Behind the glossy tourism reels of Tel Aviv’s beaches and Jerusalem’s old quarter lies a country in profound decline — its hospitals overwhelmed, its housing crumbling, its ports silent, its airport repeatedly closed, its veterans broken, its families foreclosing, and its young people quietly fleeing. Without American underwriting, the Israeli project could not stand at all.
He is twenty-one, recently discharged from a unit shredded by a Hezbollah drone in southern Lebanon, and his leg still aches from the shrapnel. He was supposed to come home to a country that valued his service. Instead, the hospital cannot fit him in. The therapist’s waiting list runs into months. His shift at a Haifa restaurant scarcely covers his share of a 1950s apartment block — built, ironically, by socialist Zionists with grand ideas about communal courtyards and gardens for the children, before it was sold off to a private landlord and crammed with twice the families it was designed to hold.
He is the human face of an Israel that does not appear in the tourism advertisements: fraying, exhausted, disillusioned and quietly broke. The version of the country sold to Western audiences — sun, beaches, three thousand years of history, night-life on Rothschild Boulevard — is real enough, but it is not the country most Israelis actually live in.
What follows is an attempt to describe the country that does exist: a state that has been hollowed out from within by two decades of inequality, two years of fiscal incontinence, a military doctrine that no longer functions, and a war economy now consuming the civilian one that pays for it. None of this would be politically survivable for a single fiscal quarter without the United States.
Second only to Costa Rica
The official figures are damning. The latest OECD data places Israel’s relative poverty rate at 20.7 per cent, almost double the 11.6 per cent average across the organisation’s member states and second only to Costa Rica. Roughly two million people, in a country of fewer than ten million, live below the national poverty line. Child poverty stands at twenty-eight per cent. More than a quarter of the population suffers from food insecurity, with around one in ten enduring its severest forms.
The poorest municipalities are not Bedouin villages or Arab towns alone. They include the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Modi’in Illit, where almost half the population lives in poverty, and the city of Jerusalem, where nearly four in ten residents do. Bnei Brak, Bet Shemesh, Lod and Netanya all sit well above the national average.
Some 46,000 businesses have shuttered since the start of the present war. Israeli households have quietly moved more than half their savings abroad. The economy contracted by an extraordinary 19.4 per cent in the last quarter of 2023 alone, with further contractions logged through 2024 and only nominal recovery since. The director general of the National Insurance Institute, presenting the most recent poverty figures, was reduced to noting that the war on the cost of living had worsened the problem rather than created it. Poverty in Israel, he observed, was being passed reliably from one generation to the next.
The doctors are leaving
These structural fragilities are now buckling under the weight of war. The Jerusalem Post has reported a critical shortage of physicians, with more than half of working doctors approaching pension age — many of them Soviet-trained immigrants who arrived in the early 1990s. European hospitals, offering better salaries and a less chaotic working environment, are quietly stripping Israeli medicine of its best. Emergency rooms admit patients to corridors. The public mental health system, on which a generation of Gaza veterans now depends, has effectively collapsed; appointments, where they can be obtained, are scheduled more than a year in advance.
The current government’s response, articulated by the prime minister at a cabinet session at the close of last year, has been to cut healthcare, education and social services in order to fund the military. Defence is sacred; everything else is negotiable. The finance ministry has imposed a flat three per cent cut on every civilian department to free up funds for new munitions purchases — a small enough number to slip past most casual readers of the budget, large enough to mean fewer hospital beds, delayed university semesters, frozen pensions and welfare offices that no longer pick up the phone. Tens of thousands of evacuees from the northern frontier and the Gaza periphery remain warehoused in hotels at state expense, an arrangement everyone involved acknowledges to be unsustainable but which no minister has the political authority to end.
Two ministers between them now hold nine portfolios because the ultra-Orthodox parties walked out of the coalition over conscription. Senior civil servants and the educational professional class are resigning in protest at political interference. As the analyst Aie Goldberg argued in Al Jazeera last year, Israeli institutions are quickly becoming a hollow shell.
