Those who dislike Israel and the Jews like to imagine that we somehow censor their self-expression.

The overwhelming evidence to the contrary suggests that this is delusional. It might have more to do with their fear and loathing of that inner censor, the conscience, or the even bigger and more censorious censor upstairs.

“With Israel, It’s Time To Start Discussing The Unmentionable,” was the headline of Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed arguing for phasing out American aid to Israel.

Kristof bravely mentioned his unmentionables (also known as the “third rail”) on July 22. This was six days after Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz’s Tablet magazine essay had mentioned the unmentionable at length.

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Joe Biden (Photo: Getty Images)

Anyone who doesn’t live in a cave papered with old copies of the New York Times knows this unmentionable is mentioned all the time.

Kristof, wincing that “it’s not just liberals” who think like this, concurred with Siegel and Leibovitz: “American aid to another rich country squanders scarce resources and creates an unhealthy relationship damaging to both sides.”

Tablet followed up by commissioning eight replies. It’s striking how their arguments reflect their interests. Viewed from Washington DC or the Kirya in Tel Aviv, the wisdom of aid seems obvious.

“We get back at least ten times more than what we send,” the Republican senator Ted Cruz writes.

“It would take uncountable billions to recreate some of the military advances and intelligence capabilities that the Israelis provide to us.”

Cruz warns that though the American people are “overwhelmingly pro-Israel”, the Biden administration is “controlled by fringe progressives” who are “pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel’s security”.

Eliminating aid, Cruz writes, would “provide momentum” to their “deeply reckless policies”.

Amos Yadlin, the ex-head of IDF intelligence and deputy commander of the Israeli Air Force, and his think-tank colleague Avner Golov expand on Cruz’s case for aid as symbol (it “signifies the bond” between the countries) and aid as framework (“the basis for future upgrades”).

The serial peace-processor Dennis Ross called it “the wrong idea at the wrong time”. Aaron David Miller, another 1990s fixture who is all process and no peace, says much the same in Kristof’s Times column.

Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think-tank makes a similar argument for mutual benefit, but lists a rich catalogue of dysfunction: Biden’s “unprecedented meddling” in Israel’s domestic politics; the Democrats’ desire to give “billions of dollars in cash” to Iran, the “world’s state sponsor of terrorism”; the complicity of American Jewish organisations, which give a “kosher seal of approval” to members of Congress who “work against Israel’s security interests every day” and vote for aid.

Ritchie Torres, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, adds that cutting aid will not, as Siegel and Leibovitz argue, reduce the pressure on Jewish Americans from the lunatics of the left, right and fraying middle. He may be right, because there’s no reasoning with the unreasonable.

If Israel needs to replenish its stock of Iron Dome missiles in a war with Hezbollah, Torres writes, American aid would be “even more critical”. It’s a big “if” — if, that is, it’s an “if” at all.

In 2021, as Israel’s former ambassador to the US Michael Oren noted at the time, a Democrat-controlled Congress blocked $1 billion of military aid to Israel, including Iron Dome supplies.

In 2014, President Obama blocked the resupply of targeted Hellfire missiles in order to force Israel to curtail its war with Hamas.

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Iron Dome rockets at work (Getty Images)

Oren called for a “more equitable and durable” US-Israel relationship that reflected the emerging realities of the 2020s. So does the Israeli right-winger Caroline Glick.

America is losing its “technological advantage”, but Israel needs to maintain its “qualitative edge” and shouldn’t be harnessed to America’s strategic goals, which are “often bad for Israel”.

The Israeli socialmedia campaigner Rudy Rochman goes further: Israel’s dependency is a form of “colonisation” by America’s “military-industrial complex”.

Tablet’s Izabella Tabarovsky argues that while American politics is “hyperpartisan”, this should not be a partisan question. It is three questions: American strategy, Jewish American politics and what Tabarovsky calls “Jewish collective existence”.

She also argues that importing the twisted postures of America’s domestic politics will not help either American Jews or Israelis.

It’s time, Tabarovsky writes, for American Jews to consider the issue from a “radically different angle — the Jewish one”.

This is what’s known as striking the third rail.