The Obama Administration is offering Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a consolidated aid package guaranteeing expanded top-line funding from State Department and the Pentagon for 10 years, starting in 2018, Defense News reported. In fact, compared with the $30 billion, 10-year memorandum of understanding of 2007, this new deal gives Israel more leeway – including the normally frowned upon and even forbidden (as in the case of the F-35) ability to reprogram US made equipment (and you know how much Israelis like to tinker) – as well as a larger aid package than in the current agreement.
Don’t sound like something the BHO White House would do for Israel, you’re saying? Well, there’s a catch: if it takes the deal, Israel can’t accept Congressional plus-ups (money for programs that are not part of the President’s budget) other than in extreme emergencies.
“The benefit is we won’t need to haggle every year, first with the administration and then with Congress. We’ll have a pretty much guaranteed top-line that will help us enormously in long-term planning,” a recently retired senior Israeli security official told DN. “The downside, of course, is we’ll lose the ability for annual plus-ups on missile defense, anti-tunnel capabilities and other programs funded by the Pentagon, in all but the most-extreme cases.”
Since signing the Camp David Accords in 1978, giving back to Egypt an area more than twice Israel’s size and endowing the US with access to parts of the Middle East where it had not been received nicely since the 1940s, Israel has been the largest recipient of US security assistance, taking in about 55 percent of the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) budget worldwide. According to DN, US aid covers about 25 percent of Israel’s defense budget.
In second place is Egypt, the cosigner of that same peace deal.
It so happens that since 2009 those “congressional plus-ups” for Israel have exceeded the president’s own budget figures for the Jewish State by more than 100 percent, topping the Pentagon budget requests by just under $2 billion.
There was $487 million for US-Israel missile defense programs—more than triple the president’s budget request. There’s also been a $40 million grant for a new US-Israel tunnel detection program, with no parallel Pentagon budget to that one.
An Israeli cabinet minister told DN that, should Israel say yes, the Obama administration’s proposed “no plus-ups” package would start at $3.8 billion for the first two or three years and then grow incrementally until, by 2028, it will have reached a 10-year total of “more than $40 billion.”
Israel feels entitled to more military support because the lifting of sanctions against Iran increased the threat against Israel, as it enables Tehran to spend much more — as much as $100 billion, Netanyahu told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in Davos — on arming its own military and funding its terrorist proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Also, seeing as the Saudis and the gulf states are also engaged in an arms race, Israel can’t assume that those weapons would never be trained on her.
“Yes, there’s a convergence of interest on some key issues between us and many of the Gulf states. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the tremendous amount of sophisticated military hardware that is flowing into a region where instability is rife and regimes can change,” said an Israeli Foreign Ministry official.
“Without the right number, we won’t sign,” a former Cabinet member told DN. “But if the number is good enough, we should conclude the agreement with this administration. We started with them and we should try to finish it with them.”
Here’s something that should encourage Netanyahu’s security cabinet to embrace this $4 billion a year: of the top four presidential candidates currently competing, only Ted Cruz is a sure bet to favor Israel, and even he could prove to be a sad disappointment. The other three, including Donald Trump, are not necessarily in Israel’s pocket. As former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk tweeted last week, “Always dangerous to think next president will give you a better deal. That was one of [Yasser] Arafat’s mistakes!”