A friend who can starve you of bullets in your hour of need is not only a friend. He is also, whether he wills it or not, a master. Israel has spent 77 years pretending otherwise.

This week the prime minister stopped pretending. Standing before the cameras, Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the United States for its friendship — and then, in the same breath, called for Israel to build the means to arm itself, to depend on no foreign hand for the weapons of its own survival. The press treated the “and yet” as ingratitude. It was the opposite. It was the first honest sentence an Israeli leader has spoken about the American alliance in two generations.

Here is the truth the gratitude has always concealed: dependence is leverage, and leverage is control, however gently the hand rests on the rope. America has been Israel’s indispensable friend. America has also, again and again, used the supply of arms as a quiet instrument to bend Israel’s sovereign decisions to Washington’s preferences. Both things are true. They have always been true. And the second one is the one no one in Jerusalem has wanted to say aloud.

Consider the record — not the mythology, the record.

It was never an accident. A State Department planning memo from the Johnson years laid the doctrine down in writing: aid to Israel should be used as leverage to win greater Israeli cooperation on matters important to Washington. Leverage was not a regrettable side effect of friendship. It was the design.

The design ran for decades, and it ran through both parties. In 1975, Gerald Ford, frustrated that Israel would not move fast enough on territorial concessions, sent Yitzhak Rabin a cold letter announcing........

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