Could Israel's Continued Control Over the U.S. Congress Lead to Pogroms in America?
History has a lot to say about what happens next.
Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose continued support of the Israeli military. And yet, House Republicans just voted to give co-ownership of America’s emerging military technologies - information Israel used to spy on us to obtain - which is worth an incalculable sum of money, way more than 3.8 billion per year. American Citizens are rightly outraged. But could the outrage over Israel controling our politicians in Washington get out of control?
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday by a vote of 216 to 212, sending a trillion-dollar defense package to conference with the Senate that includes a provision merging American and Israeli military research and development across six “frontier weapons technologies,” which are those technologies that will be used for war-fighting that will take us into the next century of warfare. A total of 209 Republicans voted to give co-ownership of our most essential weaponry to Israel.
The vote came during a full crash of Israel public opinion polling in the U.S., with a super-majority of American Citizens opposing the continued military welfare for Israel, the vast majority growing disenchanted with Israel’s use of the funds to engage in what, by every discernible and widely accepted definition, is genocide. Knowing that their continued support for the expansion of the Memorandums of Understanding funding Israel to the tune of 3.8 billion annually would be incredibly unpopular among their constituents, AIPAC’s Congress instead found a way to give Israel support without having to risk an unpopular vote. Their solution? Just give Israel our entire military’s future.
The overall cash value of these emerging technologies is not only far more than 3.8 billion annually, but it’s also practically incalculable. It’s worth more than the keys to every jet, warship, submarine, and aircraft carrier in the American fleet.
The vote came one day after the House approved the rule governing floor debate by an even narrower margin, 214 to 211, a rule that excluded a bipartisan amendment from Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna that would have stripped the provision from the bill entirely. Lawmakers never got a standalone vote on the measure itself. They got a vote on the whole defense bill with it buried inside, take it or leave it.
The provision is Section 219 of the NDAA, previously numbered Section 224 before a committee renumbering changed nothing about what it does. It is titled the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, and it directs the Secretary of Defense to designate a Pentagon official whose job is synchronizing American and Israeli defense development across artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, quantum computing, cybersecurity and data integration, directed energy weapons, and biotechnology. It does not send Israel money. It sends Israel a seat at the table where the next fifty years of American weapons get designed.
In recent months, Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby repeatedly told the American public that Israel would not ask to re-up their 3.8 billion welfare checks, indicating they were ready to “stand on their own two feet.” What they did not say is that Israel found a workaround to the welfare votes. They would just be given the U.S. military instead. It was, all things considered, a move as genius as it was evil.
WHAT THE ROLL CALL ACTUALLY MEANS
The House Rules Committee controls which of the thousand-plus amendments proposed to a defense bill get a vote, and it used that authority to keep the Massie-Khanna strike amendment off the list entirely. No debate happened. No recorded vote on Section 219 by itself ever took place. Members were handed a binary choice between voting for the entire trillion-dollar defense authorization or voting against military funding altogether, and every one of them understood which choice was survivable back home.
This is the same maneuver that kept the provision alive when the House Armed Services Committee considered it back in the spring. It worked then, and it worked again this week, and the reason it keeps working is that burying an unpopular provision inside an unkillable bill is not a mistake. It is the entire strategy, and it has now succeeded twice in a row against the two lawmakers willing to fight it in public.
Massie told the country in early July that he would bring his amendment back the moment the House reconvened. He did. The problem was never his resolve. The problem is that the people who control which amendments get a vote made sure his resolve never mattered.
NETANYAHU ALREADY EXPLAINED THE WHY
The timing of this week’s vote aligns with something that received far less attention than it deserved. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat for a Fox News interview the same week the bill moved. When a host asked him whether the drawdown in American aid would be offset by a merger between the Pentagon and the IDF, he said yes without hesitation. He described the two countries “co-investing as equal partners” in emerging military technology, sharing both the intellectual property and the payoff, in an arrangement he has taken to calling aid to partnership.
He had been rehearsing that answer for months. He told Major Garrett on 60 Minutes back in the spring that he wants to “wean Israel off American assistance” entirely. He told an Israeli audience separately that he wants the phaseout to start immediately because “Israel can finance itself.” Every one of those interviews was public preparation for the exact legislative outcome that landed on the House floor this week. A foreign head of state spent months explaining to two different national audiences why this provision needed to survive. It survived.
Partnership implies two parties with equal standing walking away with what they came for. The United States of America received absolutely nothing from this legislation. Nothing. The U.S. Congress gave our essential military technologies and our data to a nation convicted of spying on the U.S., stealing our weapons technology, stealing our uranium, giving our nuclear secrets to Russia, selling our weapons technology to China, and weaponizing Mexican drug cartels. Now, they own our military tech.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Section 219 traces back to the U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act, introduced by Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas and Rep. Don Davis of North Carolina, with companion Senate legislation from Ted Budd of North Carolina and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. All four have taken substantial money from AIPAC and allied pro-Israel groups over the course of their careers. The standalone FUTURES Act received public backing from AIPAC itself along with the neoconservative group FDD Action. The standalone bill could not pass on its own. Its authors did what failed legislation in Washington eventually does. They found a bill too large to reject and moved in.
Remember those four names, because when this becomes law, and it likely will once the Senate reconciles its own version sitting in Section 1217, these are the four who wrote the blueprint that ended up smuggled into a trillion-dollar defense bill most members of Congress never read past the table of contents.
