Who Is Spitting on Christians in Israel?

Audio Version:Who Is Spitting on Christians in IsraelThe wolf at the door, part five: notes from the Israeli frontierEarlier this month, a group of Israeli teenagers knocked on the door of the Armenian Apostolic Church headquarters in Jerusalem’s Old City. They asked whether there were Christians inside.They wanted to spit on them.The boys told a reporter that it was a mitzvah, a religious duty, to humiliate Christians, whom they called idol worshipers.That account appeared in theWall Street Journalon August 3 under the headline, “Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel.” Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the piece a distortion of reality disguised as reporting, saying it had taken radical voices and extreme cases and turned them into the face of an entire country. The American ambassador, Mike Huckabee, said the paper should have called him.The story is now being weaponized against the country it is about. But simply dismissing the reporting as distorted does not answer the underlying question.Who is actually spitting on Christians in Israel?What is DocumentedThe spitting is real, it is increasing, and the people counting it are Jews.The Religious Freedom Data Center runs a hotline for Christians in Israel who have been harassed. It was founded and is directed by Yisca Harani, a Jewish Israeli scholar of Christianity, and is staffed by Jewish Israeli volunteers who provide documentation, accompaniment, and a protective presence for victims.The center documented 107 incidents in 2024 and 181 in 2025. By early June 2026, it had logged more than 88 incidents, with 63 in the second quarter alone, putting this year on pace to exceed last year’s total (Religious Freedom Data Center 2026).The incidents include spitting, verbal abuse, vandalism, desecration of graves, tombstones and crosses, stone-throwing, trespassing, garbage dumping, and arson. Most occur in the Old City, on Mount Zion, and along the route past the Armenian Patriarchate leading to the Jewish Quarter. Some have occurred at Christian sites in northern Israel.A separate Israeli organization, the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue, which works on relations among the country’s religious communities, documented 111 cases in its 2024 annual report, including 46 physical attacks and 35 attacks on church property (Rossing Center 2025).These are two independent Israeli organizations, counting separately and documenting the same problem.Datasets that combine unlike things into a single number and then circulate that number as though every incident were equivalent deserve skepticism. I have made that argument about other datasets, and the same standard applies here.But it does not make this problem disappear. Throw out every ambiguous case, and the trend remains. Christians are still being spat on, harassed, and their churches and religious sites vandalized.Who is Doing the SpittingThe reporting is more specific than the headlines, and two communities appear repeatedly. They are not the same community.Most documented incidents involve Haredi youths and men. CNN obtained video of two young ultra-Orthodox men spitting at, swearing at, and kicking Father Nikodemus Schnabel near Zion Gate. One told bystanders he did it because Schnabel was a Christian (CNN 2024). TheTimes of Israeldocumented Haredi men and boys, some of them children, spitting at a Christian procession after watching an adult do it first. Channel 12 aired footage of young men in black hats and suits, several carrying prayer shawls.One community inside the Old City comes up again and again. Participants at a forum on the problem placed much of the blame on the Zilbermans, a Lithuanian Haredi community of roughly three hundred families whose approach to Torah study incorporates right-wing Zionist ideas. Tammy Lavi of the Jerusalem Intercultural Center told the same forum that at least half of the Friday Armenian processions are disrupted by spitting, cursing, or people deliberately walking through the ceremony. A right-wing city councilor and a deputy mayor went to speak with the Zilberman rabbis about their students, apparently to little effect (Times of Israel2023a).But it is not only Haredim. TheJerusalem Postdescribes offenders as both ultra-Orthodox and National-Religious youths. The Religious Freedom Data Center’s surveillance footage attributes attacks to ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox Jews. And when five people were arrested in October 2023, Channel 12 reported that some were students of Rabbi Natan Rothman, brother of Religious Zionism Knesset member Simcha Rothman. That is a Religious Zionist yeshiva, not a Haredi one (Times of Israel2023b).Two things need to be said immediately.First, the numbers are small. Three hundred families and a scattering of yeshiva students are not a country. And the Christians being spat on are overwhelmingly Armenian and Arab, not American.Second, the leadership of the Haredi world has not defended this behavior. When the October 2023 video circulated, Haredi politicians joined in condemning it and rejected the claim that spitting on Christians is either a Jewish tradition or a religious duty. Netanyahu condemned it as well.The question is whether anyone will actually be charged.Malone News is reader-supported. No advertisers, no institutional funders, and nobody to tell us which facts are inconvenient. If you want more work like this, a paid subscription is the entire business model.The Minister Who Defended ItIn 2017, when an earlier wave of harassment against Christians made the news, a settler activist and lawyer named Itamar Ben Gvir gave a radio interview defending the practice of spitting at Christian monks and churches. He called it an ancient Jewish tradition, said he did not think it constituted a violation, and asked why anyone would turn the matter into a criminal one (Washington Post2026).That has essentially remained his position for nearly a decade.In 2015, Jewish extremists set fire to the Church of the Multiplication on the Sea of Galilee, where the Gospels place the feeding of the five thousand. Nikodemus Schnabel, now abbot of Dormition Abbey, attended the trial. What stayed with him was the attorney defending the arsonists.The attorney was Ben Gvir.Ben Gvir is now Israel’s Minister of National Security, and the police answer to him.He has not revised his position since taking the portfolio. After five men were arrested in October 2023 for spitting at Christians and churches, the police minister said publicly that the offense was not criminal.His own Jerusalem District contradicted him on the radio. Chief Superintendent Assaf Harel told Army Radio that spitting on somebody is certainly assault, and that seventeen such incidents had been reported in the preceding six months (Times of Israel2023b).A sitting police minister telling the country that an offense is not an offense, while his own district commander publicly says that it is, gets very close to the heart of the problem.Nothing about this requires inference. A man who publicly defended the conduct in 2017 now holds the portfolio responsible for policing it. The record of enforcement is not encouraging.The Israel Religious Action Center is the legal and advocacy arm of the Reform Jewish movement in Israel. Of twenty-five complaints it filed between 2012 and 2021, nineteen were closed because the suspect could not be found, no offense was deemed to have been committed, or the case was considered unsuitable for investigation (Israel Religious Action Center 2026).Harani puts the consequence plainly. If there is no enforcement, it is a green light to do it again.That distinction matters. A small number of people committing these acts is not evidence of some general Israeli hostility toward Christians. But when the state repeatedly fails to enforce its own laws, and the minister responsible for the police has himself defended the conduct, it becomes more than a story about the people doing the spitting.It becomes a story about whether the government is willing to stop them.Why Nobody Stops ItAn American reader will reasonably ask why a government that condemns this behavior does not