New legislation could codify Tel Aviv's interests as a legal priority and grant it a permanent seat at the table for strategic decisions
Mitchell Plitnick
US policy continues to lag far behind public opinion, which now clearly wants an end to support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its invasion of Lebanon, and its outsized influence on US policymaking.
But as each election cycle passes, more politicians are going to be elected who fastidiously avoid taking pro-Israel money, and who commit to a change in foreign policy.
Presidential races are no exception; Democratic hopefuls have either distanced themselves from Aipac, the country’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, or tried desperately - often embarrassingly - to avoid the topic.
With Aipac having become toxic among Democrats, and increasingly viewed with suspicion even among some Republicans, Israel is pursuing a new strategy. Its advocates are crafting legislation that, building on years of lawmaking, would codify Israel’s interests as a legal priority and grant Israel a permanent seat at the table for strategic decisions.
Israel is collaborating with its American allies to ensure that it will be exceedingly difficult to disentangle it from US policymaking going forward, regardless of public opinion. It won’t be impossible, but it will be complicated, with layers of legal and structural obstacles - some of which are already in place.
For example, Congress years ago made it law that the US president must continue to guarantee Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, defined as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or non-state actor”.
In other words, US law requires the country to ensure that Israel can beat back any assault from any combination of forces, regardless of whether that conforms to a given president’s official policy.
Deepening security cooperation
Now, Israel’s advocates are trying to surreptitiously insert two measures into must-pass legislation that would prioritise Israel’s position in US policymaking, and grant it and its chosen allies broad access to American intelligence.
These measures would be included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA), which together fund the American military and intelligence programmes writ large, so they cannot realistically be rejected by Congress.
Because these are must-pass bills, Congress members often add other measures to them, rather than trying to pass them as standalone legislation.
In the NDAA, the proposed measure would create an executive agent responsible for ensuring widespread integration of Israeli and American defence and security cooperation across all departments of the US government. It would also require that Israeli technology be integrated into major American defence purchases, and vastly expand tech sharing.
In its utter contempt for the wishes of the people whose taxes would be funding so much of this, it is hard to imagine anything more anti-democratic
This would create a union that would be difficult to untangle, just as more Americans are demanding that the US reverse its complicated relationship with Israel and chart a course based on American, rather than Israeli, interests and concerns.
Because technology, strategy and intelligence are integral parts of what would be shared, Israel could also argue that it would be illegal for a president to exclude Tel Aviv from planning in a joint war effort, as US President Donald Trump recently did in his quest to find a path towards a permanent ceasefire with Iran.
As for the IAA, it includes a proposed measure for vast intelligence sharing not only with Israel, but with any Muslim or Arab country that joins the Abraham Accords and agrees to normalise relations with Israel.
That measure requires intelligence sharing on just about everything defence-related that Israel might be interested in, and only allows the president to withhold such intelligence if there’s a “specific and identifiable national security concern”, which the president would then have to justify to Congress.
Moreover, it treats American intelligence - which, we should recall, is harvested from some of the most sophisticated technology in the world - as a perk for countries to normalise with Israel. They, too, would have access to a wide range of intelligence, albeit with additional conditions, such as the ability of the US to withhold information from them if they are allied with its adversaries. There is no such constraint on intelligence sharing with Israel.
These would be legally binding provisions that could only be reversed by new legislation in Congress.
Weapons and technology
The third prong of the Israeli strategy involves creating a new pipeline for weaponry and technology going from the US to Israel that bypasses Congress.
This is a response to the now-overwhelming opposition to the free flow of American aid to Israel. There is more support than ever for ending the annual transfer of taxpayer money to fund Israeli purchases of American weapons, and for conditioning all aid to Israel on its compliance with US and international law and human rights norms.
It is also an outgrowth of the pronouncements of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said that Israel should “wean” itself off American aid, and instead move towards increased public-sector funding for private-sector partnerships between US and Israeli tech companies and weapons manufacturers.
The idea is to insulate US military aid to Israel from public opinion by dressing it up as a partnership that will create jobs in tech and manufacturing; an investment, rather than a giveaway.
As the Institute for Middle East Understanding puts it: “Instead of deepening the US-Israeli military partnership through the expansion of joint weapons projects, the US should be fulfilling its obligations under domestic and international law to punish Israel’s genocide and cut off all forms of assistance as is required for regimes that systematically violate human rights.”
Funding would not have to be directed to Israel under such a system, but to American businesses, thereby addressing some of the objections to the current system. The plan would also strengthen an existing argument in defence of American aid to Israel: that it helps provide American jobs to some of the country’s biggest manufacturing corporations engaged in building aircraft, military vehicles, and other tools of warfare.
Most importantly, such a partnership would have massive support from the business sector, and would thus be exceedingly difficult to interfere with - especially since, after the initial costs, the partnership would be able to sustain itself, even if government support was taken away. Popular pressure would become irrelevant.
All of this is meant to defend Israel’s ability to wage war with American weapons and American logistical, intelligence and technological support, regardless of what the American public wants.
Undoing the foundations of the destructive US-Israeli relationship, developed over decades through laws and entrenched corporate partnerships, is already a herculean task. These measures aim to make it even harder.
And, in its utter contempt for the wishes of the people whose taxes would be funding so much of this, it is hard to imagine anything more anti-democratic.
