Redacted: The Receipts of the US-Israel Aid Project

This piece is the longer version of the receipt printed on Redacted States of Israel.

The flag and the policy

Fifty stars and thirteen stripes are supposed to represent fifty states and thirteen original colonies. The arrangement is the arrangement of a country. The Redacted States design replaces the stars and blacks out the stripes because, in the matter of one specific foreign recipient, the country's policy stopped looking like a country's policy decades ago. It started looking like a co-signature on someone else's wishlist.

None of what follows is interpretation. All of it is in the Congressional Research Service report that updates every six months and is the official document of record for US foreign aid to Israel.

The MOU — the baseline

In September 2016, the Obama administration signed a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding with Israel: $38 billion in military assistance from 2019 through 2028. Broken out: $33 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) plus $5 billion in missile-defense cooperation. The MOU represented an increase from the prior 2007 MOU ($30 billion over 10 years) and made Israel by a wide margin the single largest cumulative recipient of US military aid in the post-World-War-II era — over $310 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars total.

The MOU runs annual at roughly $3.8 billion. It is renewed without serious debate. It is renewed under both parties. The annual appropriation arrives.

The supplementals — what October 7 changed

After October 7, 2023, the MOU baseline was joined by emergency supplementals.

The largest of these — the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024, signed April 24, 2024 (P.L. 118-50) — provided $8.7 billion in additional military assistance:

• $3.5 billion in additional Foreign Military Financing
• $4 billion for Iron Dome and David's Sling replenishment
• $1.2 billion for Iron Beam (Israel's directed-energy missile defense system)

Combined with the FY2024 and FY2025 regular MOU appropriations (~$3.8 billion each), the Costs of War Project at Brown University estimated US military spending in direct support of Israeli operations and related US regional posture at $22.76 billion in the first year after October 7 alone. Updated reporting through 2025 from the Quincy Institute tracks specific weapons transfers — 2,000-pound bombs, 155mm artillery shells, JDAM kits, tank ammunition — and arrives at higher totals when arms-sale notifications and ammunition transfers are counted.

The differences in totals between sources reflect what's being counted. The order of magnitude does not change.

The lobby

The lobby that defends this arrangement on Capitol Hill is AIPAC. AIPAC files Federal Election Commission disclosures quarterly. The disclosures are public. They show seven-figure contributions to congressional primaries — both parties — explicitly tied to candidates' positions on Israel. In the 2024 cycle alone, AIPAC's affiliated United Democracy Project super-PAC spent over $100 million in primary races to defeat candidates the lobby considered insufficiently aligned.

This is not the only lobby with a political-action committee. It is the lobby whose stated public mission and disclosed spending pattern is to ensure no member of Congress is electorally rewarded for moderating the aid. The strategy has worked. The vote against the supplemental was 37–58 in the Senate. The lobby is the floor under the vote count.

The files

The pattern of an arrangement protected by classification did not begin with the MOU.

In July 2019, days after Jeffrey Epstein's federal re-arrest in Manhattan, Vicky Ward reported that Alexander Acosta — the Trump-era Labor Secretary who, as US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 2008, had signed Epstein's first non-prosecution agreement — had told the Trump transition team a single sentence: "I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence — leave it alone." Acosta later disputed the framing. He did not address the substance.

An FBI Los Angeles field office memo dated October 2020, surfaced in subsequent FOIA releases and reported by Al Jazeera, recorded a source describing Epstein as a "co-opted Mossad agent" who had been "trained as a spy" for Israeli intelligence. Mossad has not commented. Mossad does not comment on questions like this.

The framing did not start with Epstein. It went back to Ghislaine Maxwell's father.

Robert Maxwell was a British media tycoon — the Daily Mirror, the New York Daily News — who died in November 1991 falling from his yacht off the Canary Islands. His funeral was held in Israel. It was a state funeral by every measure but name: Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir attended, six former or serving heads of Israeli intelligence services attended, the President of Israel attended. Shamir's eulogy: "He has done more for Israel than can today be said." Maxwell is buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, in his book Profits of War (1992) and in subsequent interviews, claimed Maxwell had functioned as a Mossad asset for decades. Investigative journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon published Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy in 2002 laying out the case in detail with named intelligence-service sources. Israel has not confirmed any of it. The funeral attendance is not in dispute.

In July 2025, the Trump administration's Department of Justice and FBI released a two-page memo concluding that Jeffrey Epstein had "no incriminating client list," that there was "no credible evidence" he blackmailed prominent associates, and that he had died by suicide. The memo accompanied thousands of pages of Epstein-related documents — heavily redacted. Representative Ro Khanna called the release an "incomplete release" in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Survivors disputed the no-blackmail finding. The stated rationale for the redactions: victim privacy and ongoing investigations.

The pattern is the pattern. A US Attorney told the man belonged to intelligence. A father with a state-honored funeral and six Mossad chiefs in the room. A 2020 FBI memo recording him as a "co-opted Mossad agent." A 2025 DOJ memo declaring there is nothing to see. The redactions are the connective tissue.

The same project that classifies the MOU's intelligence-sharing annexes is the project that redacts the Epstein files. The aid is the open surface. The redactions are the rest.

The bombs

The aid funds bombs. The bombs land somewhere. The somewhere is documented.

The International Court of Justice in January 2024 called what was happening to Palestinians in Gaza a plausible genocide and ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts of genocide. The bombs did not stop. The MOU appropriation that arrived two months later was the FY2024 baseline. The supplemental that arrived two months after that was the $8.7 billion P.L. 118-50.

The phrase "aid conditioned on compliance with international humanitarian law" was used in administration statements. The conditioning never reached the appropriations bills.

The redaction

Every American flag has fifty stars and thirteen stripes because the country is a republic of fifty states. The Redacted States flag has the stars and stripes blacked out because the part of US foreign policy this shirt is about does not run on the consent of fifty states. It runs on a MOU signed by a White House, an annual appropriation few members of Congress will openly oppose, a supplemental ratified under emergency rules, a lobby that punishes electoral dissent, and a classified annex on intelligence sharing that the public is not allowed to read.

Redaction is the visual receipt of that. The stripes are blacked out because the terms of the arrangement were never meant for public record.

The sentence

The shirt is not anti-American. The shirt is anti-the-part-of-American-policy-that-stopped-being-a-policy-and-started-being-an-arrangement. It is anti-the-classification-that-keeps-the-arrangement-off-the-record. It is anti-the-lobby-that-keeps-the-arrangement-off-the-floor.

It is, in plain words: wear the receipt.

The receipt is on the back of every appropriations bill. The shirt makes it visible.

Free, free Palestine.