For a long time now, Americans have been giving large sums
of money every year to support friendly military forces.
Dubbed Foreign Military Support, the program includes not
only Israel but also several other nations – including
Egypt. In the minds of many Americans – and other
people all over the world – the acronym FMS is firmly
associated with ‘aid to Israel’. Thus, support
and opposition to the program is also divided according
to how people feel about Israel. Ostensibly “Jewish”
organisations such as the ADL and the American Jewish Congress
support the FMS program, while groups aligning themselves
against Israel’s policies in the Middle East back
cutting it.
Those first – the people who back FMS due to it’s
ostensible benefit to Israel – would be well-advised
to look at te actual effects the Foreign Military Support
policy has on the Jewish State before they continue denouncing
it’s enemies as nothing more than another brand of
Anti-Semites. The truth of the FMS may be grimmer then they
think.
One who reads the Israeli papers for news of military
contracts and procurements would soon notice that the Israel
Defense Forces have two budgets – the “shekel
budget” and the “dollar budget”, the latter
provided almost entirely by the FMS program. As per the
condition of the program, money of the “dollar budget”
may not be spent except on American products and services.
As such, the FMS constitutes a program of aid to American
business – one that is by definition harmful to Israeli
business. In the last two decades, Israeli businesses have
moved small arms manufacturing, shoe-making, and other military
support industrial capabilities out to the United States,
in order to benefit from the program – creating jobs
in America, killing jobs in Israel.
What’s more, the American aid program enables the
United States government to put pressure on Israel during
peace negotiations, forcing the Jewish State to agree with
more compromise than Israeli leaders would otherwise be
ready to accept. Ever since the Camp David negotiations
(some say since Oslo), withdrawal of the FMS has always
been the Damocles sword of Middle-East negotiations, whether
overtly mentioned or covertly implied.
This in itself would of course be enough, but it is not
all. More and more, Israel’s benefactors from across
the Atlantic seem to believe they may not only use the aid
program as leverage over such things as the treaties Israel
signs with the Palestinians, but also as a method to manipulate
Israel’s military purchases made from Israel’s
own money – for example, pressuring the IDF to choose
American-manufactured automobiles for officer transport
over the previously mainstay Renault Megane cars –
despite the fact the larger American cars mean more budget
expenditures on fuel in the long run.
Those different measures would perhaps be tolerable if
FMS was indeed as key component in Israel’s continued
survival as an independent state. This, in itself, is a
concept that bears evaluating. FMS was started in a time
where a concerted attack on Israel by the Muslim world was
a very serious threat indeed. In such a scenario, Israel
would have needed every resource it could get it’s
hands on. Indeed, in 1973, it was only the American airlift
that saved the nation from certain doom. Today, this scenario
is no longer realistic. Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties
with Israel. Iraq is not a veritable military threat. Only
Syria’s mottled military remains – and it is
not likely that a nation that lets Israeli F-16’s
bomb targets in it’s territory willy-nilly is a serious
conventional threat to anybody at all. In short, Israel
is not likely to be engaging in high-scale, resource-intensive
defemsove conventional conflict in the near future. What,
then, is the role of FMS in the modern world?
