The Israel Exception: How U.S. Shields a Rogue Nuclear State, Threatening Global Order
As Israel bombs Iran over alleged nuclear ambitions, it’s time to confront the decades-long hypocrisy surrounding its own secret arsenal.
Amidst the backdrop of its ongoing genocide throughout Occupied Palestine, and simultaneous operations in Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, Israel has now turned its crosshairs eastward—launching what it claims was a "preemptive" strike on Iranian nuclear sites.
The June 13 air raid, carried out under the banner of self-defense, marks a dangerous new front in Israel’s long-standing campaign against Iranian sovereignty, one shaped as much by narrative engineering as by military might.
Israel has justified the attack, which (once again) targeted facilities in Isfahan and Natanz, as a “necessary” measure to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
This shaky rationale is hardly new. For decades, Israeli leadership—most consistently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—has recycled the same language of imminent doom, warning that Tehran was on the verge of building a bomb.
In 1996, Netanyahu warned the U.S. Congress that "the most dangerous regime in the world would have the most dangerous weapon in the world."
By 2008, he declared: “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2012, he theatrically drew a cartoon bomb at the United Nations, warning the world that Iran was “months away” from a nuclear breakout.
The presentation included no source material, no intelligence citations—just an arbitrary diagram and dramatic gestures toward a red line, drawn in marker on an illustration reminiscent of so many ACME products perpetually tormenting a certain coyote.
Now, more than a decade later, that moment remains perpetually “imminent.”
While Netanyahu is the foremost Chicken Little of this particular narrative, he’s hardly the first to have cried nuclear skyfall.
Israeli alarmism over regional nuclear development stretches back to the early 1980s, when then–Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered a preemptive strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.
That mission—Operation Opera—set a precedent: Israel would not permit any neighboring state to acquire a nuclear deterrent, even if it meant defying international law.
From that point forward, Israeli foreign policy embraced a militarized doctrine of preemption, often undergirded by exaggerated claims and worst-case hypotheticals.
Iran became the central target of this fear campaign by the 1990s, as Israeli intelligence memos under leaders like Yitzhak Rabin began framing Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy development as “an extraordinary new threat.”
Who’s allowed to have nuclear energy?
Nuclear energy is not inherently a threat. It’s used in medical treatment, electrical grids, and national energy infrastructure. Iran’s program has long included peaceful development, yet its ambitions are treated as criminal by default.
Western powers—led by the U.S.—claim the right to decide who may enrich uranium and who must be bombed for trying. That judgment reflects not law, but power, fear, and strategic interest. This, from the only nation to drop two atomic bombs on civilian populations.
This view ignores, or outright rejects, key facts: Iran’s nuclear program was launched under the U.S.-backed Shah; the Islamic Republic maintains that its program is peaceful; and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei issued a religious fatwa forbidding the production or use of nuclear weapons.
These declarations are dismissed in Western media as mere deception. This, despite the U.S.’ own intelligence confirming that any Iranian nuclear weapon ambitions were abandoned in 2003. Meanwhile, Israel’s opaque arsenal, constructed outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty and confirmed only by whistleblowers, is never questioned.
It is within this long arc of hysteria, projection, and unilateral aggression that the latest strike can be understood.
The newest attack on Iran follows a well-worn path—a narrative decades in the making, sustained by billions in American support, diplomatic insulation, and domestic indifference.
The dissonance reflects an old, tired strategy—one that has long defined U.S. policy toward Israel: enable aggression in private, deny it in public, and invoke self-defense only after the damage is done.
The real question isn’t why Israel struck Iran; it’s why it continues to do so with impunity, in violation of domestic laws, international treaties, and basic ethical standards.
Funding the Exception: Machinery of U.S. Support
To understand the scale of this alliance, one need only follow the money. Since World War II, Israel has received more U.S. foreign assistance than any other country—over $150 billion in cumulative aid.
In the 2024 fiscal year alone, Congress authorized roughly $17.9 billion in bilateral support and supplemental military assistance.
That’s in addition to the billions funneled through missile defense programs like Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow— initiatives funded largely by the U.S. but operated by Israel.
American taxpayers also subsidize Israel through the War Reserve Stockpile, a U.S. military cache stored on Israeli soil that can be accessed by Israeli forces in times of conflict.
