Fact check for Massachusetts educators: "Does the US give more federal aid to the average Israeli citizen than to the average American?" ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, February 14, 2025

Fact check for Massachusetts educators: "Does the US give more federal aid to the average Israeli citizen than to the average American?"

Inside the Massachusetts statehouse on Monday, State Representative Simon Cataldo displayed the image of a dollar bill folded into a Star of David in front of a packed audience of teachers, activists, and staffers. They were there to attend a hearing on the state of antisemitism in Massachusetts public schools.

“You’d agree that this is antisemitic imagery, correct?” Cataldo, who co-chairs the state’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, asked Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA)—the largest union in New England, representing 117,000 members.

“I’m not gonna evaluate that,” Page responds calmly.

Cataldo pressed him. “Is it antisemitic?”

Page continued to sit stoically, before breaking into a smile. “You’re trying to get away from the central point,” Page said, “which is that we provide imagery, we provide resources for our members to consider, in their own intelligent, professional way.”

In fact, this image is referenced in materials recently made available to Massachusetts educators for teaching about the Middle East. Entitled “Resources on Israel and Occupied Palestine,” the union’s Training and Professional Learning Division developed the framework “for learning about the history and current events in Israel and Occupied Palestine, for MTA members to use with each other and their students.” Last December, the union published the resource document on a webpage accessible only to MTA members.

Let's take Max Page's statement at face value. Let's set aside that the image of a dollar folded into a Star of David is obviously antisemitic. Let's pretend that the Massachusetts Teachers Association really provides materials like this just as resources for teachers' information about the conflict for them "to consider, in their own intelligent, professional way."

If all that is true, then you would expect the editor of the collection of graphics to do at least a modicum of fact checking, wouldn't you? After all, what honest educator would purposefully provide lies for teachers? And you would expect that by now one of these intelligent, professional teachers would have checked the numbers and verified them, right?

So let's do some fact checking using that most esoteric of skills - arithmetic.

The poster was created in 2007. If we assume that the amount of total aid to Israel plus interest from 1948-2007 really is $133 billion, that would mean that in the average year, about $2.2 billion was given to Israel. (In fact, US aid was quite small before the 1970s, but since then it has averaged over $3 billion a year.)

But for the purposes of anti-Israel propaganda, we want to inflate the amount of aid the US gives Israel as much as possible while being truthful. To make this more interesting, let's use the numbers from 2024.

In 2024 the US gave far, far more aid to Israel than ever before. In the 12 months between October 2023 and October 2024, the US gave Israel nearly $18 billion, about 500% more than usual. So if we want to make Israelis look like the biggest beneficiaries of US aid per capita in the world, we should definitely use 2024 numbers.

Given Israel's population of 9.7 million, that comes out to about $1,855 per person in that year from the US.

Now, how much does the average American citizen get from the US government?

If we only include social programs that directly benefit citizens, like social security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, housing, SNAP (nutrition assistance) and so forth, that adds up to $4.7 trillion. That's about $14,000 per citizen.

If we add more indirect expenditures, like paying interest on the national debt and the defense budget, that comes out to closer to the total US budget of $6.5 trillion, which comes out to about $19,000 per citizen. (Keep in mind that nearly all US aid to Israel is military aid, so it would not be fair to exclude the US defense budget if we want things to be equivalent.)

To compare apples to apples: the total amount the US spent on US citizens is about $6.5 trillion, which is $19,000 per citizen, over ten times more than Israelis received.

So even in a year where Israel received much, much more aid than ever before, the amount the US spent on Israel per capita is far less than what it spends on US citizens per capita. In fact, the US per capita defense budget expenditures alone (about $2,500) is higher than what Israelis received for military aid per capita in 2024 ($1,855) in an extraordinary year where Israel was fighting on seven fronts at the same time.

There is no way to massage this data to make the statement that the US gave more federal aid to Israeli citizens per person than to Americans.

If we would choose the year 2007, the year the poster was made, and compare US budget expenditures with the amount it gave Israel and their respective populations at the time, the difference is even starker: $8,300 per US citizen vs. $340 per Israeli citizen. That is a multiple of 24 times.

Conclusion: the poster is knowingly false.

This would be a good math exercise for the Massachusetts teachers to give their students. After all, basic arithmetic can be used to disprove sophisticated propaganda. Learning to think critically about information people receive from the Internet and from the news media is a crucial skill that all students should be familiar with.

But that is not a lesson that the Massachusetts Teachers Association wants its students to ever learn. No, the very people who should be qualified to fact check this antisemitic poster instead spread its lies.

This post, which can be taught to the average high school student in an hour, is more educational and more important to students' futures than any given lesson ever taught in any Massachusetts classroom on any given day.

Go ahead, MTA members - prove me wrong.