The price of the multi-front war
Two years on, the cost of fighting on every cardinal point of the compass has been quantified, and the numbers are extraordinary. Direct war expenditure between October 2023 and the end of 2025 has reached around 199 billion shekels — roughly $55 billion — with no obvious end in sight. The Bank of Israel’s own estimate of cumulative economic loss over the same period sits at 177 billion shekels, equivalent to 8.6 per cent of annual GDP. The twelve-day exchange with Iran in June 2025 alone is estimated to have shaved 0.3 per cent off output.
The arithmetic of fighting on multiple fronts has eaten through the budget at a rate few outside the finance ministry seem to fully grasp. Defence spending now sits at between eight and nine per cent of GDP — the highest share since 1967. The Knesset approved an additional 30.8 billion shekels for defence this year, lifting the total budget to 787 billion shekels — roughly $237 billion — and treasury officials have already conceded the figure is insufficient. A further 42 billion is penciled in for the coming financial year merely to replenish munition stockpiles drained by Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the Red Sea and the Iranian missile barrages. Public debt has risen from around 60 per cent of GDP to at least 69 per cent by the end of 2025, with some forecasts pushing it above 70. Interest payments alone reached 58 billion shekels in 2025, a billion more than the original forecast — a budget line that now eats more than the entire public health budget.
The damage on the ground is similarly concrete. Hezbollah’s persistent rocket, missile and drone campaign has caused, by far, the heaviest cumulative toll on Israeli soil: official Israeli figures by late 2024 acknowledged 45 civilian and 73 military deaths in the north, around 60,000 civilians evacuated from northern towns, more than 8,800 buildings damaged, 7,000 vehicles destroyed and 343 agricultural sites either hit directly or made unworkable by the bombardment. Government compensation to the affected northern population had crossed $38 million by November 2024 and has since climbed steeply; indirect agricultural losses alone were estimated at $269 million by mid-2024.
The Houthi campaign from Yemen, though far less frequent, has been disproportionately consequential. More than forty ballistic missiles and several hundred drones have been launched at Israel since November 2023; most were intercepted, but several broke through. A drone strike in Tel Aviv in July 2024 killed one civilian, the first Israeli death from a Houthi attack. A ballistic missile evaded interception over Tel Aviv–Jaffa in December 2024, injuring at least twenty and damaging buildings. A second drone breach in September 2025 wounded twenty-two people in Eilat. In May 2025, a Houthi hypersonic missile landed inside the perimeter of Ben Gurion airport itself.
The Iranian strikes — the three so-called “True Promise” operations — represent something genuinely new in the country’s history. The first, in April 2024, involved more than a hundred drones and cruise missiles and produced minimal damage; the second, in October 2024, involved roughly 200 ballistic missiles and, despite Israeli denials, was independently confirmed by satellite analysis to have struck Nevatim airbase, damaging an aircraft garage and maintenance facilities. The third, in June 2025, was the most intense; the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported at least nine buildings destroyed in central Tel Aviv and several hundred more damaged, including a 32-storey high-rise. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s claim that the attack had “far exceeded” Israeli expectations was, on the ground, difficult to refute.
The war currency
To solve a manpower crisis the army cannot openly admit, Israel has begun paying reservists at extraordinary rates: roughly 29,000 shekels a month, more than twice the average wage and five times the minimum. Officers distribute these “reserve tokens” at their own discretion, and units have begun recruiting tank drivers and mechanics over WhatsApp like gig-economy bosses chasing couriers. Some have used the tokens as payment to butcher shops in lieu of cash. The political economist Shir Hever, who has tracked Israel’s wartime finances from his exile in Germany, calls the result a parallel currency — a development unseen in the country since the hyperinflation of the early 1980s, and one the central bank has no instruments to control. Cafés and courier firms across the country are short-staffed because young men who once waited tables now find it more lucrative to fight.
The strain on the labour market is, in any case, structural. Around 360,000 reservists have been called up since October 2023 — a staggering proportion of the country’s working-age population, removed from the civilian economy with little notice and dubious cost discipline. The defence ministry has been criticised internally for the misuse of reserve service days, with billions of shekels said by auditors to have been wasted on unnecessary call-ups. At the other end of the labour market, the suspension of work permits for around 140,000 Palestinian workers has gutted the construction and agriculture sectors that depended on them; building sites in greater Tel Aviv have stood half-finished for the better part of a year, and the country now imports labour from Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan to fill the gap.
