Blessing Israel, Part 2

We've been blessing modern Israel for 78 years. Let's see if we are being blessed.

As we noted in Part 1, Scripture is clear that the promises made to Abraham are, in the Christian era, applicable to Jesus Christ, and to the Christian church through Christ. Those who bless Christ and His church will be blessed; all the families of the world are blessed through Jesus Christ, through his atoning death on the cross, resurrection from the dead, and ministry on our behalf in the sanctuary in Heaven.

A Thought Experiment

But it might be instructive to conduct a thought experiment based upon the idea that the dispensationalists are right, and that God’s 3,800-year-old promise to Abraham applies to the secular socialist Jews who founded the modern state of Israel. Let us assume that we are blessed to the extent we bless the modern state of Israel, and cursed to the extent we curse it.

It turns out that the United States has been conducting this very experiment for the past 78 years. We, the people of the Unites States of America, have been blessing Israel, and blessing them lavishly, since 1948, when the modern state of Israel declared its independence from the British, who had taken Palestine from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the Great War in 1918. Here are some of the ways we have blessed Israel:

Immediate Recognition

President Harry Truman recognized Israel’s independence on its very first day of existence, May 14, 1948. In fact, we recognized Israel eleven (11) minutes after Israel declared its independence!

The magnanimous Truman recognized Israel notwithstanding that Jewish Zionists had tried to assassinate him just months before. In 1947, the Stern Gang, a clandestine Jewish terrorist group founded by Avraham Stern, sent President Truman a series of letter bombs. Suspicious staffers in the White House mailroom alerted the Secret Service, which determined that the bombs were powerful enough to kill anyone who might have opened one of them. (This incident was related in Margaret Truman’s biography of her father, among other places. I’m not going to be dropping footnotes, because this is all Wikipedia-level stuff.)

The Stern Gang, also known as the Lehi, had a horrifying history, including participating in a massacre, along with the Irgun, of 107 Palestinians, in April, 1948, at the village of Deir Yassin. A few months after Israel’s independence, in September, 1948, the Stern Gang assassinated Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish nobleman who was acting as a mediator between the nascent state of Israel and its Arab enemies. Although the killers were well known, Israel never punished anyone for Bernadotte’s murder. One of the murderers was Yitzhak Shamir, who later served two terms as Israel’s prime minister.

The irony is that during the final weeks of the Second World War, Bernadotte had organized a “white bus” Red Cross transport system that rescued over 20,000 people from the dying Nazi regime, including over 1,600 Jews. Hence, Bernadotte was eligible to be called a “righteous gentile,” like Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and scores of others who saved Jews from death in the holocaust. But Jews are not sentimental; although Bernadotte saved 1,600 of them, he also trial-ballooned a peace proposal that Israeli hard-liners did not like, so they murdered him.

The murder of Folke Bernadotte was not a one-off. Israel has a habit of murdering the people they are negotiating with, and has done so frequently over the decades. They assassinated Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari in November, 2012, while he was in discussions with Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin. The most recent such murders were last September, when Israel bombed a building in Doha, Qatar, that housed Hamas negotiators who were involved in indirect negotiations with Israel through U.S. mediators. Five Hamas members were killed, along with a Qatari security guard, but the top negotiators survived.

Monetary Blessings—the Dollars flow without End

a. Direct Federal aid

What about monetary blessings? Since 1948, the United States has given Israel at least $146 billion (others say $174 billion), almost all of it to buy military equipment. That is about $300 billion (others say $310 billion) adjusted for inflation. The grants are structured through multi-year agreements; the current Memorandum of Understanding, which goes from 2019 through 2028, commits the U.S. to $38 billion over ten years, or $3.8 billion per year including $33 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and $5 billion for missile defense systems.

Following the October 7 attacks, Congress approved additional funding, including a broader $10.6 billion support package, which allocated billions more toward missile defense programs like Iron Dome and Iron Beam.

Although the U.S. provides foreign assistance to many nations around the world, including to Israel’s neighbors Egypt and Jordan (whom we have been bribing to remain at peace with Israel since the Camp David Accords in 1978), no other nation has ever come remotely close to Israel in terms of the amount of support received from the United States.

b. Military and “black ops” spending benefiting Israel

The annual grant of billions to Israel does not include the amount the United States has spent on wars beneficial to Israel (if to anyone). The Iraq War cost the United States an estimated $2 trillion dollars adjusted for inflation, roughly $13,468 per U.S. taxpayer, and caused 4,431 American deaths. This war benefited only Israel, by degrading Iraq. Prior to the war, under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was a strong state with a respectable military; now it is a weak state that Israel need not worry about.

Published aid to Israel also does not include CIA “black budget” spending, substantial amounts of which go to further Israel’s aims. In the transition period between Biden and Trump II, a years-long CIA/Mossad operation culminated in the ouster of Bashar al Assad, the strongman ruler of Syria. Assad, who protected Christians and other religious minorities in Syria because he was from a minority himself—an Alawite—was replaced by an Al Qaeda mujahadin named Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is not protective of religious minorities or anyone who is not a Salafist Muslim. This years-long operation benefited mainly Israel by granting them another easily dominated failed or weak state in their region—to go along with Libya and Iraq, and the bribed Jordan and Egypt—but the hundreds of millions, likely billions, spent on it is not included in official aid to Israel. How many of similar black ops have we funded over the decades?

c. State and Local Aid

Several American states have purchased Israeli-issued bonds specifically to support Israel. Florida and its local governments have purchased a billion dollars’ worth of Israeli bonds. Heavily Jewish Palm Beach County, Florida, has purchased $700 million. Texas has bought $500 million worth. As of two years ago, states and localities were holding $1.6 billion in Israeli bonds.

