CAMERA Prompts USA Today Correction on U.S. Aid to Israel

After contact from CAMERA, USA Today has changed inaccurate wording in a May 18, 2021 report.

That article initially claimed that “Democrats have been divided over the consistent economic and military support the U.S. has provided Israel since its founding.”

Yet, as CAMERA pointed out to USA Today editors, the United States did not provide military support to Israel at its founding. In fact, the U.S. initiated an arms embargo against the fledgling Jewish state. Further, as the Middle East scholar Dennis Ross detailed in his 2015 history of U.S.-Israel relations, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S. Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama, most scholars date the beginning of military cooperation between the two countries to President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 approval of HAWK missiles to Israel. Kennedy, Ross notes, “was the first American president to speak of a special relationship with Israel, to talk explicitly of our commitment to its security, and to overrule the prohibition on the provision of arms.”