Much is made of Israel's hefty foreign aid from the US: more than $3 billion every year. It's a lot of money, and it also isn't. Israel has a GDP (gross domestic product) of almost $500 billion every year. So on the one hand, Israel seems like it doesn't need the money, and believe it or not, there are calls across the political spectrum to cut it in both countries - nearly as many on the right as on the left, so it probably won't last much longer.
So why is it there?
The answer is: it's a public endorsement, a statement of credibility on both sides. In this arrangement, the US gets the use of Israeli intelligence (of which General George J. Keegan said is 'worth more than five CIA's'), and Israel gets confidence from American investors without parallel in any other country. Put those two facts together, and what do you get? Israel's favored nation status is not the reason Israel 'misbehaves', it's reason Israel doesn't 'misbehave much worse.' So long as Israel exists publicly under the US's embrace it will act in the interests of a place like the US and not drop a host of WMD's on the Arab world, which their government threatened to do in 1973, just before the funding started... People think they want to find out what happens when that check goes away, but I really don't think they do.
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