Israel is an incubator for weapons systems, and generic contributions buy access. The US manufactures the ammunition for Iron Dome, and the DoD is generally keen on adding something like Iron Beam to the abilities of every branch of the service.
This is just a side effect of the Israel lobby pushing for strong alignment between the US and Israel. The lobby pushes for alignment and dollars and military cooperation follows. You can mixing up cause and effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_lobby_in_the_United_Sta...
For example AIPAC is pledging $100m to target in primaries progressive democrats who have not supported Israel recently. That is a hell of a lot of money: https://www.bostonherald.com/2023/11/17/powerful-pro-israel-...
the bombs being dropped on Gaza are american bombs. It is not 1% of bombs being american, so I don't know what GDP relativism has to do with it.
Are you replying to someone else? I didn’t mention gdp or even imply it.
And it buys itself invaluable feedback by way of Israeli military being the beta users of many weapon systems. And of course intelligence sharing
Why would you compare (mostly) military aid to the GDP? Aid from the US has comprised around 15% of Israel's defense budget in recent years and the current bill under deliberation would almost quintuple that sum.
It is the largest recipient of American foreign aid since WW2
It's not just the money, it's the fact that Israel has backing from the US at the UNSC, and from a military point of view.
Remove that and Israelis will be making peace with Palestinians very quickly.
US funding of Israel is at most a few percent of their GDP. Some years it drops to below 1 percent. If the US stopped funding Israel nothing would happen in Israel. Israel is more than capable of looking after themselves. And they have nukes.
The only political repercussions of cutting funding for Israel would be in the US itself. It buys votes. They’re not actually doing it for Israels benefit.