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By Tom O'Connor
Deputy Editor, National Security and Foreign Policy
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President Donald Trump's stated decision to halt annual payments of nearly $4 billion to Israel may ultimately prove beneficial to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The U.S. leader portrayed the surprise move, announced Tuesday amid the midterm elections, as having been taken pursuant to an agreement with the Israeli premier. In fact, it was Netanyahu who "brought it up," Trump said, arguing that the yearly aid offered left-wing critics like Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan "an easy target" to scrutinize levels of U.S.-Israel alliance assistance that Israeli officials "no longer need."
Netanyahu did not immediately comment. In January and May, he expressed his desire to ultimately wean Israel off U.S. military aid, though Trump's year-end cut-off comes far sooner than most observers anticipated.
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Still, the Israeli leader, who again put his political survival skills to the test last week during a heated election in which neither he nor his rival secured a majority, has ample opportunity to spin the end of an era of U.S. aid into a win for his policies.
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"There is no question that assistance has played an important role in Israel’s security," Victoria Coates, former deputy national security adviser to Trump who currently serves as vice president of the Heritage Foundation's Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, told Newsweek.
"But Israel today is not the Israel of 30 or 40 years ago. It has become a significant military, economic and technological power, and its defense spending has grown substantially."
The result, she argued, was "a story of Israeli strength and success, not American abandonment."
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Redefining the Relationship
The U.S. has provided varying degrees of assistance to Israel since the country's 1948 founding. It began with primarily economic and humanitarian aid in the immediate post-World War II period and eventually shifted into larger security packages amid growing Cold War-era geopolitical conflict and competition in the Middle East.
By the 1990s, U.S. economic aid to Israel had already begun to wind down as the nation's domestic industrial base rapidly developed. Yet regular military funding continued to grow through successive arrangements established under former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with whom Netanyahu reached the memorandum of understanding worth $3.8 billion annually in 2016.
The vast majority of this sum, around $3.3 billion, goes largely into financing Israel's purchase of U.S. military equipment. The remaining roughly $500 million supports joint missile defense programs.
Former President Joe Biden further expanded assistance to Israel following the outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023, showcasing Washington's flexibility in coming to its longtime ally's aid. By May 2024, however, the Biden administration withheld the sale of certain heavy munitions over humanitarian concerns, demonstrating a conditional nature to the relationship and its vulnerability to political pressures.
Those pressures were once again on full display for Tuesday's U.S. midterm elections as criticism against Netanyahu became a central feature of campaigns led by El-Sayed and other progressive candidates.
El-Sayed offered a backhanded endorsement of Trump's shift on aid to Israel, telling reporters at an Ann Arbor polling site, "Even a broken clock can be right twice a day," according to The Wall Street Journal.
But should the U.S.-Israel defense dynamic evolve beyond the need for aid, as a March 2025 Heritage Foundation report advocated, the result could be a shift in favor of Netanyahu's freedom from such constraints.
"It could reduce one important source of political leverage, and the report is quite candid about that," Coates said. "It argues that the relationship should be placed on a more equitable footing so that disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem do not allow security assistance to become a source of political pressure.
"The difference is that the relationship would be based less on donor and recipient, and more on two allies bringing significant capabilities to the table. That makes the partnership more durable and helps insulate it from the political swings of any particular administration."
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Two Benefits and A Backfire
Michael Koplow, chief policy officer of the Israel Policy Forum and senior research fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America's Kogod Research Center, saw two possible ways in which Netanyahu could channel advantageous outcomes from the multibillion-dollar loss.
"One, he will portray Israel’s economy as strong enough under him to no longer depend on U.S. security assistance, and two, he will portray the move as one that will grant Israel more independence and freedom to operate as it pleases outside of U.S. constraints that come with threats to condition security assistance tied to Israeli policies," Koplow told Newsweek.
At the same time, Koplow said that the fallout "does come with political risk." He noted that, while Netanyahu has advocated for the general idea of breaking off Israel's dependency on U.S. aid, Trump appears to have pursued his own version of the plan, one that could result in a shortfall of 15 percent of Israel's military budget currently covered by the decade-old memorandum of understanding.
Already, Koplow said, "the Israeli opposition portrays this as a punitive measure that was not coordinated with Israel and that risks eroding bilateral ties with the U.S. over time, particularly given Trump’s framing that assistance to Israel has become a political albatross in American domestic politics."
Gadi Eisenkot, a former Netanyahu minister whose electoral bloc won 48 seats to the 58 secured by Netanyahu's coalition in the election last week, accused his incumbent rival of blindsiding the Israeli public through a change in the nation's "special relationship with the United States," which he referred to as a "key component in its national security."
"The fact that the defense establishment, along with the citizens of Israel, learned of a shift in the strategic relationship through the media, demonstrates just how much Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct poses a real danger," Eisenkot wrote on X. "He can no longer be trusted, and he must be replaced."
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Weighing the Costs
Meanwhile, in the U.S., polls indicate support for reducing or ending U.S. aid to Israel has grown substantially in recent years.
A survey published last month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 35 percent of respondents said U.S. military aid to Israel should be stopped altogether, a near doubling from the previous 18 percent who voiced that position in 2014, while those who favored reducing support grew from 19 percent to 21 percent in that same time.
The same poll saw the number of supporters for expanding military assistance drop from 13 percent to 8 percent, and those advocating for maintaining the current level of aid drop from 46 percent to 35 percent between 2014 and 2026.
Overall favorability of Israel also plummeted to 44 percent this year, the lowest on record throughout nearly a half-century of tracking by the Chicago Council.
Daniel Samet, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, saw Trump's decision as an appropriate means of addressing the reality of the U.S.-Israel relationship and the evolving perceptions around it.
"Israel is among the world’s richest countries and can afford to buy American weapons on its own dime. Once essential, the aid is no longer in the two countries’ best interests," Samet told Newsweek. "For the bilateral relationship to prosper in subsequent years, it must go.
"This decision will please those who argue the aid hinders Israel’s freedom of action. It has also become a political necessity. The aid fuels anti-Israel grievances here at home, where a significant number of Americans resent Israel’s alleged mooching off Washington. Furnishing aid now comes at too high a cost for Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Dave Siminoff.
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