In recent months, two ideas that were once on the fringes of Democratic policy thinking \u2014 cutting off financial support and stopping arms transfers to Israel \u2014 have gone mainstream.<\/p>\n
Nearly half of House Democrats voted to end aid<\/a> to Israel last month, while roughly 40 percent of the caucus has called for blocking the sale of offensive weapons<\/a> to the Israeli government until it persuades Congress that it will not use American bombs to perpetrate war crimes.<\/p>\n Democrats are increasingly willing to cut aid and arms sales to Israel.Ending financial aid would have little effect on Israeli policy.Broader weapons restrictions would put more pressure on Israel \u2014 but not necessarily enough to make it accept Palestinian statehood.Forcing Israel into full compliance with international law would likely require sweeping economic sanctions.<\/p>\n Many of the party\u2019s 2028 hopefuls have also embraced these general concepts. Rahm Emanuel<\/a>, the former Chicago mayor and consummate centrist, recently suggested<\/a> that America should end aid to Israel and condition arms sales on its compliance with US law. Progressive Sen. Chris Van Hollen has gone several steps further, saying<\/a> that Israel should be barred from accessing US-made offensive weapons until it \u201cagrees to a time-bound plan to end the occupation and enact a two-state solution.\u201d<\/p>\n If recent elections are any indication, these ideas will only grow more prominent in the coming years. Over the past two months, a slew of Democratic candidates<\/a> \u2014 often with establishment backing and largely progressive voting records<\/a> \u2014 lost to left-wing rivals who promised to take a more adversarial posture towards Israel. Rep. Haley Stevens\u2019s apparent defeat<\/a> at the hands of the staunchly pro-Palestinian Abdul El-Sayed in this week\u2019s Democratic Senate primary<\/a> is the latest and perhaps most consequential example of this trend.<\/p>\n The Democratic Party\u2019s burgeoning support for restricting aid and arms transfers to Israel is well-founded. In prosecuting its war with Hamas, the Israeli government has subjected Gaza\u2019s civilian population to grotesque and illegal forms of collective punishment<\/a> (if not genocide<\/a>). Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel is expanding illegal settlements<\/a> and allowing Jewish settlers to violently dispossess Palestinian residents<\/a>. In this context, supplying Israel with money and weapons is contrary to both America\u2019s moral obligations and security interests. It is wrong to subsidize or provision any foreign military\u2019s assaults on human rights. And doing so undermines global respect for both the United States and the concept of international law.<\/p>\n For many Democrats, however, the purpose of cutting off aid and weapons to Israel is not merely to end America\u2019s complicity in its crimes. Rather, the objective is to effect a radical change in Israeli policy \u2014 and ultimately, a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.<\/p>\n Such Democrats believe that the Israeli government will not seriously pursue a two-state solution (much less, a binational democratic state<\/a>) unless it is forced to do so. Fortunately, in this view, Israel\u2019s reliance on American aid and military technology provides the US with potent leverage over its internal policies: If America ceases to provide the Israeli military with cash and offensive weapons, then Tel Aviv will eventually have little choice but to start upholding its end of the two-state bargain.<\/p>\n But this is probably too optimistic. Ending aid and conditioning arms sales may be preconditions for realigning Israeli policy. But coercing its government into an acceptance of Palestinian statehood would likely require measures far more sweeping \u2014 and controversial \u2014 than those that congressional Democrats are presently entertaining.<\/p>\n Israel doesn\u2019t need our money <\/p>\n Of all the Democratic Party\u2019s proposals for disciplining Israel, ending US aid may be the most politically palatable \u2014 yet least effective.<\/p>\n The notion that the United States should stop giving Israel $3.8 billion each year has some appeal on the left, right,<\/a> and center<\/a>. Which is not surprising: One doesn\u2019t need to be passionately pro-Palestinian to be skeptical of America giving billions in aid to a rich, foreign country. In his Senate race, El-Sayed tried to tap into this isolationist sentiment, describing<\/a> his plans for slashing aid to Israel \u2014 and increasing benefits for US citizens \u2014 as an \u201cAmerica First<\/a>\u201d agenda.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, ending aid would have little impact on Israeli policy. And for the very reason that such assistance is hard to justify, even to those who care little about the Palestinians: Israel is a wealthy nation that can fund its own military.<\/p>\n In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on the military, not counting its use of American aid. To sustain its 2025 level of defense funding \u2014 without American aid \u2014 Israel would need to dedicate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. This increase might be slightly inconvenient for Israeli taxpayers. But it\u2019s clearly doable.<\/p>\n And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do it.<\/p>\n Or so he told 60 Minutes<\/a> in May, saying that he would like to \u201cdraw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.\u201d In the view of some Israeli analysts, forgoing US aid would give Israel a freer hand to pursue its security objectives as it sees fit without worrying about a backlash from politicians thousands of miles away. The American Enterprise Institute\u2019s Daniel J. Samet and former IDF Maj. Raphael BenLevi spelled out the logic<\/a> of this position back in 2023, writing, \u201cAs long as aid continues, the temptation to dictate Israel\u2019s policies will be too strong for Washington to resist, while Israeli officials will be inclined to seek approval for every action they take.