The American alliance, item by item

The USS Liberty, 8 June 1967

On 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American intelligence ship in international waters off Sinai. Thirty-four American servicemen were killed and 171 wounded.

Israel said it had taken the ship for an Egyptian vessel, apologised, and paid compensation in three instalments: $3,323,500 to the families of the dead in 1968, about $3.5 million to the wounded in 1969, and $6 million for the ship itself in December 1980 — close to $13 million in the money of the day. In the published diplomatic record, Secretary of State Dean Rusk's protest called the attack an act of military irresponsibility reflecting reckless disregard for human life.

Every official United States inquiry — the Navy court of inquiry, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, congressional committees — concluded misidentification rather than a deliberate attack on Americans. The survivors' association, Admiral Thomas Moorer, later chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and a number of historians reject that conclusion; the commission that found the attack deliberate and reported to Congress in 2004 was a private panel, not a government body. This page does not pretend to settle it.

Caveat: Officially: misidentification. Rejected by the survivors and by senior officers. This page reports the dispute, not a verdict.

American pressure on Israel, 1957 to 1992

The aid has never come without conditions, and the record of American pressure is long and bipartisan. In March 1957 Eisenhower forced Israel out of Sinai by threatening to cut off not only government aid but American private assistance — the tax-deductible donations and the bond purchases that Israel depended on.

In December 1969 Nixon's Secretary of State William Rogers published a plan requiring Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 lines; Israel rejected it outright. In March 1975 Ford and Kissinger opened a formal reassessment of the relationship, froze arms deliveries including F-15s, and instructed departments to put Israeli business at the bottom of the pile; it ended only when seventy-six senators signed a letter against it.

In October 1977 Carter issued a joint statement with the Soviet Union on a comprehensive Middle East settlement, bringing Moscow back into the file over Israeli objections, and withdrew from it under pressure. In 1981 Reagan suspended two shipments of F-16 aircraft. In 1991 and 1992 George H. W. Bush withheld ten billion dollars of loan guarantees over settlement construction.

Clinton, Camp David and the parameters of December 2000

The pressure of an American president is not always punitive; sometimes it is the pressure to sign. One correction first, because the story is usually told backwards: Barak was not dragged to Camp David in July 2000 — he asked Clinton to convene it.

The summit failed, and on 23 December 2000 Clinton put forward his own bridging proposal, the furthest an American president has gone: a Palestinian state on 94 to 96 per cent of the West Bank with land swaps of 1 to 3 per cent, and Jerusalem divided along ethnic lines with special arrangements for the Historic Basin. Barak's cabinet endorsed the parameters on 27 December with reservations that Clinton judged to fall inside them.

Clinton's own verdict, written in his memoir, is the sentence that survives every retelling: “Arafat's rejection of my proposal after Barak accepted it was an error of historic proportions.” By then the second intifada had been running for three months; it began on 28 September 2000, after Camp David failed and before the parameters were offered. On the human cost, the counts differ by source, by the period each covers and by how combatants are classified, so this card gives ranges rather than a false precision.

Israeli figures come from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: 1,058 Israelis killed by Palestinian violence to 9 April 2005, about 1,100 through the end of that year, of whom roughly two thirds were civilians. Palestinian deaths over the same period are put at about 3,000 to 3,400, of whom several hundred were killed by other Palestinians rather than by Israeli forces.

Caveat: Contested: whether Arafat's answer was a rejection or an acceptance with reservations, and whether the Israeli reservations also fell outside the parameters. The quotation above is Clinton's own judgment, not a neutral finding. Casualty counts in this conflict vary by source and by method; the figures here are given as ranges for that reason.

And in our own time: 2016 and 2024

On 23 December 2016, in the last weeks of his presidency, Obama instructed the American delegation to abstain rather than veto United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared Israeli settlements a flagrant violation of international law; the resolution passed fourteen votes to none with the single American abstention, and it stands today because the United States did not lift its hand.