The Senate still has to pass its version, and the two chambers still have to reconcile the final text in conference. That process draws even less public scrutiny than a House floor vote because conference committees operate almost entirely behind closed doors, with a handful of senior members deciding what survives in private meetings that produce a final bill that nobody outside the room gets to amend. If the Rules Committee stripping out the Massie-Khanna amendment felt like a quiet maneuver, a closed-door conference committee handling language this valuable to the people who wrote it will be quieter still.
Massie will not be in that room. He lost his seat before he ever got the floor vote he was promised. Khanna will keep raising the issue from the minority party, and Bernie Sanders will keep quoting the same 16% poll number showing how few Americans actually want unconditional military support for Israel, and none of it changes the arithmetic on a bill that just passed with Israel’s fingerprints on the language and AIPAC’s fingerprints on the sponsors. The annual aid vote did not get renegotiated. It got welded permanently into the architecture of the American military itself, and this week the House made certain nobody gets a vote on prying it back off.
THIS IS HOW POGROMS HAPPEN
People who are legitimately concerned about anti-Jewish violence should walk carefully and consider cautiously such actions as what was just taken by the U.S. Congress. Historically, when the majority of a nation’s citizens feel like no matter what they want, they are not in control of their own nation and their leaders are instead beholden to a tiny class of Jewish influence, bad things historically happen. It’s actually nothing to play with, and the United States Congress is flirting with real trouble by sending the message that this is the situation that American Citizens are facing.
The word pogrom comes from the Russian language and literally means “to wreak havoc” or “to devastate.” Historians generally use the term to describe an organized or semi-organized outbreak of mob violence directed against a particular ethnic or religious minority, most commonly Jews. A pogrom usually involved attacks on homes, businesses, synagogues, and neighborhoods, often accompanied by looting, assault, and murder. Unlike a formal military campaign or judicial punishment, a pogrom was usually carried out by crowds, militias, or local authorities acting with the encouragement, acquiescence, or indifference of those in power.
We want to be clear. NXR opposes all non-government-sanctioned violence occurring outside the established authority of the civil magistrate. And we are highly concerned that Americans, given our spirit of revolution, personal independence, and contempt for abuses of government power, that the U.S. is quickly approaching an era where violence may be seen by some of our fellow citizens as the only solution for a government that is controlled by foreign interests and a fringe minority power class that just gave away the American military - and with it, American sovereignty - to a foreign power. We are not far from the same type of anger felt by nations and peoples who looked to pogroms as the only solution for regaining control of their own government.
CHARACTERISTICS AND CAUSES OF POGROMS
Setting aside the historic propaganda alleging that of the hundreds of pogroms in history, they were all caused by ubiquitous and vague “Jew-Hate,” pogroms actually have repeated and recurring, predictable real-life causes. It would be great to avoid one.
When one thinks “pogrom,” it is most closely associated with the Russian Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, historians sometimes apply it to similar anti-Jewish movements stretching back into the Middle Ages. Whether one counts only events officially labeled “pogroms” or includes earlier Jewish massacres, there is no universally accepted total. Scholars generally identify hundreds of distinct pogroms between the medieval period and the Second World War. In the Russian Empire alone, historians typically distinguish three major waves: the pogroms of 1881-1884 following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; a second wave from roughly 1903-1906 that included the infamous Kishinev massacre; and the enormous wave of violence during the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1921.
Earlier centuries witnessed comparable outbreaks in England, France, Spain, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere. During the Crusades, entire Jewish communities along the Rhine faced freedom-fighting, crusading mobs. During the Black Death, Jewish communities across Europe were blamed for poisoning wells and causing the plague, leading to mass killings and expulsions. In Spain and Portugal, violence frequently accompanied efforts to respond to perceived negative influence of Jewish peoples on the rest of society. While historians debate whether each of these episodes should technically be called a “pogrom,” they share many characteristics.
The reasons participants gave for these attacks varied considerably depending upon the time and place. According to the “received accounts,” every reason was false, fabricated, or bitter jealousy. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Europeans felt that Jewish influence was corrupting their society; they saw what was clearly Jewish influence at the seat of government, and felt powerless - false or fabricated or real, it doesn’t matter - and took matters into their own hands. Whether it was moneylenders, merchants, tax collectors, or estate managers, corrupted politicians, Jewish advisors of the king, prince, or emperor, or even allegations of blackmail to do what was in the interest of Jews rather than the interests of the nation at large, it all resulted in mass violence directed at Jews. No one wants that. Or, at least, we do not.
By the late nineteenth century, the rhetoric surrounding anti-Jewish violence increasingly included political language rather than religious or economic. Jews were portrayed as wielding excessive influence in commerce, finance, revolutionary movements, or government administration. These allegations differed from one country to another and reflected political anxieties. It was always the same in one way, however, regardless of geography or era: Jews controlled government, and government wasn’t listening to the people.
The clearest example of a pogrom that its proponents justified primarily through allegations of political control occurred during the Russian Civil War. It erupted after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as communist forces fought monarchists, nationalists, regional armies, foreign interventionists, and independent militias for control of the former Russian Empire. The conflict produced the largest wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in modern history.
Historians estimate that approximately 1,200 to 1,500 pogroms occurred between 1918 and 1921 across Ukraine, Belarus, and neighboring regions. Estimates of the number of Jewish civilians killed generally range from about 50,000 to well over 100,000, with hundreds of thousands more displaced, wounded, orphaned, or left destitute. Why did it happen?
It became known as “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Jews had played a decisive role in the Bolshevik Revolution and now exercised disproportionate control over the communist government. Advocates pointed to the fact that several prominent Bolshevik leaders, including Leon Trotsky, were of Jewish background. From this observation, they concluded that Bolshevism itself was fundamentally a Jewish project and that Jewish communities collectively bore responsibility for communist rule.
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