simply prosecute it. To understand the answer, you have to understand how Israeli coalition politics works.Israel has 120 Knesset seats and no electoral districts. There are no constituencies, no primaries in the American sense, and no individual candidate whose name appears on the national ballot. Voters choose a party list, seats are allocated roughly in proportion to the national vote, and any party clearing the 3.25 percent threshold enters the Knesset. It takes sixty-one seats to form a government.No party has ever won sixty-one. Not once in seventy-eight years. Every Israeli government has therefore been a coalition, which gives smaller parties enormous influence when neither major bloc can govern without them.Two of those parties represent the Haredi world. United Torah Judaism is Ashkenazi, an alliance of the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael and the Lithuanian Degel HaTorah, and holds seven seats. Shas is Sephardi and Mizrahi, led by Aryeh Deri, and answers to a Council of Torah Sages. Together, the Haredi parties have typically controlled fifteen to eighteen seats.Several things give those seats considerably more political weight than the numbers suggest.Historically, Haredi parties have been willing to join governments of both the left and the right. They joined Ehud Barak’s government in 1999, for example, although United Torah Judaism later resigned over electrical work on the Sabbath and Shas left amid disputes with Barak’s government. The ability to negotiate with competing blocs gives a small party considerably more leverage than one permanently attached to a single side.Their political demands are also relatively concentrated. Foreign policy and the peace process have traditionally mattered less to them than yeshiva funding, rabbinic authority over marriage and conversion, Sabbath observance, and, above all, exemption from military conscription. These are the issues on which their participation in a coalition is negotiated.They are also remarkably disciplined voting blocs. Their Knesset members generally follow party and rabbinic leadership, which gives a prime minister a degree of certainty that is much harder to obtain from a less cohesive coalition partner.And they are growing. Haredim make up roughly an eighth of Israel’s population and have a fertility rate substantially above the national average. Their political importance is therefore unlikely to diminish.The Haredi exemption from military conscription dates back to the founding years of the Israeli state. Ben-Gurion granted exemptions in 1949 to about four hundred yeshiva students, partly out of concern for preserving a world of Torah scholarship nearly destroyed in Europe. What began as an accommodation for a few hundred men grew enormously over the following decades. Roughly sixty-three thousand young Haredi men are now eligible for conscription, and the exemption has become one of the most consequential disputes in Israeli coalition politics.The nearest American comparison is imperfect, but useful. Imagine a religious voting bloc representing roughly an eighth of the country, represented by parties that vote with extraordinary discipline and can determine whether a governing coalition survives. Now imagine that the issue its leadership cares about most is an exemption that successive governments have struggled for decades to resolve.That begins to explain the political leverage.It also begins to explain why a problem everyone publicly condemns can remain remarkably difficult to stop.The Last Two YearsIn June 2024, all nine justices of Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that there was no legal basis for exempting yeshiva students from conscription, that the arrangement was unconstitutional, and that the state was gravely undermining the principle that all persons stand equal before the law. The court ordered conscription to begin and funding to be withdrawn from noncompliant yeshivas (Israel Supreme Court 2024).The coalition has spent the two years since trying to legislate around that ruling.In July 2025, United Torah Judaism resigned from the government over the delay, and Shas followed the next day, leaving Netanyahu with sixty-one seats. Both parties continued supporting him on critical votes, allowing them to distance themselves from the government without immediately bringing it down.In January 2026, Shas announced that it would oppose the budget unless an exemption bill passed (Times of Israel2026). In May, the spiritual head of Degel HaTorah said he had lost confidence in Netanyahu and instructed his members to work toward dissolving the Knesset (Al Jazeera 2026). In June, the party boycotted coalition votes altogether while police arrested draft evaders and Haredi protesters blocked roads in Bnei Brak (Jerusalem Post2026). Israel votes in October.This matters to the question of Christian harassment because the young men responsible for many of the documented incidents come from a community whose exemption from military service has consumed Israeli politics for the past two years and may yet bring down the government.The ministry responsible for policing them belongs to a different partner in the same coalition, whose leader has said publicly that spitting on Christians is not a criminal offense.That does not require a conspiracy or an explicit agreement to look the other way. It requires only a coalition government with almost no room to lose votes, dependent upon small religious parties whose support is necessary for its survival.That is the political environment in which these cases are being handled. The prime minister condemns the behavior. Haredi leaders condemn it. Police officials acknowledge that spitting on someone can constitute assault. Yet complaints continue to be closed without suspects identified or charges brought.The problem is not that Israel has decided spitting on Christians is acceptable. The problem is that condemnation has not been followed by consistent enforcement. This is the reason a country that condemns an offense at the level of the prime minister still has nineteen complaints out of twenty-five with no suspect found.The Ambassador’s LetterHuckabee wrote a letter a year ago that reads rather differently from his response to theJournal.On July 16, he wrote to Israel’s Interior Minister, Moshe Arbel, about the treatment of Christian organizations by the Israeli visa department. The letter later leaked to the Israeli press. In it, Huckabee described discrimination against Christian ministries since the start of 2025, naming the Baptist Convention of Israel, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Assemblies of God among the groups placed under investigation. He wrote that these organizations felt they were being treated as adversaries.Huckabee went considerably further than expressing concern. He threatened to announce publicly throughout the United States that the State of Israel was no longer welcoming Christian organizations, to tell American Christians that their contributions were being met with hostility, to issue travel advisories, and to pursue reciprocal treatment of Israelis seeking American visas.That is the same ambassador now saying theJournalshould have called him.I do not read that contradiction as dishonesty. I read it as the behavior of a friend who applies pressure privately and defends publicly, which is hardly unusual in diplomacy.But the letter matters. Huckabee himself was sufficiently concerned about the treatment of Christians in Israel to threaten public criticism, travel advisories, and reciprocal visa restrictions. His criticism of theJournaldoes not erase what he wrote to the Israeli government a year earlier.The Other Side of the LedgerEverything above is true. So is everything below.Israel’s Christian population stood at roughly 184,200 at the end of 2025, about 1.9 percent of the country, and it has grown from about 34,000 in 1948. The country counts around 300 churches, roughly double the number at independence (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2025; Fox News 2026).The situation in the rest of the Middle East is the complete opposite. Christians were something on the order of twenty percent of the Middle East