On 1 February 2024 Biden signed an executive order imposing financial sanctions and visa bans on Israeli settlers accused of violence in the West Bank — the first time an American president had used that instrument against Israeli citizens. In May 2024 his administration paused a shipment of 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs over the prospect of an Israeli assault on Rafah, and Biden said publicly that he would withhold further weapons if that assault went ahead.

The shipment was released by the following administration in January 2025. The point of this list is not a grievance. It is that a relationship in which seven presidents of both parties have withheld weapons, money or a veto is an alliance between states with distinct interests, not a client arrangement — which is the thing critics of the alliance most often assume it to be.

AIPAC: what it legally is, and what it actually spends

AIPAC is an organisation of American citizens, registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act like any domestic cause. It is not registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, because that statute covers entities funded or directed by a foreign principal, and AIPAC takes no money and no instruction from the Israeli government.

A bill in the current Congress would force it to register anyway; that is a political proposal, not a legal finding. On the money: AIPAC reported $3,324,268 of lobbying in 2024, which made it the 191st largest lobby in Washington. The United States Chamber of Commerce spent $76.4 million the same year, twenty-three times more; the pharmaceutical and health products sector spent $457.3 million in 2025, about one hundred and thirty-seven times more.

One thing must be said in the same breath, because a card that hid it would deserve to be disbelieved: since 2021 AIPAC has also run a political action committee and a super PAC, and that electoral spending is large and growing — OpenSecrets reported AIPAC's super PAC as the top outside spender of the 2026 cycle. Electoral spending by citizens is a different instrument from lobbying, and it is the instrument every American cause uses.

Caveat: Two different instruments: lobbying (small, 191st) and electoral spending through a super PAC (large). Both are printed here.

Every diaspora does this, and no one asks the others to register

Citizens organising to press their government on the country their family came from is among the oldest features of American politics, and the scholarship on foreign policy treats it as ordinary. Irish Americans lobbied nineteenth-century presidents on Irish autonomy and pressed Wilson to stay out of the First World War.

The Armenian National Committee of America dates from 1918 and campaigned for decades for recognition of the 1915 genocide, obtaining congressional resolutions in 2019 and a presidential acknowledgment on 24 April 2021 — over the strenuous objection of Turkey, a NATO ally. Greek, Cuban, Indian, Taiwanese and Ukrainian Americans run comparable organisations, and academic surveys list the Armenian, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Irish, Israeli, Taiwanese and Ukrainian lobbies together as the strongest of them.

Nobody proposes that the Armenian committee register as an agent of Armenia, or the Cuban American National Foundation as an agent of anyone. The activity is identical; the suspicion is not distributed identically.

Where the actual foreign money is, and what it attracts

Money that really does come from foreign governments is registered, published and easy to count. The Quincy Institute — a think tank that is a persistent critic of American policy in the Middle East, and so not a friendly witness here — reports that since 2016 Qatar has spent close to $250 million on eighty-eight FARA-registered lobbying and public relations firms, that its agents recorded 627 in-person meetings with American political contacts between January 2021 and June 2025, more than any other country on earth, and that it is the third-largest foreign donor to American think tanks.

On universities the source is the United States government itself: under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, Qatar is the single largest country of attribution in the Department of Education's disclosure data, at roughly $8.8 billion reported, and in 2025 alone it gave about $1.1 billion, ahead of the United Kingdom at $633 million and China at $528 million. In FARA spending for 2024, Japanese principals led all countries at $48.5 million, and Saudi Arabia, Japan, China and South Korea each outspent both Israel and Qatar. None of this is an accusation: lobbying by foreign states is lawful, universal and disclosed. It is a measure of where attention goes.

Caveat: FARA country totals include private firms, not only governments, and OpenSecrets' foreign-lobby database has had documented errors; the university figures come from the Department of Education's own disclosures.