Further support comes via tax-deductible donations to pro-Israel organizations and settlement enterprises, which are funneled through U.S.-based nonprofits and private foundations.
These entities routinely support colonization efforts in occupied territories, in direct violation of international law—all under the banner of charity.
At the state level, dozens of legislatures have passed anti-BDS laws, coercing public institutions and private businesses to uphold Israel’s image and economic interests.
Elsewhere, in places like Texas, the support goes even further. The state has invested hundreds of millions in Israeli bonds, redirected pension funds, and publicly declared unwavering allegiance—ensuring that taxpayer dollars fund Israeli state priorities regardless of public consent or international law.
Then there’s the intelligence-sharing pipeline, in which U.S. agencies integrate Israeli surveillance technologies—often battle-tested on Palestinians—into domestic law enforcement systems.
This aid has flowed under the guise of ensuring regional stability, deterring shared enemies, and preserving Israel’s “qualitative military edge.”
In practice, it has enabled occupation, apartheid, genocide and—now—escalation with a nuclear-capable state.
This support functions as a standing commitment—untethered from behavior, accountability, or legal thresholds.
In 2016, President Obama signed a 10-year memorandum of understanding that locked in $38 billion in military aid to Israel through 2028—$33 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and another $5 billion earmarked for missile defense.
Meanwhile, unlike most foreign aid recipients, Israel is allowed to spend a significant portion of this funding domestically, sustaining its defense industry and ensuring mutual entrenchment.
Congressional oversight exists only on paper; in practice, the Pentagon and State Department defer to Israeli assurances, routinely invoking vetting exemptions to shield military units from Leahy Law scrutiny.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the sustained narrative around Iran. The weapons are paid for in cash, but the justification is paid for in panic.
Since the 1990s, Israeli alarmism over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has shaped U.S. foreign policy more than any verifiable threat.
Manufactured Israeli urgency—framed through its familiar lens—has reliably secured weapons packages, stalled diplomacy, and justified unilateral strikes. The narrative’s credibility has mattered far less than its utility ever has.
According to Axios, former U.S. President Donald Trump secretly gave the green light to the Israeli operation in Iran—privately backing the strike while publicly distancing himself from it.
Immediately after the attack, Trump emerged with the reflexive refrain—standing with Israel and supporting its right to “defend itself”—with a quickness rivaled only by the frenzied zeal with which the United States first recognized the rogue state in 1948.
The dissonance belies an old strategy—one that has long defined U.S. policy toward Israel: enable aggression in private, deny it in public, and invoke self-defense only after the damage is done.
Simutaenously, the aid train keeps rolling, and the spin machine whirs with the sound of dutiful talking heads
Indeed, behind every weapons package lies a story—crafted, rehearsed, and recycled.
Each fabricated deadline served a purpose: to extract continued American funding, block diplomatic normalization with Iran, and shield Israel from international scrutiny. Every aid cycle becomes a performance of deterrence; every act of aggression reframed as prevention.
To be clear, this campaign of “prevention” has often taken the form of targeted killing.
Between 2010 and 2012, a series of Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated—killed by magnetic bombs attached to their cars by passing motorcyclists, or gunned down in front of their homes.
One of the most public examples came in 2012, when Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, an official at the Natanz facility, was murdered in Tehran by a motorbike hit team during morning traffic.
These operations— attributed to Israel’s Mossad—were extrajudicial executions carried out by a nuclear-armed state against a non-nuclear one, in service of a threat that never materialized.
All the while, Israel carried out these operations while sitting atop a secret arsenal of its own—an arsenal not only undeclared, but created in large part by uranium stolen from the United States.
A nuclear reactor rises from the desert at the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona, Israel, 1960. Credit: David Rubinger / CORBIS
The Origin of the Arsenal: Stolen Fuel and Strategic Silence
While Israeli officials warned the world of Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, they were already amassing an atomic arsenal in secret—and with uranium stolen from the United States.
By the mid-1960s, Israeli intelligence operatives working under a covert espionage unit known as Lakam had infiltrated American nuclear facilities. Their objective was clear: acquire weapons-grade material by any means necessary.
One of their most consequential targets was the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania.
NUMEC handled enriched uranium under U.S. Navy contracts. In a series of audits, the Atomic Energy Commission discovered an alarming discrepancy: over 600 pounds of highly enriched uranium—enough to build dozens of bombs—had gone missing.