a century ago and are now under two percent. Iraq’s Christian community has been reduced to a remnant. Syria’s has collapsed. Lebanon’s has emigrated. Turkey’s was destroyed.Against that history, Israel stands apart. Its Christian population has grown rather than disappeared.In April 2026, Israel created a new post, Special Envoy to the Christian World, and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar appointed George Deek to it. Deek is an Arab Christian from Jaffa, a veteran of eighteen years in the foreign service, and previously Israel’s first Christian ambassador, serving in Azerbaijan. His father chaired the Orthodox Christian community of Jaffa (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2026). No other country has created an equivalent diplomatic position.Deek’s own summary of why the job exists is the regional one. He describes the ethnic cleansing of the Middle East of its Christians, and says the places that once held thriving Christian communities have been reduced to nothing.And then there is the government’s response to the harassment described earlier. Israeli officials have repeatedly condemned these incidents when they occur. Police have made arrests, including after the recent incident at the Armenian church. When police blocked Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and the senior Roman Catholic authority in the Holy Land, along with other senior clergy, from a Palm Sunday service at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher under wartime restrictions, Netanyahu intervened personally to grant full and immediate access. When an Israeli soldier took a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon, he and the soldier who filmed it were pulled from combat operations and jailed for thirty days.None of that is the behavior of a state hostile to Christianity. It is the behavior of a state with a problem it is handling unevenly.Both Things Can Be TrueThe Foreign Ministry’s response was that theJournalhad distorted the situation, sought out Christians most willing to condemn Israel, and presented their experiences as representative of the country. It pointed to Israel’s nearly two hundred thousand Christians as evidence of a very different reality.There is truth in that response. But it does not answer the teenagers at the door.When documented harassment occurs, arguing about whether the reporting fairly represents Israel is not a substitute for dealing with the people responsible for it. The government can object to the framing of theJournalarticle and still acknowledge that enforcement has been inadequate.The people using the story against Israel make the opposite error. They take the conduct of a small and identifiable group of extremists and present it as evidence of how Israelis, or Jews more broadly, treat Christians.The evidence does not support that conclusion either.What it does support is more specific. A relatively small number of religious extremists have repeatedly harassed Christians, particularly in and around Jerusalem’s Old City. Israeli political and religious leaders have condemned the behavior, but enforcement has been inconsistent. And the minister ultimately responsible for the police has himself publicly questioned whether spitting on Christians should be treated as a criminal offense.That is a serious indictment of the way this problem has been handled, and particularly of the minister responsible for policing it.It is not an indictment of Israelis as a people.That distinction is largely missing from what is now circulating on American podcasts and social media.Who is Actually Being Spat OnThe people being harassed in the Old City are overwhelmingly Armenian and Greek Orthodox clergy, along with Arab Christians who are Israeli citizens. Seventy-nine percent of Israel’s Christians are Arabs. These are not American evangelicals.American Christian Zionists are, if anything, among the most welcomed foreign Christians in Israel. Jill and I spent an afternoon this summer with young Americans who have been pruning vines in Samaria for twenty years. The state gave them rifles, and the Knesset gave their organization an award. I will have more to say about them on Monday.So when an American Christian reads about Christians being spat on in Jerusalem and takes the hostility as directed toward Christians like themselves, an important distinction is being lost. The person on the receiving end is much more likely to be an Armenian monk whose community has been in that quarter for sixteen centuries, or an Arab Christian whose family has lived there for generations.That does not make the harassment any less ugly. But it does matter if we are trying to understand who is doing it, who is being targeted, and why.The Case Tucker Carlson is MakingCarlson has been building this argument for two years, and by now the specifics are on the record.On April 9, 2024, he interviewed Munther Isaac, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, in a conversation that attributed the collapse of Bethlehem’s Christian population largely to Israeli persecution. On February 4, 2026, Carlson interviewed Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, under the title “The Shocking Reality of the Treatment of Christians in the Holy Land by US-Funded Israel.” He has since interviewed a Palestinian-American minister from Beit Sahour, a largely Christian town beside Bethlehem, and pressed Ambassador Huckabee directly on Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Christians. In February, Carlson also said he had been detained at Ben Gurion Airport, an account Israeli officials disputed and which the Orthodox Jewish outlet Aish contested in detail (Aish 2026).Some of what Carlson is reporting is true. Palestinian Christians in the West Bank face real hardships. Bethlehem’s Christian community has declined dramatically over decades. Huckabee’s own letter, quoted above, shows that the Israeli visa bureaucracy treated American Christian ministries badly enough for the American ambassador to threaten the Israeli government with travel advisories and reciprocal visa restrictions.Carlson did not invent those facts.The problem is what he does with them.There are three problems with the case he is building, beginning with his method.The February interview was filmed in Jordan. Carlson produced an hour-long program about the treatment of Christians in the Holy Land from another country. The Christians whose treatment was supposedly being investigated live in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, Ramallah, Nazareth and elsewhere in Israel and the West Bank. Yet the program was not reported from those communities.That is an odd way to investigate a claim this serious.The second problem is more consequential because it goes to the substance of Carlson’s argument. He repeatedly blurs the distinction between Palestinian Christians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Christian citizens of Israel. Those are two populations living under fundamentally different legal systems and political circumstances.This criticism does not come only from defenders of Israel. Mondoweiss, the American news site founded by journalist Philip Weiss and explicitly hostile to Zionism, has made essentially the same point. Carlson frequently drops the word “Palestinian” and speaks instead about “Christians in Israel,” merging populations whose legal circumstances are profoundly different. The grievances he cites concerning Palestinian Christians are largely the same grievances made by Palestinian Muslims living in the same places, subject to the same checkpoints, permits and restrictions (Mondoweiss 2026).That distinction changes the argument.If Palestinian Christians are being subjected to the same restrictions as their Palestinian Muslim neighbors, then the discrimination at issue is based on nationality and territorial status, not Christianity. One can condemn the occupation, the checkpoints, the permit system, settlement policy, or Israeli control of the West Bank as harshly as one wishes. Those are legitimate subjects for argument.But they are not evidence that Israel is persecuting Palestinians because they are Christians.Carlson turns one argument into the