AOC’s rant at Sunday night’s Mamdani rally was only a tad more unhinged than her usual, but she amplified a nasty leftist lie when she said that military aid to Israel is why there’s poverty in America.
“We demand,” declared Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Queens-Bx.), “that we pay to care for our people instead of the flattening of Palestinians.”
Zohran Mamdani says he finds it “hard” to explain to tenants of Queensbridge Houses why “they have to live in substandard conditions” while we spend “billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians.”
The canard that Israel is skimming the cream from America to oppress Palestinians has become a popular trope among anti-Zionists and antisemites left and right; the gross insinuation is that, absent aid to Israel, all America’s social needs would be answered.
Yes, under the US-Israeli security assistance Memorandum of Understanding, the Jewish state gets an annual $3.3 billion voucher to buy US-made military equipment.
That’s not nothing, but it pales against the $1 trillion a year America now spends on defense, including $40 billion to $45 billion in support of Europe. And that doesn’t count the nearly $200 billion we’ve given Ukraine to frustrate Moscow’s European ambitions.
Washington spends at least $12 billion a year in military support for Japan and Korea, where we station about 80,000 troops; those nations reimburse us for roughly a third of the cost of protecting them from North Korea, China and Russia.
In 2024, Uncle Sam gave Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen and Sudan a total of about $4 billion.
Those countries are human-rights disasters, with millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead in their various wars. But you never hear AOC or her anti-Israel friends fret about their victims.
Israel spends roughly $25 billion on defense every year; the aid it gets from America is not insignificant, but it’s hardly make-or-break for either side.
We also benefit heavily from Israeli technology and intelligence sharing, from its position in a crucial and volatile region and from its service as a laboratory to field-test American weaponry.
You can absolutely make the case that some US aid to other countries has been foolish.
But the crowd pretending that Washington doesn’t get real value for its support of Jerusalem isn’t actually looking to benefit anyone here at home; these haters simply despise the Jewish state, and the Jews.