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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

US aid to Israel is about 1% of Israel's GDP. Arguably Israel might be better off without the aid, the aid killed a large part of Israel's defense industry and it restricts the technology they can transfer to secondary markets such as China and India.

One should also note that most of that money isn't actually given as cash, only a few 100's of million of the 3 bln are direct cash allocations intended to fund defense projects within Israel, the rest has to be spent on buying toys from US defense contractors.

So for the most part US aid to Israel is a US job program.

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Israel is the 7th largest arms dealer in the world. The US aid has not killed anything of it. On the contrary, it has helped it grow since (until this year) 25% of the aid given was given in cash and could be spent on domestic weapons. Today he Israeli and US weapons industries have many competing products thanks to the aid.

It is true that Israel is supposed to not export sensitive technology to China, but that is more a factor of being a US ally than strings attached to the aid. Canada also shares a lot of stuff with the US, but does not align themselves with China despite not getting any military aid.

And weapons are fungible. The $3.8 billion in weapons the US provides the state with means that it saves exactly $3.8 billion to spend elsewhere. Giving away free weapons is a very poor job program in comparison to funding jobs that would help the US economy (such as building and repairing infrastructure) rather than hurt it.

US aid killed Israel's indigenous fighter jet program.

If Israel could get drones from the US it would've eventually killed the Isreaeli drone industry.

Overall what Israel gets on aid they don't make and can't sell.

US aid also comes with a leash Israeli arm sales have congressional oversight ever since the Phalcon deal with China.

Without US aid the Lavi would not have been canned and Israeli Mirage clones like the Nesher and the Kfir are considered one of the best airframes of the time even today.

I once checked this out and as it turns out there's quite a lot of cases where foreign aid is spent on weapons, even sometimes as a condition of foreign aid.

I was was stupefied that Belgium made a foreign aid donation to Saudi Arabia. I found the reason : it was contingent on the Saudis spending about 30x the amount of the donation on weapons made by a plant south of Brussels, with (I'm sure coincidentally) several (then) cabinet members on the board. They bought "weapons for crowd control" with it, because apparently that's what fully automatic machine guns are used for.

I think the issue is that weapons production is an industry that is entirely controlled by government action, both in the positive and negative direction.

Governments forbid certain parts of the market on one hand, and they cheat and lie and deceive everyone so their own weapons manufacturers would see more customers on the other hand. US, Israel, France, even tiny little Belgium all engage in this.

Israel GDP is $290.6B/yr, US Aid is 3.8B/yr. That is 1.3%.

Israel government spending is $64B/yr. US Aid of $3.8B/yr is 6%.

For comparison, if the US got relative aid like that it would be: $170B/yr. US military expenditures is only 598.5, so this would cover about 1/3rd of it.

so does that 1% includes tens of billions in loans , subsidies, military equipment or tech transfers ?

Yes on average the aid is valued at around 3bln per year.

Israel hasn't used the Loan guarantees since 1988.

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