Israeli bonds are not AAA bonds. In 2024, Moody’s downgraded them to Baa1 (Baal?), which is “lower medium grade”—a rating category that is below prime, high grade, and upper medium grade, but still above non-investment grade or “junk bond” status. Some states and municipalities may soon be facing lawsuits for violating laws requiring that public investments must be made in higher grade bonds.

AIPAC

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress in July, 2024, he was interrupted by applause 79 times, and given 58 standing ovations. He would not have been applauded that much in the Knesset; he leads a minority party that must cooperate with other parties to form a slim governing majority. In fact, Netanyahu sometimes gets booed when he speaks in the Knesset. But never in the American Congress. What gives?

The answer is that AIPAC gives. The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee coordinates Jewish and Israeli giving to American congressional and presidential candidates. Some ninety percent of Congressional candidates from both parties receive AIPAC-directed money, anywhere from $100,000 to $10 million per candidate, over the course of their careers. This is big money in American elections, and our Congress does pretty much whatever AIPAC tells them to do. If they don’t, if they resist Israel’s wishes to even the slightest degree, they risk being “primaried.”

The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee was founded in 1954 by Isaiah Kenan, partly to counter the global uproar over the Qibya massacre, an atrocity Israel had committed in October, 1953. The IDF’s “Unit 101,” led by future Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, attacked the village of Qibya in the West Bank, which was then under Jordanian control, and killed at least 69 Palestinian civilians, two-thirds of whom were women and children. Forty-five houses, a school, and a mosque were destroyed. Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary that, “Qibya was to be an example for everyone,” and that he had ordered, “maximal killing and damage to property.” Houses were cleared with grenades and machine-gun fire.

For the first five years of its existence AIPAC was called the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs. Those who lobby on behalf of Israel for AIPAC do not need to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), because . . . well, because we are blessing Israel. AIPAC does not give directly to candidates for office, rather, it coordinates hundreds of millions in targeted political spending by individuals and political action committees of various sizes.

In 2002, AIPAC lobbied Congress to authorize President Bush to use American military forces to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Remarkably, AIPAC was spying on the United States during the Iraq War. In 2005, Lawrence A. Franklin—a top Defense Department analyst, the 3^rd highest Pentagon official on Iran and the Middle East—pleaded guilty to giving classified information to an Israeli embassy official and to two AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. Franklin met with Rosen and Weissman several times between 2002 and 2004 and discussed classified information, including battles and tactics of the Iraq War. Rosen and Weissman shared the classified information with Israel.

AIPAC’s enormous political power was displayed recently in Kentucky. All the machinery and money that AIPAC can bring to bear was targeted at the one congressman who has never voted for foreign aid to Israel, Thomas Massie. The Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, ran a headline before the Massie primary election in May, 2026, that read, “The most consequential Republican Primary for Israel is happening in Kentucky.” After the election, which Massie lost because AIPAC coordinated over $15 million of spending against him, much of it on deceptive television and radio ads, Haaretz ran these two headlines: “GOP Rebel Massie loses primary after Record-High Spending from Pro-Israel Foes” and “Pro-Israel Spending May Have Achieved its Goal in Kentucky, but at What Cost?”

Anyone wanting a deeper dive into the Massie race can watch Tucker’s excellent interview with Massie before the primary and his post-mortem after the primary loss. The AIPAC money poured into the race made it the most expensive congressional primary election campaign in American history.

It is quite possible that foreign aid was not the main issue in Israel’s lavishly funded effort to primary Thomas Massie. Israeli and Jewish AIPAC-directed spending goes to almost 90% of Congress, and there hasn’t been a close vote on the (currently) $3.8 billion a year for Israel in several decades. But Massie did something else much more damaging to Israel and Jewish interests: he organized a near-unanimous vote (427-1 in the House, voice vote in the Senate) passing a law to force the Trump Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files. Trump, who has called the Epstein matter “a Democrat hoax,” and wants to keep the Epstein secrets secret, called for Massie to lose his seat, and endorsed his primary challenger.

Epstein, who was Jewish, was a Mossad asset tasked with gathering kompromat—blackmail material involving sex with underage girls—on important entrepreneurs, industry leaders, lawmakers, and opinion leaders, to be used to “persuade” them to support Israel’s narratives and policy wishes. Epstein’s Jewish Mossad handler, Ghislaine Maxwell, is the daughter of another famous Jewish Mossad asset, Robert Maxwell.

But Epstein’s activities went beyond producing kompromat; the documents already produced pursuant to Massie’s law hint at Epstein’s involvement in a sort of global super-government far above Mossad and the CIA. Epstein claimed that he was working for the Rothschilds, and among the documents released, there was evidence that Epstein was in contact with Ariane de Rothschild, widow of Benjamin de Rothschild, who, until his death in 2021, ran the Geneva-based Edmond de Rothschild Group of banks, which has 184 billion Swiss francs ($236.8 billion dollars) in assets. In a February 28, 2016, email to Peter Thiel, a Jewish homosexual billionaire who founded the surveillance company Palantir, Epstein wrote, “As you may know, I represent the Rothschilds. I was hoping to find a way for the bank, managing assets worth $160 billion, to do something in the technology sector.”

I’m wandering off into the weeds, but one conclusion that can be drawn from Trump’s behavior regarding the Epstein files and Massie, and especially the Iran War, is that AIPAC and Jewish interests have enormous influence over the Congress and over the chief executive. No other nation of any size or significance allows a foreign country to interfere in its internal politics the way Israel interferes in the politics of the United States. It is debatable whether allowing Israel this extraordinary and extreme level of influence in American politics is really “blessing Israel,” because it is bound to lead to a backlash at some point.

In tomorrow’s post, we will begin to count our blessings.