Dr. Roger J. Mattson, then a safety official at the AEC, later confirmed that this missing material could not be explained by accounting errors.
The company’s director, Dr. Zalman Shapiro, was a known Zionist and longtime officer in the Zionist Organization of America. When questioned by federal agencies, Shapiro admitted he had been advised by Israeli officials to remain in the U.S., as he was “more valuable” to them operating domestically.
There was no FBI investigation. No indictment. No public inquiry. The AEC concluded, without basis, that it did not believe the material had been stolen—despite having no evidence to the contrary.
Later, the CIA conducted covert environmental sampling near Dimona, Israel’s undeclared nuclear facility. What they found was unmistakable: uranium traces with a 97.7% enrichment signature—identical to the fuel used by the U.S. Navy and handled by NUMEC. Israel had no enrichment capacity of its own. It didn’t need one. It had acquired the fuel elsewhere and concealed the source under a doctrine of denial.
The United States chose silence. Rather than confront Israel over what amounted to nuclear theft, the U.S. buried the evidence and doubled down on strategic ambiguity. The stolen uranium became an open secret—acknowledged in internal briefings, ignored in public policy, and quietly laundered through decades of aid and diplomatic cover.
This is the true origin of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. It did not emerge from sovereign development. It was a theft, facilitated by allies, and erased from public record. The arsenal that now serves as justification for preemptive strikes, targeted assassinations, and perpetual war was built in violation of the very norms Israel claims to uphold.
Israel’s Nuclear Ambiguity a Legal Black Hole
As Israeli F-35s rain down American-made bombs on Iranian soil, they do so in service of a threat that never materialized—while sitting atop an undeclared nuclear arsenal of their own, built through espionage and protected through decades of silence.
That arsenal has never been inspected. It has never been confirmed by Israel’s own government. It has never been acknowledged in any formal sense, even as estimates place the Israeli stockpile at around 80–400 warheads, placing it among the most heavily armed nuclear states on Earth.
To put this in perspective: North Korea was expelled from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2003 after failing to comply with inspections and disclosure requirements. It has faced international sanctions and diplomatic isolation ever since.
Israel, on the other hand, never joined the NPT in the first place—and has never faced comparable consequences. Its arsenal remains undeclared, its facilities uninspected, and its exemption unchallenged.
Perhaps most bewildering of all, Israel has never joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), refuses to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and has evaded all International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) oversight. It rejects every form of verification, transparency, or limitation. The hypocrisy is staggering, but it’s by design.
This strategic opacity, known as nuclear ambiguity (amimut in Hebrew), was formalized in 1969 under a secret pact between Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and U.S. President Richard Nixon.
The agreement, reached behind closed doors, committed both governments to neither confirm nor deny Israel’s nuclear status.
This doctrine allowed Israel to build its arsenal in the shadows and avoid international sanctions. It also provided the U.S. plausible deniability while continuing to provide aid—skirting the Symington and Glenn Amendments, which prohibit assistance to non-NPT nuclear states.
The U.S. has upheld this charade for over five decades. Whistleblowers like Mordechai Vanunu, who exposed the weapons-grade plutonium production at Dimona in 1986, were swiftly discredited, imprisoned, and silenced. Intelligence reports confirming Israeli nuclear capabilities have been classified, sanitized, or ignored.
Even when former President Jimmy Carter publicly admitted Israel’s nuclear status in 2008, U.S. policy remained unchanged.
Put simply, Israel is permitted to strike other countries over the suspicion of nuclear development, while avoiding any semblance of accountability over its own stockpile, which, again, was developed by theft, in defiance of international norms, and funded predominantly by U.S. largesse.
This is a bilateral arrangement—crafted at the highest levels of power—to immunize Israel from the very standards the U.S. imposes on the rest of the world.
It allows Israel to invoke the non-proliferation regime even as it operates entirely outside of it. It punishes transparency in others while weaponizing secrecy for itself—a legal and moral black hole that exists with America’s full blessing.
The Leahy Law and the Theater of Accountability
Under U.S. law, no security assistance may be provided to foreign military units that commit gross human rights violations.
This is the premise of the Leahy Law, a statute named after Senator Patrick Leahy, intended to serve as a safeguard against American complicity in war crimes. In practice, however, it functions as little more than theater—particularly when it comes to Israel.
