Not since the notorious 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provided for indefinite detention of American citizens, has the annual funding bill been as misused as this year. Embedded in the bill is an insult to every American who values our national sovereignty. The NDAA’s Section 224, the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” would “integrate” the Israeli military with our own, fusing technology, production, intelligence-sharing, and more.
As Ben Freeman wrote last week in Responsible Statecraft:
“The US and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes ‘network integration’ and ‘data fusion.’ In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.”
It is hard to think of a more “America last” position than handing the keys to the Pentagon (and our intelligence community) to a foreign country.
The insanity of Section 224 is made even more clear with news over the weekend that the Pentagon has raised to “critical” the threat level of Israel spying on the United States and its officials!
We should not “integrate” our military with any foreign country or organization, but integrating with a country that is a “critical” espionage threat to our national security? How does this make any sense?
The “problem” for American lawmakers is that after the killing in Gaza and now Lebanon, the American people – particularly younger Americans – have turned sharply against the US relationship with Israel. This foreign entanglement has sucked billions from the US treasury over the decades, and it has sucked us into endless conflict in the Middle East, including the current US war on Iran.
Rather than listen to the will of their constituents, Congress has decided to defy the wishes of Americans in favor of the wishes of a foreign government. AIPAC largely controls our Congress and passing Section 224 would be a great victory for the foreign lobby.
It should come as no surprise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorses Section 224. He may have written it for all we know!
Should Section 224 remain in the NDAA, it would essentially remove future Congresses from any role in determining what level of support, cooperation, and oversight should be included in the US relationship with Israel. It would be worse even than President Obama’s 10 year guaranteed US financial support for Israel. Funding would not only be on autopilot, but the US would be further drawn into Israel’s multiple wars with its neighbors. Worse even than backing up Israel in its regional wars, the wars themselves would become ours.
Americans must speak out against plans to integrate our military with any foreign country. What we should be doing is disentangling from these overseas obligations, whether they be NATO or support for Ukraine or backing Taiwan against China.
We already spend more than a trillion dollars a year on our own military and our national debt is nearing $40 trillion. Taking on the obligation to fight even more wars overseas will hasten our bankruptcy. Section 224 must be stricken from the NDAA and it is up to every American who cares about our sovereignty to demand that Congress do so.
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