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Israel needs both American aid and military independence – analysis

Vaseline

The cat is out of the bag.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed the flood of media leaks that Washington had halted a shipment of munitions, mainly large bombs, to pressure Israel to abandon a major invasion of Rafah in Gaza.

Hours later, US President Joe Biden went further, saying that if Israel ignored this warning shot and fully invaded Rafah anyway, he would halt all shipments of offensive weapons to the Jewish state (while retaining the Iron Dome interceptor and other defensive shipments ).

In the space of six months, Biden has gone from being Israel’s biggest military supporter in history, providing billions in military aid and visiting Israel while Hamas rockets were still flying over the country, to inciting the largest military crisis between countries. in decades.

There are two undeniable critical conclusions from this crisis: 1) Israel must change course in its war strategy to move closer to Biden and thus maintain US military and diplomatic support; and 2) Jerusalem must begin the long and incredibly expensive process of achieving full military independence.

Aviation personnel stand next to JSOW (Joint Standoff Weapon) (left) and JDAM satellite guided bombs (right) aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk in the northern Gulf, April 9, 2003 (credit: YVES HERMAN/REUTERS)

Being militarily independent is easier said than done

To those who say Israel can ignore the US and be completely militarily independent at this point, no serious Israeli military expert believes this.

Israel can change and adapt some weapons systems quickly, some over several months, but some critical systems can easily take a decade.

Israel’s entire future offensive and defense strategy for the next 20 to 30 years is based on receiving additional squadrons of F-35 and F-15-EX fighter aircraft, as well as KC-46 air refueling aircraft and a wide variety of other weapons products of the US.

These are not weapons systems that Jerusalem can produce on its own within a few years.

Building such weapons products will require initiating new industries and finding markets for those industries besides Israel so that the companies involved are not just huge, ongoing money losers.

That’s on the quality side.

In terms of quantity, Israel simply does not have enough bombs.

If the Jewish state were cut off from American weapons supplies, the Jewish state’s ability to continue the current war and its ability to fight future wars for anything other than a very short time would be severely curtailed.

This is not the political ideology of one side or the other, but cold, hard facts.

Significant new industries will need to be created to substantially increase the amount of ammunition that Jerusalem itself can produce.

All this will not only take time, but could also require a restructuring of aspects of Israel’s macroeconomic strategy, shifting funds from other areas to defense.

Figuring out how best to shift those funds without resorting to shock therapy that rips apart aspects of today’s economy and the social security net will also take time and planning.

So from a military perspective only, if Israel wants to be ready for another round with Gaza, Hezbollah or Iran, it must focus on aspects of what the US wants, whether that is the best move or not.

This may not mean abandoning a larger Rafah operation, but it could mean taking longer to evacuate Palestinian civilians until the US is satisfied, or committing not to use larger US-supplied bombs in the operation.

There were some earlier years, not so long ago, when proponents of immediate Israeli defense independence said the US could easily be replaced by its new allies Russia and China. Can anyone imagine being able to rely on Moscow and Beijing after the last six months of their close cooperation with Iran and Hamas?

Besides the military side, the US may be the only thing that can stop the International Criminal Court from issuing international arrest warrants against Israeli officials in more than 120 countries around the world.

Although the Biden administration did not veto one UN resolution that put some pressure on Israel to end the war, it did veto all other resolutions and this is the main reason that Jerusalem entered a six-month battle could continue to eliminate Hamas, while almost the entire world left Israel much earlier.

And all of this still ignores what top Israeli defense officials say is the most important aspect of U.S. support: It deters and deters Israel’s adversaries.

Yes, Iran launched a massive attack on Israel on April 14.

But imagine if Tehran and Hezbollah had unleashed everything they had in October.

A major reason they didn’t was because Biden warned them “don’t do it.”

If Israel loses the perception that America has its back when the cards are down, it will lose incalculable aspects of deterrence against enemies, as well as one of the main reasons why many Arab Sunni countries want to normalize with it – using Israel to curry favor with the USA .

So until Israel has time to make some of these major transitions, it needs to move closer to the American playbook with the current situation.

This doesn’t mean we have to do everything America wants.

The US did not want Israel to take over the Philadelphi Corridor from Rafah, but did not stop arms sales to do so.

It wanted Israel to end the war in December, but arms sales did not stop in recent months, giving Jerusalem the opportunity to drive Hamas out of Khan Yunis.

But it means we need to take U.S. policy recommendations more seriously, and sometimes act on them.

Yet that is only half the story.

The truth is that Biden’s decision is not just about Biden.

America is not as pro-Israel as it used to be

America is changing.

Bernie Sanders came in second in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, and he was a rabidly anti-Israel candidate.

The isolationist wing of the Republican Party, which hates to spend money on anyone who is not American, rises above the interventionist, heavily military wing and can overcome the evangelical wing, which is unequivocally pro-Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly upset the Democratic Party’s general public by clearly aligning himself with key Republicans, dating back to his 2015 speech to the US Congress against the Obama administration.

Twenty years from now, all these trends would likely make Israel much less of a bipartisan issue.

The Gaza war accelerated this process.

While polls continue to show that Americans as a whole favor Israel over the Palestinians, Israel has taken a historic negative hit in the way Americans view it over the past six months.

Biden reflects this evolution and in some cases is pushed to recognize it, much more than he leads it.

Israel can therefore no longer simply talk about perhaps one day achieving defense independence.

It needs to start pushing hard in that direction, because some aspects will take years, and between now and then Jerusalem will sometimes have limits to what it can do.

That window of borders must be shortened and closed as quickly as possible.

On October 7, Hamas showed what Russia showed in Ukraine in 2022 and what Iran showed with its massive airstrike on April 14: that bad guys in this world are as bad or worse than ever and perhaps more willing than ever to sacrifice sacred cows. break. and launch devastating attacks.

In the face of this more dangerous world, there may be times when Israel will have to fight back in ways that the West has not yet come to terms with, because it has not yet been in the direct crosshairs of the new era of conflict.

Every effort must be made to maintain American support for as long as possible, and if it is possible to restore Israel as a bipartisan issue, then Jerusalem must make every effort to do so.

But at the same time, Israel must plan for and prepare for the worst, including a day when it may truly have to stand alone.



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