The crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations isn’t going away. If anything, it keeps getting worse, precisely because it has exposed and crystallized a gap between the goals, expectations and even the national interests of these old allies.
The basic relationship may still be “rock solid,” as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton put it recently, but it is being tugged in opposite directions. Maybe now is the time to take money out of the equation.
Israel will get $2.7 billion in military aid from the United States this year — or 18 percent of Israel’s military budget. By 2013, that will lock into an annual level of $3.15 billion for five years. It also has almost $4 billion outstanding in available U.S. loan guarantees, left over from $9 billion extended at former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s request in 2003.
That makes Israel the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, if you don’t count Iraq and Afghanistan. It also benefits from some of the easiest terms: Unlike other recipients, which must buy 100 percent American, Israel can spend about a quarter of its U.S. military aid at home, which amounts to a significant boost to its defense industry.
The problem with this kind of largesse is that it muddies the picture, both for Israel and the United States. The best thing for the relationship would be for the United States to cut Israel’s allowance.
Under that scenario, Israel could pay less heed to U.S. pressure and do what it thinks it must for its own national security. Many would argue that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing that anyway. The difference would be that the United States wouldn’t be there to help pay for it.
Housing blocks for Jews in east Jerusalem? Pursuit of terrorists in the Gaza Strip, even in southern Lebanon? A security fence around the whole country?
If this strategy makes Israel feel more secure, maybe it should just pursue it and not complain about “restraints” imposed by the U.S. Then Israel could start thinking seriously about what its defensible borders should look like, perhaps even question the logic and the cost of tying up its military protecting unsustainable settlements in the West Bank.
Freed from its reputation as a stalking horse for the U.S., Israel could explore deeper relations with more moderate Arab states as a counterweight to Iran.
The advantages for the U.S. are obvious: It would save money at a time when the federal debt is zooming out of sight. The sums aren’t great — a drop compared with the $1.4 trillion budget deficit in fiscal 2009 — but it would take some of the sting out of Israel’s stubborn opposition to U.S. policies.
Severing the financial links could also correct the perception that the U.S., as Israel’s patron, can’t be an honest broker in the Middle East.
That assumption, widely held in the Arab world, was put on the record by Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. military’s Central Command, when he told Congress that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict “foments anti- American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel.”
Similar words have been used by James Jones, the U.S. national security adviser, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The message is clear: Failure to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians isn’t just about Israel anymore. It’s about U.S. national-security interests.
Obviously, there can be no peace without Israel’s participation. But at the moment, it seems no amount of U.S. hectoring is going to sway Netanyahu and his Cabinet. If that’s their considered opinion, let them have it — and pay for it.
It wouldn’t be the first time the U.S. withheld aid from Israel. This happened several times in the 1990s, and again in 2003, when Israel built settlements in the West Bank. By law, U.S. loan guarantees can’t be used to finance settlement construction.
These sanctions had zero effect: Israel went ahead with its settlements anyway. When a new threat to withhold $1 billion in remaining loan guarantees was hinted at last January by George Mitchell, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Israeli Finance Minster Yuval Steinitz just shrugged and said his country doesn’t really need the money anyway.
Cutting Israel’s aid may have been a meaningless gesture in the past, but this time might be different. President Barack Obama isn’t the only one who is rapidly losing patience with Netanyahu’s insistence on stoking tensions with new building projects in east Jerusalem.
Figuring out where to cut in a way that would have political impact would be a tricky business. As a key ally in the region, Israel deserves U.S. military support, more, say, than neighboring Egypt, which gets $1.5 billion in military and economic aid, in spite of its repressive regime.
Back in 2007, when President George W. Bush pushed through a 10-year military aid agreement with Israel, Nicholas Burns, then undersecretary of state, said the U.S. considered the cumulative $30 billion in assistance to Israel “to be an investment in peace — in long-term peace.”
Now might be a good time to check the return on that investment.
Celestine Bohlen is a columnist for Bloomberg News. This piece appeared in the Jerusalem Post.