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I had better explain myself in detail here because US-Israeli relations are so prone to emotion and controversy and the Pollard case is a particular flash point.

The US arms budget is large, but concessionary US arms sales to Israel and other military aid is but a small part of it. Money that would be saved if the US ended such aid to Israel would easily be consumed by other defense needs with little discomfort to the industry.

Calling the US defense industry socialistic is silly. The industry depends on and is bound to serve the interests of its prime customer, the US military. That makes for a lot of lobbying, influence peddling, and heavy restrictions by the government, all common attributes of socialism. Nevertheless, the US defense industry is capitalist in the key criteria that ownership and the flow of profits are in private hands.

US foreign aid has various purposes, but the overriding one is that US interests are served in some fashion, even in assistance to organizations and countries that do not like us. The rationales are case specific.

Egypt, a country that does not like the US, gets US support for one prime reason: to buy relative peace for Israel. In that sense, US aid to Egypt is an extension of US support for Israel and its tenuous peace with Egypt. A serious effort to terminate US aid to Egypt would be strongly opposed by Israel.

A free market Israel in a peaceful Middle East could go it alone economically without US aid. But Israel has a tightly controlled socialistic economy, and since Zionism was expressly formulated as socialistic and modern Judaism has a strong attachment to socialism, Israel is unlikely to embrace free market capitalism. Even in a peaceful Middle East, a socialist Israel would be regularly asking for US aid.

Of course, the Middle East is not peaceful and is unlikely to become so in the foreseeable future. Without billions of dollars per year in military and economic aid from the US, socialist Israel would not last long because the strain of paying for its defense would run the country into bankruptcy within a few years.

Israel is a substantial net burden to the US. If Israel did not exist, US relations with the Muslim world would be easier and the US could more easily play its cards as a superpower to pick and chose allies and enemies in the Muslim world according to our interests.

George Marshall, the revered top WWII general and US Secretary of State at the time of Israel's creation, was fiercely opposed to US recognition of Israel because he foresaw that it would be a strategic complication and burden to the US. The USSR is believed to have recognized Israel in part because Arab-Israeli conflict would be useful to Soviet efforts to court friends in the Muslim world -- and so it was.

These calculations incline more than a few Americans to resent Israel and to wish that the US would cut off support and get the best terms available for ourselves from the Muslim world. But I am adamantly pro-Israel. Not only does Israel exist and should exist, but the US has a moral and strategic obligation to support Israel as a fellow democracy. Israel's existence spurs conflict with the Muslim world, but the prime cause of such conflict is not Israel but the vile pathologies of Islam and of Arab societies.

What I find galling from Israel are those instances in which it does direct harm to the US: the Pollard case (Israel spying on the US and negating billions of dollars worth of intelligence capacity essential to US security); the attack on the Liberty (Israel deliberately attacking a US naval vessel and causing dozens of American casualties); and arms sales and intelligence cooperation with China (which means that China is using Israeli military equipment, technology, and intelligence against America). There are even some unresolved reports that suggest Israel knew that 9/11 was coming and preferred to let the attack proceed so as to benefit from US action against Muslim terrorists.

For all the dedication and shrewdness of Israel's military and intelligence agencies, they are reckless at times in seeking advantages where fundamental good sense urges that American patience should not be risked beyond its natural limits. If the left wing of the US Democratic party comes back into power -- which is always a possibility -- Israel would soon find itself pressed hard to make fatal accommodations with her Muslim neighbors.

Clinton did that, more for his ego than anything else, but post 9/11, the American Left back in power would seek a de facto abandonment of Israel for the sake of an American peace with Islam. A fully energized right wing of the Republican Party would be essential to preventing that, but the accumulated antagonisms generated by the Pollard case and other episodes of Israeli overreaching would weaken and perhaps disable such opposition.

Although those episodes are relatively obscure for now, a liberal Democratic administration could easily stir them to prominence by releasing new information about them. That was done by the Clinton administration as to the Pollard case in the aftermath of the collapse of the Wye River Plantation deal. Israel got a lot of bad press in consequence. It took weeks before Arafat's turn down of the deal was made clear.

The Bush administration is strongly pro-Israel -- but Israel's arms deals with China have recently led to a downgrading of US defense cooperation on a range of projects. Is loyalty to Pollard or arms deals with China worth gravely damaging Israel's relationship with the US? As a supporter of Israel, I think not -- and I wish that Israel's leaders were of the same opinion.