An End to U.S. Military Aid to Israel May Be Closer Than You Think

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at Mar-a-Lago in late December, he had a surprise message for President Trump: Israel would begin weaning itself off U.S. military aid. At first, Trump was taken aback: The billions of dollars that Washington provides Israel each year, after all, have been a bedrock of America’s Middle East strategy for decades, and essential support for its closest regional ally. Trump, ever the wary transactionalist, ribbed the prime minister: Oh, and what do you get out of it?

By the time the leaders next met, in Washington, D.C., on February 11 to discuss Iran, Trump had come around. Eager to shift the military burden onto others and curtail foreign aid, the president brought up Netanyahu’s proposal, according to an Israeli official who shared previously undisclosed details of the recent discussions. By the way, Trump told the prime minister, according to the official, your new approach is a great idea. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had told Netanyahu in a separate meeting the same day that the United States would embrace his approach.

Ending decades of U.S. military assistance to Israel—which has included $3.8 billion a year since 2017, or close to one-fifth of Israel’s annual defense spending—would be a momentous shift that Netanyahu says reflects his country’s emergence as an advanced military power that can reduce its reliance on outside help. In the prime minister’s vision, the aid would be replaced over the next decade by a strategic partnership that, according to the few details he has released, would bring increased joint innovation and reciprocal investment.

The proposal says a great deal about the dramatic political shifts unfolding in both countries. Having covered Washington’s security ties with the Middle East for nearly 20 years, I was startled when I heard Netanyahu publicly float his plan days after his visit to Mar-a-Lago, in a video interview last month with The Economist. Some scholars have argued in recent years that Israel’s growing economy could now support the cost of its own defense. But Republicans had mostly stood firm in support of the arrangement, particularly in the aftermath of Hamas’s gruesome October 7, 2023, attacks, rejecting calls from the left to cut or condition the aid. Trump, ahead of his 2024 reelection, had described President Biden as “morally rotten” over his failure to provide Israel unqualified support. Netanyahu went so far as to blame Biden’s decision to suspend a shipment of heavy bombs at the height of the Gaza conflict for the death of Israeli soldiers.

But the dynamics surrounding the two countries’ relationship are changing fast. Ahead of elections this year in Israel, Netanyahu faces pressure from far-right elements of his governing coalition to lessen Israel’s reliance on the U.S., which they say constrains Israeli decision making and inhibits a robust self-defense. And although Trump—whom Netanyahu has characterized as “the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House”—has repeatedly delivered for the prime minister, some elements of Trump’s “America First” movement oppose sending taxpayer funds overseas and question America’s traditional alliance with Israel.

Polls show that support for Israel has declined across the political spectrum, most sharply among Democrats and young voters. According to a Gallup survey released today, Americans overall are voicing greater support for Palestinians than for Israel—the first time since the polling firm began measuring that question in 2001.

Netanyahu must take all of these trends into account. The worst-case scenario for the prime minister—who has made his close relationship with Trump a political selling point—would be to request funding and be refused. Taking the initiative to end the flow of money from Washington could be a face-saving way to get ahead of the inevitable.

In 1948, just 11 minutes after Israel’s official independence, President Harry Truman became the first world leader to recognize the newborn state. Since then, American assistance has amounted to more than $300 billion, when adjusted for inflation, making Israel the largest single recipient of U.S. aid. As Israel’s economy prospered in the 1990s, the United States began phasing out economic aid, leaving military funding as the anchor of the two countries’ relationship. The assistance has composed at least 14 percent of Israel’s defense budget in normal years, and reached roughly 35 percent amid Washington’s post–October 7 funding surge. The money has been used to buy fuel, ammunition, and American hardware such as bulldozers and F-35 fighter jets. Israel now has the most sophisticated military in the Middle East, one that has not only won wars of survival but dominates the region and forms an integral part of Israel’s self-identity.

