Al Jazeera June 3, 2021, quotes Stephen Zunes:
Regarding the spike in US military aid in 2003, Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at San Francisco University, noted that the increase “was part of an overall increase in US arms transfers to the Middle East and US military spending” in the wake of the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the US, the US-led war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.
  “US aid to Israel has always been primarily in relation to how Israel could assist in advancing perceived US strategic objectives, not about Israeli security needs,” he told Al Jazeera.
With respect to the surge in US military aid in 2000, Zunes noted that the US had agreed in the 1998 Wye River Memorandum to boost aid to Israel “in return for [relatively minor] Israeli concessions in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks”.
  “Since budgets are put forward the year prior, this was the first budget subsequent to that meeting and was therefore probably a result of that,” he said.
Israel is the most significant recipient of total US foreign military financing (FMF) – a programme that provides grants and loans to US allies to acquire “US defense equipment, services and training”. During the past two decades, 55 percent of all US FMF was dedicated to Israel, more than the rest of the world combined, according to Security Assistance Monitor, part of the Center for International Policy, a Washington DC-based think-tank.