The law requires the State Department and Department of Defense to vet foreign military units before providing them with funding, equipment, or training. It mandates investigations into violations and prohibits aid to units credibly implicated in abuses unless the host nation takes corrective steps. Of course, Israel is not treated like a foreign nation.
Instead it’s treated as an extension of U.S. power—an untouchable proxy. As a result, the law has been rendered moot through a combination of technical evasions, diplomatic deference, and classified exemptions.
The Leahy Law is not the only statute rendered meaningless. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, along with the Symington and Glenn Amendments, were designed to prevent aid from reaching countries that develop nuclear weapons outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Israel, which has never signed the NPT and secretly built its arsenal, qualifies on every count. Yet, rather than trigger restrictions, successive administrations have sidestepped enforcement through classified waivers, administrative loopholes, and a refusal to confirm what is already known.
Just as it lets its domestic law enforcement investigate itself, the U.S. allows Israel to self-vet. Military units receiving American funding are not subject to independent oversight. Instead, the U.S. accepts Israeli assurances of compliance with human rights standards—the same assurances it accepts when civilians are killed under the familiar pretext of “fighting Hamas.”
This self-policing arrangement ensures that no matter how egregious the abuse—whether it be the bombing of schools and hospitals in Gaza, the execution of journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh.
The Leahy Law is invoked only when politically convenient. Otherwise, it is ignored.
On rare occasions, the illusion of accountability is performed. In 2023, amid mounting pressure from rights organizations, the U.S. conducted a review into the Israel Defense Forces' Netzah Yehuda battalion, implicated in the death of 78-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Assad, who died after being bound, gagged, and left unconscious in the cold.
The review confirmed the violation, yet the unit was never formally sanctioned. Instead, the battalion was redeployed—rebranded elsewhere—and military aid resumed uninterrupted.
This is how the Leahy Law functions in the context of Israel: as a public relations mechanism. It exists to assure American taxpayers that their government is not funding atrocities, even when it is—especially when it is. The law’s language remains intact, its procedures nominally followed, and its purpose entirely inverted.
Its very presence helps manufacture the illusion that the U.S. has moral red lines—when in reality, it has only red carpets for its allies.
Lobbying, Legislation, and the Price of Protection
Any serious examination of U.S. support for Israel must contend with the architecture of influence behind it. This is not simply a matter of shared values or Cold War inertia. It is the product of a sprawling, well-funded lobbying apparatus that has entrenched Israeli interests into the American political bloodstream—often at the expense of U.S. law, diplomacy, and strategic coherence.
At the center of this infrastructure is AIPAC—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. For decades, AIPAC has functioned as the most powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington, deploying its considerable resources to cultivate relationships, draft legislation, and eliminate dissent.
Its influence extends beyond financing; it’s embedded in the very structure of policymaking.
Whereas any other foreign entity would be condemned for so much as attempting to interfere in American democracy, AIPAC hand-picks candidates, monitors their votes, and ensures that no meaningful critique of Israel gains traction without swift and severe political cost.
Bipartisan complicity is not incidental—it is engineered. The group’s success lies in its ability to reduce the Israel-Palestine question to a litmus test of loyalty, patriotism, and political viability. Lawmakers who challenge Israeli conduct are smeared as antisemitic.
Those who call for conditioning aid are accused of jeopardizing national security. Even tepid calls for restraint are drowned out by unanimous congressional resolutions affirming “Israel’s right to defend itself”—a phrase invoked with numbing regularity, even as entire neighborhoods in Gaza are vaporized.
This influence extends well beyond campaign donations. AIPAC and its satellite organizations shape the very language of foreign policy.
They draft bills that criminalize boycott movements, frame Palestinian resistance as terrorism, and shield Israel from international accountability. They operate across both parties, ensuring that U.S. policy remains aligned not with international law, but with Israeli strategy.
When Congress overwhelmingly reaffirmed its “ironclad” support for Israel—even as allegations of war crimes in Gaza were repeatedly broadcast—this wasn't genuine consensus. It was institutional capture .
This is the American price of Israeli protection: the surrender of policy to narrative, of oversight to lobbying, and of law to ideology.
The result is an abandonment of principles disguised as alliance. While millions in military aid flow unimpeded, the moral debt accumulates—unacknowledged, but compounding.
