Rethinking U.S. Support

Rethinking U.S. Support: The Quiet Rerouting of Israel Aid

The 2028 expiry of the $38 billion Obama-era MoU has triggered formal U.S.-Israel talks on a new framework — one that phases out grant aid and reroutes support through the Pentagon by 2038.

The story is not that Washington is walking away from Israel. It is that Washington and Jerusalem are jointly dismantling the most visible instrument of U.S. support — the annual $3.8 billion Foreign Military Financing check — and rebuilding it, out of public view, inside the Pentagon's acquisition machinery. Formal talks on the 2029–2038 framework opened in June 2026, on a timetable Israeli officials expect to conclude in about four months, according to Ynetnews. The result, if it holds, is a defense relationship that will be deeper, more industrial, and less accountable than the one it replaces — and the biggest losers are not Israeli hawks or American critics of Israel, but the congressional oversight process itself.

The pivot: from aid recipient to industrial partner

The current 10-year memorandum of understanding, signed in 2016 by the Obama administration, delivers $3.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million annually for joint missile defense — the largest bilateral security package in U.S. history, worth $38 billion through FY2028, per the Congressional Research Service's standing brief on U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS News on May 10, 2026 that he intends to drive the financial component of that aid "to 0 over the next 10 years," and that he did not "want to wait for the next Congress" — language then written verbatim into H. Res. 1339, introduced by Republican Marlin Stutzman on June 3.

The Israeli delegation to the new talks is led by Defense Ministry Director-General Amir Baram alongside Ambassador Michael Leiter; the American side is led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, senior adviser Michael Needham, and Ambassador Mike Huckabee, Ynetnews reported. Under the emerging model, the annual U.S. grant will decline every year while both sides expand joint development of directed-energy weapons, hypersonic-missile defense, and battlefield AI. The framing is inversion, not exit: Netanyahu's letter to Congressman Stutzman argues that "the time has now arrived for us to move from aid recipient to partner," per Al Jazeera.

What Section 224 actually does

The mechanism sits in Section 224 of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act, H.R. 8800, which establishes the "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative." The Senate Armed Services Committee's own executive summary describes it as an authority "to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, coordination, and industrial cooperation." The standalone predecessor bill, Rep. Ronny Jackson's H.R. 7540, authorised $150 million per year through FY2029 and specified ten cooperative domains — counter-drone, missile defense, AI, directed energy, cyber, biotech, network integration, and defense-industrial co-production among them.

The Pentagon's defense secretary would designate an "executive agent" to synchronise the two militaries' technology pipelines. That is the load-bearing change. The Quincy Institute's Steven Simon, in a June 2026 brief titled "The Disappearing Aid Check," argues that the shift moves support "from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal." That is precisely why the pro-Israel establishment likes it and why progressive critics are alarmed.

Why now: the polling has moved

The political ground beneath the aid relationship has collapsed faster than either capital's rhetoric admits. In February 2026, Gallup recorded, for the first time in a quarter-century of polling, that more Americans sympathised with Palestinians than with Israelis, 41% to 36%. A May 2026 New York Times/Siena poll found that nearly three-quarters of Democratic voters oppose U.S. military aid to Israel, up from 45% three years earlier, according to reporting compiled by Al Jazeera. An April Pew survey showed 60% of U.S. adults holding an unfavourable view of Israel, with 84% unfavourable among Democrats under 50 and 57% among Republicans in the same cohort, per BBC News.

Congress is catching up. In April 2026, 40 Senate Democrats voted to disapprove a sale of military bulldozers to Israel — the largest bloc ever to try to block a weapons transfer to the country, Al Jazeera reported. Progressive candidates who ran explicitly against Israel aid, including New York's Brad Lander, have won primaries in previously safe pro-AIPAC districts, according to the BBC. Netanyahu's team read the trendlines and moved. Framing the pivot as Israeli independence — "we've come of age" — is easier politically than defending FMF checks in a Democratic caucus that is drifting away and a MAGA base that increasingly calls Israel aid "welfare."

Who wins, who loses

The named winners are three. Israeli defense industry — Elbit, Rafael, IAI — gains preferential integration into U.S. supply chains. Israel's arms exports hit a record $19 billion in 2025, Al Jazeera reported, and Israel overtook the United Kingdom to become the world's seventh-largest arms supplier in the 2021–25 period, per SIPRI. Section 224 embeds Israeli subsystems into American procurement, giving that industry a captive market. The U.S. primes — Lockheed, RTX, Boeing — win too, because Foreign Military Financing has always recycled U.S. taxpayer money back into their order books, and the emerging model preserves that pipeline while adding joint R&D revenue. And AIPAC wins the structural fight: the pro-Israel lobby's Foreign Affairs advocates now openly argue for shifting cooperation "under Trump's Golden Dome initiative" and toward joint AI and quantum programmes, moving the relationship into acquisition channels where a single dissenting senator has almost no leverage.

