Part I — What an Ally Actually Is | Part II — Did the Strategy Reduce Threats?
The Question Nobody Likes
Foreign policy is rarely shaped by a single motive. It is shaped by incentives.
Campaign incentives. Donor incentives. Defense industry incentives. Electoral incentives.
When policy becomes politically expensive to question, it becomes structurally permanent. That is the story of how Washington makes — and more importantly, fails to unmake — foreign policy commitments. And it is exactly where the U.S.–Israel relationship sits today.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of how political systems behave when enough money, enough power, and enough institutional inertia all push in the same direction. You don’t need a villain when you have incentive structures.
$127B AIPAC + UDP Spending | 2023–2024 Cycle
$18B+U.S. Military Aid to Israel, FY2024
80%+of House seats had AIPAC spending in 2024
$2.4TPentagon Contracts to Private Firms, 2020–24
The Machinery of Influence
Lobbying is not a conspiracy. It is a system — and it works exactly as designed.
Lobbying is legal in the United States. It is protected political activity. Organizations across every sector advocate for policy outcomes: energy companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, labor unions, civil rights groups, defense contractors. The formal machinery for shaping legislation is open to anyone who can afford it.
Pro-Israel advocacy groups operate within that same legal framework. The most influential is AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And in the 2023–2024 election cycle, it was not merely influential. It was dominant.
According to FEC filings analyzed by Sludge, AIPAC’s PAC and its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent nearly $126.9 million combined during the cycle — making it by far the largest PAC contributor to federal candidates. That figure includes more than $55 million in direct donations to campaigns and $61 million from the super PAC in independent expenditures. AIPAC spent money in more than 80 percent of the 469 House seats up for reelection. There are few congressional races it sat out.
This is a shift in kind, not just scale. For 60 years, AIPAC engaged in issues-based lobbying behind the scenes. In 2022, it made a decisive pivot: it would now spend directly on elections, using its war chest to unseat members of Congress who challenged unconditional military aid. It immediately succeeded — removing two outspoken progressive critics of the aid framework. In 2024, it came back with nearly ten times as much money and took out two more.
Watch — How AIPAC Shapes Congress
A breakdown of AIPAC’s transformation from a lobbying operation into one of the most powerful electoral forces in American politics.
The Cost of Dissent
The signal doesn’t require coordination. It just needs to be clear.
Members of Congress who publicly challenge military aid frameworks or call for conditionality often face well-funded primary challengers. The mechanism doesn’t require a phone call or a threat. It requires only that elected officials observe what happens to colleagues who step out of line.
Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman — both among the first in Congress to call for a ceasefire — were targeted with a combined $20 million from AIPAC-affiliated spending. Both lost their primaries. AIPAC had previously tried and failed to recruit a challenger against Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania. She won easily. The message was not subtle in either direction.
“This gets to the point where it is very troubling — outside spending can top what the candidates spend. The candidates aren’t in charge of the campaigns.”
Craig Holman, Public Citizen government affairs lobbyist, via Al Jazeera
Policy alignment then appears unanimous, even when internal disagreement exists. The Congressional Record shows bipartisan consensus. What it doesn’t show is the number of members who privately harbor doubts but have calculated that voicing them is professionally fatal.
The Defense Industry Variable
Foreign aid that cycles back home isn’t charity. It’s industrial policy.
Military aid to Israel is not a simple cash transfer. Under the terms of the Foreign Military Financing program, the overwhelming majority of those funds must be spent on American-manufactured defense equipment. That means appropriations for Israel flow directly into U.S. defense firms: missile defense systems, precision munitions, aircraft platforms, armored vehicles — produced by American workers at American factories.
Since October 7, 2023, the U.S. has enacted legislation providing at least $16.3 billion in direct military aid to Israel. The Costs of War Project puts the FY2024 figure at $17.9 billion — the highest single-year total in history. In May 2025, the Israeli Defense Ministry confirmed the United States had delivered ninety thousand tons of arms and equipment on 800 transport planes and 140 ships.
The Quincy Institute’s analysis of Pentagon contracting from 2020 to 2024 found that private firms received $2.4 trillion in contracts — roughly 54% of all Pentagon discretionary spending. Just five firms — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — captured $771 billion of that. The same firms benefit from Israel aid packages. They also employ 950 lobbyists in Washington as of 2024, and their campaign contributions flow overwhelmingly to members of Armed Services and Defense Appropriations committees — the very people who write the checks.
The result is a seamless alignment: strategic partnership and domestic economic interest become functionally indistinguishable. Questioning the aid framework isn’t just politically risky — it means asking constituents in defense manufacturing districts to accept job losses in the name of abstract foreign policy principles.
Bipartisan Consensus — and What It Conceals
The rhetorical justifications differ. The funding outcomes rarely do.
Unlike most foreign policy issues, support for Israel has historically enjoyed genuine bipartisan consensus — which makes it unusual and, from an analytical standpoint, worth examining carefully.
Republican leadership frames the alliance through security and theological lenses: Israel as a bulwark against Iran, as a valued intelligence partner, and for a significant constituency, as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Democratic leadership frames it through shared democratic values, historical obligation, and strategic partnership. The language is entirely different. The line items in the appropriations bills are nearly identical.
What bipartisan consensus does, practically speaking, is eliminate the normal friction that constrains policy. When both parties compete to be more supportive rather than debating the merits, oversight mechanisms weaken. Conditions that would be applied as standard practice in any other context get characterized as hostile rather than prudent.
Watch — The Generational Divide in U.S. Foreign Policy
As younger voters diverge sharply from older Americans on Middle East policy, the political calculus in Washington faces growing pressure.
Conditionality — The Third Rail
America applies oversight to every major aid relationship. Except one.
