Rethinking dependence on US arms amid shifting US public opinion
On March 1, three IDF soldiers – Sgt. Dolev Malka, Sgt. Afik Terry, and Sgt. Yinon Yitzhak – were killed, and another 14 soldiers wounded, six of them in serious condition, when an explosion went off in a booby-trapped building they entered in Khan Yunis.
The deaths triggered a debate over IDF tactics: why were IDF troops sent to clear out buildings when those same buildings could be leveled from the air?
Two answers were proffered. The first was that most buildings can only be rendered completely unusable if destroyed by explosives planted by soldiers on the ground. The second was that the IDF preferred to use explosives or artillery shells to destroy buildings to preserve the type of bomb that would be needed for other operations.
In other words, the IDF is carefully monitoring its supply of bombs and munitions because this is turning into a prolonged war – after the War of Independence and the Second Lebanon War, this is the third-longest war the country has ever fought, with perhaps an even more lethal war around the corner in Lebanon.
Simply and starkly put, Israel does not want to run out of bombs.
Managing the country’s supply of munitions seems, to many, a throwback to a bygone era, to the pre- and early-state days when Israeli arms procurers scampered around the world looking for machine guns, mortars, and refitted fighter planes.
Hasn’t Israel moved past that? Doesn’t the country now have an advanced military-industrial complex, turning out some of the most sophisticated weapons systems in the world? Didn’t Germany just sign a multibillion-dollar contract to buy the Arrow 3?
The answer to all these questions is yes.
But still, the Jewish state is not arms self-sufficient; it does not have an endless supply of bombs, assault rifles, night-vision equipment, and bullets. This is why US President Joe Biden’s announcement at the beginning of the war that the US would ensure that Israel has the military wherewithal to defeat Hamas was so significant.
“My administration has been in close touch with your leadership from the first moments of this attack, and we are going to make sure you have what you need to protect your people, to defend your nation,” he said on October 18 during his visit to Israel.
Those were not just empty words, and the US has kept up an airlift of arms to Israel, which has allowed the country to continue defending itself against Hamas.
Increasingly, however, voices are being raised in the US questioning this policy. Increasingly, as well, the administration seems to be paying more attention to those voices.
First came calls in Congress, as the ground incursion pressed on in Gaza last year, calling for conditions to be placed on military aid to Israel. Then came outcries when Biden bypassed Congress and sent two batches of armaments. This was followed by a new State Department directive at the end of February mandating that Israel – and other countries engaged in conflict who receive US aid – must give “credible and reliable written assurances” attesting that its use of US weapons is in line with international law.
On Wednesday, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, well connected with the administration, wrote a column saying that the administration “appears to be considering ways to prevent Israel from using US weapons if it attacks the densely populated area around the city of Rafah.
“Any limit on US arms supplies to Israel would mark a sharp break in the relationship – and cause a political furor,” Ignatius wrote. “A break in the arms-supply relationship would once have been unthinkable. But as US patience ebbs, it’s something that administration officials seem to have begun considering.”
On the same day that this column ran, The Washington Post ran another story saying that the US has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the war began October 7, “amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms, and other lethal aid.”
According to the report, this is over and above the two approved foreign military sales made public since the start of the conflict: $106 million worth of tank ammunition and $147.5m. worth of components needed to make 155 mm. shells.
“You ask a lot of Americans about arms transfers to Israel right now, and they look at you like you’re crazy, like, ‘why in the world would we be sending more bombs over there?’” Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), a House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committee member, was quoted as telling the paper. Castro is a progressive Democratic representative often highly critical of Israel.
Voices such as Castro’s are obviously not going unheard
in Jerusalem, and a Ynet story on Tuesday gives an indication of the direction in which calls to limit or condition aid to Israel are leading.
According to the story, the Defense Ministry’s procurement division is launching a local tender to purchase tens of thousands of assault rifles to replace the US-made M4 and the Israeli-made Tavor, which could be completed by 2025.
More significantly, perhaps, the ministry is looking to establish the first-ever local production line of one-ton bombs, which would reduce reliance on American-manufactured bombs.
None of those new developments in Israel’s arms procurement plans can be divorced from the degree to
which this war has highlighted Israel’s dependence on US arms and the country’s national interest in reducing that dependence.
THE RESULTS from Gallup’s annual World Affairs survey, released this week, which gauges American public support for Israel, would seem to spur on these plans. While support for Israel remains strong in the US overall, it sure isn’t what it once was.
The advantage of this particular poll is that it has been asking the same two questions pretty much since 1988: “What is your overall opinion of Israel?” and “In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?”
The poll measures two metrics: whether people are more sympathetic to Israel or the Palestinians, and what is
their overall opinion – favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable – of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
And the two metrics are different.
One is an overall feeling for the country, the other has to do with whom people sympathize more within a one-on-one contest. The first measures opinion of Israel standing alone, and the second measures sympathy for Israel in competition with the Palestinians.
The bad news is that Israel is down in both metrics. The good news is that so are the Palestinians.
Or, as Gallup wrote in releasing the poll, “The war between Israel and Hamas has made Americans less favorable toward both sides.”
For instance, on the favorability question, Israel dropped 10 points from 68% to 58% of
the respondents who viewed the country either very favorably or mostly favorably, while the total favorability for the PA dropped, over the past year, from 26% to 18%, its lowest point since 2015.
Israel, however, has not had such a poor favorability rating in these Gallup polls since the heat of the tension between Yitzhak Shamir and George H.W. Bush in 1991 over settlements and housing loan guarantees, when the country’s favorability rate stood at only 47%.
The signals regarding where the American people’s sympathies lie are also not great. Again, the results to this question are mixed.
The bad news is that sympathy for Israel is at 51%, the lowest figure in more than 20 years since a Gallup poll in 2003, during the height of the Second Intifada and after Israel went on a military
offensive in Judea and Samaria. At that time, only 46% said their sympathies were with Israel, and 16% with the Palestinians.
And the good news? Well, let’s just call it less bad news: sympathy for the Palestinians over Israel, which has been trending upward since 2017, fell four points this year, from 31% to 27%. That is still a far lower rating than Israel’s, but a considerable increase over the last decade – in 2013, only 12% of respondents said their sympathies lay more with the Palestinians than with Israel.
And all that is when looking at the American public in its entirety. When one dives down deeper into specifics – age, parties, and race – Israel’s position becomes even more problematic.
The telephone survey was conducted from February 1 to February 20, with a random sample of 1,012 adults
and a ±4 percentage point margin of error.
Those who are 18-34 today will be America’s leaders tomorrow. Among this demographic, Israel’s favorability took an enormous hit over the last year, going from 64% who had a favorable view of the Jewish state in the 2023 poll to only 38% now. The pictures from Gaza, the situation on college campuses, and the “Free, free Palestine” demonstrations are seemingly having an impact – at least on this demographic.
Then there are the party differences, and they are huge.
While 80% of Republicans said they sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians, that figure among Democrats is only 35%.
For the second year in a row, more Democrats sympathize with the Palestinians (43%) than with Israel. However,
support for the Palestinians among Democrats dropped six points last year, while their support for Israel fell by only three points.
Regarding race, while whites sympathize with Israel more than with the Palestinians (58% to 22%), among non-whites there is more sympathy for the Palestinians (39%) than for Israel (38%).
These findings, as Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones noted in releasing them, underscore the policy challenges the conflict is creating for the Biden administration, since his fellow Democrats are “tending to side with the Palestinians more than the Israelis and wanting the US to exert more pressure on its traditional ally.”
No surprise, then, that reports are beginning to emerge about Israeli plans to start manufacturing more of