other, and in doing so makes the issue personal for millions of American Christians. The message becomes: Israel is persecutingyour fellow Christians.The evidence he presents does not establish that.The third problem is the population itself. If Israel were systematically persecuting Christians because they are Christians, one would expect some evidence of that persecution in the demographic trajectory of Christians who actually live as Israeli citizens.Instead, Israel’s Christian population stands at roughly 184,000 and increased again in the most recent year. Meanwhile, the Christian share of the broader Middle East has fallen from roughly twenty percent a century ago to under two percent today.Open Doors, an international Christian organization that publishes an annual ranking of the fifty countries where Christians face the most extreme persecution, placed eight Muslim-majority countries in its 2026 top ten. Israel does not appear on the list (Open Doors 2026; Media Line 2026).None of this excuses the spitting in Jerusalem. It does not excuse Ben Gvir’s statements, failures of police enforcement, problems with visas for Christian organizations, or legitimate Palestinian Christian grievances. Those facts should be reported, and I have spent much of this essay reporting them.But they do not establish the case Carlson is making.He is taking documented abuses involving different people, different jurisdictions and different causes, combining them under the heading of Christian persecution, and presenting the resulting picture to an overwhelmingly American Christian audience.A theory that predicts Israeli Christians should be fleeing, in a country where they are increasing, and that ignores the countries where Christians actually are fleeing, is not a theory about Christians.Christian Antisemitism: When it Stops Being About IsraelOn April 15, 2026, Carlson was criticizing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism when he came to its treatment of the ancient charge that Jews collectively killed Jesus.“It also tells us that the suggestion that Jews killed Jesus is, quote, ‘classic antisemitism,’” Carlson said. “So there goes the New Testament. The whole New Testament is antisemitic too.”He then added: “Read the Gospels and see if they fall under that definition. They do.”The issue is not whether particular Jewish authorities appear in the Gospel accounts of the events leading to the crucifixion. They plainly do.The deicide charge is something much broader: the claim that Jews collectively, as a people and across generations, bear responsibility for killing Christ.That accusation has been used for centuries to justify persecution and violence against Jews. Christian churches have spent decades repudiating collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion. The Catholic Church did so formally inNostra Aetatein 1965.That is the deicide charge, and it is the oldest engine of Christian violence against Jews there is. Churches have spent sixty years repudiating it. The Catholic Church did so formally in 1965.And this is where Carlson’s argument crosses a very different line. Criticizing the Israeli government, including its treatment of Palestinian Christians, is not antisemitic. Documenting harassment of Christians by religious Jews is not antisemitic. Neither is condemning Ben Gvir or the failure of Israeli police to prosecute offenders.But invoking collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ belongs to a long history of Christian antisemitism. Whatever Carlson intended by the remark, that history does not disappear because the comment occurs in the middle of an argument about Israel.I do not know whether Carlson understands the history of the claim he is repeating. His audience evidently includes a great many Christians who may not understand it either.What Would Actually Fix ItArrests, prosecutions, and a minister who wants them.The Israeli organizations documenting this problem have been quite clear about what they need, and it is not another statement of sympathy. Harani and her volunteers want complaints filed, investigations opened, suspects identified, and charges brought. Without consistent enforcement, there is little reason for the people doing this to stop.This is, ultimately, a police problem. And it is a problem Israel is entirely capable of solving.The difficulty is political. Enforcing the law against members of a community whose political representatives can determine whether a government survives is considerably harder than condemning their behavior in a press release. That does not excuse the failure to enforce the law. It helps explain why the failure has persisted.American Christians who care about this should demand enforcement. Ask the question publicly and in writing, as Huckabee did privately. Ask how many complaints were filed, how many investigations were opened, how many suspects were identified, and how many people were actually charged. Do not accept another statement about Israel’s respect for religious freedom as an answer to a question about whether someone who spits on a Christian monk will be prosecuted.But American Christians who are being told that Jews hate them should also pay attention to who is documenting these attacks.The most complete record of anti-Christian harassment in Israel is being compiled by a Jewish Israeli woman and Jewish Israeli volunteers who document the incidents, accompany victims, and provide a protective presence at Christian churches and processions.They are Jews protecting Christians from other Jews.That fact rarely makes it into the podcasts.It may be the most important fact in this story.RWM/JGMYou can get the flattering version of this story free in a dozen places, and the hostile version free in a dozen more. The version that concedes what is true on both sides is the more difficult one to produce, and paid subscribers are why it exists. Malone News takes no advertising and answers to no institution.ReferencesAl Jazeera. 2026. “How Ultra-Orthodox Recruitment Could Unseat Netanyahu in Israeli Elections.” May 16.Anti-Defamation League. 2026.Tucker Carlson. Backgrounder. New York, May 5.Aish. 2026. “Tucker Carlson’s Lies About Jews and Israel.” February 19.CNN. 2024. “Ultra-Orthodox Man Seen Spitting at Christian Priest in Jerusalem.” February 4.Fox News. 2026. “Meet the Man Israel Chose to Be Its First-Ever Ambassador to the Christian World.” June 21.Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 2025.Christians in Israel: Selected Data on the Occasion of Christmas. Jerusalem, December.Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2026.Appointment of Special Envoy to the Christian World. Jerusalem, April 23.Israel Religious Action Center. 2026.Complaints Concerning Harassment of Christians, 2012 to 2021. Presented to the Religious Freedom Conference, Jerusalem, June 4.The Media Line. 2026. “Fact-Checking Tucker Carlson’s Portrayal of Christians in the Holy Land.” February 12.Mondoweiss. 2026. “Tucker Carlson’s Criticism of Israel Misses the Point.” February 27.Israel Supreme Court. 2024.Judgment on the Conscription of Yeshiva Students. Jerusalem, June 25.The Jerusalem Post. 2026. “Ultra-Orthodox Party Holds Knesset Hostage over Draft Exemption Bills.” June 29.Open Doors. 2026.World Watch List. Santa Ana, CA.Religious Freedom Data Center. 2026.Documented Incidents Against Christians in Israel. Jerusalem, June 4.Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue. 2025.Annual Report on Attacks Against Christians, 2024. Jerusalem.The Times of Israel. 2023a. “Old City Spitting Videos Underscore Troubling Reality for Christian Clergy.” April 17.The Times of Israel. 2023b. “5 Arrested for Spitting at Christians in Jerusalem; Police Minister: It’s Not Criminal.” October 4.The Times of Israel. 2026. “Israel Appoints First Special Envoy to Christian World After Scandals Strain Ties.” April 23.The Times of Israel. 2026. “Shas Vows to Oppose 2026 Budget Unless Coalition Passes Haredi Draft Exemption Bill.” January 4.The Wall Street Journal. 2026. “Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel.” August 3.The Washington Post. 2026. “As Christians Are Attacked in Israel, Government Shows Little Concern.” July 5.


