In the first days of June 1967, before the war had even ended, something was already shifting in a far quieter place than Israel’s front lines: its source of arms. France had until then been Israel’s principal supplier. Mirage jets, technical support, spare parts, all arriving through Paris. Once the war ended, France, seeking to repair relations with the region’s Arab states, imposed an embargo on Israel. The gap was filled quickly, but by a different hand. The Johnson administration had already shown interest earlier, selling tanks in 1965 and Skyhawk aircraft in 1966. The real break came in 1968. With the Phantom deal, the United States became Israel’s unrivaled main arms supplier. From that point on, Israel’s security no longer passed through more than one door, but through a single one.

Read through Bourdieu’s concept of the field, this is no ordinary change of supplier. Before 1967, Israel’s security field was a dependency distributed across multiple outside powers: France, partly Britain, its own industry. If one withdrew, another could compensate. After 1968, this became a dependency concentrated in a single power. The field was no longer plural but heteronomous, built on the tolerance of one external actor.

On that October morning in 1973, the outcome of this structure sat on Golda Meir’s desk. Elazar wanted a preemptive strike, within hours. Meir said no. The military logic was one thing, the political calculation another. Strike, and you are right but alone; don’t strike, and you lose lives but Washington stays with you. By then, really, there was only Washington. That decision was the mature form of the structure built in 1967. The field before Meir had never been autonomous, but by 1973 that heteronomy had narrowed to a single source. Israel’s military decision was shaped not by its own logic but by how that decision would read in Washington. Meir knew this, and implicitly admits it in her book: not striking first was about not losing American support. It wasn’t a military decision but a calculation of capital. Symbolic capital, capital of legitimacy, the status of being seen in Washington’s eyes as the victim.

Meir’s return to this decision in My Life opens a more personal space. After the war she holds herself responsible for not mobilizing the reserves in time. She acknowledges that the decision was made with an eye on Washington, but she carries this not as a military calculation but as a personal weight. She writes that the person she had been before Yom Kippur could never be again. Whoever decides within a heteronomous field pays the cost of that decision in their own conscience. The field itself never pays. Washington’s tolerance was something measurable. The responsibility Meir placed on herself was not.

Einat Wilf, in her book Peace, Not Now, shows that this dependency was written into the founding itself. Truman was the first leader to recognize Israel, in 1948, eleven minutes after the declaration of independence. The relationship never moved in a straight line. Under Eisenhower it reversed entirely, as Israel’s secret arrangement with Britain and France during the Suez Crisis angered Washington, and the US imposed one embargo after another. Under Kennedy the relationship softened but remained distant, defensive weapons sold for cash. The real qualitative leap came in 1967-68. Meir’s generation inherited this relationship, but the relationship itself was a historical construction, not a fixed fact.

After Yom Kippur, dependency spread from the military field into the financial field as well. In the 1985 economic crisis Wilf........

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