The bond markets have noticed. Fitch has cut the sovereign rating and placed it on negative watch; Moody’s has dropped Israel to BA1, a single notch above junk. Hever notes that the structural crisis would normally have caused immediate insolvency, and the only reason it has not is that the international financial press has largely declined to read the Hebrew-language coverage. That protection is starting to fail. The United Nations has expanded its blacklist of companies operating in the settlements; pension funds in Europe and North America are quietly accelerating divestment; and Israeli households themselves have voted with their wallets, moving more than half their savings out of the country.
The cost at the kitchen table
The bond market verdict — Moody’s BA1, Fitch on negative watch — does not stay in the bond market. Sovereign downgrades raise the cost at which the state borrows; the state’s borrowing cost is the floor under what its banks pay for funds; and what the banks pay for funds is what they charge homeowners for mortgages. The transmission, in other words, is direct, and it has been working its way into Israeli kitchens for the better part of two years.
Israeli mortgage architecture is unusual by Western standards. A substantial portion of the average home loan is what locals call “prime-linked” — a variable-rate component pegged to the central bank’s policy rate plus a margin — with the remainder typically indexed to inflation or to a fixed shekel rate. The Bank of Israel, fighting both wartime inflation and a fragile shekel, has held its base rate at around four and a half per cent through most of 2024 and 2025, having barely budged from the post-pandemic peak. For a young couple who bought a flat in a Tel Aviv satellite town in 2021, when rates were near zero and house prices near record highs, the effect on the monthly bill has been brutal. A loan written at a prime margin of 2.5 per cent has, over four years, mutated into a loan effectively serviced at over five and a half per cent. Monthly payments on a typical 1.5-million-shekel mortgage have risen by several thousand shekels. For a household where one earner has been on reserve duty for half the year and the other has watched her hours cut at a tech firm running on fumes, several thousand shekels is the difference between staying in the apartment and leaving the country.
The same Bank of Israel data show household savings rates collapsing and consumer-credit defaults beginning to rise in late 2024 — quietly, because the Israeli press has had bigger stories to write, but unmistakably. Rent in Tel Aviv proper has continued climbing through the war, partly because of the influx of internal evacuees from the north and the Gaza periphery, partly because investor flats are being held empty by owners who have themselves left the country. Grocery inflation has run several percentage points above the official headline number for two straight years, as anyone who has watched their weekly shop in shekels recently can attest.
The political consequence of this is not yet fully visible. The young middle-class families currently being squeezed at the kitchen table are the precise demographic the centre-right and centrist parties needed to retain. Their rage is at present being aimed at Netanyahu personally, where it is loudest at the weekly Tel Aviv protests; the more uncomfortable truth — that the squeeze is structural, that no plausible alternative coalition would meaningfully reverse it without ending the war and the budget logic the war supports — has not yet entered Israeli public discourse. When it does, the protests will not be against any specific government. They will be against the project itself.
From startup nation to shutdown nation
The slogan Hever’s circle has adopted — “from startup nation to shutdown nation” — captures something the tourist promos do not. Israel’s celebrated tech sector, the engine on which the country’s claim to first-world status mostly rests, is being hollowed out by mobilisation fatigue. By early 2025, around 8,300 senior tech employees — about 2.1 per cent of the entire sector workforce — had quietly relocated abroad, taking their visas, their patents and their venture relationships with them. You cannot ship cloud infrastructure when your senior engineers are rotating in and out of armoured units; you cannot raise a Series C when half a trillion shekels of domestic investment has already shifted abroad. Private investment is falling. Consumer demand is flat. Exports are shrinking. Sales to the eight largest EU buyers fell by $1 billion in 2024 and a further $1.5 billion in 2025.
