In the 15 years since its founding, the U.S. Israel Education Association, a nonprofit, has brought dozens of congressional delegations to Israel to see the reality on the ground, building support for projects like Iron Dome funding and regional alliances.
“From where we were to where we are now, I think the most surreal part is that when we started, it was kind of the very, very beginning of the U.S.-Israeli missile defense program collaboration,” Heather Johnston, founder and president of USIEA, told JNS.
“To see where we are, in the midst of a war throughout the Middle East, with Israel and the United States really dominating the war, you see where we would be without that missile defense collaboration,” she said.
The association’s first delegation to Israel, facilitated by then House speaker Eric Cantor, included key members of the House Armed Services Committee and offered lawmakers a sneak peek at an emerging technology called Iron Dome.
Impressed by what they saw, the lawmakers returned to Washington and sought funding for getting the project off the ground—literally and figuratively.
A large increase in appropriations followed for what became a staple of Israel’s defense and a symbol of the country’s technological prowess.
Ari Sacher, one of Iron Dome’s lead engineers, is a senior policy adviser to the association. The United States is now working on a Golden Dome.
“Let’s say USIEA never existed. Congress doesn’t take that trip to Israel, and Cantor doesn’t go back and quadruple the funding for Iron Dome,” Bruce Pearl, chair of the association’s board of directors and former Auburn University men’s basketball head coach, told JNS.
“Rockets get launched from Gaza. They land and kill thousands of people in Israel—Jews, Muslims, Christians,” he said. “We’re looking at World War III. I know it sounds a little much, but I actually don’t think so.”
Without the association’s involvement, the Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile system jointly developed by the United States and Israel wouldn’t “get tested over Alaska, because that wasn’t exactly a popular thing to do,” Pearl said.
“Because of the relationship between USIEA and taking congressional leaders over, they were able to test it over Alaska in time to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles,” which the Islamic Republic launched at Israel, he said.
‘Looking to Israel’
With increasing talk, including from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about weaning the Jewish state off U.S. defense aid in favor of more collaborative military initiatives, Johnston, the association president, said the idea is right, but calling for immediacy in fulfilling it is wrong.
“We’re going to be looking to Israel, to that full-running technology called Iron Beam, to what has worked in these wars, to what’s working against the all-powerful drone technology,” Johnston told JNS.
There is increased collaboration described in the last U.S. defense policy bill, she said.
“We’re not pushing Israel away. We’re actually elevating what needs to happen in the future because the United States actually needs to build with Israel, to work with Israel to build our own defense systems,” Johnston told JNS. “That’s a little bit of a shift in where things have been. I think it will be done over time and appropriately.”
Johnston also said that the association has played a role in combating antisemitism, using the levers that the organization has developed in Congress.
“The antisemitism that’s roiling the world today and impacting our government leaders and politics is at a different level,” she said. “I think USIEA has played an incredibly important educational role with the senior leaders of Congress, who really are, in many ways, holding down the fort.”
Many leaders in Congress have avoided voting for any type of boycott or withdrawal of aid for Israel, but support for Israel appears to be dwindling in the Capitol, most conspicuously of late on the Democratic side of the aisle.
Johnston told JNS she believes the phenomenon to be cyclical, and it could be much worse but for strong advocacy for the Jewish state on the Hill.
“We will see a changing tide. Even as we’re at a fever pitch in the negative, you still have, by and large, the Congress in support of Israel,” Johnston said. “That’s due to leadership voicing, guiding, speaking into, understanding the holistic viewpoint” that the association shares about the U.S.-Israel relationship.
There are also more pro-Israel Democrats than it would appear, according to Johnston, although she said fewer speak out publicly due to the party’s pivot to the left.
“I had one Democratic leader come up to me and say, ‘If I had my druthers right now, I would become a Republican, because the Democrats have moved so far to the left, and they don’t support Israel anymore, and I do,’” she said. “There are plenty of Democrats like that.”
“They’re struggling inside their own party, and they’re certainly not going to, in the middle of midterms, put their long neck out for Israel,” she said. “But it does not mean that they are not ripe for education and supporting Israel outside of this momentary season.”
‘Balanced view’
The association is still communicating with “maybe a more conservative Democrat” in order to “really give a balanced view inside of Judea and Samaria,” including the Palestinian view, which “no other organization has taken the time to care about,” Johnston told JNS.
The association is the only Israel advocacy group that leads congressional delegations to Judea and Samaria, both to see Jewish communities and joint Israel-Palestinian businesses and projects, even as it opposes a Palestinian state on security grounds.
It has also developed a “lane,” it said, in building bilateral work in the life sciences. That makes fewer headlines than missile defense but is more likely to draw bipartisan support.
It focuses in particular on breaking U.S. dependence on pharmaceuticals produced in China and moving the supply chain to the Middle East with more dependable partner countries as an extension of the Abraham Accords.
“Why would we not put a staging ground there,” including a U.S. Food and Drug Administration office in the Middle East,” Johnston told JNS. “We had this giant vision of how to make that happen.”
The initiative got significant bipartisan backing and presidential sign-off this year. Johnston predicts that there will be an FDA office in one of the Abraham Accords countries, probably Israel or the United Arab Emirates, within two years.
That’s in addition to forming a commission connecting the U.S. administration to Congress, experts in the field and pharmaceutical leaders to strategize with relevant government agencies to carry out what the association says is its “friendshoring” effort.
Pearl said that it’s important to keep emphasizing the “E” in USIEA, “education.”
“The founding of our organization has been trying to educate congressional leaders, which I think is essential,” he told JNS. “I think we do it as well as anybody.”
“I’d like to see us continue to grow so that we can begin to educate more than just congressional leaders,” he said. “I’d like to get involved in how we can start educating universities, how we can go state to state and begin to work with governors and at the state and local level, with the historical and the biblical truth.”