Israel Is Trying to Stop Taking Our MoneyThe wolf at the door, part four: notes from the Israeli frontierBefore getting into part four, a quick word to those of you who have stayed with me through this series. I know that six essays examining Israel, its security problems, its history, and its relationship with the United States are not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. This has turned into a deeper examination than I originally anticipated, and I appreciate your patience with it. There are two more installments after this one, and then I promise we will move on to other subjects.But having spent time in Israel, Judea and Samaria, and along the Gaza border, I wanted to follow the questions wherever they led rather than reduce what I saw to another argument about whether one is “pro-Israel” or “anti-Israel.” The answers have often been more complicated than I expected. This installment is about one of those complications: the widespread belief that Israel wants, needs, and intends to remain dependent on American military aid.It may be that Israel increasingly wants exactly the opposite.*The short version, for readers who do not spend their days on Capitol Hill.*In May 2024, the United States paused a weapons shipment to Israel in an effort to change an Israeli military decision.That is what leverage is for. And it worked exactly the way leverage works.It also taught Israel something that will not easily be forgotten: American military aid has an off switch, and an American president can throw it.Israel is now negotiating its way out of that arrangement.The current U.S.-Israel military assistance agreement expires in 2028. Rather than simply asking Washington for another decade of checks, Israel is proposing something quite different: gradually reduce American grant aid and replace at least part of it with joint investment in weapons research, development, and production.Both countries put money in. Both countries get something out.That may sound like a technical change in defense procurement.It isn’t.It is a transfer of power.Aid carries conditions. Congress can attach them. Administrations can interpret them. Committees can investigate them. Presidents can delay weapons already approved in order to influence what Israel does next.A jointly funded weapons program, particularly one containing substantial Israeli money, sits on different legal and political ground. The old tools of leverage may not disappear entirely, but they become considerably harder to use.Four terms will carry you through the rest of this essay.Foreign Military Financing, or FMF, is the main American military aid program for Israel. Despite the way it is usually described, this is not simply Washington handing Israel a check. Most of the money must be used to purchase American defense products, from American companies, employing American workers.The Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU, is the ten-year political agreement that establishes the framework and anticipated level of assistance. It is not a treaty. It does not bind Congress. Congress still has to appropriate the money.The Leahy Lawsrestrict American assistance to foreign security-force units when there is credible information implicating them in gross violations of human rights. The important word here isassistance. How those restrictions would apply to jointly developed and jointly financed programs is considerably less straightforward, and that distinction may become enormously important.Qualitative Military Edge, or QME, is the requirement embedded in American law that Israel maintain the ability to defend itself against credible military threats from neighboring states and coalitions while possessing superior military capabilities. QME does not disappear if Israel takes less American aid.Now we can get to the argument.Washington spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars building a system that did two things at once. It strengthened Israel militarily while giving the United States extraordinary influence over how that strength could be supplied and, when Washington chose, constrained.Then Washington demonstrated the constraint.And Israel noticed.In April 2024, the Biden administration began reviewing proposed transfers of particular weapons to Israel. By early May, it had paused a shipment containing 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs. Thousands of JDAM guidance kits were also caught up in the broader debate over transfers.Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed the bomb shipment pause before Senate appropriators on May 8.That same day, President Biden made the policy explicit. If Israel launched the major Rafah operation his administration opposed, he told CNN, the United States would not supply certain weapons Israel might use in that operation.There is no need to speculate about Washington’s purpose. The United States wanted Israel to make a different military decision, so the administration used Israel’s dependence on the American weapons pipeline as leverage.Whether you believe Biden was right or wrong to do that is almost beside the point. Because Israel learned something much larger than the immediate lesson of Rafah. It learned that a weapons supply chain controlled by another country is not merely a supply chain. It is a veto waiting to be exercised.The most important consequence of the 2024 weapons pause, therefore, may not have been what happened in Rafah at all.It may be what happens in 2028.Israel is now negotiating the agreement that will replace the current MOU, and the structure being discussed points toward a very different relationship: less dependence on American grants, more Israeli financing, more joint development and production, and eventually much greater Israeli freedom to build what it needs without asking Washington for permission.For sixty years, American military assistance to Israel bought the United States something far more valuable than gratitude. It bought leverage.In the spring of 2024, Washington used it.Israel’s response is to make sure Washington cannot use that kind of leverage against it again.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareThe Instrument, PreciselySince 1999, the U.S.-Israel military relationship has been organized around ten-year Memoranda of Understanding. Clinton’s was worth $21.3 billion, George W. Bush’s $30 billion, and the current agreement, signed by Susan Rice and Jacob Nagel on September 14, 2016, provides for $38 billion across fiscal years 2019 through 2028. Of that, $33 billion is Foreign Military Financing and $5 billion is for cooperative missile defense, roughly $3.3 billion and $500 million per year, respectively (Congressional Research Service 2026b). Those are the numbers everyone quotes, but three features of the arrangement matter considerably more than the headline number.First, an MOU is not a treaty. It requires no Senate ratification, appropriates no money, and does not legally bind a future president or Congress. It is an executive commitment that Congress has historically chosen to honor, and the money still has to be appropriated each year. Israel can therefore plan around ten years of American assistance, but Washington retains the machinery to delay it, condition it, withhold it, or simply stop providing it.Second, Israel gave up something significant in exchange for that predictability. In a side letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed that Israel would return any money Congress appropriated above the agreed MOU levels for fiscal years 2017 and 2018. Israel also agreed not to lobby Congress for additional military assistance during the MOU period except in the event of a regional conflict, and even then only with the administration’s prior consent (Washington Institute 2016). The restriction was not theoretical. In September 