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Israel’s combat air fleet is predominantly American-made, featuring stealth strike fighters such as F-35s, F-15s, and F-16s. “Let me put it this way: In the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, all the planes flown by the IDF [Israeli military] were American,” Yaakov Amidror, a former national security advisor to Netanyahu and now JINSA Distinguished Fellow, told me over the phone.
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“We want to be more independent in terms of producing our own ammunition, spare parts for weapons systems, gathering more intelligence capabilities, and so on,” Amidror said. However, he also acknowledged Israel’s limitations.
“We are not going to produce Apaches, F-35s, F-15s. We will continue to buy those main systems from the U.S. one way or another,” he said. If Trump or another U.S. leader made that impossible, he added, “we will go back to the free market, to whoever is ready to sell.”
Until the early 1960s, Amidror continued, “we didn’t have American weapons. I fought in the 1967 war with a Belgian rifle. The planes we flew were French. In our war of independence in ’48, we were banned from buying anything from the U.S., so we got weapons from Czechoslovakia.”
Israeli strategists believe that stopping the use of U.S. financial aid could save military cooperation.
The United States has agreed to provide Israel with $38 billion in military aid between 2018 and 2028. Lately, Netanyahu has said Israel will draw it down to zero to assuage concerns from those in the United States who see Israel as a mighty military power and a rich nation, and not in need of American aid.
“In the U.S., there are more voices against financing other countries’ defense. Our idea is that it will be wiser to substitute direct American support with joint ventures in which both countries give money for innovation and more sophisticated systems that are manufactured by both sides,” Amidror said.
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