World News

Just so you know, defacto means in practice. Not in law.

Your second article is interesting:

Israel has also historically been permitted to use a portion of its FMF aid to buy equipment from Israeli defense firms—a benefit not granted to other recipients of U.S. military aid

I've posted the rest of the paragraph:

Israel has also historically been permitted to use a portion of its FMF aid to buy equipment from Israeli defense firms—a benefit not granted to other recipients of U.S. military aid—but this domestic procurement is to be phased out in the next few years. U.S. aid reportedly accounts for some 15 percent of Israel’s defense budget. Israel, like many other countries, also buys U.S. military products outside of the FMF program.

And the article you linked to goes on to say:

Other experts argue that U.S. aid actually weakens Israel’s own defense industrial base while serving primarily as a guaranteed revenue stream for U.S. defense contractors.

The article you linked to, then links to an article you really should have read before commenting.

As the price of its dependency, Israel is now being forced to downgrade its own defense industries. Whereas the previous MOU contained a special provision for Off-Shore Procurement (OSP) that allowed Israel to spend around 26% of the aid it received on domestic products, the new terms require that all aid received from Washington be spent inside the U.S. In 2018, Israel’s Defense Ministry projected that the new MOU would cost the country $1.3 billion annually in lost revenue and cause the loss of some 22,000 jobs. Moshe Gafni, a former chairman of the Knesset’s financial committee, warned of the deal’s “severe ramifications for the delicate fabric of the State of Israel, harming its security.” A separate assessment in 2020 by the Israeli think tank INSS, concluded that “anywhere between several thousand and 20,000 of the 80,000 jobs in the defense industries in Israel will be lost.” ... The consequences for Israel’s economy and to the country’s security posture will get more severe in coming years as the full bill from the MOU comes due. According to a congressional report, the “phasing out [of] Off-Shore Procurement (OSP) is to decrease slowly until FY2024, and then phase out more dramatically over the MOU’s last five years, ending entirely in FY2028.” As a consequence, the report notes “some Israeli defense contractors are merging with U.S. companies or opening U.S. subsidiaries”—in other words, transferring their personnel and capacities from Israel to the U.S. So, in return for a so-called “aid package” that actually costs Israel a fortune, the Jewish state is now tethered to its benefactor’s Iran-centric foreign policy and prohibited from capitalizing on its own considerable capabilities, while granting the U.S. access to its best military and scientific minds at a heavily reduced rate of pennies on the dollar. In turn, the ostensible largesse of this arrangement transforms Israel into a scapegoat for every lunatic conspiracy theorist in America to indulge in Jew-baiting in the guise of pontificating about “U.S. foreign policy.” Indeed, in order to maintain their own power, the entire cosmos of American Jewish organizations, with few exceptions, is now dedicated almost exclusively to maintaining an arrangement that cripples Israel’s capacity for independent action, while locking American Jews into a permanent posture of appearing to suck the U.S. government dry in order to fund their own niche overseas project.

That's an article you linked to indirectly. Not me.

Look, this isn't the first time this happened Linkerbaan, but you really need to read the articles you're posting. Because if you don't or give the appearance of disingeniously cutting out the bits you think don't support your argument, you undermine any argument you make.

Put simply, when you go around the fediverse going spouting unnuanced or underresearched rhetoric, in an attempt to virtue signal that you're the fiercest critic of Israel, you are in fact undermining your argument and the cause of those who are critical of Israel's far right government and the occupation.

That's assuming you actually care about the Palestinians, and this isn't simply about parrotting Russian propaganda in the run-up to the US election.