The United States places conditions on foreign aid globally. Egypt’s aid packages have included human rights benchmarks. Pakistan’s assistance has been periodically suspended. Ukraine aid includes oversight mechanisms and reporting requirements. Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico — the pattern is universal. Aid comes with strings. That is standard practice.
Proposing similar conditionality for Israel triggers accusations of hostility rather than standard oversight. That asymmetry is the heart of the debate — not whether Israel matters, but whether it occupies a structurally different category from every other U.S. ally.
In February 2024, the Biden administration issued a national security directive requiring written assurances from Israel that U.S.-supplied weapons were being used in accordance with international law. A subsequent investigation by ProPublica found that USAID and other agencies had determined Israel was deliberately blocking humanitarian aid — but that Secretary of State Blinken rejected their findings. Arms transfers continued regardless.
If no mechanism for enforcement exists, the oversight requirement is performative. And performative oversight, applied only to this relationship among all American aid relationships, tells you something about the underlying incentive structure.
The Antisemitism Boundary
The distinction matters — and blurring it serves no one.
Antisemitism is real. It is historically documented, morally indefensible, and on the rise. Pew Research found that the share of Americans who say Jews face “a lot” of discrimination has doubled since 2021. The American Jewish Committee’s 2024 survey found that about nine in ten Jewish Americans said antisemitism had increased in the previous five years. These are not trivial concerns.
A Necessary Distinction
Antisemitism: Targeting, demonizing, or discriminating against Jewish people because of their identity. Historically documented. Morally indefensible. Should be challenged without qualification.
Policy criticism: Questioning the strategic rationale, funding levels, conditions, or conduct associated with a government’s actions. The same analysis applied to any other country’s government. Democratic accountability.
When those two categories are conflated — when criticism of a government’s conduct is framed as evidence of bigotry toward a people — two things happen simultaneously. Democratic debate narrows. And the rhetorical force of the word “antisemitism,” which needs to retain its moral weight to be effective against actual antisemitism, gets diluted.
Blurring those lines weakens both democratic accountability and the fight against real antisemitism. The distinction is not difficult. Its consistent erasure is a political choice, not an honest mistake.
The Widening Gap
Policy inertia and public opinion are diverging — and the gap is accelerating.
For decades, the question of U.S. policy toward Israel was one of the most stable in American political life. The bipartisan consensus was broadly reflected in the public. That is no longer true — and the divergence is generational in a way that carries long-term structural implications.
Pew Research Center data shows that a third of Americans under 30 sympathize
primarily with Palestinians, while only 14% sympathize primarily with Israelis. Among those 65 and older, those numbers are reversed: 47% sympathize primarily with Israelis, 9% with Palestinians. Brookings analysis found millennials held net-zero sympathy for Israel versus Palestinians — compared to a net positive of +46 among Baby Boomers and +32 among Gen X.
Among Democrats, only 8% now approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza — down from 36% at the start of the conflict. Among independents, it dropped from 47% to 25%. The Gallup tracking measure found that American sympathy for Israelis hit its lowest point in 25 years in 2025.
Washington’s policy has not moved at anything close to this pace. The gap between public sentiment and institutional positioning is widening every cycle. When institutional incentives consistently resist recalibration, that tension doesn’t dissipate — it builds.
When Policy Becomes Untouchable
Democracy depends on the ability to revisit policy. When revision becomes taboo, accountability erodes.
The question is not whether Israel has strategic value. The question is whether the political cost of reassessing the relationship has become disproportionately high compared to other alliances.
Consider the contrast: members of Congress openly debate aid levels to Ukraine, NATO burden-sharing, the future of U.S. bases in Japan, trade agreements with South Korea. These are major alliance relationships. The debates can be substantive, even contentious. They are considered normal democratic deliberation.
Apply the same scrutiny to U.S.–Israel policy and the vocabulary shifts entirely. The debate is no longer strategic. It becomes a character test. That asymmetry — one alliance in a structurally immune category while all others remain open to review — is not a sign of an especially important partnership. It is a sign of an especially effective incentive structure.
“When elected officials observe that dissent carries high political risk, self-censorship follows. Policy alignment then appears unanimous, even when internal disagreement exists.”
The incentive mechanism, operating as designed
Conclusion — Follow the Incentives
No alliance should be immune from scrutiny. Not because it is hostile. Because it is expensive.
In politics, incentives are gravity. Money shapes incentives. Political risk shapes silence.
The machinery described here isn’t unique to foreign policy. The same system appears in pharmaceutical pricing, fossil fuel regulation, and gun legislation. Interests organize. Money flows. Politicians calculate the risk of crossing it.
But foreign policy has one difference.
The consequences don’t stay inside our borders.
When incentives distort domestic policy, Americans pay more at the pharmacy or the gas pump. When incentives distort foreign policy, the bill arrives in wars, long-term military commitments, and trillions borrowed from future taxpayers.
Those commitments often outlive the political moment that created them. The incentives remain. The strategy rarely gets revisited.
If the United States applies conditionality to almost every partner in the world — economic aid, military assistance, trade agreements — but treats one relationship as politically untouchable, then the question isn’t unreasonable.
It’s necessary.
Why?
“Because it’s politically difficult to do otherwise” may be an honest answer.
It is not a strategic one.
Part I defined what an alliance is supposed to produce.
Part II asked whether this one has delivered on those terms.
Part III exposed the incentive structure that makes asking that question feel dangerous.
Because in Washington, the most powerful force in foreign policy is rarely ideology.
It’s incentives.
And incentives don’t change until someone is willing to question them out loud.
In Part IV, we examine what a genuine strategic reset would require — and what it would actually look like if Washington chose to build one.
Coming Next