Baladia: where allied armies rehearse urban war

In the Negev, at the Tze'elim base, stands a mock Middle Eastern city of some nineteen square kilometres: shops, a grand mosque, a hospital, a kasbah quarter, a cemetery that doubles as a football pitch. It was built from 2005 at a cost of about $45 million, with United States funding and the involvement of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Israel trains there, and so have foreign forces including American units and UN peacekeepers. Urban combat is the form of war the United States found itself fighting in Fallujah and in Kandahar — and the ally that fights it continuously is the one who built the classroom.

Trophy: an Israeli shield on American tanks

Trophy, built by Rafael with IAI's Elta, sees an anti-tank rocket coming and shoots it down before it reaches the hull. The US Army bought it for its Abrams brigades: Leonardo DRS and Rafael completed delivery of the first order in January 2021, and a further order for components in 2022 was worth $280.1 million, with support contracts since.

The crew of an American tank that survives a rocket in a street somewhere owes that to a system designed in Israel, by an army that had learned the hard way what such a rocket does.

Litening: the pod the Pentagon bought after refusing to sell its own

A targeting pod hangs under a fighter and lets the pilot find, identify and guide a weapon onto a point on the ground — the difference between a strike that hits the building and one that hits the street. When the United States declined to sell Israel its LANTIRN pod, Rafael built its own, Litening.

It proved cheaper and better, and since 1996 the Pentagon has bought some nine hundred of them, co-produced with Northrop Grumman; in 2025 the US Air Force signed a further contract worth $1.84 billion. The refusal produced the supplier.

The helmet that lets a pilot see through the floor

The F-35 has cameras all over its skin, including underneath. Its helmet projects those feeds onto the visor, so a pilot who looks down sees the ground through the aircraft. The Pentagon ran two competing programmes for that helmet and in 2013 abandoned its own in favour of the one built by Israel's Elbit Systems with Rockwell Collins.

Every F-35 flying wears it, American aircraft included — and Israel, the first country to select the jet through Foreign Military Sales, was also the first to take it into combat, in May 2018.

The drone the American forces learned on

In January 1986 the US Navy awarded a contract for a battlefield drone to AAI and to Mazlat, a joint venture of Israel Aircraft Industries and Tadiran. The result, the RQ-2 Pioneer, descended from the Israeli Mastiff and Scout, and flew for the Navy and the Marine Corps from 1986 until 2007, over the Gulf, Somalia, the Balkans and Iraq.

Everything the American forces now do with unmanned aircraft — and it is most of how they see the ground — began with an aircraft of Israeli parentage.

The dressing American soldiers named after the country that made it

In 1984 Bernard Bar-Natan, a Brooklyn-born medic in the Israeli army, noticed that the field dressing he had been issued was stamped with a manufacturing date in the 1940s, and that the standing instruction for a wound that would not stop bleeding was to press on it with a stone.

He spent years building a dressing with the pressure bar inside it, so that a wounded soldier could close his own wound with one hand. US Army Rangers adopted it in 2001; it became standard issue in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the troops carrying it called it the Israeli bandage. It is the first real change to the field dressing since the Second World War.

A country of ten million on the American exchanges

About a hundred Israeli companies are listed on the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange — behind only a very small number of other foreign countries, and out of all proportion to a population of ten million.

The exact rank is disputed and moves with each year's listings and delistings: the US State Department's investment climate statement has placed Israel third among foreign countries on the Nasdaq, after the United States and China, while more recent counts put Canada ahead of it. The order of magnitude is not disputed.

Caveat: Rank varies by source and by year; the count of around one hundred is stable.

Where American products are designed

Four hundred and thirty-four multinational research and development centres operate in Israel — Intel, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Apple, Meta, Amazon among them. They employ about a third of the Israeli technology workforce and account for the majority of R&D spending in the country.

Intel opened its Haifa centre in 1974, the company's first development site outside the United States; Israeli teams there produced the 8088 that IBM put in the first personal computer, the Pentium MMX, the Centrino chipset that untethered the laptop, and much of the multi-core architecture that followed. Intel is Israel's largest single exporter, at $8.7 billion in 2022.