\u201d<\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t mean that the US should continue funding Israel\u2019s military; revoking such aid could improve America\u2019s global image while saving taxpayers a little money. By itself, however, canceling all military grants to Israel would not force its government to make any real changes in its security strategies, much less to accept Palestinian statehood.<\/p>\n Blocking bombs would have a bigger impact <\/p>\n Although Israel does not need America\u2019s dollars, it does currently require our weaponry. Between 2021 and 2025, the United States supplied 68 percent of Israel\u2019s imported major arms<\/a>.<\/p>\n Israel can domestically manufacture<\/a> many of these weapons \u2014 including drones, missiles, air-defense systems, armored vehicles, and aerial, artillery, and tank munitions. But its arms industry is not capable of churning all of these out at the rate required by its intensive, multifront wars since October 7, 2023.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Israel is wholly reliant on America for its combat aircraft fleet. They don\u2019t make F-15s, F-16s, or F-35s in Haifa. Critically, this doesn\u2019t just leave Israel dependent on the US for new fighter jets but also for the maintenance of its existing ones.<\/p>\n \u201cThe F-35 is a system that is deeply reliant on just-in-time delivery of spare parts,\u201d Josh Paul, a former Biden State Department official who resigned in protest<\/a> of American arms transfers to Israel, told me. \u201cAnd were the US to say we\u2019re not going to provide you those spare parts, it wouldn\u2019t be more than one or two months before Israel\u2019s F-35s would not fly, certainly at the current operational paces.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, conditionally freezing sales of US military equipment to Israel would place real constraints on its martial capabilities. Although, the scale of those constraints depends a lot on the details of US policy.<\/p>\n The most prominent proposal for an arms embargo in Congress, the Block the Bombs Act,<\/a> would freeze the transfer of select classes of weaponry, including bunker-busting bombs and precision missiles. This policy might force Israel to scale back or delay certain aerial campaigns. In the long run, however, Israel has domestic substitutes for these weapons.<\/p>\n By contrast, were the US to choke off military supplies more broadly \u2014 leaving the Israeli air force bereft of fighter jets and component parts \u2014 the implications for Israeli security strategy would be far more profound.<\/p>\n In either scenario, however, it seems unlikely that the Israeli government would respond to an embargo by agreeing to cede territory or autonomy to the Palestinians, in service of a two-state solution.<\/p>\n The reasons for this are twofold. First, although an embargo would substantially diminish Israel\u2019s military capabilities, those capacities would remain formidable. As already noted, Israel domestically produces a great deal of military hardware \u2014 so much, it actually exported more arms than all but six countries<\/a> between 2021 and 2025.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, the Israeli government has already launched an effort to achieve \u201cmunitions independence<\/a>.\u201d This entails a $110 billion investment<\/a> into its arms industry, including initiatives to increase Israeli production of aerial munitions<\/a>, heavy bombs,<\/a> and artillery shells<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the same time, Israel is also developing a plan for expanding its domestic raw materials industry,<\/a> so that it enjoys sovereignty over the inputs necessary for arms production.<\/p>\n Given all this, even without access to American weapons, Israel would still be able to militarily dominate the West Bank and Gaza.<\/p>\n \u201cIsrael\u2019s dependence on US weapons is more about its position in the region; its capacity to deter Iran and so forth, not in the Palestinian context,\u201d Paul said. \u201cCut off Israel\u2019s access to US weapons, and it would still have overwhelming military superiority over any Palestinian resistance group.\u201d<\/p>\n Further, in the face of a US arms embargo, Israel would not only remain capable of sustaining its subjugation of the Palestinians; it would also likely retain the will to do so.<\/p>\n Israeli opinion on politics in general \u2014 and the Palestinian issue in particular \u2014 has been drifting rightward for decades<\/a>. In a 2025 Gallup poll<\/a>, 27 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution while 63 percent opposed one. And opposition to Palestinian statehood is even more pronounced among Jewish Israelis, who dominate the nation\u2019s politics. In a Pew survey<\/a> from last year, only 16 percent of Israeli Jews agreed that peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was possible \u2014 down from 46 percent in 2013. Support for a binational, democratic state of Israel-Palestine \u2014 the \u201cone-state solution\u201d favored by many on the American left \u2014 is all-but non-existent among Israeli Jews, with only 1 percent<\/a> backing the policy in a 2025 poll.<\/p>\n Israeli political leaders share its electorate\u2019s opposition to Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu\u2019s leading rival in Israel\u2019s upcoming election, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, recently told<\/a> an interviewer, \u201cI have never said two states for two peoples, because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about \u2018peace now\u2019 and two states doesn\u2019t understand the conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian sovereignty do shift with events; after the horrors of Hamas\u2019s October 7, 2023, attacks<\/a>, skepticism of a two-state solution<\/a> among Jewish Israelis spiked. It is therefore conceivable that Israelis might become more open to Palestinian statehood, were the people of Gaza and the West Bank to unify behind conciliatory political leaders, who were prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish state within Israel\u2019s legal borders. But that is an unlikely prospect in the near or medium term \u2014 and one that Israel\u2019s criminality makes evermore remote.