The U.S. will provide Israel’s military with $38 billion during the next 10 years, officials said Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016, the largest batch of military assistance the U.S. has ever pledged to another country.
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Pamela Chasek, chair of the government and politics department at Manhattan College, emphasizes that the secret nature of the negotiations makes it impossible to say with certainty what the motivations are on both sides of the agreement, but it seems like Mr. Netanyahu has doubts about how good a deal Israel could get with the next president.
Significantly, Israel will spend increasing amounts of the military assistance in the USA, beginning at the current rate of about 75 percent of the aid and rising to a full 100 percent by the conclusion of the MOU.
Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, said the new yearly total, $3.8 billion, does not represent a significant increase overall.
Israel’s preference for spending some of the funds internally had been a major sticking point in the deal. In March, Trump said he would make Israel pay for defense aid.
Advisor Jacob Nagel said the military assistance package that the USA has generously agreed to provide Israel is not taken for granted and will help it shoulder the enormous defense burden that they face and enable better Israel – and enable Israel to better defend itself by itself against any threat.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that opposition to Israeli settlements in the West Bank – which is Palestinian territory – amounts to “ethnic cleansing”.
Obama described the US commitment to Israel’s security as “unshakable”.
Power said the US shares Ban’s views on rising Israeli-Palestinian tensions and urges all parties to “exercise restraint, refrain from provocative actions and rhetoric”.
“As we have said repeatedly, such actions are not consistent with Israel’s stated desire to achieve a two-state solution”, she said.
In some of the strongest language he’s used on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Ban said Israel’s “stifling and oppressive” occupation of Palestinian territory “must end”. While the United States has always been a key ally to Israel, the new deal is the largest investment the country has ever made in the Middle Eastern nation’s security. “No other Administration has done more for Israel’s security, and U.S. commitment to Israel will remain unshakeable”, Rice said. “The $5 billion in missile defense funding will allow Israel to fully implement the multi-tier missile defense systems of Arrow 3 and David’s Sling”.
Washington’s ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer attended the ceremony in the State Department’s Treaty Room. “I also thank our many, many friends in the American Congress and the American people for their support, bi-partisan support from the United States”, said Israeli prime minister Netanyahu in a televised address. Israel considers a nuclear-armed Iran to be an existential threat and disagreed sharply with Obama’s contention that the deal actually made Israel safer by limiting Iran’s nuclear program.
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Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton welcomed the new security assistance deal as sending a clear message to the region and the world that the U.S. Israel said it was important to help the Israeli defense industry grow and mature, especially in high technology.