The country’s trade arteries are clogged or severed altogether. The port of Eilat is effectively closed under sustained Houthi pressure on the Red Sea; Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, the two largest container shippers in the world, have rerouted their fleets around the Cape of Good Hope at a cost of billions; Chinese carriers have simply stopped calling at Israeli ports altogether. Sanctions from Colombia, which cut off coal exports, and Turkey, which restricted dual-use materials, have stalled the planned upgrade of Israel’s electricity grid — an infrastructure crisis Hever warns could, in extremis, take significant parts of the country off-grid for weeks at a time. The much-trumpeted India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor remains marooned on the runway. Tourism, in any meaningful sense, has collapsed. Saudi Arabia, on the brink of normalisation under the Abraham Accords two years ago, has reversed course and once again insists on a two-state settlement with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. Turkey has severed ties altogether. The 2023 rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered by China, completed the picture: a regional architecture in which Israel is no longer a hub but an outlier.
The closing of Ben Gurion
Nothing has dramatised the country’s loss of normality more vividly than the repeated paralysis of its principal airport. Ben Gurion, once a regional hub linking Tel Aviv to seventy international destinations daily, has been intermittently shut, evacuated or rocketed for most of the past two years. After Israel’s pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear programme in June 2025, the airport closed for three to four days, effectively cutting the country off from international travel altogether. The May 2025 hypersonic missile that landed inside the perimeter forced an immediate suspension of operations and produced injuries on the apron. A briefer closure followed Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in August 2024, and the Houthis declared an open “aerial blockade” of the airport from July 2024 onward, succeeding in cancelling dozens of flights even when their projectiles did not arrive.
The foreign carriers have responded as commercial logic dictated. British Airways, Lufthansa and its subsidiary group, Air France, United and a long list of smaller airlines have repeatedly suspended Tel Aviv service, in some cases for many months at a stretch and in some cases indefinitely. Ryanair, which had become a budget mainstay of Israeli leisure travel, has cancelled and reinstated its Tel Aviv operations multiple times; its chief executive has publicly threatened a permanent withdrawal, citing what he called constant uncertainty. During full closures, the Israeli flag carrier El Al has at times been the only operator in the air, and even El Al has been forced to evacuate its fleet abroad to protect the aircraft from being targeted on the ground. Passenger traffic at Ben Gurion fell by 34 per cent in 2024, to 13.8 million from the previous year’s total. The Israeli aviation sector logged losses of at least $28.8 million in the first nine months of 2024 alone — a figure dwarfed in 2025 as the airport closed repeatedly under Iranian and Houthi fire.
For a country whose economic identity is built on global integration, this is not an inconvenience. It is a structural injury. A nation cannot remain a regional hub when its hub airport is intermittently a war zone, and Israel can no longer plausibly claim to be one.
When the doctrine flew out the window
The fiscal crisis is mirrored, in real time, by a military one. Israel’s traditional doctrine — fight short wars, on the enemy’s territory, on the assumption that a small country cannot sustain prolonged mobilisation — has been openly abandoned for the simple reason that the present war is now the longest in the country’s history. Hever has put it more starkly: there is no doctrine. What remains is a campaign without a clear strategic objective, fought, in his telling, with the eyes of the planners closed.
The clearest symptom of this is southern Lebanon. The former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter, who has tracked the campaign closely, argues that Hezbollah has not been subdued by the past two years of bombardment but reinforced by it. Years of preparation have turned the south of Lebanon into a fortified battlefield in which Israeli incursions function less as raids than as deep plunges into pre-laid ambushes. Israeli reliance on overwhelming air supremacy has produced thousands of casualties on the Lebanese side without breaking Hezbollah’s command structure or its capacity to fire missiles into Galilee. Among reservists, desertion rates and public dissent have begun to rise — a phenomenon Israeli media is reluctant to dwell on but which serving officers acknowledge in private.
Iran and its allies have meanwhile pursued what analysts have come to call “escalation management”: a deliberate strategy of keeping Israel bogged down on multiple fronts, militarily and economically, without provoking the kind of full regional confrontation that would force Washington’s direct intervention. The internal collapse of the Israeli economy, in this reading, is more useful to its adversaries than any direct military victory could be. They have only to wait.
