Don’t wait for next president to sign aid deal, US urges Israel

A senior American official has reportedly urged the Israeli government to sign a 10-year military aid agreement that the Obama administration is offering and not wait for the next US president in the hopes of securing a better deal.

Despite a “particularly challenging budget environment” in the US, the administration is willing to sign a memorandum of understanding for “the largest single pledge of military assistance to any country in US history,” a senior US official told the Haaretz newspaper Sunday night.

The official spoke after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ministers at the weekly cabinet meeting earlier in the day that “perhaps we won’t succeed in reaching agreement with this administration and will have to reach an agreement with the next administration.”

The US official was quoted as saying, “Israel is of course free to wait for the next administration to finalize a new [memorandum of understanding] should it not be satisfied with such a pledge, but we would caution that the US budgetary environment is unlikely to improve in the next 1-2 years and Israel will certainly not find a president more committed to Israel’s security than is President Obama.”

Washington has to weigh the needs of its own security and internal needs with those of its key allies, and already gives Israel 50 percent of its allocations for foreign military aid, the official reportedly said. Obama had approved $20.5 billion dollars for military support for Israel since becoming president, plus $3 billion for anti-missile systems, he said.

“No other US administration in history has done more for Israel’s security” than the Obama administration, Haaretz quoted the White House as saying.

US and Israeli representatives have completed three rounds of as-yet unfruitful negotiations for a deal to cover the decade beginning in 2018, when the current 10-year agreement, signed in 2008, runs out.

Israel currently receives some $3 billion a year in US military aid. In November, when both sides first met to negotiate a new 10-year package, US congressional sources told Reuters that Israel would be asking for an annual $5 billion, starting in 2017. The sources estimated that the White House and Israel would ultimately agree on a sum between $4 billion and $5 billion.

Last week, an American delegation led by Yael Lampert, the Israel point person on the White House national security council, visited Jerusalem for a third round of talks.

Higher level talks between the two countries will kick off when Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon visits with his US counterpart Ashton Carter early next month. Two weeks later, Netanyahu is expected to meet with Obama during a visit at which he’ll speak at America’s pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual policy conference.