When asked about the cost of their government’s support of the State of Israel, some Americans will say it’s $3.8 billion a year — the amount of annual military aid the United States is committed to under its current, 10-year “memorandum of understanding” with Israel. However, that answer massively understates the true cost of the relationship, not only because it doesn’t capture various, vast expenditures springing from it, but even more so because the relationship’s steepest costs can’t be measured in dollars.
Since its 1948 founding, Israel has been far and away the largest recipient of American foreign assistance. Though the Ukraine war created a brief anomaly, Israel generally tops the list every year, despite the fact that Israel is among the world’s richest countries — ranked three spots below the UK and two spots above Japan in per capita GDP. Driving that point home, even when using the grossly-understating $3.8 billion figure for US expenditures on Israel, America gave the Zionist state $404 per person in the 2023 fiscal year, compared to just $15 per person for Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries on Earth and America’s third-largest beneficiary that year.
Source: Council on Foreign Relations
Israel’s cumulative post-World War II haul has been nearly double that of runner-up Egypt. What most Americans don’t realize, however, is that much of Egypt’s take — $1.4 billion in 2023 — should be chalked up to Israel too, because of ongoing US aid commitments rising from the 1978 Camp David Accords that brokered peace between Egypt and Israel. The same can be said for Jordan — America’s fourth-largest beneficiary in fiscal 2023 at $1.7 billion. US aid to the kingdom surged after it signed its own 1994 treaty with Israel, and a wedge of Jordan’s aid is intended to address the country’s large refugee population, comprising not only Palestinians displaced by Israel’s creation, but also masses who’ve fled US-led regime-change wars pursued on Israel’s behalf.
Then there’s the supplemental aid to Israel that Congress periodically authorizes on top of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) commitment. Since the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel, these supplements have exceeded the MOU commitment by leaps and bounds. In just the first year of the war in Gaza, Congress and President Biden approved an additional $14.1 billion in “emergency” military aid to Israel, bringing the total for that year to $17.9 billion.
One must also consider the fact that, given the US government runs perpetual deficits that now easily exceed $1 trillion, every marginal expenditure, including aid to Israel, is financed with debt that bears an interest expense, increasing Americans’ tax-and-inflation burden.
On top of money given to Israel, the US government spends huge sums on activities either meant to benefit Israel or that spring from Israel’s actions. For example, during just the first year of Israel’s post-Oct 7 war in Gaza, increased US Navy offensive and defensive operations in the Middle East theater cost America an estimated $4.86 billion.
Those Gaza-war-related outflows have not only continued but accelerated. For example, earlier this year, the Pentagon engaged in an intense campaign against Yemen’s Houthis. In proclaimed retaliation for Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza, the Houthis have targeted Israel, and ships the Houthis said were linked to Israel. In response, America unleashed “Operation Rough Rider,” which often saw $2 million American missiles being used against $10,000 Houthi drones, and cost between one and two billion dollars.
President Trump’s military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities — amid a war initiated by Israel on contrived premises — cost America another one to two billion dollars, according to early estimates. Even before the attack on a nuclear program the US intelligence community continues to assess is not aimed at producing a weapon, the Pentagon was already spending more money on Israel’s behalf, helping to defend the country from Iran’s response to Israel’s unprovoked aggression. The run-up to US strikes itself entailed a massive and costly mobilization of American forces and equipment to the region, as the Pentagon readied for multiple scenarios.
Propelled by Israel’s powerful US-based lobby, by Israel-pandering legislators, and by a revolving cast of Israel-favoring presidents, cabinet members, and national security officials, the United States has consistently pursued policies in the Middle East that place top priority on securing Israel’s regional supremacy.
Among the many avenues used to pursue that goal, none has been more costly than that of regime change, where an outcome that results in a shattered, chaotic state is seemingly just as pleasing to Israel and its American collaborators as one that spawns a functioning state with an Israel-accommodating government — and where the cost is often measured not only in US dollars but in American lives and limbs.
Of course, the most infamous such regime-change effort was the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. “If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured a US congressional hearing. Doing his part to aid a Bush administration dominated by Israel-aligned neoconservatives bent on taking out one of Israel’s regional adversaries, Netanyahu also said there was “no question whatsoever” that Hussein was “hell-bent on achieving atomic bombs.”
The drive to topple Syria’s Iran-allied Assad government is another prominent example of regime change on behalf of Israel, as the two countries sought to sever the “Shia Crescent” that — due in great part to Saddam’s ouster — presented a continuous pipeline of Iranian influence extending to Israel’s borders. To the contentment of the US and Israeli governments, Syria is now led by an al Qaeda alumnus who’s reportedly poised to relinquish Syria’s long-standing claim on the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in 1967.
Taken together, the price tag of US military operations in Iraq and Syria, including past and future medical and disability care for veterans, totals $2.9 trillion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The human toll has been even more mind-boggling: upwards of 580,000 civilians and combatants killed, with perhaps two to four times that number indirectly perishing from displacement, disease and other factors. More than 4,600 US service-members died in Iraq, and 32,000 were injured, many of them enduring amputations and burns. Alongside mass suffering, these and other US interventions undertaken to ensure Israel’s regional supremacy have fomented enormous resentment of the United States across the region.
Those resentments help drive another massive debit in the Israel’s account with the United States: Any thorough assessment of the costs of the relationship must reflect the fact that US backing of Israel is a principal motivator of Islamist terrorism directed against Americans, and there’s no greater example of that fact than 9/11.
