AOC’s Iron Dome defeat is a win for the United States

Moshe Feiglin is the figurehead of far-right, free-the-weed libertarianism in Israel, a country where this barely makes the top ten weirdest ideological mash-ups. Back in 2013, when he was still a powerful player on the right-wing of the right-wing of the Likud, Feiglin gave an interview to the New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society. He used the opportunity to do something most ambitious Israeli politicians would never dream of doing: he called for an end to US military aid to Israel.

Noting America’s unemployment troubles at the time, Feiglin said he was ‘totally against this aid’ because it ‘doesn’t look moral to me’. He opposed the money, too, because: 

‘This aid is not in our favour, not economically, not militarily, not in any way. This aid serves psychological purposes, not anything else.’

By psychological purposes, he meant not only the Israeli need for hyper security but a dependency mindset in which the Jewish state filtered its foreign and even some domestic policies through its relationship with the United States.