Borrowed Legitimacy: Israel and the US Since 1967

In the first days of June 1967, before the war had even ended, something was already shifting in a far quieter place than Israel’s front lines: its source of arms. France had until then been Israel’s principal supplier. Mirage jets, technical support, spare parts, all arriving through Paris. Once the war ended, France, seeking to repair relations with the region’s Arab states, imposed an embargo on Israel. The gap was filled quickly, but by a different hand. The Johnson administration had already shown interest earlier, selling tanks in 1965 and Skyhawk aircraft in 1966. The real break came in 1968. With the Phantom deal, the United States became Israel’s unrivaled main arms supplier. From that point on, Israel’s security no longer passed through more than one door, but through a single one.

Read through Bourdieu’s concept of the field, this is no ordinary change of supplier. Before 1967, Israel’s security field was a dependency distributed across multiple outside powers: France, partly Britain, its own industry. If one withdrew, another could compensate. After 1968, this became a dependency concentrated in a single power. The field was no longer plural but heteronomous, built on the tolerance of one external actor.

On that October morning in 1973, the outcome of this structure sat on Golda Meir’s desk. Elazar wanted a preemptive strike, within hours. Meir said no. The military logic was one thing, the political calculation another. Strike, and you are right but alone; don’t strike, and you lose lives but Washington stays with you. By then, really, there was only Washington.
That decision was the mature form of the structure built in 1967. The field before Meir had never been autonomous, but by 1973 that heteronomy had narrowed to a single source. Israel’s military decision was shaped not by its own logic but by how that decision would read in Washington. Meir knew this, and implicitly admits it in her book: not striking first was about not losing American support. It wasn’t a military decision but a calculation of capital. Symbolic capital, capital of legitimacy, the status of being seen in Washington’s eyes as the victim.

Meir’s return to this decision in My Life opens a more personal space. After the war she holds herself responsible for not mobilizing the reserves in time. She acknowledges that the decision was made with an eye on Washington, but she carries this not as a military calculation but as a personal weight. She writes that the person she had been before Yom Kippur could never be again. Whoever decides within a heteronomous field pays the cost of that decision in their own conscience. The field itself never pays. Washington’s tolerance was something measurable. The responsibility Meir placed on herself was not.

Einat Wilf, in her book Peace, Not Now, shows that this dependency was written into the founding itself. Truman was the first leader to recognize Israel, in 1948, eleven minutes after the declaration of independence. The relationship never moved in a straight line. Under Eisenhower it reversed entirely, as Israel’s secret arrangement with Britain and France during the Suez Crisis angered Washington, and the US imposed one embargo after another. Under Kennedy the relationship softened but remained distant, defensive weapons sold for cash. The real qualitative leap came in 1967-68. Meir’s generation inherited this relationship, but the relationship itself was a historical construction, not a fixed fact.

After Yom Kippur, dependency spread from the military field into the financial field as well. In the 1985 economic crisis Wilf describes, inflation had reached 445 percent annually, and the US stepped in directly with a financial aid package. The book’s image fits precisely: Israel had become a country living off the interest, not of its own capital, but of the returns on support flowing in from outside. The same dependency repeated itself in the arms industry. The Lavi fighter jet project was canceled in 1987 under American pressure and budgetary justification. In 2000 the sale of the Phalcon radar system to China was likewise halted by a Washington veto.

The book’s own chapter titles place this history inside a three-stage financial logic: first investment, then interest, finally debt. The period from 1948 to 1967 was an accumulation phase, diplomatic recognition, early support, founding legitimacy. After 1967 the country began living off the interest on that accumulation, in the book’s own phrase. But interest is not infinite. Looking at the picture today, the title of the book’s following chapter becomes meaningful too: accruing loan shark debt, mortgaging the national assets. As the interest shrinks, what gets borrowed is no longer the yield but the principal itself. Legitimacy capital follows the same logic. The security relationship built in 1967 was an investment. The 1970s and 1980s ran on its interest. But the decline Quinnipiac’s numbers show suggests the interest no longer flows as generously. What’s left is borrowing against the principal.

The most striking demonstration of dependency came during a period when the special relationship was supposedly at its peak. In 1981, when the Reagan administration decided to sell AWACS early-warning systems to Saudi Arabia, Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, Menachem Begin, objected fiercely; these systems would erode Israel’s air superiority. Secretary of State Alexander Haig made the point plainly, saying the president had to be free of what he called the restraints of overriding external vetoes. Israel’s lobby won the first vote in Congress, but the Reagan administration broke the resistance in a second vote by a single-vote margin, and the sale went through. What’s telling is that the crisis didn’t damage the relationship. The two sides quickly returned to the special relationship, as though nothing had happened. In Bourdieu’s terms, this was a crisis moment that revealed the field’s true nature. However warm the rhetoric of alliance, the hegemon’s own strategic calculation prevails.

This asymmetry appeared in far more concrete form a decade later. A scene Wilf recounts in her book captures it vividly. During the 1991 Gulf War, as Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel, the US asked Israel not to retaliate, so as not to fracture the Arab coalition, and Israel complied. Wilf describes a pilot friend who sat in the cockpit every morning waiting for orders that never came, a contrast, she notes, to the heroic stories of pilots from the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War. Simmel’s concept of the stranger does real work here: the ally is, at the same time, the party that constrains you. The power that guarantees your security can also take away your right to exercise that very security. There is a direct kinship between Meir’s hesitation in 1973 and this scene. In both, the side under attack cannot make its own defensive decision alone.

Then politics itself became Americanized. First in 1992, with the introduction of direct election of the prime minister and a primary system, Rabin’s campaign carried a personalized American slogan culture, “Israel Waits for Rabin.” Then in 1996, Netanyahu had his campaign built by the American strategist Arthur Finkelstein. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus fits here: dependency became so internalized that it stopped being a limit imposed from outside and became a way of thinking that arose on its own. In 1967 it had been a supplier relationship. By the 1990s it had become a mentality.

