Calls from politicians who have long backed Israel like Rahm Emanuel to re-assess aid to Israel have been depicted as meaningfully critical of Israel in various media outlets.
However, Responsible Statecraft reports in “The U.S. wants to end aid to Israel but replace it with something worse” that “Congress is trying to move the controversial relationship out of the public eye.”
Netanyahu himself recently stated: “I want to stop American aid. It’s like welfare; I don’t want it.” See further background below.
BENJAMIN FREEMAN, [email protected], @BenFreemanDC
Freeman wrote the pieces “Congress quietly moves to integrate U.S. and Israeli militaries” and “Congress blocks Massie-Khanna effort to kill U.S.-Israel integration” for Responsible Statecraft. He is director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy Program at the Quincy Institute. He is also co-author of the The Trillion Dollar War Machine.
ANNELLE SHELINE, [email protected], @AnnelleSheline
Sheline is research fellow for the Middle East at the Quincy Institute. In 2024, Sheline resigned from the State Department over Biden’s “unconscionable” Gaza policy.
The Quincy Institute warned in a briefing paper in May: “The United States and Israel are now approaching the renegotiation of their 10-year defense Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU. Israeli officials have said they want to phase out U.S. military grant aid — a position that sounds like a step toward ending U.S. military assistance to Israel. It is not.
“What top Israeli officials — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — are quietly backing is not a reduction in American support, but a reorganization of it: shifting billions in resources from State Department-administered foreign aid grants into general Pentagon procurement accounts, industrial partnerships, and sustainment pipelines. The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.”