April 20, 2024: In 2016, the U.S. government agreed to provide Israel with $38 billion in weapons during the next ten years. The shipments cease after 2026 unless a new agreement is negotiated. The purpose of these massive arms transfers is to assist America’s primary and most reliable ally in the Middle East. Israel also has the most powerful military and the most robust and productive economy. Israel also leads the region in developing new technologies. Israel is the only nation in the region with nuclear weapons and locally made ballistic missiles to deliver them anywhere in the region. Israel has also developed the Arrow BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense) system to intercept any Iranian missiles fired at Israel. The religious dictatorship that has ruled Iran since the 1980s openly declares its goal to destroy Israel but does not have the means. One reason for that is the Iranian government runs a police state that is quick to accuse anyone who opposes the police state as traitors and imprison or murder them. This has led many Iranian scientists and engineers to leave the country for safer places like Europe or the United States. Most of the Iranian Jews, who had been in Iran for thousands of years, left, many of them settling in Israel. As a result of the Hamas attack on Israel, Iran ordered Hezbollah to fire some rockets into northern Israel. The response was violent as Israeli forces fired back at Hezbollah and began temporarily evacuating Jewish and Arab Israeli civilians from areas that were under fire from Hezbollah. About twenty percent of the Israeli population are Christian or Moslem Arabs. These Arabs are not conscripted into the Israeli military, but many join voluntarily. The Israeli Arabs know they are better off in Israel than in any nearby Arab nation and don’t want to lose that. A few of these Israeli Arabs join anti-Israel groups and that activity is usually reported to the Israeli security forces by Israeli Arabs.

The shipments of American weapons to Israel are done without much publicity. The Americans send their latest technology because they know that Israelis can, and often do, improve Americans weapons. Israel does this largely because they are constantly threatened by hostile neighbors, like Iran, who want to destroy Israel. This is a rough neighborhood, but it has been the Jewish homeland for thousands of years and since the late 1940s Jews are once again in control of their homeland. Israel made peace with Egypt, the largest Arab state in the region as well as Jordan and non-Arab Turkey. The remaining Anti-Jewish neighbors, mainly Iran, seek to destroy Israel. It wasn’t always that way.

Until the Iranian revolution of the 1980s, which was taken over by religious leaders, Iran was a constitutional monarchy and now many Iranians would like to have their democracy back, with or without the monarchy. Most Iranians are opposed to their current government, which is becoming more and more violent against any Iranians who complain about the corrupt and dictatorial rule of the religious leaders. Some of those complaints are expressed by leaving pro-Israel messages in public places. This enrages the government because they have not been able to find and eliminate these pro-Israeli Iranians.

So desperate are the Iranians to harm Israel that Shia Iran has supported the Sunni Hamas terror group. For about two decades Hamas controlled the government in Gaza and used that to launch an attack on Israel in October 2023 that killed about a thousand Israelis. Hamas declared this a great victory despite the fact that Israeli counterattacks have sought to destroy any Hamas presence in Gaza. Most Palestinians, especially those in the West Bank, oppose Hamas which wants to replace the current corrupt Fatah government with a corrupt Hamas dictatorship. Hamas does not have enough support among Palestinians to do that and members are currently being sought out and captured or killed by Israeli forces operating in Gaza, the West Bank and in southern Lebanon where the Iran-backed Hezbollah Shia Arab militia has long controlled southern Lebanon and threatened to attack Israel with thousands of rockets and guided missiles imported from Iran over the last few decades. There once was a lot of pro-Israel Lebanese and a mutually prosperous economic relationship between Lebanon and Israel. Iranian aggression and support for the Hezbollah militia ended that and crippled the Lebanese economy and political system. The United States supplied the weak Lebanese government with weapons but that was not sufficient to enable Lebanese to expel Hezbollah.