The Aid-to-Israel Question Is a Red Herring

National Review Online

Monday, November 09, 2026

 

On the morning of Election Day, probably trying to front-run the results, President Trump announced that U.S. aid to Israel would be terminated at the end of the year, noting that they don’t need it. After the ensuing historic Republican defeat, Vice President Vance said that a GOP pollster asked 2024 Trump supporters who voted for Democrats this time what could bring them back into the fold, and one of the top answers was changing our relationship with Israel.

 

It is important when assessing these statements not to conflate aid to Israel with support for Israel. While U.S. assistance draws a lot of attention, it is largely a red herring.

 

The truth is that a contingent of the Israeli right has long called for ending U.S. aid to become more independent. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been making the case publicly all this year, although in interviews he had talked about over time.

 

Under a ten-year memorandum of understanding with Israel that was signed in 2016 and originally slated to expire at the end of fiscal year 2028, Israel receives $3.8 billion in military aid per year. It now has a thriving economy driven by the tech sector and is expected to hit a gross domestic product of nearly $750 billion this year. On a per capita basis, its economy now surpasses that of the U.K., Canada, and France. The Bank of Israel projects growth of 5.6 percent this year, and 7.5 percent next year.

 

While Israel is certainly prosperous enough to absorb an aid cutoff, it should be noted that the current arrangement provides a lot of advantages to the U.S. for a relatively cheap price. Nearly all of the aid is paid back by Israel to American defense contractors. And as part of the agreement, Israel shares its technological tweaks to U.S. military equipment. By working together on anti-missile technology, the U.S. is able to improve its own missile-defense capabilities and benefit from Israel’s regular stress-testing of these systems. Reproducing this R&D and real-world experience would be difficult, if not impossible, even at a much higher cost.

 

In a major irony, cutting off aid and making Israel less dependent on the U.S. financially would reduce the leverage any future president has over Israeli actions.

 

Will this at least lower the temperature of the debate about Israel? No. Anti-Israel sentiment is not driven by the relatively small amount of aid the country receives. The U.S. foreign aid budget is $48 billion, and few in this crowd are complaining about billions given to Jordan, Egypt, or nations in Africa.

 

The aid cutoff will only whet the appetite of Israel’s critics. Following the Trump statement, Darializa Avila Chevalier, an incoming socialist member of the House from New York, wrote on X, “Ending military aid is not enough. We need to end U.S. taxpayer funding for Israel’s war crimes, a full arms embargo, and the Palestinian right of return.”

 

The “right of return” is a plan to flood Israel with millions of Arabs who would seek to destroy Israel as a Jewish state.

 

Ending aid won’t resolve the question of whether the U.S. will still permit contractors to sell weapons to Israel that Israel pays for with its own money, continue to provide diplomatic cover to Israel at the United Nations, and treat Israel as an economic partner.

 

Israel may be tiny, but it is a superpower when it comes to military technology and counterterrorism. Its intelligence capabilities would be impossible to replicate. When the U.K. recently sanctioned Israel, MI6 was not only worried about how the reduced intelligence-sharing would directly impact Britain; they were also concerned about how it would affect alliances with the Gulf countries. “The Gulfies come to us because they know that we have a good relationship with Israel and they know that basically they’re getting Israeli product,” a U.K. security source told The Spectator.

 

On the economic side, Israeli tech companies are among the most innovative in the world and are now playing a crucial role in the development of AI.

 

Aid or no aid, choosing to abandon an ally that shares our interest in preserving Western civilization in a geopolitically important part of the world would be a strategic blunder of colossal proportions.