The losers are more diffuse. Progressive Democrats lose their single most effective oversight tool — the appropriations vote. As the advocacy group A New Policy warned in a brief cited by Al Jazeera, Section 224 "provides the framework for continuing — and expanding — U.S.-Israel military ties by entrenching Israeli technology within the U.S. defense supply chain in a way that would shield it from the annual appropriations process." Rep. Ro Khanna's attempt to strip Section 224 died in a voice vote on June 4 without even being logged as a roll call, per the same Al Jazeera report — the outcome and the procedural burial together telegraph the future of oversight in this domain.

Arab-state partners and Gulf competitors also lose leverage. The Senate Armed Services Committee's FY27 summary pairs Section 224 with a separate initiative "to bolster defense cooperation among the United States and signatories of the Abraham Accords" — a signal that Washington intends to institutionalise Israeli-Emirati-Bahraini defense integration on the same Pentagon rails, freezing out any future administration that might want to reprice normalisation.

The historical parallel that reframes it

There is a precedent, and it isn't flattering to Congress. In 2007, the George W. Bush administration used a similar MoU expiry to lock in the largest package in U.S. history at the time, converting what had been a mixed grants-and-loans relationship into an all-grant regime worth $30 billion over ten years. The 2016 Obama renewal deepened that lock-in, eliminating the offshore-procurement carve-out that let Israel spend part of FMF on its own industry. Each renewal has tightened the industrial coupling and reduced congressional exit ramps — a point made in Foreign Affairs by Israeli analysts now arguing the 2028–38 iteration should complete that arc. The 2038 target is the logical endpoint of a 20-year trajectory: end the vote, keep the flow, deepen the entanglement.

The Al Jazeera opinion piece by Said Arikat argues that "institutionalising" the relationship in this way removes the possibility of leverage over Israeli conduct, aljazeera.com. That is the second-order effect worth naming. When U.S. support flowed through the appropriations vote, presidents could — in principle — slow-walk deliveries, as President Biden briefly did with 2,000-pound bombs in May 2024. When support flows through joint program elements, multiyear procurement authorities and industrial-base investment funds, the same pause requires unwinding contracts, breaking supply chains, and inviting lawsuits. The Trump administration's Golden Dome missile-defense project — into which Israeli interceptor IP is being folded, per the Foreign Affairs blueprint — is the clearest example: once Israeli technology is inside a U.S. homeland-defense program, no future president will unpick it.

Diplomat View

Our call: the 2029–2038 framework will be signed, and Section 224 or a lightly amended version will survive the FY27 NDAA conference. The forecast rests on three named conditions — hold them and this thesis holds. First, AIPAC's demonstrated ability to defeat rescission amendments (Khanna's voice vote, Massie's primary defeat) is intact. Second, Netanyahu's political incentive to reframe dependence as partnership is durable through Israel's late-2026 election, since it insulates him from both the "welfare" attack on the American right and the "genocide subsidy" attack on the American left. Third, the U.S. primes have no reason to oppose a model that keeps their order books full while adding co-development revenue.

What would revise the forecast: a hard break between Trump and Netanyahu over Iran's Lebanon file — Vance's June warning that "two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected [Israel's] homeland" are American, cited in Al Jazeera, suggests the leverage exists — or a bipartisan floor amendment in the House uniting Massie Republicans with Khanna Democrats to strip Section 224 from the conference report. Neither is the base case.

The real story is subtler than "the U.S. is dropping Israel," the frame currently dominating Middle East commentary. Washington is not dropping Israel. It is dropping the vote on Israel. That is a bigger change, because votes are the only place where American publics — now decisively skeptical of the relationship — actually touch the policy. Rerouting through the Pentagon converts a democratic constraint into an industrial fact.

What to watch next

• FY27 NDAA House floor vote (expected September 2026): whether Massie–Khanna amendments to strip Section 224 get a recorded roll call.
• Baram–Rubio talks conclusion (targeted late 2026): first disclosed numbers on the FY29 grant taper and joint program authorisations.
• Netanyahu's Washington visit (previewed July 4 by Trump, per Al Jazeera): whether the two leaders publicly frame the new MoU as "partnership" or dodge the aid question entirely.

The Bottom Line

Rethinking U.S. support for Israel is not about ending the relationship — it is about moving it out of the appropriations process and into Pentagon acquisition, where public opinion has no vote. Netanyahu's push to zero out grant aid by 2038, and Section 224's institutional plumbing, together lock in a deeper alliance at the precise moment American voters are turning against it. The winner is the U.S.-Israel defense-industrial complex; the loser is congressional oversight itself. *