Every year, the United States sends billions of dollars to Israel – money, critics say, that would be better spent on American schools, American hospitals and American workers.

Washington has committed over $300 billion in total assistance to Israel since 1948, and since October 2023, more than $16 billion of that has been in direct military aid. But the critics have made one fundamental error in determining who actually receives it.

The money the United States gives to Israel is not a foreign aid package of the sort it gives to Pakistan or Afghanistan; it is an American jobs programme with a Middle Eastern address.

The vehicle for most US military assistance to Israel is the Foreign Military Financing programme. This does not transfer cash to Jerusalem but instead extends a line of credit redeemable exclusively for American-made weapons and military services. Israel is hardly able to pocket the money; it spends it at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Caterpillar. It spends it on fighter jets, guided munitions and armoured vehicles built by American workers in American factories. The dollars that the critics say they are losing leave the US Treasury and return, almost immediately, to the American defence economy.

This means the senator denouncing aid to Israel from the Senate floor may be, without fully realising it, arguing against contracts in his own state.

But the procurement argument only captures the most visible return on this investment. The deeper dividend to see is technological: The United States and Israel build weapons together. American military projects are trialled on Israeli battlefields before they are handed to their own soldiers. And a family of missile defence systems now central to American strategic thinking........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)