by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:

Thank You Congress and President Trump!

Few Americans know the history of how Israel’s “wag the tail” relationship with the United States developed. Israel’s 1967 successful war against its neighbors demonstrated to military planners in Washington how a qualitative edge in weapons could enable a small country to resist much larger and seemingly more powerful adversaries. Israel was largely supplied with French weapons at the time that reportedly out-performed the Russian equipment in the hands of Syria and Egypt. As a consequence, in 1968, with strong support from a heavily lobbied Congress, Zionist influenced US President Lyndon B Johnson approved the hitherto blocked sale of F-4 Phantom fighters to Israel, establishing the precedent for continuing US support of Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, generally referred to by the acronym QME, over its Arab and Christian neighbors. Five years later, in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the United States and Israel came to an understanding whereby they tacitly adopted the doctrine of active US maintenance of Israel’s QME. After that war, the United States also quadrupled its foreign aid to Israel, effectively replacing France as Israel’s largest arms supplier.