The Catalogue
Wile E. Coyote has been ordering from the same company since 1949. Rocket skates, earthquake pills, dehydrated boulders: all delivered to the desert, all failing at the worst moment. In Coyote vs. Acme, which finally reached cinemas in August, he stops blaming himself and hires a lawyer.
The film has been read as a satire on corporate power and as a parable of its own survival, since its own studio shelved it, reportedly for a tax write off, before a smaller distributor rescued it. There is a third reading, and with an election less than four weeks away it is the one Israelis should care about. The Coyote’s problem was never incompetence. His problem was that he had one catalogue.
Israel’s catalogue is American. The memorandum signed in Washington in September 2016 promised 38 billion dollars over the decade to 2028: 33 billion in grants for equipment and five billion for missile defence. The grant is best understood as store credit. When the agreement began, Israel could spend about a quarter of it in its own factories. That share has been shrinking, stands at roughly a tenth today and reaches zero in 2028. By then every dollar must be spent in American plants.
Israel has stood at this counter before. In the 1980s Israel Aircraft Industries designed and flew a fighter of its own, the Lavi, paid for in large part with American money. Washington pressed hard for cancellation. On 30 August 1987 the cabinet cancelled the program by a single vote, thousands of jobs went with it, and Israel bought more F-16s instead. The decision may well have been right on the numbers. It also settled, for nearly forty years, where Israel buys its combat aircraft.
The comparison needs two honest caveats. Acme’s products explode in the customer’s hands. America’s do not: the F-35 has flown to Iran and back in Israeli colors. Nor did Israel stumble into the single catalogue. It chose it, repeatedly, for sound reasons. The aircraft are the best available, the credit was free, and American law commits Washington to preserving Israel’s military edge in the region. The danger of a single supplier is not that the goods are bad. It is that the supplier can decline to deliver. In the spring of 2024 the Biden administration held back a shipment of 3,500 bombs as Israel prepared to enter Rafah. The lesson was plain. A customer with one shop has a shopkeeper with a veto.
The film has a darker subplot. Acme was not merely careless. Under a program named after Sisyphus, it had been using customers like the Coyote as unwitting test subjects, to refine its products for others. Israel is nobody’s unwitting subject, and nothing here is hidden or improper, but it will recognize the trade. When its air force announced in 2018 that it had been the first to fly the F-35 in combat, an American analyst called it the best endorsement the aircraft could get. Iron Dome’s thousands of interceptions are the record on which a version is now built in America for the United States Marine Corps. This is the part of the relationship that never appears on the invoice. When Benjamin Netanyahu raised the idea of ending the aid at Mar-a-Lago last December, President Trump was reportedly skeptical, on the view that the aid serves America too.
Netanyahu’s answer is the taper. In January he told The Economist that he wants American military aid reduced to zero within ten years. In June he wrote to an American congressman that the time had come “to move from aid recipient to partner”. Talks on a successor agreement opened the same week, built around joint research, development and production. By July a deal before the new Congress sits in January was being described as a long shot. The file will therefore land on the desk of whoever forms a government after 27 October.
That government should be clear about what the taper is. It is being presented as independence. It is, at most, a change in who pays. A country that pays full price at the only shop is still a country with one shop. Joint production cuts both ways as well. It gives Israel a seat at the design table, but it also places Israeli systems on American assembly lines, as happened with Iron Dome. Under a 2014 agreement more than half of its components came to be made in the United States, and last November a plant opened in Camden, Arkansas to build complete interceptors.
Sovereignty in arms is not measured by who settles the invoice. It is measured by what a country can make for itself, or buy elsewhere, on the day a delivery is withheld. That means the unglamorous things: bombs, shells, propellant, the raw materials for all three. In January 2025 the Defense Ministry signed contracts worth some 275 million dollars with Elbit for heavy bombs and a national raw materials plant. Whoever wins should be judged on how far that list has grown, not on the wording of a memorandum.
The film ends with Acme’s chief executive under arrest, a queue of new clients at the lawyer’s door and the Coyote back in the desert, chasing the bird. It does not say where he will buy his next anvil. In another desert, at the air force museum at Hatzerim, a single Lavi prototype stands in the open. Around it are the American aircraft that did the flying: Phantoms, Skyhawks, an F-15, the first F-16 to land in Israel. Each of them served for decades. The Lavi never served a day, and every fighter Israel has put into service since has arrived by catalogue.