2017, Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio wrote Secretary of State Rex Tillerson objecting after Congress appropriated an additional $75 million and the administration moved to enforce the agreement. Congress wanted to give Israel more money, and under the agreement Israel had negotiated with the executive branch, Israel had effectively promised not to take it.Third, the portion of American aid that once directly supported Israel’s own defense industry is disappearing. Historically, Israel enjoyed an unusual privilege known as Off-Shore Procurement, which allowed it to convert roughly a quarter of its AmericanForeign Military Financing (FMF) into shekels and spend that money with Israeli defense companies. The 2016 MOU phases that privilege out entirely, reaching zero in fiscal year 2028 (Congressional Research Service 2026a).That changes what the familiar phrase “$3.3 billion in aid to Israel” actually means. By the end of the current agreement, essentially all American FMF provided to Israel must be spent purchasing American defense goods and services. American taxpayers provide the money, Israel uses it to purchase qualifying military equipment, American defense companies receive the orders, American factories build the weapons, and American workers are paid to produce them. Israel gets the military equipment, certainly, but much of the money itself never really leaves the American defense-industrial economy.Put those pieces together, and the arrangement looks rather different from the political slogan. By 2028, the system is designed to provide Israel with American military assistance that is spent almost entirely inside the American defense-industrial base, under a ten-year political commitment that legally binds neither Congress nor the president, while Israel itself is constrained in seeking assistance beyond the negotiated amount. Call it foreign aid if you like, but economically much of it functions as a directed procurement program for American weapons manufacturers. Strategically, it purchases something considerably more valuable for Washington: influence over an ally whose military depends heavily on an American-controlled supply chain.That influence remained largely theoretical as long as Washington and Jerusalem agreed on what Israel should do. In May 2024, they did not. The Biden administration demonstrated that the supply chain could also be used as an instrument of American policy, and Israel discovered that the price of American military assistance was not simply the conditions written into an MOU. The price was dependence on a weapons pipeline another government ultimately controlled.Israel is now calculating whether that price is still worth paying.How It ComparesThe scale question is where most public discussion goes wrong, usually in both directions. Israel is routinely described as the largest recipient of American foreign aid, which is true historically, but that statement tells you surprisingly little about either the size of the current flow or Israel’s dependence on it.Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign assistance since the Second World War. From 1951 through 2022, the United States provided roughly $318 billion in inflation-adjusted assistance, about $225 billion of it military (USAFacts 2023). But that is the accumulated total across more than seventy years. Under the current MOU, the normal annual commitment is $3.8 billion, consisting of $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing and $500 million for cooperative missile defense.FY2024 was an exceptional year because of the war that followed October 7. Israel received approximately $6.8 billion in U.S. foreign assistance, temporarily pushing the annual figure far above the normal MOU level. By FY2025, disbursements had fallen back to roughly $3.3 billion. Ukraine, by comparison, received about $6.7 billion in FY2025, making it the largest recipient of American foreign assistance that year, with Israel second.The comparison becomes more striking when the entire period since Russia’s 2022 invasion is considered. Congress has appropriated roughly $174 billion to $183 billion for the Ukraine response, depending on which programs and regional expenditures are included in the calculation. Direct American military assistance committed to Ukraine has exceeded $65 billion. Israel also received substantial emergency military assistance following October 7, but the scale and speed of the Ukrainian effort were of a different order. In only a few years, Washington committed military assistance to Ukraine equivalent to decades of Israel’s normal annual FMF allocation.Other major recipients provide some perspective. Egypt has received approximately $1.3 billion a year in FMF for decades as part of the security architecture that followed the Camp David accords. Jordan receives several hundred million dollars annually in military assistance within a broader American assistance package of roughly $1.5 billion to $1.75 billion. These are significant sums, but simply ranking countries by dollars obscures the more important question.The number that matters is the size of American assistance relative to the recipient country’s own ability to finance its defense. American FMF currently represents roughly 15 to 16 percent of Israel’s defense spending, depending on the year and which expenditures are included (Congressional Research Service 2026b). Israel pays for the large majority of its own military, maintains a sophisticated domestic defense industry, exports advanced weapons systems, and possesses the economic capacity to replace at least some American assistance with its own spending.Ukraine has occupied a fundamentally different position. Since 2022, American and allied assistance has not merely supplemented an otherwise self-sufficient Ukrainian defense budget. It has supplied a substantial portion of the weapons, ammunition, air defense, intelligence support, and financial capacity required to sustain the war. When American assistance stalled during the congressional appropriations fight of 2023 and 2024, Ukraine could not simply replace the missing supply from domestic production. Ammunition was rationed and shortages appeared at the front.Israel watched that happen.Then, in May 2024, Washington demonstrated that the same basic mechanism could be used against Israel. The circumstances were different and Israel was far less dependent, but the lesson was impossible to miss. If another government controls an important part of your weapons supply, that government possesses leverage over the decisions you make with those weapons.This is why the raw dollar figure is such a poor measure of dependency. Israel may be the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign assistance in modern history, but the United States finances only a minority share of Israel’s defense establishment. More importantly, Israel has the industrial base, technological capacity, and national wealth to reduce that share further.Ukraine demonstrated what extreme wartime dependence on foreign military supply looks like. Israel appears to have drawn the obvious conclusion: do not wait until you are in the middle of a war to discover who controls your ammunition.The choke pointsThe vulnerability is structural, not partisan, and the Israeli analysis I heard treats it that way.Three separate actors can interrupt the flow. The executive can slow-walk obligation, notification, or delivery. Appropriators can attach conditions or decline to fund. And the coalition politics of either party can shift within a single cycle, which the Arab Center notes is already making routine appropriation more uncomfortable for members (Arab Center Washington DC 2026).Congress appropriated $3.5 billion in FMF in the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act and then spent months disputing whether the executive