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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Israel isn't particularly funded by the US. They receive a small amount of money from the US, as do about 100 other nations around the world, including several prominent nations that have historically disliked Israel (see: Egypt, Pakistan).

Israel is now one of the most prosperous nations in world history. Their GDP per capita will soon be among the highest of any nation. They passed Japan, Britain and France recently on that metric; next they'll pass Canada and Germany. They're entirely free-standing economically at this point and do not require US funding (even though the US will obviously continue to have deep economic ties with Israel, including militarily).

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The US gives Israel billions of dollars every year:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–United_States_relatio...

The US has given Egypt $80 billion over the last 40 years, which is about what the US has given Israel over 70 years.

Of course the US gives Israel some money still, mostly related to its on-going military relationship with Israel in developing weapons systems and technology. There isn't anybody in this thread that doesn't already know that. And the US gives money to a lot of other nations too.

None of that negates what I so precisely worded to try to avoid this follow-up response. I failed unfortunately.

Israel has a $400 billion GDP at this point. As I noted, the US does not particularly fund Israel. US funding to Israel represents a now trivial part of their economic system. They do not require the US, they are free-standing.

> Of course the US gives Israel some money still, mostly related to its on-going military relationship with Israel in developing weapons systems and technology

This is the problem I have with funding Israel. We're literally giving them money to commit war crimes and illegal military action. We should be sanctioning them (if we want to be consistent), not funding them.

War crimes and illegal military action seem to very much be the preferred business of the American military-industrial complex. Most of the US foreign aid given to Israel can only be spent on purchasing US military hardware. The people who benefit from funneling additional billions into the MIC are the same ones that benefit from ongoing American military actions on foreign soil...

Israel received $3.8b in the covid bill passed a few days ago. If they don't need it, send it back because we could sure use it here.

here's a better link, i think (Sam i am).

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

Thanks. From the link:

In 2016, the U.S. and Israeli governments signed their third 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on military aid, covering FY2019 to FY2028. Under the terms of the MOU, the United States pledged to provide—subject to congressional appropriation—$38 billion in military aid ($33 billion in Foreign Military Financing grants plus $5 billion in missile defense appropriations) to Israel. This MOU followed a previous $30 billion 10-year agreement, which ran through FY2018.

My pleasure! Always happy to discuss facts.

Israel and Egypt are always pointed to as recipients of greatest US aid. But that is only because the US military that is stationed in South Korea, Japan, and a bunch of other countries is not counted as aid. And all that military is very expensive, like in the tens of billions or maybe even hundreds. I don't know how much it costs to maintain an aircraft carrier fleet to protect the Arabs from the Persians.

And on a similar note, when comparing overall spending on the military, the perception of the size of the US military is inflated because in China and many other countries there's a draft, so they pay their soldiers next to nothing while the US has to pay theirs a prevailing wage, which is somewhere around the highest in the world.

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