We Can’t Run a War on America’s Permission Slip

In the middle of the war, when we needed them most, the bombs stopped coming. In May 2024, Washington quietly held back a shipment of heavy bombs because it didn’t like how we were fighting in Rafah. The weapons were ours, paid for and promised, and overnight they became a bargaining chip. Every Israeli should have felt a chill.

It wasn’t only the bombs. The Biden administration also made us sign a memo promising how we would and wouldn’t use American weapons, and it froze a shipment of armored bulldozers on top of that. And remember: this was a friendly president, one who proudly called himself a Zionist. The next one might not be. We cannot bet the survival of the country on who happens to win an American election.

Here is the part most of us never think about. By American law, the aid money we get has to be spent buying American weapons. For years, we had a special arrangement that allowed us to spend about a quarter of it on building our own arms at home. That exception is now being phased out on purpose, because Washington would rather the money create jobs in Ohio than in Haifa. So a huge share of “aid to Israel” is really a check handed straight to Lockheed and Boeing, while our own defense companies wait in line. Think about how backward that is: our security budget builds factories in America while our engineers sit idle. Then we have to politely ask Washington not to delay the weapons we have already paid for.

And we can absolutely do this ourselves. This is not a fantasy. We are already one of the largest arms exporters on earth. Our defense exports hit a record of around $15 billion, and our companies, Elbit, IAI, and Rafael, rank among the best anywhere. Two years of war turned our systems into the most battle-tested on the planet, and buyers are lining up to get them. When the world wants air defense now, it calls Tel Aviv before it calls almost anyone else. We’ve even started the shift ourselves: last year, we paid Elbit hundreds of millions to build heavy bombs we used to import. The talent is here. The factories are here. The only thing missing is the decision to commit.

Because making your own weapons is what real independence means. If you depend on a foreign supplier, you depend on foreign politics. Look around: Slovenia has banned arms trade with us, Spain has passed an embargo, and others are wavering. Allies get cold feet. Ports close. A country that can’t build its own weapons isn’t fully sovereign; it’s a guest in its own defense. We already taught ourselves to make our own water and grow our own food in a desert. Our weapons should be no different. Build at home, and we decide when we fight and with what. Not a committee in Washington. Not a parliament in Europe. Us.

Let’s be honest about what this is not. It is not turning our back on America. We still need that friendship,  the cover at the UN, the shared intelligence, the big platforms like the F-35 that we simply cannot build alone. Some of our finest systems, like the Arrow, were built with American money and American partners, and pretending otherwise would be foolish. Weaning ourselves off the grants will cost real money up front, and it won’t happen in a year. But the point was never to walk away from a friend. The point is to stop needing his permission.

The deal that pays for all of this runs out in 2028. We can drift into whatever comes next and let other people shape it for us, or we can shape it ourselves and put our money where it belongs: into our own factories, our own weapons, and our own freedom to act. The war has already shown us, in the hardest way possible, what it costs to depend on others. The only question left is whether we have the nerve to fix it.