Today is tax day. It’s a day where Americans everywhere are forced to reflect on all the income we’ve been forced to hand over to the government. Unpleasant as that is by itself, it’s also worth going a step further and using the occasion to reflect on what the government is using our money for.
There are, of course, the big-ticket items. The programs the government spends the most money on: entitlements and war. The federal government spends trillions of dollars on generational wealth transfers like Social Security, demand-side healthcare subsidies like Medicare and Medicaid that have caused the price of healthcare to skyrocket for everybody (including those dependent on government support), and a massive war-making apparatus that is constantly creating new enemies by attempting to maintain a costly global empire—not to mention, by the way, all the wealth siphoned away from us by the government through inflation.
There’s plenty there to get upset about. But, these days, there’s another use of our tax dollars that, while not as quantitatively dramatic, is quickly, understandably, and rightfully coming under a lot of scrutiny: foreign aid to the Israeli government.
This is not a new spending program. The US government has been sending money to the Israeli government for decades. In total, Israel has received far more “foreign aid” from the US than any other government. And most of that money—especially in recent years—has gone to the Israeli military.
Also, much of this transfer has taken the form of recurring annual payments. So it’s not really accurate to think of this as foreign aid as most people understand it. It’s more accurate to say that a portion of Israeli government programs are funded by American taxpayers and have been for a long time.
This setup has been remarkably uncontroversial with the American public for nearly its entire existence. It’s remarkable because these are literally taxes being paid to a foreign government and because that government has carried out abhorrent atrocities since its founding—the exact kinds of atrocities Americans have prided themselves on opposing.
There are a lot of reasons for that persistent public and institutional support, ranging from tribalism to apathy. But a primary reason has been the success of the Israel lobby.
As I explained a few weeks ago, the massive war-making apparatus in DC was not built up to current levels because that was in the interest of the American people, but because it was in the interest of all the government bureaucrats and officials making up the “national security state” and the weapons companies and other “defense” contractors who stood to benefit.
These groups are perpetually lobbying heavily for more money, more power, and more foreign interventions. But their interest in growth is constant and largely indifferent to geopolitics. As long as the warfare state keeps growing and never shrinks, they will be happy.
The specific directions and objectives of American foreign policy are primarily determined by domestic and foreign interest groups that lobby to steer Washington’s war-making apparatus to serve their own ends.
That isn’t a glitch or the recent corruption by special interests of a system that used to work for the American people. It’s how American foreign policy has operated since at least the end of World War II. Government officials and industry insiders conspired to build a massive warfare state, then turned around and offered it up for sale to whichever groups had enough money to lobby effectively and the geopolitical enemies necessary to justify further growth.
The Israeli government and its ideological allies have proven to be remarkably good at using this setup. They are, arguably, the most effective foreign lobby in American history—especially because they have extended their efforts beyond politicians in DC to the opinion molders in American academia and media.
So, while the Israel lobby helped steer Washington’s foreign policy in ways beneficial to whatever regime was currently in power in Tel Aviv, they and their allies in the US also worked to ensure that pro-Israel narratives dominated in American media and, therefore, that the American public was either enthusiastically supportive of or, at least, indifferent to what the Israeli government was doing.
That narrative dominance began to show cracks after the internet shattered the Israel-friendly American political establishment’s monopoly over the information space. But the current historic collapse in public support for Israel didn’t really kick off until Hamas used its atrocity-laden attack on October 7, 2023, to bait the Israelis into a response that would destroy, not only the global sympathy they had garnered in the wake of the attack, but the broad US public support Israel had been enjoying for decades.
Israel’s response was predictable and brutal. The American public watched the Israelis rain airstrikes down on combatants and noncombatants at scale in Gaza for years. The horrors conducted by the Israeli military in that conflict, with US government support, go far beyond the scale of this article. But, overall, at least tens of thousands—likely over a hundred thousand—Gazans were killed in the war. And, at the very least, a substantial number of those killed were civilians.
The American public was clearly affected by the footage of horrors like children buried in rubble, paramedics being blown up while treating injured bombing survivors, crowds of hungry Gazans being shot at while desperately seeking food at aid stations, and much more. Public support for Israel began to take a nose dive.
And rightfully so. Not only were these atrocities happening in plain view, but we Americans were being forced to send money to the government committing them. Even after the Trump administration helped broker a ceasefire last year, the American public’s support for Israel has continued to fall. And one only has to glance at the news to see why.
For starters, Israel is continuing to kill people in Gaza. Since the so-called ceasefire went into effect last fall, the Israeli military has killed over 750 people and injured over 2,000.
And then, of course, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helped encourage Trump to launch this latest air war on Iran. A war that was unpopular with the American public from the beginning, and that has caused significant and unavoidable economic damage that is now beginning to hit an American population that was already struggling economically. The war killed thousands of people—including thirteen American soldiers—all to momentarily deplete Iran’s military capabilities to help shore up Israeli hegemony in the region for the near future (notably, the operation has, so far, appeared to have had the opposite effect).
And finally, after Hezbollah entered the war that the US and Israel started, likely in an attempt to draw some heat away from their allies in Iran, the Israeli government launched a major invasion of southern Lebanon with the explicit stated purpose of permanently displacing over 600,000 people to expand Israel’s territorial control up to the Litani River. Over a million people have been, at least temporarily, displaced so far, and the operation has already brought about the exact kind of brutal civilian death the American public was already growing increasingly troubled by.
Much of that came last week when Israel launched a massive bombing campaign across the city of Beirut that killed over 250 people and injured over a thousand. The Israeli government first announced that the strikes had targeted and killed a Hezbollah leader, but later revised their statement to say it was the leader’s nephew who had been killed. But the timing and intensity of the strikes have led many to speculate that its purpose was actually to undermine Trump’s attempt to bring about a ceasefire and return to the negotiating table with Iran.
That is, at the very least, a believable theory that is in line with the recent behavior of Israeli government officials—especially Netanyahu, whose looming corruption trial gives him a strong personal reason to extend any and all wars Israel is involved in for as long as he’s able to. And it feeds the growing impression that Israel is emboldened by and taking advantage of US support.
In addition to those strikes on Beirut, the Israeli military in Lebanon has also targeted paramedics and medical facilities, killed a UN peacekeeper, struck and collapsed residential buildings, and even bombed a funeral where four family members of the deceased were killed, including a girl under the age of two. And moving beyond Lebanon, Israeli forces also recently killed a teenager in Syria and a nine-year-old girl in Gaza. And all of this has occurred in just the past two weeks.
It is ridiculous that, as Americans, our government forces us to bear a heavy tax burden to fund expensive domestic programs that make our lives harder, less affordable, and less safe, all to benefit government officials and their well-connected friends. Even more ridiculous is the fact that—in addition to all that—we are forced to pay taxes to other governments, too.
But as terrible as those rackets are, they are nothing compared to the moral hazards and moral outrages we are forced to pay for through Washington’s “foreign aid” to Israel. The American population as a whole is finally starting to wake up to this reality. But, regardless of opinion polls, all of us who oppose what the Israeli government is doing should, at the very least, not be forced to fund it against our will.
