The Birth of the Neocons.

Yes, it was indeed all in aid of the Pentagon budget

It is no secret that the ongoing war in Gaza has been good for the U.S. weapons industry, which has been happily supplying Israel since October 7 with tens of thousands ofbombs, artillery shells, missiles, and other systems including armored bulldozers. No doubts or smidgeons of conscience appear to have tinged corporate celebrations of the profits flowing from the rain of death. Three weeks into the war, as Biden was promising billions in military aid to Israel, Cai von Rumohr, aerospace analyst for asset manager TD Cowan set the tone in an October 25 General Dynamics earnings call. “Hamas has created additional demand, we have this $106 billion request from the president,” said von Rumohr,.“Can you give us some general color in terms of areas where you think you could see incremental acceleration in demand?”

“You know, the Israel situation obviously is a terrible one, frankly, and one that’s just evolving as we speak,” responded Jason Aiken, the company’s executive vice president of technologies and chief financial officer. “But I think if you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.” The following day, von Rumohr, as Eli Clifton noted in Responsible Statecraft, assigned a “buy” rating to GD stock.

Clearly, Israel enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the U.S. Military Industrial Complex, ensuring handsome profits all round. (Asked once on what basis Israel decided which U.S. warplanes to buy, former Israel Air Force commander Motti Hod replied blithely “bribes, darling, bribes.”) This relationship is underpinned by the power of the Israeli lobby, spearheaded by AIPAC, in U.S. domestic politics, which can be counted on to lend potent support for ever-burgeoning Pentagon budgets.

When the Israel lobby was anti-war. But it was not always so.

Time was when the American Jewish community, strenuous in support of the civil rights struggle at home, was generally dovish on issues of defense and foreign policy unrelated to Israel. “A bunch of rabbis came to see me in 1967 to tell me I ought not to send a single screwdriver to Vietnam,” Lyndon Johnson once complained. “but on the other hand told me I should send all our aircraft carriers through the Straits of Tirana to help Israel.” The reversal of this irksome divergance was largely the result of an artful and supremely successful lobbying campaign, crafted by a leading architect of postwar American militarism.

As Director of the Office of Policy Plannng at the State Department in 1950, Paul Nitze had authored NSC 68, which laid out the ground plan for a permanent war economy in the face of the purported military threat from the Soviet Union.

“We were the real neoconservatives!”