UnHerd78%
Israel doesn't need friends 90%
By Edward Luttwak93%
7/16/2026, 11:01:36 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 41 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Negativity Bias, and Anecdotal, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 50.5% saturation with 884 hits. Analysis detected 5,229 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,751 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 84.6% and a BS Rank of 90% (1,704 of 16,694 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 89.80% of the article peer group.
The classic definition of a Great Power is a country that can wage war without allies.
Unbeknownst even to its own leaders, Israel must have been a Great Power from the very day of its birth, when it had absolutely no allies and was invaded by Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and the volunteer Arab Liberation Army.
Worse still, the new Jewish statelet had to face the very active hostility of the British and US governments, which used their then-pervasive influence to close every Mediterranean port to shipments of weapons and ammunition.
For the roughly 650,000 Jews of the new mini-state, who sang and danced that day in May 1948, the very strict embargo was much more than an inconvenience.
The British had already supplied their best fighter aircraft and tanks to the Egyptians, and armored cars with cannons to Transjordan’s Arab Legion, the best Arab army and still led by British officers.
All the while, the British rulers of what remained Mandate Palestine until midnight on 14 May 1948 had done their best to stop any attempt to smuggle weapons into the future Israel with full US support — a number of Las Vegas Jews, not necessarily accountants, doctors or lawyers, went to jail for sending mere hand guns to their coreligionists.
The intent, clearly, was to guarantee an Arab victory, the exact opposite of the myth of Anglo-American help for Israel which is taught as fact across the Muslim world.
President Truman did recognize Israel immediately, at the urging of his Great War comrade and best friend Eddie Jacobson.
But the Secretary of State, the retired five-star general George Marshall who had led the US to victory against Nazi Germany, was immensely more authoritative than ex-Vice President Truman.
He simply ignored Truman’s recognition, flatly refusing to receive the new state’s first envoy, who was bound to ask for weapons Marshall was determined to deny.
Focused on keeping the Russians from overrunning Europe, Marshall had no time for an ephemeral micro-state that would soon vanish in defeat.
American interests in the Arab world were not yet that important — Saudi Arabia’s giant Ghawar oil field had just been discovered — but Arab oil mattered while the Jewish statelet could never amount to anything.
That the State Department was run by antisemites was true but at that point irrelevant, because Marshall was no antisemite: his solution for the Jewish refugees still in European camps was to waive anti-immigration laws and bring them all to the US.
The determined Anglo-American attempt to strangle Israel at its birth was partly foiled by newly liberated Czechoslovakia, which had plenty of leftover machine guns and ammunition, as well as some Spitfires and other fighter planes that it was eager to sell.
The Jews, for their part, had some transport aircraft and pilots, but they could not reach Israel without a refueling stop.
The State Department and the Foreign Office knew all about this desperate attempt to circumvent their embargo, and they moved to deny Israel’s use of every single European airfield.
Only Tito’s Yugoslavia allowed the use of a single runway in Montenegro, at the insistence of Mosa Pijade, a Sarajevo Jew and close wartime comrade of the Marshal.
In the end, that minuscule cargo was enough to secure Israel its independence.
Yet even after the Jews defeated their Arab enemies, the State Department did not give up, strenuously and successfully opposing any US arms sales to Israel, even after the Soviet Union started sending hundreds of aircraft and thousands of tanks to Arab governments.
The US only relented after Israel defeated the Arabs in June 1967, again without any US-supplied weapons and instead relying on second-hand British tanks and new French fighters sold for cold hard cash.
This history matters because it puts paid to the idea that Israel is entirely dependent on US largesse.
There are people, including some in the Trump administration, who imagine that cutting American aid would irreparably damage the Jewish state.
Israel’s population today is not 650,000, but nine million, including two million loyal Arab citizens who supply one in four of its doctors and a great many engineers.
And precisely because of that long history of denials and embargoes, those nine million are enough to support disproportionately large and diverse military industries.
They would mitigate any would-be restrictions on US support, especially because Israel neither has nor needs the biggest items, whether aircraft carriers or the B-2 bombers that flew all the way from Missouri to bomb Iran’s vast nuclear installations at Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan.
“Those nine million Israelis are enough to support disproportionately large and diverse military industries”
That raises the old question of Israel’s own nuclear weapons, which have long been known to exist as bombs, as well as tactical and ballistic missile warheads.
But it also raises a major mystery: why did the US have to bomb three different centrifuge installations?
Just one of these, the Natanz centrifuge-enrichment plant, had an immense 2,500 square-meter hall at ground level, and two similarly sized subterranean halls with space for up to 50,000 centrifuges, far more than enough to separate the uranium needed for a number of bombs.