Within the cabinet, this circular crisis has acquired its own perverse logic. Each new escalation restarts the emergency powers on which the prime minister’s coalition depends; each round of fighting postpones his corruption trials by another month or two; each fresh front justifies another supplemental budget. When Gaza quieted, operations widened in Lebanon. When Lebanon cooled, strikes intensified across Syria and the Red Sea. The June 2025 exchange with Iran reset the wartime narrative once more. Peace, in this configuration, is the only outcome the government cannot survive — because it would force the books open and the trials forward simultaneously.
The wounds that will not close
The macro numbers on the war’s human cost — roughly 360,000 reservists rotated through active operations, somewhere upwards of 1,000 IDF dead, several thousand wounded, a hostage crisis still officially unresolved — are widely reported. The numbers behind them are not. In Gaza-veteran Telegram channels, the most active topics of conversation in the last twelve months have been combat trauma, suicide, and where to find a private therapist who will see you within six weeks rather than the year-plus wait now standard at any public clinic. Among the units that took catastrophic casualties in the early phase of the Gaza ground campaign — particularly several of the Golani battalions and the reserve units thrown into clearance operations in Rafah and Khan Younis — the rate of post-traumatic presentations has been described internally as a slow-motion epidemic.
Veteran suicides in Israel were not formerly a category of public discussion. They are now. Reporting in the Israeli press, when it appears, is generally cautious and partial; family members of dead soldiers have begun speaking publicly about what they call a second wave of casualties — the men who came home physically intact and could not function inside the country they had returned to. The defence ministry, which is responsible for veteran care, has acknowledged what officials call a post-trauma wave but lacks the budget infrastructure or staff to absorb it. Many claims for treatment are being denied or stretched out administratively for years; private therapy, at 600 to 800 shekels a session, is unaffordable for the bulk of veterans now working in the civilian gig economy.
The opening vignette of this piece — the twenty-one-year-old in Haifa whose leg aches and whose therapist will not see him for eleven months — is not a literary device. It is a category, and it is enlarging. A meaningful share of the young men who served the early phase of the present war, the rifle companies who entered Gaza in November 2023 and the tank crews who were rotated north into Lebanon in late 2024, are now in or near that condition. What this means for Israeli society over the next decade — for its labour market, its crime statistics, its political culture — is barely being discussed in public, partly because the resources to do anything about it do not exist, and partly because the war is still ongoing and the official position remains that diagnosis can wait.
There is a small but growing political insurgency emerging from this constituency. Right-wing veterans’ groups, most of whose members supported the initial Gaza campaign without hesitation, have begun calling publicly for an end to the war on welfare grounds: the army cannot indefinitely sustain the cycle of mobilisation, demobilisation and re-mobilisation that the multi-front campaign now requires, and the men being asked to sustain it are breaking. A handful of prominent former IDF officers — among them, several who briefly held senior commands in the present war — have made the same argument in op-eds and broadcast interviews. They are still a minority, but they are no longer marginal. They are the most credible internal voice currently arguing for an end to the war, precisely because they cannot be accused of insufficient nationalism. Whether the prime minister’s coalition can ignore them indefinitely is no longer obvious.
From kibbutz to slum
Nowhere is the unravelling more visible than in the country’s housing stock. The first generation of Israeli planners built sparingly and ideologically: identical modernist blocks set in green courtyards, designed to fuse a population imported from across three continents into a single national body. Equality, frugality and what the planners cheerfully called the education of immigrants from backwards countries were stitched into the brickwork. From the 1970s onwards, that vision was sold off. Privatisation re-engineered the apartments into ever denser configurations, the courtyards filled in with new towers, and the original tenants — disproportionately Mizrahi and Sephardi families pushed into peripheral development towns by Ashkenazi-dominated governments — were left holding the bag. Today the same buildings, sub-divided and dilapidated, house the working poor while private landlords harvest the rent.
This is the second part of the story Israeli tourism boards do not tell: that the country has always been ethnically stratified, even within its Jewish majority. Mizrahi Jews, whose families came from the Arab and Muslim world, make up the largest single bloc, around forty to forty-five per cent. Ashkenazim, the European Jews who founded the state and have traditionally controlled its institutions, are around a third. Then come Sephardim, Ethiopian Jews, recent arrivals from India, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel — a fifth of the population — at the bottom of the hierarchy alongside foreign migrant labourers from Thailand and the Philippines. The phrase “the second Israel” has long described the lingering sense among non-Ashkenazi Jews that the state was built for someone else.