was obligating and notifying it (Congressional Research Service 2024). The money was voted. Delivery was a separate question, decided elsewhere.From Aid to Joint VentureThe Israeli position going into the FY2029 negotiation is considerably more interesting than most of the coverage suggests, because Israel is not asking for more American money. It is discussing how to need less of it.Netanyahu has publicly argued that Israel has reached the point where it should begin phasing out American military aid, and has even raised the possibility of forgoing assistance already committed for FY2027 and FY2028. In January, he argued that Israel’s economy could reach $1 trillion within a decade and that the country’s growing defense industry could support the transition (American Jewish Committee 2026). Israel is also reportedly seeking a much longer framework, potentially twenty years and extending to 2048, centered not on annual grants but on joint research and development, defense technology, artificial intelligence, and Israeli participation in Golden Dome (Congressional Research Service 2026a; Quincy Institute 2026).The right way to understand this is not as an aid reduction. It is a change in the business model.FMF is fundamentally a donor-recipient arrangement. The United States appropriates the money, Israel receives the purchasing authority, and most of that money is then spent with American defense manufacturers. Because Washington supplies the money and controls the program through which it moves, Washington also retains considerable control over the terms.What Israel is proposing would move the relationship toward co-investment. Both countries would contribute capital and technology to programs in which both have a direct interest. The important negotiations would increasingly concern intellectual property, production rights, cost sharing, technology transfer, export rights, and where the resulting systems are manufactured. The relationship would move away from grant administration and toward joint program management.This is not an entirely new model. Pieces of it already exist inside the U.S.-Israel defense relationship. Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow have all involved combinations of American funding, Israeli technology, cooperative development, and American production. RTX, through Raytheon, has long participated in Iron Dome production with Israel’s Rafael, and the two companies have expanded American manufacturing capacity for the system. What Israel is proposing, in effect, is to take a model previously used for selected weapons programs and make something much closer to it the foundation of the relationship.For Washington, the practical consequences are substantial. Cost sharing begins to replace grants. Intellectual property and production rights become as important as the size of the appropriation. The question shifts from how much money Congress will give Israel each year to how much each country will invest, what each contributes, what gets built, where it gets built, and who owns the technology that emerges.None of this would eliminate American leverage. The United States would still control American technology, export licenses, components manufactured in the United States, and whatever money Congress continued to appropriate. But it would change the nature of that leverage. With FMF, Washington can impose a cost on Israel by withholding something Washington is giving it. In a genuinely co-funded program, withholding cooperation can impose costs on both countries because American money, American companies, American technology, and American military requirements are tied to the same project.That is a very different negotiating position.Israel is not proposing to end its defense relationship with the United States. Quite the opposite. It is proposing to make the relationship more transactional while making the dependency smaller.The distinction matters because the exchange runs in both directions. Israel wants access to American technology, manufacturing capacity, and the enormous scale of the American defense industry. But the United States also wants Israeli technology, battlefield experience, research, innovation, and weapons systems that Israel has become exceptionally good at developing. The proposed relationship recognizes that reality. Instead of one country writing the check and the other receiving it, both countries bring something valuable to the table, both invest, and both have something to lose if the relationship is disrupted.That does not eliminate American leverage. It does something more important. It makes the leverage mutual.The Mechanism Nobody is Discussing in PublicThe Congressional Research Service describes the most consequential part of the proposed change in characteristically dry language. If the next agreement phases down Foreign Military Financing and replaces it with jointly funded Defense Department programs, the money does not simply move between accounts. The rules and congressional oversight move with it.FMF is foreign assistance, putting much of the relationship under the State Department and congressional foreign affairs committees, where conditions on aid are traditionally attached and enforced. Joint defense programs fall increasingly under the armed services committees and defense appropriators, whose focus is procurement, weapons development, military readiness, and whether the program works.The legal consequences may be even more important. CRS notes that, under the executive branch’s interpretation, Leahy restrictions may not apply to certain transactions financed entirely with the purchasing country’s own money (Congressional Research Service 2026a). If Israel pays with Israeli funds, or jointly develops a system with the United States rather than receiving an American grant to purchase it, some of the existing human-rights conditions may no longer attach in the same way.In Washington budget language, this is partly a shift from the150 account, which covers international affairs and foreign assistance, toward the050 account, which covers national defense. Congress does not lose its authority. It can still impose restrictions, and American export controls and arms-transfer laws remain. But the existing machinery of conditionality was built around foreign assistance. Change the funding structure and some of those legal hooks change with it.Whether you see that as Israel securing greater freedom of action or shedding legitimate American restraint depends on your view of Israel. But the mechanism is the same. Israel is trying to replace a relationship in which Washington supplies the money and therefore writes many of the conditions with one in which both countries invest and both expect to benefit.The argument in Washington is about how much aid Israel should receive. The more consequential question may be whether the next agreement is “aid” at all.The Constraint Israel Cannot Wish AwayThe rhetoric of Israeli self-reliance runs ahead of the balance sheet, and CRS has identified the problem. Israel and the United States have agreed to tens of billions of dollars in arms sales since October 2023, much of it financed through cash-flow financing, which allows Israel to commit future FMF payments against contracts signed today. Some of those payment schedules extend beyond the current MOU.That means Israel cannot simply reach 2028, refuse another MOU, and walk away. Without continued FMF or some replacement arrangement, Israel would have to pay existing obligations with national funds, arrange alternative financing, renegotiate contracts, or terminate them, potentially creating liabilities for both governments (Congressional Research Service 2026b). That gives Washington considerable leverage over the transition. Israel may want out of the existing aid structure, but it first has to unwind obligations