Progressive Democrats are targeting Iron Dome. That’s good news for Israel

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Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system saves lives. Nearly a decade since it entered service, its 2,000-plus interceptions have destroyed rockets from Gaza (and a handful from Lebanon) that were headed toward built-up civilian areas, saving untold Israeli lives. Palestinian ones as well – not just Palestinians of Israeli citizenship, but Palestinians in Gaza too. In fact, it may well have saved more Palestinian lives than Israeli ones.

Iron Dome doesn’t just protect Israeli cities from Palestinian rockets. It also gives Israel’s leadership breathing space and more options before taking a decision on launching another military strike on Gaza. The fact Israel has a defensive shield against rocket attacks makes a wide-scale military operation with thousands of – mainly Palestinian – casualties less likely.

The threat by a handful of progressive Democratic members of Congress to oppose the Biden administration’s $1-billion funding of the replenishment of Iron Dome’s interceptor missiles, which led to the spending item being removed from the administration’s stopgap funding bill on Tuesday, is a pointless and hypocritical exercise in virtue signaling.

That’s partly because the funding for Iron Dome will simply be passed separately a bit later, perhaps even this week. And it’s partly because Iron Dome – the initiative of former defense minister and peacenik Labor leader Amir Peretz – is the one thing that has done the most to save Palestinian (and Israeli, but they don’t seem to care about those) lives in the past decade.

But the real irony is that while withholding finance from Iron Dome is a stupid move if you actually care about Palestinian lives, it would actually be a good thing from Israel’s purely selfish perspective.

Originally, as a weapons system developed and manufactured wholly in Israel, Iron Dome was not eligible for U.S. military “aid” – the word “aid” comes in quote marks because the $3.8 billion of U.S. taxpayer money that ostensibly goes for Israel’s defense is in reality a sneaky form of annual government subsidy to the U.S. arms industry, which gets all that cash for making fighter jets and other aircraft for Israel’s air force. The annual funding for Iron Dome, which began under the Obama administration, is extra. And while in the short-term it helps plug a hole in Israel’s budget, it isn’t doing Israel any real favors.

When the U.S. began spending significant sums on subsidizing arms for Israel in the 1970s, the country was still a financial basket case. After the trauma of being caught unprepared by Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War, for a few years it spent nearly a third of its entire budget on reequipping the Israel Defense Forces. As a result, in the mid-’80s, the already ramshackle economy nearly went into hyperinflationary meltdown. That’s why part of the U.S. “aid” at the time was actual economic aid that helped Israel stay afloat.

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Much has changed since then. Today, Israel is a financial powerhouse with a GDP that compares with Western European countries, and yet the total sum of U.S. money earmarked for Israeli arms is higher than ever. Why does it still exist? Good question.

On the American side, it has become a tradition for both major parties to show they support Israel by voting through these 10-year aid packages, the last one being approved by then-President Barack Obama in 2016. On the Israeli side, it’s helpful for the housekeeping. The U.S. money is less than 3 percent of the annual budget, but it helps balance the books. In other words, after some short-term budgetary adjustments, Israel could do fine without the U.S. money, but it’s still nice to have.

And it’s especially nice to know that after any relatively large-scale military operation, like Operation Guardian of the Walls – the 11-day conflict in Gaza in May – that the U.S. can be relied upon to “replenish” the IDF’s arsenal.

An IDF Iron Dome battery on display at the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington two years ago.ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP

It’s nice, but it also highlights the main drawbacks of Iron Dome.

Iron Dome is a technological and operational marvel. It does exactly what it is designed to do, and with increasing efficiency the more the algorithms in the tracking and command-and-control systems are improved. But from an economic standpoint, it’s a nightmare. The cost of a single Tamir interceptor missile is around $40,000 – which is half of what the original cost before part of the production was transferred to the U.S., but still a horrendous amount of money when you take into account that in May alone, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fired 4,369 rockets at Israel.

These are mainly improvised and inaccurate projectiles, some of which probably didn’t cost more than $100 to manufacture in Gazan workshops. But about a third of them did pose a deadly threat to Israeli citizens and needed to be intercepted. So Israel had to launch at least 1,500 interceptors, probably a lot more (the actual number is classified). Do the math.

Not only is Iron Dome an extremely expensive system to keep stocked with adequate numbers of interceptors, it isn’t actually a solution to the main challenge facing Israel in Gaza and Lebanon: non-state enemies equipped with tens of thousands of rockets. Iron Dome keeps over 90 percent of the rockets from hitting Israel’s towns and cities. But when huge salvos are fired over a week or two, enough rockets will still get through, causing multiple casualties and paralyzing large parts of the country.

Still, most of the time (in between large-scale escalations), Iron Dome is more than adequate and allows the Israeli government to defer any serious solution to the Gaza issue. So, by funding the replenishment of Iron Dome, the U.S. is helping Israel to both avoid the major costs involved in operating it or to come up with any long-term solution.

It would be much better if the U.S., as Israel’s ally, would leave it to face the dilemmas, rather than giving it the money to kick the can down the road. Which is why, rather than pressuring Israel, the progressive Democrats who are trying to block the funding could actually be doing Israel a favor.

Sadly, that will not be happening this time. The Iron Dome funding will be approved separately, despite the progressives’ grandstanding, and the folly of Israel’s addiction to American “aid” will continue.

This is bad for Israel. Israel’s military budgets will remain inflated and its inventory will still be based on expensive and unnecessary American systems (no one in Israel is asking why the IAF needs 300 first-line U.S. fighter jets, because they’re getting them for free). And while, with U.S. help, Iron Dome will continue to save Israeli and Palestinian lives, more precious years will be squandered until the necessary reckoning and tough decisions on Gaza are made.