Consequences of Impunity: Global Norms in Collapse
Laws, when enforced selectively, cease to function as laws. Instead, they become tools of power—wielded not in pursuit of justice, but to discipline enemies and protect allies.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Israel, whose actions have not only destabilized the region but helped unravel the very fabric of international order the U.S. claims to uphold.
Israel’s repeated violations of international law—its illegal settlement enterprise, targeted assassinations, the collective punishment of civilians, extrajudicial killings, and attacks on journalists, medics, and humanitarian infrastructure—have been met not with sanctions, but with arms shipments.
At every turn, the U.S. has used its veto power at the United Nations to shield Israel from accountability, blocking resolutions that would even acknowledge atrocities, let alone punish them. This pattern has normalized impunity and rendered multilateral diplomacy meaningless.
In this vacuum, other states have taken note. If Israel can ignore the Non-Proliferation Treaty, why should Iran—or anyone else—respect it?
If international humanitarian law applies only to designated enemies, what incentive remains for adherence?
The erosion is not theoretical. It is visible in the crumbling authority of the International Criminal Court, in the cynical redefinitions of “terrorism,” and in the growing chorus of states dismissing Western norms as colonial relics wielded selectively by empire.
The U.S., in backing Israel unconditionally, has undermined its own strategic interests. It has alienated much of the Global South, radicalized generations across the Arab and Muslim worlds, and emboldened authoritarian regimes who now point to Israel as a precedent for their own actions.
When the world watched Gaza flattened in real time, with American-made bombs falling on schools and refugee camps, and the response from Washington was a blank check and a press release about restraint—credibility died.
What remains is certainly not order; it’s enforcement. It isn’t diplomacy, it’s domination.
This is the global consequence of the Israel exception. It is not merely a regional tragedy. It is a systemic rupture—a crisis of legitimacy manufactured in Tel Aviv, subsidized in Washington, and paid for everywhere else.
The Price of Protection
For generations, the United States has sold the world a story: that its foreign policy, however flawed, aspires toward law, stability, and democratic values. That story unravels with Israel.
What the U.S. offers Israel is not a partnership of principle—it is an arrangement of exception. Military aid flows unconditionally. Legal frameworks are bypassed. Atrocities are ignored.
At the center of the arrangement is a doctrine of denial: a tacit understanding that Israel’s behavior—on human rights, on nuclear weapons, on international law—will never be subject to the same rules imposed on others.
The "Israel exception" is not a theoretical concept. It’s embedded in law and operationalized through policy.
It is why the Leahy Law, designed to block aid to human rights violators, has “never been applied to Israel,” despite mountains of documentation by Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations.
It’s why the U.S. accepts Israel’s “assurances” in place of inspections, why Israeli units like Netzah Yehuda, implicated in torture and the death of Palestinian-American Omar Assad, still receive U.S. arms.
It’s why billions of dollars in weapons continue to flow even as the International Court of Justice weighs genocide charges against the Israeli state.
Israel’s arsenal has been confirmed. It’s photographed, and catalogued by whistleblowers like Mordechai Vanunu, whose revelations in 1986 included technical specifications and neutron bomb capacity.
Rather than investigate Vanunu’s revealtions regarding Israel’s violations of non-proliferation standards, it allowed Israel to abduct and imprison the whistleblower in solitary confinement.
The U.S. does not merely tolerate Israel’s nuclear ambiguity—it protects it, through diplomatic vetoes, withheld intelligence, and silence.
While Iran is sanctioned for enrichment, Israel remains immune for weaponization.
The result is a system in which American power is apparently wielded to erode international norms, rather than uphold them.
Selective application of law becomes the law. Human rights become rhetoric. Strategic “partnership” becomes a euphemism for impunity.
The June 13 strikes on Iran are not an escalation. They are the natural outgrowth of decades of narrative laundering—of framing preemptive aggression as security, of weaponizing fear to override diplomacy, of rendering public consent irrelevant through bipartisan consensus and AIPAC-scripted policy.
Each bombing run is carried out with American-made jets. Each civilian death is paid for with American taxes. Each red line crossed is one Washington refused to draw.
This is the price of protection. It’s paid in blood. It’s paid in lies. It’s paid in the collapse of every principle the U.S. claims to stand for.
Unless the structure that sustains it is dismantled—unless the American public begins to see through the mythology of shared values and demands an end to legal double standards—the price will only rise.