Let me make sure I have this straight, because I’ve read it three times and it still sounds insane.
Last week, the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency raised the threat level for Israeli espionage against the United States to its highest tier.
An official told The New York Times that Israeli intelligence operations targeting senior U.S. officials have gotten so aggressive they described them as “unhinged.”
A fringe blogger didn’t say that.
It came from inside the U.S. government, about a country we send billions of dollars to every year.
And in that same stretch of days, the United States Senate is advancing a bill that would legally force our intelligence agencies to hand more of our secrets to that exact government.
I’m not being hyperbolic. This is written down.
What Section 622 of the Intelligence Bill Actually Does
Buried inside a 192-page intelligence authorization bill is Section 622, with the friendly title “United States–Israel Intelligence Sharing Enhancement.”
As Paul Pillar — a former CIA analyst — lays out, it would require the president to “expand and enhance” intelligence sharing with Israel across nearly every topic of interest in the Middle East.
Sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, it would also block any future president from scaling that sharing back — unless they make a formal national-security finding and file a report to Congress justifying it within fifteen days.
Read that again.
The default is forced sharing.
Protecting our own secrets becomes the exception you have to file paperwork to get.
Now, the people pushing this will tell you Israel is a vital intelligence partner and that sharing runs both ways.
Fine — liaison relationships between intelligence services are real and sometimes useful.
But that’s exactly why career intelligence officers, not senators writing it into permanent law, are supposed to decide case by case who gets what.
You don’t hard-code one country’s access into statute.
Especially not this country, this week.
This is an Escalation, and I’ve Been Tracking it
I’ve already written about Section 224 of the defense bill — the quieter push to integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries without the obvious price tag that grant aid carries.
This intelligence mandate is the next rung on that ladder, and it’s worse.
It drags the relationship even further into the shadows, into the one corner of government with the least public visibility and the least accountability.
Less daylight, fewer questions, more of your secrets out the door.
This is the part that should bother every American regardless of how you feel about Israel: we have receipts on what happens to U.S. secrets once Israel has them.
The Receipts
Start with Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. Navy analyst who handed Israel a staggering volume of classified material in the 1980s.
Then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger told the sentencing court he could hardly imagine greater harm to national security.
When Pollard finished his sentence in 2020, Israel gave him a hero’s welcome, with Netanyahu himself there to greet him.
That’s how they treated a man who spied on us: as a celebrity.
It doesn’t stop at theft.
Pillar notes Israel probably passed some of what Pollard stole to the Soviet Union, trading our secrets to Moscow in exchange for letting Soviet Jews emigrate.
Israel has also transferred U.S.-origin military technology to China, and it cooperated on weapons — including nuclear weapons work — with apartheid-era South Africa.
The pattern is consistent: what we give Israel, Israel is willing to trade onward when it serves Israel.
And I’ll say this part as a Pennsylvanian, because it happened here.
In 1965, roughly 100 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium — enough for multiple bombs — went unaccounted for at a nuclear plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania.
The CIA’s own deputy director for science and technology later told regulators the agency believed that uranium ended up in Israel’s nuclear program.
I want to be careful and honest here, because the truth matters more than my opinion: this was never officially proven, the government’s own review couldn’t resolve it, and key CIA and FBI files are still classified sixty years later.
But the suspicion was serious enough to be investigated for decades by the FBI, the CIA, and Congress.
That it remains buried tells you something too.
Who Section 622 Actually Serves
Meanwhile, what are Americans getting for the more than $300 billion we’ve poured into Israel?
Right now we’re getting a war.
Netanyahu was a driving force behind the decision to drag us into war with Iran — a war that is killing civilians, destabilizing the region, and hammering a global economy that working Americans are already struggling inside of.
And as Pillar documents, his government has been sabotaging the efforts to end it.
Our interests and theirs are not the same.
They are openly diverging, in real time, with American wallets and American security on the line.
This is not anti-Israel paranoia. It’s arithmetic.
Even most Americans have done the math — support for Israel and Netanyahu keeps falling, especially among young people who can see exactly what they’re being asked to fund and fight for.
So here is my question, and I’d love for one of these senators to answer it on the record: Why would we pass a law forcing ourselves to hand more secrets to a government that our own Pentagon just flagged for spying on us, that has a documented history of passing our secrets to our enemies, and that keeps dragging us into wars that bleed us for its benefit?
It doesn’t make sense. It was never supposed to make sense for us.
And that’s exactly why they buried it on page 100-something of a bill they’re hoping nobody reads.
I read it. Now you have too.