[Read: How Trump pushed Israel and Hamas to yes]

In recent decades, the U.S. has provided aid under a series of 10-year memorandums of understanding that have outlined expected aid amounts. Negotiations to reach a new agreement have typically taken several years, and the current MOU expires in 2028. The United States has also helped fund the development of Israeli missile-defense systems such as Arrow and David’s Sling. (The United States has benefited from that technology too.) Having a predictable, substantial stream of aid helps Israel negotiate big-ticket arms purchases from U.S. manufacturers in advance of having the money in hand. Congress also has mandated that assistance be sufficient to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” over its Arab neighbors by providing advanced U.S. weapons before they are offered to other nations and by subjecting arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries to special scrutiny.

The consensus in Congress began to fracture in 2024, as Netanyahu’s military response to the Hamas attacks intensified; the largest fissure appeared in the Democratic Party.

Throughout that year and into the next, critics such as Senator Bernie Sanders tried and failed to pass measures that would have suspended aid. Biden attempted to balance what was widely known as his “bear hug” of Israel in its time of need and his administration’s dismay at the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza. Officials continued the bulk of military aid and arms sales to Israel while pressuring Netanyahu to blunt the worst impacts of the Gaza offensive. The compromise angered both sides.

In 2024, facing pressure from Senate allies who wanted to condition aid, Biden introduced a measure requiring the State Department to assess whether Israel was using U.S. weapons in line with international law. That May, the State Department found that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used U.S.-provided weapons in ways that violated international law, but also said that Israeli assurances that those arms would be used correctly were credible. That, too, satisfied no one. “The president’s ultimatums should be going to Hamas, not Israel,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. When Biden suspended a planned shipment of 2,000-pound bombs ahead of an Israel Defense Forces offensive in southern Gaza, some Republicans (including Trump) accused him of orchestrating an arms embargo. As soon as Trump returned to office, he lifted those restrictions and ensured that Israel (along with Egypt) was exempt from his administration’s blanket freeze of foreign aid.

But given shifting public opinion in the United States, Israelis can’t be sure that they can count on the same level of American support in the future. Would a Democratic president attach new human-rights conditions to aid? Would Trump or another Republican leader attach their own strings, perhaps prohibiting Israel from formally annexing the West Bank? That possibility, members of Netanyahu’s Likud Party have argued, constrains Israeli actions and shows why U.S. aid should be eliminated.

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly, when asked about the president’s position on ending military aid to Israel, said that Trump has a “great relationship” with Netanyahu and that his administration would continue to work closely with the country “to implement President Trump’s historic Gaza peace agreement and to strengthen regional security in the Middle East.”

For Victoria Coates, who served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser for Middle East and North African affairs during his first term, the problems with U.S. assistance to Israel were visible as far back as 2014. The Obama administration, frustrated by Israeli actions during a six-week war against Hamas in Gaza, delayed a shipment of Hellfire missiles and subjected other arms shipments to additional scrutiny.

“That was an alarm bell for me that this was not a bipartisan issue anymore, and that it could be exploited to actually try to coerce Israel,” Coates told me. “So that if you support Israel, the idea would be to get them into the condition where they would not need that.”

A White House strategy document on Israel produced near the end of Trump’s first term recommended considering a transition to a security partnership rather than the providing of aid, Coates, who is now a vice president at the Heritage Foundation, said. She and Robert Greenway, another former colleague from the National Security Council who is also at Heritage, published a report last year advocating for the same transition. But their proposal so angered Netanyahu’s ambassador in Washington that he canceled a planned speaking engagement at the conservative think tank, Coates said. The Israeli embassy said that the ambassador wasn’t given due notice that the proposal would be part of his engagement.

Some Republicans also accused Coates and Greenway of isolationism and abandonment of an ally, Coates said.

