The Mitzpe Institute is a think tank working on Israeli security and the threats facing Jewish communities abroad. It's an educational programme of the Atlanta Israel Coalition. We publish the Israel Brief from Sunday to Friday, in two forms. The Flash Brief is free by email: a short scan of what moved overnight. The full Brief is for members on mitzpe.org, with our analysis of the war, Israeli politics, the region and the diaspora, and the shorter items in Briefly Noted. Each Friday this edition pulls the week together for Guerre and Shalom readers.
Trump told Fox & Friends on Tuesday morning that America stops paying for Israel's weapons at the end of this year, and that it was Netanyahu's idea. "Can I be honest with you? He brought it up." Jerusalem heard that on television along with everybody else. Herzog called it a bolt from the blue, and a senior official summed up everything the government knows in a single line: "Nobody knows anything, except that Bibi promised him he would give it up without making a fuss."
Netanyahu has wanted Israel off the grant (what amounts to an American Jobs Program, if we’re honest, that gives Israel yet another PR issue) for years, and the country he'd be weaning has the industry to manage it.
Israel signed $19.2 billion in defence export deals last year, its fifth record running, and Europe bought more than a third of them. On Wednesday the Czech Republic, the first NATO country to buy a complete Israeli air-defence system, arranged to buy four more. Israel already spends about 7 per cent of its GDP on defence (more than any NATO member) and that's with the aid.
Europe, for its part, buys Israeli interceptors though for it’s part would rather not be seen doing it. At Euronaval outside Paris this week, France let Israeli firms show air and missile defence and nothing else, and kept Israel's government out of the hall entirely. Paris can't stop Prague buying, or Berlin running the Arrow 3 it paid $4.6 billion for. It can keep the stand small. Petty, but there it is. The sales are another matter.
Democrats took both houses on Tuesday, and from January the House Foreign Affairs Committee belongs to Gregory Meeks, who put a hold in September on a $2.8 billion sale of 2,000-pound bombs. With no “grant”, every American weapon Israel gets is a purchase, and the big ones cross his desk. The State Department already counts about $10 billion in Israeli orders beyond anything the aid covers — a squadron of F-35s among them — and nobody has said who pays for it.
The right is moving too, lest you be tempted to blame the debacle on one party. JD Vance put his party's defeat down to the Iran war, and told Republicans that the voters they lost wanted to "change our relationship to Israel." Trump called that "largely true," then said he'd do it all again.
Herzog decides on Sunday who gets the first go at forming a government, and on 67 recommendations to 46 it's Gadi Eisenkot's to lose. Whoever gets it inherits a deal with Washington that nobody in Jerusalem has seen on paper. If Netanyahu really did trade the grant for something better, the time to get it signed off on is before 3 January.
You Should Know
JNS: Thailand's prime minister revoked Chabad's Rabbi Yosef Chaim Kantor's citizenship, and a Phuket rally now wants all seven Chabad Houses in the country shut.
Jerusalem Post: Baghdad opened a museum of Iraqi Jewish history in the old Shamash School. More than a thousand came on the first day. Four to six Jews still live in the city.
JNS: An American 17-year-old, two days into a semester in Israel, picked a 3,300-year-old Egyptian scarab up off the ground at Tel Gezer and handed it in.
The Washington Institute: Israel has broken up 28 Islamic State attack plots since October 7, against 18 in the nine years before, and almost none of them got anywhere.
JNS: The Defence Ministry blew up about 3,300 old mines near Ein Zivan on the Golan this year, and the cleared land goes back to farms and housing.
Algemeiner: Amersfoort's museum cancelled its show for the town synagogue's 300th birthday over Gaza "tension," and the mayor apologised and put it back on.
Jerusalem Post: Norway has published the Oslo channel papers its negotiators kept at home. Ahmed Qurei, in 1993: "When it is signed, it will be forgotten by everyone."
Israeli Politics
Herzog closed consultations at 67 recommendations for Eisenkot to 46 for Netanyahu, and decides on Sunday.
Liberman says he'll now compromise on the haredi draft law, and still rules out a rotation or a government leaning on the Arab parties.
Eisenkot's 67 include the Arab parties' 19, and Yashar backed its own leader on Thursday.
The Shin Bet suspects Ayman Odeh took hundreds of thousands of shekels from the Palestinian Authority. He calls it political persecution.
Jewish families moved into eight homes bought on state land outside Jericho, and the IDF says nobody told it first.
The Diaspora
Labour pulled out of power-sharing with the Greens in 11 councils where local Greens wouldn't disown "Zionism is racism."
BBC management accepted Jeremy Bowen's explanation for telling a Glasgow audience that Gaza is "a genocide."
A kosher bakery in Montreal burned two nights after surviving an arson attempt, and the hate crimes unit is on it.
A Philadelphia "Boycott Ride" targets six Jewish-owned restaurants on Sunday, the eve of Kristallnacht's anniversary.
Eva Geller z"l, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor shot at Bondi's Chanukah celebration, has died, the attack's sixteenth victim.
Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute, which publishes the Israel Brief from Sunday to Friday. Read it at israelbrief.com.