Layered onto this is a demographic clock that the right-wing coalition is not winning. The Palestinian population inside Israel and the occupied territories continues to grow at a faster rate than the Jewish one, and emigration is doing the rest of the maths. A growing chorus of analysts, Israeli and foreign alike, now openly compare the country’s trajectory to that of late-apartheid South Africa, with the eventual transition to some form of single state — bi-national or Palestinian-majority — treated as a matter of timing rather than of probability.
The country that cannot see itself
Several of the people interviewed by +972 Magazine, in Hila Amit’s investigation published earlier this year, described not war fatigue exactly, but a kind of cognitive break in the society they had left behind. One former Haaretz journalist, who left for Europe shortly before the present war and has not returned, told Amit that on October 7th the last illusion of the state’s basic competence — that the army would, at minimum, protect Israeli civilians — collapsed in real time. Others described a society in which neighbours casually discussed the killing of Palestinians over coffee, and a school system whose nationalism they no longer wished to inflict upon their sons.
Hever, observing from Berlin, has noted a related phenomenon: a substantial number of mainstream Israelis sincerely believe that South Africa did not accuse Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice, a claim refuted by ten seconds of English-language search. Haaretz, once the country’s paper of record, has begun publishing what he describes as fabrications. The protests against Netanyahu, framed in Western broadcast media as the stirrings of a vibrant democratic opposition, are in fact populated mostly by pensioners who remember 1973 and still believe a Zionist project worth saving exists somewhere beneath the rubble. The younger generation, by contrast, was raised to believe its privileges were ancestral and inviolable; it has neither the political vocabulary nor the appetite to fight a war whose existential stakes its grandparents recognised instinctively.
Less than fifteen per cent of Israeli Jews — the religious-nationalist base of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — still believe the present war is winnable, and even they believe so on theological rather than military grounds; for that constituency, defeat is simply God’s testing of the faithful, to be answered with more settlements rather than fewer. The remaining eighty-five per cent, Hever suggests, has quietly concluded that the project is over and that those who can leave should do so.
The flight of conscience
The aggregate numbers bear him out. By the middle of 2024, the tourism section of one Israeli newspaper had recorded a net loss through Ben Gurion airport of around a quarter of a million people. The American political scientist John Mearsheimer placed the figure closer to half a million by the year’s end. Cyprus has absorbed so many that Hebrew is reportedly heard more often than Greek in some seaside towns. A great deal of educated Israeli capital — the doctors, the engineers, the architects, the academics — has already gone, taking with it the human infrastructure on which the country’s economy depended.
Hever calls this voting with one’s feet. The protests Western broadcasters frame as the country’s democratic conscience are, in his reading, the dying gasp of a generational cohort that no longer commands the future. The future, such as it is, is being made at passport offices and on outbound flights. It is not being made in Tel Aviv squares.
The American crutch
None of this is hidden. The data is in OECD reports, in Bank of Israel estimates, in Israeli broadsheets, in the budget documents of the Knesset itself. What is hidden — or rather, deliberately unspoken — is the corollary: that Israel has never been the modern, prosperous, self-sufficient European outpost it sells to tourists. It is a state with second-world social indicators, a shrinking professional middle class, an exodus of doctors and a poverty rate exceeded only by Costa Rica. And yet it is also, simultaneously, a state currently engaged in active campaigns against multiple neighbours, fielding fifth-generation aircraft and one of the most sophisticated air defence networks ever built.
The arithmetic does not add up on its own. It adds up because of Washington.
The United States provides Israel with roughly $3.8 billion in military assistance every year under the current memorandum of understanding, the largest such commitment to any country on earth. Since October 2023, that baseline has been topped up by tens of billions of dollars in supplemental aid packages, fresh deliveries of munitions and the replenishment of stockpiles drained by months of bombardment. The April 2024 supplemental signed by the Biden administration alone authorised roughly $14 billion in new assistance — the largest single tranche in the relationship’s history — and successive administrations have continued to authorise both new sales and accelerated drawdowns from existing stocks ever since.