[Read: Why Trump broke with Bibi over the Gaza famine]

Things are different now. The Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share details of a private meeting, told me that Netanyahu’s proposal was not rooted in the evolving politics in the United States but the emergence of Israel as an economic dynamo. The country’s economy has grown about 115 percent in inflation-adjusted terms the past two decades; its GDP per capita now stands at $64,000 per person, ahead of those of Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. Israel’s booming high-tech and defense industries are closely intertwined with those in the United States, and the country is now an important global arms exporter. Netanyahu hasn’t provided much detail about what a new U.S.-Israel partnership would entail, except that it would involve joint or parallel investment in advanced weapons or cybertech.

The Israeli official told me that negotiations for the next MOU are just beginning. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, will lead the discussions on the U.S. side along with a top Rubio aide. Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, and Major General Amir Baram, the director general of the Defense Ministry, will negotiate for Israel.

Israel is likely to request a slow decline in aid in the early years of the next agreement, which would give Israel the opportunity to restock ammunition and other materiel expended in its recent wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, according to Jesse Weinberg, an expert on Washington’s ties with the Middle East at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. Still uncertain is whether the phaseout would include the $500 million a year Israel now receives in missile-defense funding on top of the annual $3.3 billion in foreign military financing. Israel is already on the hook for $20 billion in aircraft purchases currently in the pipeline, which it might have to fund from its own budget, depending on when aid ends.

“The way everyone here is looking at it now is, essentially, ‘How do we prove we are a strategic partner?’ We do that by building up Israel’s defense industry and investing in the U.S. industrial base,” Weinberg told me, as well as potentially through the joint development of weapons systems and new technologies such as AI and quantum computing. The aid, he said, “was a no-brainer for the older generation, but with the Trump administration it needs to be ‘Here’s what we’re doing to support you.’’’

If the shift toward cooperation and away from assistance has the effect of easing criticism from elements of both the Republican and Democratic Parties, so much the better. “If it’ll calm the nerves of Tucker Carlson, or Congresswoman Jayapal on the other side of the spectrum, let it be,” the Israeli official said. Both Carlson, an influential Republican podcaster, and Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic lawmaker from Washington State, have criticized Israel’s handling of the Gaza conflict and said that U.S. support should come with more conditions or be stopped altogether.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, a leading supporter of U.S. aid to Israel, “didn’t know what hit him” when he heard about Netanyahu’s proposal, the Israeli official said. Weeks earlier, Graham had decried what he said was growing anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic opinion in the U.S., and said that any attempt to diminish the relationship would be a “big mistake.” But after hearing Netanyahu’s case, Graham said he would draft legislation to “dramatically expedite” Netanyahu’s new proposal.

“I will always appreciate allies who are trying to be more self-sufficient,” Graham wrote on social media. “Given what the Prime Minister said, we need not wait ten years.” (The senator’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid and others have dismissed Netanyahu’s plan as electioneering, arguing that it will increase Israelis’ tax burden while diminishing the country’s military and technological capabilities. Daniel Shapiro, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017 and helped lead negotiations on the existing MOU, cautioned that such a dramatic shift could reinforce the perception that the U.S. is walking away from the region, potentially tilting Arab allies toward China and Russia, and leaving Israel more exposed to Iran. “The whole thing to me adds up to a significant reduction in U.S. leverage and our ability to check our competitors in the region,” Shapiro told me. “That’s something advocates for phasing out U.S. assistance in both countries, including in my party, rarely grapple with.”

Ultimately, the question of military assistance alone won’t determine the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship. “What matters more is whether the U.S. is going to sell Israel weapons, and under what conditions,” Ilan Goldenberg, a former Biden-administration official and now the chief policy officer at J Street, a liberal Jewish-advocacy group, told me. “Are we going to send aircraft carriers when Israel is worried about Iran? Are we going to shoot down those missiles?”

But even those elements of support, although not a direct gift of taxpayer funds, will likely be subject to additional scrutiny given the changing views of Americans in both parties. The old consensus is giving way, and it’s still unclear whether a new one can be forged.