Source Body Text

Congress is considering legislation that would embed Israel’s military deeply within the US military-industrial complex. Stunned by the cratering of public support for Israeli policies in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank and towards Iran, Israel’s advocates are frantically seeking to preserve and even escalate US support for the Jewish state in ways that do not rely on defense of its policies or permit scrutiny of the manipulations involved. Politically, this means avoiding public discussion of Israeli policies in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank or Iran and disguising the sources of massive amounts of money pouring into election races to defeat candidates raising questions about US support for Israel. The proposed legislation shows what this means bureaucratically. News of section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act – a section that would deeply intertwine the US and Israeli militaries by committing to bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements and an unprecedented integration of the US and Israeli weapons industries – triggered an immediate backlash led by Representatives Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, to strip the section from the defense budget. The origins of this addition to the defense budget tell us much about how Israel’s lobby pursues a foreign country’s interests even as 60% of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. In February, the representatives Don Davis, a Democrat from North Carolina, and Ronny Jackson, a Republican from Texas, introduced the United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security (Futures) Act of 2026 alongside companion legislation in the Senate introduced by senators Ted Budd, a Republican from North Carolina, and Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York. Israel’s lobby prominently endorsed and lobbied on the legislation. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel thinktank originally incorporated as “Emet”, the Hebrew word for “truth”, and committed, according to its founding IRS filings, “to provid[ing] education to enhance Israel’s image in North America and the public’s understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations”, advocated for closer integration of US and Israeli militaries and weapons research and development in a December report, Beyond the US-Israel MOU: The Case for a Strategic Partnership Agreement. Two months later, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies was the only outside validator for the legislation on Davis’s 19 February press release. “The United States–Israel Futures Act builds on decades of successful collaboration by improving cooperation across the public, private, and academic sectors to swiftly develop, test, and field defense technologies that will help safeguard US service members and provide Israel with the means to combat a diverse set of threats from foreign adversarial states and terror groups,” said Tyler Stapleton, senior director of government relations at the FDD. “FDD Action strongly supports the bipartisan United States-Israel Futures Act.” On 19 February, Washington’s largest pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), endorsed the legislation, highlighting its “key provisions”, including “encouraging US-based co-production, joint ventures, and manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry”. Aipac also reported lobbying on the US-Israel Futures Act on Capitol Hill as well as at the Department of Defense in the first quarter of the year. While neither the House nor Senate legislation made it out of committee, the same legislative architecture and much of the same language appeared in section 224 of the NDAA, buried deep within the 505-page draft legislation. In short, Aipac and the FDD were successful in moving their unpopular legislative agendas forward, even as both the House and Senate bills remain stalled in committees. Make no mistake, the intent and the consequences of this legislation, dubbed the United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, go far, far beyond the sharing of military technology that traditionally has attracted so much support among Senators and Congress members. For the Israel-first theorists whose thinking and position papers guided its formulation, it is the proverbial camel’s nose. By making the United States increasingly dependent on Israeli technology – in AI, quantum computing, high-powered lasers, cyberwarfare, anti-drone systems, and other advanced fields – while also transferring America’s most sophisticated technologies to Israeli governments, Israel and its advocates are quietly steering the relationship away from patronage or even partnership and toward something more asymmetrical: a structure designed to harness American power for the aims of “Zionism 2.0”. That was the vision advanced by David Wurmser, the main author of the Clean Break document – a 1996 policy paper submitted to Benjamin Netanyahu, which advocated ending the Oslo peace process, casting the US and Israel as engaged in a struggle to defend western civilization, empowering Israel to reshape the political landscape of the Middle East, and overthrowing regimes in the region, beginning with Iraq. Its signatories included Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. All three were highly placed within the George W Bush administration as architects of the American invasion of Iraq. Wurmser introduced this new “Zionism 2.0” framework in a report published the same month the US-Israel Futures Act was introduced. Titled Israel 2048: A Blueprint for a Rising Asymmetric Geopolitical Power, the report advocates an Israeli security strategy based on “preventative wars”. US authorization for these wars is to be achieved by forging such an intimate relationship between the Israeli and US militaries that Israel would become “indispensable” to the United States, both in the Middle East and in its global struggle to defend “western civilization” against Russia, China and an increasingly Islamized Europe. Their vision is of “New Jerusalem” (the US) wedded to “Old Jerusalem” (Israel) on the basis of both having been divinely chosen for the mission of saving civilization from the “red-green” (Marxist-Muslim) alliance. For Israel, this means not just ruling all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but dominating the Middle East, launching wars of “prevention” against all potential adversaries (including Turkey, Iran and even Egypt) and, with Britain and France succumbing to the influence of foreign immigrants and the disease of “European secularism”, serving as the US’s most important ally in its global struggle to preserve “civilization” – labeled either “Jewish-Christian” or “western”. The extravagance of such ideas clearly marks the origins of the project, exposing the influence of well-funded dark-money groups and thinktanks exerting their influence on behalf of Israel’s government. Now is the time to say what section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act really is: not an alliance with a talented and responsible ally that will help keep the US safe, but a trap being set by Israel and its lobby to bind our country to a state that, for all its past promise, has gone rogue. Ian Lustick and Eli Clifton are co-authors of the forthcoming book Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power, out in August