Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

This is factually incorrect. The amount of money that the US gives Israel is completely and totally irrelevant to whether or not Israel also invests their own money in defense.

The fact that the US has a problem with foreign influence literally does not matter for the statement above.

To be clear, I don't agree with the GP's implied suggestion that Israel is more defensive than offensive, but making objectively incorrect statements is not a valid way to refute that.

- Jewish flight/migration to Palestine, neglecting the reality to one extent or another that Palestinian Arabs were there and had aspirations to form a state

- Arab /Muslim nations forcibly ejecting their Jews to Israel in the 50s-70s (ashekenazi Jews are a minority in Israel, most are from Arab counties and Iran), thus fueling the Jewish population there. I can't think of a greater strategic failure from the Muslim perspective here, because Israelis from these countries ended up by proportion being the most extreme right-wing of Israelis (see crazy statements by the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel as examples, his family is from Iraq I believe). These folks are not going to relocate to Berlin or Vienna any time soon.

- Muslim leaders using the conflict for their internal political purposes-- think Arab nationalist Egypt or Syria or Iraq, or Islamist Iran. I find it had to believe that the leaders of any of these countries care at all about the plight of the Palestinians, in fact, the more Palestinians suffer, the more these political entities gain. Up to a point though-- it wasn't enough for Asad, and Iran will fall too, because people want more than an enemy to focus on

- Muslim chauvinism. This one is underappreciated in my opinion! But in my opinion, a huge driver of the conflict. Muslims just don't want to let go of Jews, Christians and other minorities not being dhimmis in what used to be Muslim land. Muslims demand to be the top dogs in the levant. That's the reality they want to restore, as much as Jewish religious extremists have similar biases.

- ongoing cycle of violence since the 1920s

- organizations like Hamas that exist to resist peace initiatives and, for example, sabotaged the oslo accords by blowing up buses in Israel. Similar extremists exist on both sides, but Hamas was founded explicitly to resist peace and pursue maximalist goals. NGOs like UNRWA also have a stake in the conflict continuing, sadly.

No other conflict like Israel Palestine exists in the world for a reason. Even Ukraine is willing to cede land unjustly to Russia to end that war. Palestinians have been alternating between euphoria and great tragedy for 80 years now and refuse anything but the most maximalist vision, and suffer as a result because it drives away good faith actors that would otherwise support them (for example, liberal Israelis, many successive US administrations). Palestinians are really bad a picking their battles and strategic thinking. October 7th did not go as they envisioned, and only an irrational person would pretend the illusory gains there were worth it, which was pretty clear to me in real time on October 7th, while many Gazans were inexplicably celebrating in the streets.

> Actually it does? It takes about 1/4 away.

It literally does not. The way that every English speaker uses the word "invests" is exactly the opposite of this. If you're going to speak English, you use words as native speakers use them and you don't make up your own definitions.

And it's not like there's any need of a fancy weapon to do that. This exists to engage high speed targets. Just because you can use a GBU-28 to kill a gopher doesn't mean anyone ever will.