Moreover, while Natanz alone dwarfs Israel’s nuclear-weapon center on the Dimona road, fully visible to passing travelers, Iran built another large centrifuge hall under a mountain in Fordo near Qum, and then yet another, triplicate installation south of Isfahan.
Adding up those sites — alongside other large workshops at Parchin — one can tell that Iran has spent many times more than Israel, without completing even a single bomb.
Then there is the question of time.
Israel acquired its first bomb by 1967, nine years after the project started with a small 24-megawatt French research reactor, when it was still an agricultural country of 1.8 million with no industry to speak of.
By contrast, Iran bought its first centrifuge from Pakistan in 1989, to then spend increasingly vast amounts of money for 37 more years, all without acquiring a weapon.
In the Middle East, there is always one and the same explanation for all such mysteries: corruption, in which fanatics engage with equal enthusiasm.
One glimpse suffices.
On 27 November 2020, the Revolutionary Guard’s top nuclear expert was assassinated by a satellite-aimed machine-gun when returning to his villa in Absard, a swanky hill town some 45 miles from central Tehran.
That luxuriously long commute, to sleep well away from Tehran’s pollution, proves nothing in itself.
But its sheer largesse hints at why the centrifuge installations were triplicated, and the entire centrifuge effort duplicated by a 40-megawatt heavy-water nuclear reactor.
With their priority access to Iran’s revenues, at the expense of much-needed water, gas and electricity works, the Revolutionary Guards can afford to do everything on the largest scale, including monumental headquarters in Tehran and several other cities.
Compare that to Professor Ernst David Bergman.
Born in Karlsruhe, he headed Israel’s bomb nuclear project with Germanic discipline from start to finish, living with his family in two bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen on the premises of his laboratory, allowing him to commute on foot.
That too explains how a state of nine million can research, develop and manufacture the world’s heaviest battle tank, a full range of tactical and strategic missiles, and the interceptors that inaugurated humanity’s first instance of space warfare two years ago.
Israel became an enthusiastic military ally of the US when it received its first-ever combat aircraft specifically built for its air force in October 1968: a large two-engine, two-seat, McDonnell Douglas F-4E Phantom.
Its arrival at a remote desert base was supposed to be a state secret of the highest order, but I heard about it that very day, from a taxi driver whose base-refueller son heard a just-landed pilot exclaim, again and again, “what an aircraft!
I would marry it if I could.”
Having survived until then on war-surplus and a few French aircraft, Israelis reacted to the start of US military aid with deep, genuine gratitude, eagerly pursuing any opportunity to reciprocate.
Israel’s Mossad was inside the Soviet Union, which the CIA could only watch from afar, and offered up all it uncovered.
After its October 1973 tank-warfare victories, Israel also supplied the US Army’s Fort Monroe tacticians with every bit of data for their, and Nato’s, revolutionary “fight outnumbered and win” manuals, explicitly based on the desperate Golan Heights fight in which 200 Israeli tanks destroyed four times as many Soviet-built Syrian tanks.
Israel’s enemies always present it as cynical about its US alliance, but in my many encounters over the years, extending to the current war, that is not what I have heard.
Rather the opposite: deep concern at any sign of American weakness in facing the Chinese, Russians or anyone else, including Iran’s self-destructive fanatics.
Deep satisfaction when the United States suddenly spurts ahead, as it always does, after seemingly being on the verge of being overtaken, as happened with AI and the Chinese most recently.
And, of course, a great eagerness to contribute Israel’s research and development talents, whose fruits are now built into some of the most capable US weapons, most conspicuously in the F-35 fighter jet, whose innovative helmet-mounted piloting system was entirely developed in Israel.
Just recently, I heard White House voices claim that Netanyahu’s tenacity has become obduracy.
This is a fair comment — but what is not are the suggestions by the same voices that Iran’s new leaders are very reasonable, and that Revolutionary Guard liaison officers should be received at US Central Command forward headquarters, to clear up any misunderstandings, face to face.
Iranian attacks on passing tankers duly ensued, followed by more US bombing.
By contrast, while it was very much also their fight, Israel’s pilots sat in their cockpits for hours to reach and bomb Iran’s distant missile launchers, which were attacking US bases and US allies, as well as Israel itself.
In Nato, it has long been understood that the US Navy must rely on European minesweepers and mine-hunters for its possible Persian Gulf needs, because it cannot fit such short-range vessels in its perpetual inter-oceanic transfers.
But not one European Navy even tried to obtain permission to join the US Navy in the Gulf when that help was much needed.
Israel, on the other hand, would never refuse any military help it could provide, as countless US officers have known for decades.
That counts for much in a world where US allies give ingratitude a bad name.
Analysis
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