Obama Surprised $3.8B In Israel Aid Need Not Be Delivered In Cash

It was understandable the president thought that’s what we do, considering how everything has been handled with Iran.

Washington, September 14 – White House officials told reporters today that President Obama was taken aback at discovering that the ten-year, thirty-eight-billion-dollar military assistance package to Israel does not have to be supplied in pallets of cash borne by airplane.

The assistance agreement, which will be formally signed today between American and Israeli officials, allocates an average of $3.8B annually between the fiscal years 2019 and 2028 to Israeli military needs. The White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Obama had been laboring under the assumption that transfers of funds to other countries had to be conducted surreptitiously and in hard cash, as that was the model to which he had become accustomed in his administration’s dealings with Iran. Congressional representatives disabused the president of that notion today, and informed him that wire transfers will be used.

In fact, said the officials, the story fed to the media about a delay in the completion of the assistance agreement – that South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham would withhold his support for the package unless the amount was raised – was simply to buy time to explain to the president the mechanisms of foreign aid that do not rely on loading pallets of cash reserves on a plane and flying them directly to the recipients.

“It was understandable the president thought that’s what we do, considering how everything has been handled with Iran,” explained one aide. “With his sympathy for those who consider Israel a rogue regime, it should hardly be surprising that our chief executive assumed the same measures would be necessary to effect the aid transfer as were necessary to deliver billions of dollars to Iran as ransom for captive US sailors and to sweeten the nuclear deal.”

Unlike Iran, and unknown to the president, Israel is a part of the international wire transfer network, as it is not subject to international sanctions for being the world’s largest state supporter of terrorism. “That part was even more of a shock to the president,” noted a second official. “He had always assumed Israel was a documented terrorist entity, and I guess never bothered to check whether that kind of rhetoric was supported by the facts.”

The official said she doubted that this late into his second term, Obama would reconsider a foreign policy predicated to a great degree on that erroneous picture of the world. “It’s basically too late to reverse things at this point,” she said. “So whatever.”