Washington should no longer be liable for Israeli misdeeds.
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Cutting or ending U.S. military assistance and sales to Israel is all the rage these days. In April, most Democratic senators voted against the sale of $295 million worth of armored bulldozers and $151 million of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel (the sale was approved anyway, with large Republican support). That was a dramatic shift. Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Sen. Bernie Sanders has tabled four proposals to prevent Washington from selling arms to Israel. The April vote marked the first time that a majority of Democratic senators joined him.
Clearly, Democrats in the Senate have grown increasingly uncomfortable with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and its creeping annexation of the West Bank. Yet proposals to leverage Israel’s annual allotment of U.S. assistance—$3.8 billion—to change its behavior and/or punish it predates both Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s annexationist government. During the United States’ presidential election cycle in 2020, Sanders proposed conditioning aid to force Netanyahu to negotiate with the Palestinians. During the same campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg indicated that he would cut aid if Israel annexed the West Bank, though he later walked it back, drawing fire from pro-Palestinian activists. Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared that “everything is on the table,” including suspending aid if Israel proceeded with annexation.
Cutting or ending U.S. military assistance and sales to Israel is all the rage these days. In April, most Democratic senators voted against the sale of $295 million worth of armored bulldozers and $151 million of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel (the sale was approved anyway, with large Republican support). That was a dramatic shift. Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Sen. Bernie Sanders has tabled four proposals to prevent Washington from selling arms to Israel. The April vote marked the first time that a majority of Democratic senators joined him.
Clearly, Democrats in the Senate have grown increasingly uncomfortable with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and its creeping annexation of the West Bank. Yet proposals to leverage Israel’s annual allotment of U.S. assistance—$3.8 billion—to change its behavior and/or punish it predates both Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s annexationist government. During the United States’ presidential election cycle in 2020, Sanders proposed conditioning aid to force Netanyahu to negotiate with the Palestinians. During the same campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg indicated that he would cut aid if Israel annexed the West Bank, though he later walked it back, drawing fire from pro-Palestinian activists. Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared that “everything is on the table,” including suspending aid if Israel proceeded with annexation.
I support ending aid to Israel. I first wrote about it in 2020 for Foreign Policy and then expanded on the idea in 2024, when I argued that Israel has an advanced industrial economy and a GDP per capita that’s higher than the United States’ NATO allies. Israel can afford to pay its own way. As a result, the 10-year memorandum of understanding (MOU) covering the aid—which will be renewed in 2028 and run until 2038—should be the last one.
I am hardly the only one who supports ending aid. Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli parliament member, and Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, raised the idea in The National Interest in 2020. Victoria Coates and Robert Greenway made a similar argument in a 2025 Heritage Foundation report, as did Daniel Samet from the American Enterprise Institute in a recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. Amit Halevi, a Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud party, has been Israel’s most consistent advocate for phasing out the aid in favor of strategic independence.
But as much as I support the idea, there are consequences worth considering. First, while opponents of aid to Israel often frame it as a handout, the MOU requires that Israel spend all the money in the United States, which supports thousands of jobs. Critics argue—not incorrectly—that military aid should be based on factors other than employment figures at Boeing, Raytheon, and others. Still, if Israel stops spending $38 billion over 10 years in the United States, it is possible that some Americans will lose their jobs. That is a tough call for members of Congress, who are supposed to bring jobs to their districts.
Second, while phasing out aid would make the United States less complicit in Israeli transgressions, the idea that Israel would be constrained seems unlikely. Just because Israel stops buying 1,000-pound bombs from the United States does not mean that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will not have any to use. In early 2025, the Israeli government awarded Elbit Systems two contracts worth $274 million to manufacture heavy bombs and associated raw materials that Israel previously imported. As Israel moves toward greater self-reliance, Washington’s leverage will be further diminished (though I think the idea of U.S. leverage with Israel is mostly overblown).
Since the Oct. 7 attacks and due to the response from some American politicians, Israel is rediscovering the virtues of self-reliance. Netanyahu, a former finance minister, went too far with this idea when he suggested last year that Israel “will increasingly need to adapt to an economy with autarkic characteristics.” No doubt, Israel will still want to buy warplanes and other big-ticket items from the United States. But Israel is perfectly capable of manufacturing its own ammo and some weapons systems. In fact, it already excels at manufacturing drones, anti-drone systems, air defense, and artificial intelligence technology—the kinds of weapons that have emerged as essential during the current Ukraine and Iran wars.
Finally, will phasing out military aid to Israel affect the yearly $1.3 billion tranche of military assistance to Egypt? In their excitement to punish Israel, it seems unlikely that members of Congress have given much thought to the value of Washington’s ties with Cairo. Let’s agree that the U.S.-Egypt strategic relationship never lived up to the story that Anwar el-Sadat sold to Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s. Let’s further stipulate that Egypt is a perennial violator of human rights, that the United States pays for the privilege of fast-tracking its warships through the Suez Canal, and that Egypt has robust ties with both China and Russia.
Contrary to popular myth, there is no formal link between aid to Israel and Egypt, and there is no mention of assistance in the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the 1978 Camp David Accords, or any of the memoranda related to both. Nevertheless, the military assistance to Egypt has served as an informal anchor of Egypt-Israel peace. The Israeli government recognizes this, which is why it has sometimes agreed to help Egypt lobby Congress to keep the money flowing. If assistance to Israel is phased out, then it will likely open a conversation about aid to Egypt.
To make the case that assistance to Egypt should be maintained even as aid to Israel is cut, advocates would have to find arguments that do not revolve around the peace accord. They could claim that aid to Egypt is an investment in regional stability, point out that the sum is manageable, and argue that phasing out aid will drive Cairo into the arms of Beijing. I see the arguments, but they are not strong. Egypt has not been able to drive or shape events in the region for a long time, and it is already close to China. China has major industrial zones near Ain Sokhna on the Red Sea and other major investments throughout the Suez Canal zone in addition to industrial facilities in 10th of Ramadan City near Cairo and in the Nile Delta. The most convincing argument may be that the military aid is not a huge investment, and it buys Washington some influence in Cairo, but even that claim may not withstand the pressure to wind down assistance to Egypt.
It is clear that members of Congress, activists, and parts of the public want to punish Israel for crimes both real and perceived. The benefits of ending U.S. military assistance should be clear: The United States would no longer be directly linked to Israeli misdeeds, and it would drain some of the emotion from the American debate about Israel. A little bit of distance from Israel is a good thing, but ending military assistance won’t prevent Israel from annexing territory, it won’t make the IDF any less lethal, and it will not bring about a Palestinian state.
Steven A. Cook is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East. X: @stevenacook
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