The catalogue of what has actually been resupplied, when reconstructed from defence-press reporting and congressional notifications, is striking. By weight, the bulk has been air-delivered munitions: 2,000-pound MK-84 general-purpose bombs and their 1,000-pound and 500-pound siblings, briefly paused by the Biden administration in May 2024 over civilian-casualty concerns and then resumed; tens of thousands of JDAM precision-guidance kits that turn dumb gravity bombs into satellite-guided weapons; Hellfire air-to-ground missiles; small-diameter bombs for the F-15 and F-35 fleets. By count, the bulk has been artillery: well over 100,000 rounds of 155-millimetre artillery ammunition shipped from American stockpiles in Europe and the continental United States to keep the IDF’s tube artillery in the field, plus 120-millimetre rounds for the Merkava IV main battle tank fleet operating in southern Lebanon and Gaza.
The interceptor count is the part of the audit that most directly explains why Israel is still a functioning state. Tamir interceptors for Iron Dome — jointly produced by Rafael and Raytheon, but with the production line concentrated heavily in the United States and the financing largely American — have been fired in unprecedented numbers, and have been replenished in equally unprecedented numbers. David’s Sling and Arrow-3 interceptors, which engage the longer-range Iranian and Houthi ballistic threats, have similarly been topped up from American-funded production. The Iron Beam directed-energy laser system, intended as the cheap-shot lower tier of this layered defence, is being co-developed and co-funded by American taxpayer money. Fixed-wing replacement is on a slower track but no less significant: new F-35I Adir aircraft continue to arrive in Israeli colours, F-15EX Eagle II fighters have been ordered, and KC-46A Pegasus aerial refuelling tankers — the platform that gives Israeli strike packages the legs to reach Iran — have been delivered specifically and in the relevant timeframe.
Without that interception network and that munitions pipeline, the cumulative damage from the multi-front campaign would not have run to thousands of buildings, but to tens of thousands; not to a few dozen Israeli civilian deaths, but to many multiples of that. The country’s continued physical existence in something like its present form is, as a matter of arithmetic, a function of American manufacturing capacity and American financing.
Diplomatic cover at the United Nations Security Council insulates the Israeli government from consequences that would have crippled any other state. The United States has used its veto multiple times since October 2023 to block ceasefire resolutions that the rest of the Council supported. It has sanctioned International Criminal Court officials who indicted the Israeli prime minister and former defence minister. It has shielded Israeli conduct at the Human Rights Council and shepherded supportive resolutions through the General Assembly. Without that cover and without those cheques, the structural rot described above would already be politically terminal.
There is a hidden catch in the arrangement. American military aid to Israel, by design, must mostly be spent inside the United States — on Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, RTX, and General Dynamics rather than on Israeli manufacturers. Each new package is therefore a subsidy to the American defence industrial base wearing the costume of solidarity, and it has the perverse effect of weakening Israel’s own arms sector. By the time a substantial portion of the country’s defence procurement runs through American firms — and that portion is now overwhelming — the question of who actually controls the war is no longer rhetorical.
Hever has drawn the obvious historical comparison. Without the cheques, he argues, what would unfold in Israel would resemble the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 or Afghanistan in 2021 — a client state propped up by American underwriting until the moment Washington decides the cost is no longer politically tolerable, at which point the whole edifice comes down inside a fortnight. Whether or not the analogy fully holds, the underlying point is difficult to dispute. Israel is not running its present wars on Israeli money. It is running them on American debt, American munitions, American interceptors and American diplomatic cover. Strip those away and what is exposed is a poor, overcrowded, ethnically stratified state with crumbling hospitals and emptying classrooms, an airport its own flag carrier has at times had to flee, a generation of veterans broken by a war their government cannot end, families being foreclosed at a rate the Bank of Israel will not publish, and a coalition that cannot fill its own cabinet, fighting an enemy that has only to wait.
The promised land of the tourism reels exists. It just isn’t the country most Israelis live in. The country most Israelis live in is on life support, and it is the United States that holds the plug.
