Image by Planet Volumes.

The next time you pull into a gas station, watch the number on the pump as you squeeze the handle. That rapidly spinning dollar amount is not just the price of gasoline. Included in it is an Israeli-added tax you did not consent to pay.

Since early March 2026, the average American household has been spending 50 percent more to fill their tank than just one month earlier. The Trump administration and its Israel-first ideologues blamed market forces for the spike, framing it as short-term pain for long-term gain. What they will not say, what they are never permitted to say in Washington, is that Americans have been living the “pain” of the Israeli oil surcharge tax for more than half a century. The bill keeps growing, but no longer only financially. The U.S. is also paying with something harder to rebuild than a budget, its moral standing in the world.

The history of this “pain” remained a closely suppressed secret and one of the most forbidden subjects in American political discourse. Roughly fifty years ago, September 1973 to be exact, crude oil traded at roughly three dollars a barrel, or less than 40 cents a gallon at the pump. Then came the October War. Israel-first Zionists in the Nixon administration, led by Henry Kissinger, committed the full weight of American resources through what was, at the time, the largest emergency military airlift in American history. Arab oil-producing nations responded by pulling the one lever they controlled: reduction of oil production.

By January 1974, crude had climbed to twelve dollars a barrel — a 400 percent increase in less than four months. American drivers sat in lines stretching around city blocks, waiting for rationed gasoline, paying prices they had never imagined, for a war fought thousands of miles away on behalf of a state that contributes not a single penny to the American economy.

Instead of honest and frank debate, Americans were offered a carefully curated media narrative, one that avoided the most inconvenient question of all: why were they paying 400 percent more?

Corporate American media, where Israel-first loyalists run editorial boards and Middle East commentary is filtered through a reflexively Zionist prism, rarely allows non–Israel-centric perspectives into mainstream conversation. That is why a viewpoint like this is unlikely to appear in outlets such as the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, or The New York Times.

Rather than examining the root causes of the oil embargo, the Zionist-managed media reached for a familiar deflection: exploiting public prejudice to redirect frustration and foment anti-Arab racism. The politically targeted embargo was stripped of its context and detached from the reality of Israeli occupation and the Nexon administration’s unconditional financial and diplomatic support for Israel.

That was fifty years ago. The Israeli surcharge tax did not end when the embargo was lifted. It became embedded in the architecture of the American budget and the profit structure of U.S. oil corporations. The Israeli-added tax reemerges with every made-for-Israel war Washington chooses to fight and finance.

The Iraq invasion — sold on fabricated Israeli intelligence and planed by Israel-first loyalists in the dens of the US State Department and the Pentagon — added more than eight trillion dollars to the U.S. national debt. A “legal” theft, extracted from American workers, American schools, infrastructure, and future generations and poured into the sands of a war that made the Middle East less stable, not more. The one government that cheered for that war, that lobbied hardest in Washington’s corridors, coercing and or fooling American leaders with its Weapons-of-Mass-Deception, was Israel’s. The one government that bore none of its costs—in money or in blood—was Israel’s.

Now we are here again. The U.S.-Israel war against Iran has barely begun, and the Pentagon is already before Congress requesting two hundred billion dollars. Two hundred billion dollars financed by cuts to Americans’ healthcare, money to repair bridges, financial aid for higher education, or address the tentacles of the mental health crises throughout the American heartland. Two hundred billion dollars for another made-for-Israel war undermining U.S. sovereign strategic interests and moral standing in the world.

Setting aside the financial cost, the U.S. is being drained of its moral position, year by year, war by war, veto by veto — in defense of a government whose prime minister stands indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted war criminal is defended by American diplomats in international forums, exercises a dangerous power over Donald Trump, and for whom American soldiers are now dying in a war against Iran.

These Israel-first policies have eroded the idea of America that generations around the world once admired. From the Marshall Plan and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to “give me your tired, your poor.” That America has been replaced, in the eyes of billions, by one that arms and enables genocide, vetoes ceasefire resolutions while children starve, and sends its young men and women to fight wars so that Israel does not have to. An ICC-indicted war criminal welcomed as equal alongside the U.S. president into the Situation Room to connive his next war venture. The results: Netanyahu got his new war — and Americans paid for it.

It’s no secret in Washington: “Bibi gets what Bibi wants.” In Congress, elected officials from both aisles welcome Bibi with record-breaking standing ovations, and unite when writing blank checks for Israel. Yet, they descend into partisanship over funding school lunches for American children and taxpayer healthcare coverage. All this while they borrow money to bankroll Israel’s universal healthcare and free universities. In contrast, they deny those same benefits for American taxpayers.

The Israel surcharge is real. It has a history, and a price tag. Consequently, what Americans feel at the grocery store and gas pump is not just inflation, it’s a new Israeli surcharge tax financing another Israel-first war in the Middle East.