In: Economics
ans....
The United States and Israel have made it official: The two
countries signed a new 10-year military-assistance deal on
Wednesday, representing the single largest pledge of its kind in
American history. The pact, laid out in a Memorandum of
Understanding, will be worth $38 billion over the course of a
decade, an increase of roughly 27 percent on the money pledged in
the last agreement, which was signed in 2007. The diplomatic and
military alliance between the two countries is longstanding: Even
prior to this week, Israel was, according to the Congressional
Research Service, “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign
assistance since World War II.” In many ways, Wednesday’s deal
seemed predestined.Voters, however, have more mixed views on this
kind of support. While more than 60 percent of Americans were more
sympathetic to Israel than the Palestinians in a 2016 Gallup poll,
sympathies differed along partisan lines, with around half of
Democrats being more sympathetic to Israelis versus nearly 80
percent of Republicans. In a separate Brookings poll, roughly half
of Democrats who responded said Israel has too much influence on
the United States government. Boycott, divest, and sanction
movements, which call on organizations in the United States and
abroad to cut their financial ties with Israel, have long been
popular on college campuses, although somewhat marginal; this year,
however, they got a boost from the Black Lives Matter movement,
which included statements against Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians in its recently released policy platform.
In general, young Americans are far less sympathetic toward Israel
than their older peers: A 2014 Gallup poll found that only half of
those aged 18 to 34 favored Israel in the Israel-Palestine
conflict, “compared with 58 percent of 35- to 54-year-olds and 74
percent of those 55 and older.