built around it.Nor does paying with Israeli money remove Washington from the relationship. The Qualitative Military Edge requirement remains in law, requiring the administration to consider Israel’s military advantage when approving certain arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. The Arms Export Control Act also continues to subject major American weapons sales to congressional notification and review regardless of who pays for them.So the proposed transition does not eliminate American leverage. It narrows it. Washington would still control the sale and export of American weapons and technology. What Israel is trying to eliminate is the additional leverage that comes from Washington also supplying the money used to buy them.Israel can stop depending on the American check. It cannot keep buying American weapons and stop depending on American permission.What Washington trades awayThis cuts against both standard positions, which may explain why neither camp talks about it very much.If you regard American conditionality as an essential brake on Israeli governments, the same problem runs in reverse. Israel is trying to reduce the power of that brake, and the 2024 weapons pause is part of the reason why. Using leverage does more than influence the immediate decision. It reminds the other party that the leverage exists and gives it a reason to reduce its exposure to it.There is also an American industrial consequence. FMF has functioned for decades as a subsidy to American defense manufacturers, paid through a foreign aid program. As Israel’s ability to spend FMF domestically disappears, nearly all of the $3.3 billion annual grant returns to American companies. Replace that system with greater Israeli self-financing and domestic production, and some of those American orders disappear with it. That argument will matter in areas where weapons are made, such as Fort Worth and Camden, long before most Americans notice it, because defense contracts mean factories, jobs, and congressional districts.The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has proposed one plausible middle ground: a Strategic Partnership Agreement under which Israel commits to sustained defense spending of roughly 4.5 to 5 percent of GDP and a specified level of American procurement in exchange for a longer and more predictable framework (Foundation for Defense of Democracies 2025). It would preserve much of the industrial and strategic relationship while gradually retiring the donor-recipient model.Something along those lines may be where this ends. Washington keeps a major defense customer and strategic partner. Israel keeps access to the American defense industry. What disappears, or at least diminishes, is the part both sides are increasingly uncomfortable admitting exists: dependency.The Cost of Using LeverageA relationship built partly on dependence remains stable only while both sides believe the arrangement is worth preserving. Once the dependent party concludes that the dependency itself has become a strategic risk, it begins looking for a way out.That is what changed in May 2024. Before the weapons pause, Israeli planners could reasonably treat American resupply as a dependable feature of the strategic environment. Afterward, they could not. Washington had demonstrated that weapons already in the American pipeline could be withheld in an attempt to change an Israeli military decision. No subsequent assurance can erase the fact that it happened.The United States spent decades and roughly $318 billion building a defense relationship that gave Washington considerable influence over Israeli decision-making. In 2024, it exercised that influence in a way that gave Israel a powerful reason to reduce it. Whether withholding those weapons was justified is a separate question. The larger question is whether influencing one Israeli operation in Rafah was worth changing Israel’s calculation about a military relationship both countries expect to continue for decades.I doubt anyone in Washington consciously made that trade. The administration was trying to affect an immediate decision in an immediate war. But governments rarely get to choose only the immediate consequences of the tools they use. Israel learned that American military assistance could be withheld when Washington and Jerusalem disagreed over how Israel should fight a war.Now it is trying to make sure that the next time they disagree, Washington has less to withhold.RWM/JGMMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ReferencesAl Majalla. 2025. “Israel and Ukraine Top US Foreign Aid Recipient List.” London.American Jewish Committee. 2026.What Every American Should Know About U.S. Aid to Israel. New York.Arab Center Washington DC. 2026. “Section 224: US-Israel Defense Integration Beyond Military Aid.” Washington, DC.Congressional Research Service. 2024.U.S. Review of an Arms Sale to Israel: Issues for Congress. IN12359. Washington, DC.Congressional Research Service. 2026a.Possible Changes in U.S. Military Aid to Israel: Considerations for Congress. IN12695. Washington, DC, June 4.Congressional Research Service. 2026b.U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023. RL33222. Washington, DC.Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 2025.Beyond the U.S.-Israel MOU: The Case for a Strategic Partnership Agreement. Washington, DC, December 19.Jerusalem Post. 2026. “The Sixth Eye: Reframing US Security Assistance to Israel.” July 2.Kiel Institute for the World Economy. 2026.Ukraine Support Tracker. Kiel.Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 2026.The Disappearing Aid Check: The Future of US-Israel Defense Support. Washington, DC, June 5.United States and Israel. 2016.Memorandum of Understanding on U.S. Security Assistance. Washington, DC, September 14.USAFacts. 2023.How Much Aid Does the US Give to Israel?Seattle.Washington Institute for Near East Policy. 2016.Israel’s New MOU: The Money and the Message. Washington, DC.


Sunday Strip: "There’s an App for That"

“There’s an App for That”Remember when you could justdo things?Check into a hotel. Board an airplane. Park your car. Order lunch. Buy a ticket. Enter a museum. Pay a bill. Turn on the television. Apparently those days are over.Now there’s an app for that.Checking in for a flight on an obscure foreign airline you will almost certainly never fly again? Download the app.Parking for 37 minutes in a small town in Virginia? Download the app.Want to look at the menu? Scan the QR code. Actually, no, download the app.Want to pay for the parking meter? App.Charge the car? Different app.Open the hotel room? App.Use the hotel Wi-Fi? Create an account, verify your email, accept 46 pages of terms and conditions, then download the app.And naturally, every app would like to get to know you better.Please provide your full legal name, date of birth, home address, email address, mobile number, two forms of identification, emergency contact, name and phone number of your closest living relative, credit card, billing address, location permissions, Bluetooth access, camera access, microphone access, contacts, notifications, and apparently a small vial of blood.Then create a password containing 14 characters, one capital letter, two numbers, a hieroglyph, a Sanskrit character, and the name of your third-grade teacher.Excellent.Now verify your identity with a six-digit code we have sent to the phone you are currently using to read the six-digit code.Whoops! The password has expired, create a new password. Be sure it doesn’t contain anything related to the last password. Oh, now verify your identity again.All because you wanted to park the car.There may indeed be an app for everything.Unfortunately, there does not yet appear to be an app forleaving me the hell alone.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.JGM

Summary: Whether you want it or not...