That's my understanding too. Funding is not really an issue, 8200 has one of the biggest budgets in the army but they are bound to the law and regulations, NSO on the other hand can pass the lines and keep Israel uninvolved

Not really. Israel likely openly shares secrets with other Five Eyes countries and so it gets a sort of free pass from geopolitical pressures. Its a mutually beneficial exchange. Additional to the Mossad comment, the Israeli students who work for these group take an entrance exam at 17 and that recommends them for what's known as UNIT 8200 which is a feeder network/NSA clone.

Israel isn't part of five eyes.

I think GP was referring to geopolitical alignment and intelligence sharing rather than membership per se.

Which Israel is also not part of.

Israel is only peripherally and reluctantly involved in the confrontations with Russia and China at the heart of 5E interests, and it neither trusts nor is trusted by 5E countries to the level of sharing intelligence sources or tools except in specific, transactional interactions.

American and Israeli politicians like to talk about Israel being America's "closest ally", but those are just pretty words. Israel's real selling point to the US is that it's a low-maintenance ally.

> Israel's real selling point to the US is that it's a low-maintenance ally.

Hm, that's interesting. Israel seems to be the highest-maintenance ally the US has. Other than, perhaps, Pakistan.

I would say that Israel is politically necessary in the US, but they are expensive and prickly.

And I don't think I've ever seen the "closest ally" quote.

We surely inhabit different media worlds, but FWIW that's the perspective from this side. No arguments intended.

The United States has thousands of troops deployed across the Gulf to defend its allies there. It has another several thousand as a "tripwire" in South Korea.

US troops have died in combat defending Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They've been killed by militants directly supported by Pakistani intelligence services.

How exactly is Israel "high maintenance" by those standards?

That's a reasonable argument, but I'd counter that the US has never defended Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia, but only her own interests in the region.

I think the US support of Israel comes from a different place, and I think Israel is a cantankerous partner. This may be by design, of course.

If you want to define away sending hundreds of thousands of troops to defend Saudi Arabia, using those troops to free Kuwait from foreign invasion, and then keeping those troops in both countries (where they've taken everything from car bombings to shooting attacks) as defending her own interests rather than those states, then you can define away any action taken on behalf of an ally that way. To take this to an extreme: by that definition, US defense of South Korea isn't "aid to an ally".

There is a legitimate argument that US aid to Israel isn't well thought out rationally, but the only reason that's plausible is that a few billion a year and low-cost diplomatic statements/votes aren't a big enough deal for the Serious National Security Considerations to come into play.

I agree with your last paragraph.

I think the hostility encountered by the US in the Middle East is entirely a function of protecting her own interests in a complicated and contested region. Maybe necessary, definitely inevitable.

The human suffering on all sides is a cost of doing business. This is deemed acceptable by the US govt and not contested by the hosting countries for various bad reasons. It is nothing more special than that. There is no grand righteous moral justification, but that is a useful fiction.

I apologize if this offends you, and I don't share it to be disrespectful -- just to explain my perspective.

I mean, sure. The moral question is important! But I was starting from a thread of people who didn't understand the real-life character of the Israeli-American relationship.

If you're trying to describe the actual actions of the parties involved, morality is not a useful analytical or predictive tool; that comes into play when you yourself try to act.

Doesn't USA literally send billions of dollars of hardware as "military aid" to Israel?

It gives Israel military aid on the order of $3-4B per year. On US budget orders of magnitude that's peanuts, and comes with none of the US troop or naval commitment of e.g. the Saudi or Korean alliances.

6 eyes