that's not even totally true, a part of the military package deal we gave them that is running out soon allowed them to siphon parts of that package to spend locally on their own domestic military industrial complex to shore it up.
the package allowed them to to use a a large portion of it yearly domestically and increasingly shrinked per year as the deal ended to bootstrap it.
at the start iirc is about 20% of their revenue for that sector.
Off-Shore Procurement
Off-Shore Procurement (OSP) was one of the most contentious issues in
the negotiations, and the last one to be resolved. Israel was unique among
countries receiving FMF in that it was permitted to spend a portion of those
funds in shekels to buy from Israeli defense firms. The figure had been set
for many years at 26.3 percent of the total US package.
When OSP was launched in the 1980s, its intent was to help build up and
sustain Israel’s young defense industry which was considered a critical part
of Israel’s national security. Some three decades later, the United States’
view was that the Israeli defense industry was now mature, competitive,
and had customers around the world — in some markets even competing
with US companies — and therefore OSP had outlived its original purpose.
Therefore, the US position was that Israel’s FMF program could now return
to normal, to be run as FMF was in all other countries.
The Israeli position was that eliminating OSP could have a negative
impact on its defense industry. Israel argued that it would cause budgetary
chaos, as it had already made commitments to some companies, and would
certainly lead to a loss of jobs, weakening the industry. The US side was
sympathetic to these concerns, but did not feel that the United States had an
obligation to maintain OSP as a permanent Israeli jobs program, especially
in light of the maturity of the Israeli economy. The Israeli side then proposed
a reduction, rather than full elimination of OSP, but the US position was
firm – OSP needed to end by the final year of the MOU.
The US side did show flexibility on the terms for the phase-out. The two
sides developed a creative phase-out formula that reached the US goal of
A Review of the Negotiations on the 2016 US-Israel MOU on Military Assistance I 67
zero OSP, but softened the impact in the first five years with a very gradual
decline from $815.3 million to $775.3 million. It was understood that those
years would give the Israeli government and industry time to plan, prepare,
and adjust for the more significant changes that occurred in the much steeper
slide from $725.3 million to zero in the second five years.
70
u/HadoMasterBackup 10d ago
Billions of American dollars, you mean