Leon Hadar
It has become a worn trope among anti-Semitic political commentators that the United States regularly sends its soldiers to “die for Israel.” Yet while Israel has relied on generous US military assistance throughout the years, providing access to the most advanced and cutting-edge weaponry and technologies,
no American soldier has directly fought on its behalf since its founding in 1948. During his initial tenure as Prime Minister in the 1970s, Yitzhak Rabin was the first Israeli leader to explicitly lay out a policy of never asking the United States for combat forces—an approach that all subsequent Prime Ministers have maintained.
The United States and Israel have held joint military exercises, cooperated closely on missile defense, jointly developed and tested new weapons systems, shared intelligence, and consulted on strategy. However, Israel has never requested American boots on the ground, beyond advisers and auxiliary units. Instead, the United States has provided extensive military aid to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), justified by the argument that the IDF functions as an unsinkable American “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East—a substitute for a permanent military deployment like those in Germany, South Korea, Japan, or Qatar.
When Israel has come under assault, Americans have sometimes aided in its defense—as during the missile exchanges in 2024, when US Air Force pilots helped to shoot down Iranian rockets targeting Israeli cities and military bases.
Earlier in June, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went a step further: breaking the longstanding taboo that Rabin established, he requested not only defensive support from the United States, but for American pilots and planes to bomb Iran’s nuclear uranium sites. “For the first time, Israel is asking America to fight alongside it, or for it,” as Israel’s Haaretz editor Aluf Benn put it. In Benn’s view,
the mission in question was too big for the IDF alone—and represented an “unprecedented peak” in Israel’s dependence on the United States.
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