Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he intends to wean Israel off American financial aid within a decade – and that the dramatic collapse in U.S. public support for Israel isn’t really about Gaza. It is, he insists, about bots.
Speaking on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday, the prime minister was asked whether Israel should reexamine its financial relationship with Washington. His answer was unusually direct:
“I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.” The process, he said, should “start now” and be completed “over the next ten years.”
— Benjamin Netanyahu
The size of the dependency
Israel is the single largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II, with over $300 billion in economic and military assistance flowing from Washington since 1948. A ten-year Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2016 commits the U.S. to $38 billion in military aid through 2028, of which $5 billion is earmarked specifically for the Iron Dome missile defense system. Roughly 16% of Israel’s defense budget is American money.
Cutting that to zero over a decade is not a small claim. Israel’s defense industry would have to absorb a multi-billion-dollar annual gap – and find paying customers, or domestic taxpayers, to fill it.
The “bot farm” excuse for collapsing support
Netanyahu was also pressed on the now-conspicuous fact that six in ten Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel. His explanation skipped Gaza – where the Palestinian death toll has now passed 71,000 – and pointed instead at social media manipulation by unnamed foreign actors.
“Israel is besieged on the media front, on the propaganda front, and we’ve not done well on the propaganda war.”
— Netanyahu
“We have several countries that basically manipulated social media with bot farms with fake addresses, to break the American sympathy to Israel.”
— Netanyahu
No countries were named. No bot networks were identified. The framing tracks a familiar pattern: when public opinion turns against a long-running military operation, the operation isn’t questioned – the audience is accused of being deceived.
Two messages, one strategy
Read together, the two halves of the interview point the same direction. Netanyahu is signaling to a domestic audience that Israel will become financially self-sufficient – useful as the U.S. Congress grows more skeptical of unconditional aid – while telling the same domestic audience that the foreign skepticism isn’t legitimate, only manufactured.
The promise to end U.S. cash assistance, if real, would mark the largest restructuring of the bilateral relationship in three generations. The bot-farm explanation, if accepted, would also mark something: a refusal to read the simplest available answer for why support is falling.
Source: RT.com
