The Embrace Was Always a Leash: Netanyahu Is Right about Armaments Independence

A friend who can starve you of bullets in your hour of need is not only a friend. He is also, whether he wills it or not, a master. Israel has spent 77 years pretending otherwise.

This week the prime minister stopped pretending. Standing before the cameras, Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the United States for its friendship — and then, in the same breath, called for Israel to build the means to arm itself, to depend on no foreign hand for the weapons of its own survival. The press treated the “and yet” as ingratitude. It was the opposite. It was the first honest sentence an Israeli leader has spoken about the American alliance in two generations.

Here is the truth the gratitude has always concealed: dependence is leverage, and leverage is control, however gently the hand rests on the rope. America has been Israel’s indispensable friend. America has also, again and again, used the supply of arms as a quiet instrument to bend Israel’s sovereign decisions to Washington’s preferences. Both things are true. They have always been true. And the second one is the one no one in Jerusalem has wanted to say aloud.

Consider the record — not the mythology, the record.

It was never an accident. A State Department planning memo from the Johnson years laid the doctrine down in writing: aid to Israel should be used as leverage to win greater Israeli cooperation on matters important to Washington. Leverage was not a regrettable side effect of friendship. It was the design.

The design ran for decades, and it ran through both parties. In 1975, Gerald Ford, frustrated that Israel would not move fast enough on territorial concessions, sent Yitzhak Rabin a cold letter announcing a “reassessment” of America’s entire posture toward the Jewish state — a deliberate freeze to force compliance. In 1981, Ronald Reagan — Ronald Reagan, of all people — suspended the delivery of F-16 fighter jets Israel had already bought; in 1983 he withheld them again to pressure Israel out of Lebanon. In 1982 Washington halted cluster-munitions shipments over how Israel had used them. In 1991, George H. W. Bush and James Baker made ten billion dollars in loan guarantees contingent on Israel halting construction in the settlements, threatening vetoes, squeezing an ally in public.

And lest anyone imagine this is a relic of a less enlightened age: in May 2024, Joe Biden halted a shipment of heavy bombs to pressure Israel over its conduct in Rafah, releasing them only weeks later when the political calculus shifted. The leash did not retire. It simply changed hands.

Now I will say the part that pro-Israel readers do not want to hear, because an argument that hides from the strongest objection is not an argument but a tantrum. The very same record shows America as Israel’s savior. In 1973, as Israel bled materiel in the Yom Kippur War, Richard Nixon ordered Operation Nickel Grass and airlifted over twenty-two thousand tons of arms to keep the nation alive. The aid that built Iron Dome has caught the rockets of Tehran’s proxies out of the sky over Tel Aviv. America has given, and given generously, and Israel would be a smaller and bloodier country without it. I will not pretend otherwise.

But here is the blade hidden in that gratitude: the leash and the lifeline are the same hand. The friend who saved you in 1973 is the friend who froze your jets in 1981. You cannot keep the rescue and refuse the rope. They come together, because they are the same thing — the power of one nation to decide whether another nation gets to defend itself today.

Which brings us, unavoidably, to the present — and to the friend Israel has been told is the best it has ever had.

Donald Trump returned to office calling himself the most pro-Israel president in history, and in many ways he has been. He struck Iran’s nuclear sites when no predecessor dared. He stood with Israel as the missiles fell. And then, this spring, the mask of the unconditional ally slipped — and what showed underneath was the oldest face in the relationship.

When Netanyahu pressed the campaign against Hezbollah harder than Washington’s ceasefire timetable allowed, Trump did not send a diplomatic note. According to officials briefed on the call, he told the Prime Minister of Israel: “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass.” He reportedly called Netanyahu “crazy.” He pressed him to stop striking Lebanon, dictated the terms of ceasefires Israel had not agreed to, and announced Israeli concessions before Israel had consented to them. Netanyahu’s own ministers watched it happen and drew the only conclusion available. “This is the time,” said one, “to tell our friend, President Trump — ‘no.'”

Sit with that. Under the friendliest administration imaginable, the dynamic did not vanish. It merely wore a warmer smile. The most pro-Israel president in American history still treated Israel’s wars as his to start, pause, and end — still spoke to the leader of a sovereign nation as a patron speaks to a client who owes him his freedom. If this is what the embrace looks like when America loves you, no Israeli should ever again mistake the embrace for liberty.

This is precisely why Netanyahu is right, and why his critics have it exactly backwards. The danger is not that the friendship is false. The danger is that the friendship is real — real enough that Israel forgot it was also a dependency, and a dependency is a permission slip. A nation that must ask before it defends itself does not finally govern itself. Its survival is a privilege extended by another, revocable in a phone call, hostage to an American election it cannot vote in.

And to the Christian friends of Israel reading this, who love her and pray for her: do not confuse loyalty with sentimentality. Real love wants the beloved strong, not grateful. A friend of Israel should want an Israel sovereign enough to act without a hall pass from Washington — because the God of Israel did not make this nation’s survival contingent on the goodwill of any Gentile power, and neither should we. The covenant was never cosigned by the State Department.

So let Israel build. Let her forge her own arms, her own munitions, her own independence, so that the next time a president — friendly or hostile, Republican or Democrat — reaches for the rope, his hand closes on nothing. A self-reliant Israel is not a rebuke to America. It is the maturation this relationship was always meant to reach: two sovereign friends, neither holding the other’s leash.

The embrace was always a leash. Netanyahu has finally said so. The only question left is whether Israel has the nerve to slip it — and stand, at last, on her own two feet, armed by her own hand, bowing to no one but God.