesmen traveling to those countries with little brochures, none of that would have been as effective as literally seeing it in operation. It's part of the ROI on the investment. So if you're thinking as a taxpayer, if you spend those $4 billion on European defense, you've lost the $4 billion.

and if you spend those $4 billion on Israel, you bought something. If we do lose the $4 billion, you won't lose an ally. We are not friends because you pay us, because you help us to keep our defenses strong. We are friends because Israeli Jews know the difference between the world that was before American power and the world that American power built. And they know it more viscerally and more clearly than any of your European allies who managed to despise you while you pay for their defense for 70 years. And that's not going to change.

But here's the thing. If American support for Israel collapses, another thing is quite likely to happen. Israel's enemies have maintained for generations since the 50s, that the only reason Israel wins those wars, the only reason these pathetic Jews, can you imagine losing a war to Jews, the only reason they lost to us

is that we have the great patron America we are actually merely a spearhead a beachhead of American imperialism it's a much nicer story than we lost to a bunch of Jews if we lose American support otherwise if we lose it completely to the point where American president is dead set against us

and hates us viscerally an American policy reflects that Nixon was an anti-Semite he didn't like Jews but he worked with Jews and supported Israel. If we totally lose American support, those enemies will be incentivized to come for us. They'll be incentivized to start that great war because they have explained to themselves and generations have explained to their kids

that the only reason we won was that American support and they'll come for us. And we will win that war spectacularly. We will win that war because we will fight as ferociously as we fought, not in the 80s and 90s, in 2000s when we held back our firepower. But in the 60s and 70s, when we had no firepower to hold back, when we did not have a technological

advantage over our enemies, when we were desperate, when we were digging mass graves before the 67 war, 14,000 mass graves were dug in the biggest park in Tel Aviv on the eve of that war of 1967. We did not know we were so much more powerful, so much better equipped, so much better run. Our advantage now is enormous. And our enemies will face that scale of our ferocity, which hasn't been seen for 50 years. And then we will win.

And then our enemies will have a real problem. Because how will they explain a Jewish victory shorn of American support? And then they will have to stop looking to all these crazy excuses and start looking inward, at their own incompetence, at the dictatorships that produce deeply corrupt and important. the impoverished states at the failures of Arab modernization. And maybe that'll be the beginning of peace.