Three different kinds of capital were in play throughout this history: economic capital (arms, credit, financial aid), symbolic capital (Washington’s recognition of Israel as the righted party), institutional capital (electoral systems, campaign culture, political vocabulary). Meir’s hesitation in 1973 was about preserving symbolic capital. In the Reagan-Begin AWACS crisis, what collided was economic and strategic capital. What was lost in 1991 was military autonomy. What entered the picture in 1996 was institutional capital. Each crisis exposed a different layer of the dependency, but all point to the same structure: the small state’s field has been annexed to the field of its greater ally.

Reading this record as one-directional passivity doesn’t match the historical evidence. Israel has repeatedly acted on its own despite Washington’s open objection. In 1981 it struck Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor without US approval. In 2026 it continued operations in Lebanon for a time despite Trump’s direct calls to stop. Its nuclear deterrent is entirely self-generated. Its own arms industry, Rafael, Elbit, Israel Aerospace Industries, is highly developed; systems like Iron Dome were jointly developed, not a one-way purchase. The Israel lobby’s capacity to shape American domestic politics also turns dependency into something other than a one-way street; the small state has real power to shape the field of its larger ally. Being in a heteronomous field doesn’t mean total passivity. The weaker side can still shape the field’s rules, within limits but genuinely.

A similar calculation is being rebuilt today, and the ground has shifted.

The chronology ran as follows. In June 2025, Israel launched what became known as the Twelve-Day War against Iran, with a ceasefire declared later that month. Eight months later, on February 28, 2026, Israel and the US jointly carried out a far larger operation, codenamed Operation Epic Fury. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and numerous senior officials were killed. Iran retaliated, striking US bases in the region and vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. In April, a conditional ceasefire was declared under Pakistani mediation. The truce remained fragile. In June, an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs prompted Iran to fire missiles at northern Israel, and talks were suspended for a time. On June 17, the parties signed a memorandum of understanding that did not end Iran’s nuclear program but opened a new sixty-day negotiation period. The conflict was not over, only postponed.

On the surface, this cycle looks like a mirror image of 1967 and 1973: Israel again emerging militarily stronger from a regional conflict, backed by US support. But this time the relationship itself came under strain. Trump himself confirmed that he berated Netanyahu with an expletive in a phone call over Israel’s strikes on Lebanon, reportedly telling him, “Bibi, we’ve got to stop this.” Israeli media read this as evidence of Netanyahu’s weakness. Maariv columnist Ben Caspit wrote that Israeli policy was being dictated by Trump’s social media posts, arguing that Israel had been forced to accept three ceasefires, in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon, against its own wishes. In an interview with the Financial Times, asked whether Netanyahu would approve a possible peace deal with Iran, Trump said he called the shots, all of them, not Netanyahu. The patron-client relationship was no longer implicit. It had been spoken aloud.

This is the mirror opposite of 1973. In Meir’s era the question was whether the US would abandon them, a possibility, but a distant one. Today the question is whether the US still sees them the same way, and the answer is growing uncertain. The structural reality beneath this tension hasn’t changed. Israel receives $3.8 billion annually in US support under a ten-year military aid agreement running from 2019 to 2028, and roughly 42 percent of the weapons entering Israel originate in the US. However high the rhetorical tension runs, the structural dependency stays the same. Netanyahu, however sharply criticized in public, always ends up backing down.

Simmel’s concept of the stranger is useful here. The stranger looks at the group neither entirely from inside nor entirely from outside. This is the relationship the US built with Israel throughout history: not an unconditional ally, but a power that adjusts its distance according to its own interest. Meir sensed this; in refusing the preemptive strike, she was measuring precisely how far that distance could be stretched. Now the distance being measured is wider. According to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted June 18-22, 2026, 48 percent of voters think the US is too supportive of Israel. This is the highest share recorded since the question was first asked in 2017. Sixty-six percent of Democrats hold this view. Forty-eight percent of voters see Netanyahu unfavorably, against only 20 percent favorable. An even more striking long-term trend: according to a separate Quinnipiac series, the share of voters who say support for Israel serves US national interests fell from 69 percent in December 2023 to 47 percent by September 2025. A twenty-two-point drop in under two years.

Meir’s generation lived dependency as a hidden calculation, a matter belonging to a narrow political-military circle, not to the public. Even in the AWACS crisis, the matter was settled in the corridors of Congress, behind closed doors. Today that calculation has become entirely public, visible through polls and newspaper headlines. In Bourdieu’s terms, the field has now spread beyond relations between states into the field of public opinion. For Meir’s generation, the question of what Washington thought stayed behind closed doors. Today that question echoes constantly in polling results and political headlines.

The small state’s security decision is still measured against the tolerance of its great ally. That hasn’t changed. The structure built in 1967 became a crisis in 1973, a display of power in 1981, a loss of autonomy in 1991, a financial dependency in 1985 and 1987, a mentality in 1996. There is a structural kinship between Meir’s hesitation in 1973 and the diplomatic maneuvers of 2026. Both are the product of a position in which power is not sufficient on its own in which legitimacy is borrowed from outside.

What changed is how much that loan has become open to question. The questioning now happens in plain view, not behind closed doors. In Wilf’s terms, 1948 to 1967 was investment, the following decades ran on interest, and today even the interest is running dry, what’s left is borrowing against the principal. Meir paid for her decision in her own conscience. No one forced her to make that reckoning public. She chose to. Today’s leaders seem to have lost even that choice. The reckoning is announced on their behalf, whether they like it or not, by pollsters and newspaper headlines.