A parliament that has never missed an election, and an Arab party in government

Israel has held multiparty elections continuously since January 1949, through every war it has fought, and has changed government by ballot many times. Arab citizens have voted and sat in the Knesset since the first one.

On 2 June 2021, Ra'am, an Islamist Arab party led by Mansour Abbas, signed a coalition agreement with Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid and became the first Arab party in the country's history to enter a governing coalition — in a government that ran from the left to the pro-settlement right. Israelis fight about their politics ferociously. The point here is narrower: it is a parliamentary democracy of the kind the United States recognises as its own sort, with the alternation of power that goes with it, in a region that has almost none.

The court that overruled the parliament trying to curb it

Israel's Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, takes petitions directly from any person, without the standing requirement most systems impose — a citizen can challenge the state without first showing personal injury.

In July 2023 the Knesset amended a Basic Law to strip the Court of its power to review government decisions for reasonableness. On 1 January 2024, by eight votes to seven, the Court struck that amendment down, the first time in its history it had voided a Basic Law, holding that the amendment would deal a severe and unprecedented blow to the core characteristics of the State of Israel as a democratic state. Twelve of the fifteen justices held the Court had authority to review Basic Laws at all.

A court that overrules the legislature trying to curb it, while the country is at war, is a demonstration of judicial independence rather than a claim of it.

The only country in the Middle East rated Free — and the decline in the same report

Freedom House has rated Israel Free in its annual survey, and it is the only country in the Middle East so rated. The 2025 report scores it 73 out of 100.

The same report records a decline, and there is no honest way to print the first number without the second: Israel scored 81 in the 2014 survey and has fallen eight points since, and Freedom House names the causes — growing political pressure on the independence of the judiciary, and long-standing systemic disparities affecting Arab and other minority citizens. A page that gave only the flattering half of this report would be refuted by anyone who opened it. Both halves are the report.

Caveat: Same report, both directions: Free, only one in the region — and eight points down since 2014.

A press free to attack its own government, in its worst ranking on record

Israeli newspapers and broadcasters attack the sitting government continuously and need no one's permission to do it: through the constitutional crisis of 2023 the largest outlets covered mass protests against the coalition daily, and no ministry licenses political opinion.

That is the substance of a free press, and it is the part the United States would recognise. The international ranking, however, has fallen hard. Reporters Without Borders placed Israel 112th of 180 countries in its 2025 index, down eleven places and the lowest position it has ever held, citing wartime restrictions, pressure on outlets and self-censorship. The honest sentence contains both clauses: the press is free to go after its own government, and by the measure of that index the country is at its worst standing on record.

Caveat: Both facts are true at once and neither cancels the other; the ranking is RSF's, the wartime context is what RSF cites.

The only memorial outside America that names every one of them

In the Arazim Valley on the edge of Jerusalem stands a bronze some nine metres high: an American flag folded into the shape of a flame, on a base holding a piece of steel from the Twin Towers. Around it, plaques carry the name of every person killed on 11 September 2001 — all 2,977 of them, five of whom were Israelis.

It is the only memorial outside the United States that lists them all. It was made by the sculptor Eliezer Weishoff, built by KKL-JNF with Jewish National Fund USA, and dedicated in November 2009. Nobody asked Israel to build it.

What Israelis think of America

Pew asked twenty-four countries in 2025 for their view of the United States. Israel returned the highest favourable rating in the world, 83 %, six points up on the year before.

The country is not of one mind about it: the figure among Jewish Israelis was 96 %, among Arab Israelis 19 %, and among Israelis on the political left 55 % against 97 % on the right. Israeli opinion of America has led or nearly led these surveys for two decades. That is the part of an alliance no treaty produces, and no appropriation can buy.

Caveat: The national figure covers a divided public: 96 % among Jewish Israelis, 19 % among Arab Israelis.