I don’t know why so many people take it as a given that Israel only exists because of America.

They used to be aligned with the USSR and we did a lot of work to peel them off into our own domain. They also have their own military industrial complex and are perfectly capable of manufacturing the weapons they need domestically.

They also have nukes.

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paimapi an hour ago | parent [-]

it probably has something to do with the fact that a full 2% of their GDP comes from US military aid alone: https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-aid-israel-four-charts

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lovich an hour ago | parent [-]

And they can redirect resources to the war if we removed it.

If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts.

If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.

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paimapi 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

you should look up how much the 2008 financial crisis shrank the US GDP. 2% of an entire nation state's GDP especially with aid concentrated in gov\mil sectors of which a huge part of Israel's private sector is dependent on for grants is not a 'budget reshuffle'

	▲	lovich a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		It is when there’s an existential threat which, agree with Israel’s government or not, they believe the neighboring Islamic factions are. I’m not claiming it would be easy but it’s definitely not an amount that losing would end the war overnight, which was the original claim I responded to