<\/p>\n Absent such a development, a US arms embargo is unlikely to realign Israeli politics fundamentally. Historically, when great powers have tried to force weaker states to shift their policies through coercion, the latter often resist, even at a high cost. Iran\u2019s refusal to submit to US demands on its regional policies and weapons programs, amid years of devastating sanctions<\/a> and months of bombardment<\/a>, may be today\u2019s most salient example.<\/p>\n The Iranian regime\u2019s recalcitrance may partly reflect its authoritarian character. But democratic states have also routinely bucked the strong-arming of foreign powers. For example, in the 1980s, New Zealand barred the United States<\/a> from docking nuclear-powered or armed ships at its ports. The US tried to coerce the Kiwis into reversing this policy by suspending America\u2019s commitment to defend New Zealand from military attack in 1986. But New Zealanders remained undaunted; indeed, support for the anti-nuclear policy grew<\/a> over the ensuing years.<\/p>\n What getting tough on Israel would really look like<\/p>\n This is not to say that no amount of sustained American coercion could shift Israel\u2019s political calculus on its conflict with the Palestinians. But the scale and duration of US pressure would likely need to be much greater than what congressional Democrats are presently contemplating.<\/p>\n Specifically, such a campaign would likely require an arms embargo more far-reaching than the one proposed by the Block the Bombs Act, along with sweeping economic sanctions, and the withdrawal of American diplomatic protection<\/a> at the United Nations.<\/p>\n The Biden administration created the architecture for such a sanctions policy when it froze<\/a> the US-held assets and visas of Israeli settlers who\u2019d perpetrated acts of violence in the West Bank, along with those who had materially assisted them. These sanctions could be expanded to cover all involved in settlement expansion, including construction companies, banks, financial institutions and government agencies that facilitate the colonization of Palestinian territory. Should this prove insufficient to change Israeli policy, America could apply sanctions to those populating and serving<\/a> already-existing Israeli settlements.<\/p>\n For reasons previously noted, Israel\u2019s first response to all of this is liable to be resistance. To the extent that these measures were politically controversial within the US \u2014 and opposed by the Republican Party \u2014 Israel would probably seek to undermine and wait out a Democratic government that implemented them, rather than making substantial concessions to Palestinian autonomy.<\/p>\n America\u2019s pressure campaign may therefore need to be sustained for a prolonged period \u2014 and enjoy a measure of bipartisan support \u2014 before having any transformative impact on Israeli policy.<\/p>\n This could be challenging. As El-Sayed\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d message indicates, many Americans favor cutting off aid to Israel because they want to disengage from Middle Eastern conflicts and focus attention on domestic problems. But the case for blocking arms sales, sanctioning large financial institutions \u2014 and, more broadly, expending political capital and energy on a protracted fight over a foreign country\u2019s internal policies \u2014 cannot rest on mere isolationism.<\/p>\n An effective pressure campaign would also require long-term resolve across multiple administrations, who may be tempted to re-engage with Israel if the US runs into new challenges abroad in which Israeli intelligence, military assets, diplomatic ties, or technology might be useful. When Joe Biden took office, he initially sought to treat Saudi Arabia as a \u201cpariah<\/a>\u201d over the regime\u2019s appalling record on human rights, only to come calling to its leaders in person<\/a>, in order to secure its cooperation with regional issues and the global energy supply. Since then, President Trump has drawn the two nations even closer<\/a>.<\/p>\n In any case, for now, the idea of not merely cutting off aid and select \u201coffensive\u201d weapons to Israel \u2014 but rather, forbidding the sale of all military goods to its government, sanctioning all involved in settling the occupied West Bank, and withdrawing US diplomatic support at the UN \u2014 remains too radical an agenda for most congressional progressives, much less their Republican colleagues.<\/p>\n Even if Democrats can\u2019t change Israeli policy, they can reduce American complicity<\/p>\n None of this means that ending US aid to Israel \u2014 or restricting the sale of offensive weapons to its military \u2014 aren\u2019t worthy objectives. Such measures could constrain Israel\u2019s capacity to bomb civilian infrastructure and launch wars of choice. They just might not be sufficient to singlehandedly overwhelm Israeli resistance to Palestinian sovereignty.<\/p>\n Regardless, the congressional left\u2019s Israel agenda would improve America\u2019s moral health and global image. And this should arguably be US lawmakers\u2019 priority.<\/p>\n \u201cThe United States played an enormous role in creating Israel\u2019s conventional military advantage as a player in the Middle East,\u201d Daryl Kimball, executive director of the nonprofit Arms Control Association, told me. \u201cAnd in the face of the devastation that the Israeli government has wrought in Gaza and now on the West Bank \u2014 which involves, by any objective measure, serious war crimes \u2014 the United States needs to exert its leverage, so as not to be complicit in such behavior. Whether that changes Israeli policy regarding a two-state solution, or its ongoing treatment of Palestinians in occupied territories, is ultimately a separate question.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In recent months, two ideas that were once on the fringes of Democratic policy thinking \u2014 cutting off…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":580351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43,48,238,17652],"class_list":["post-580350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news","tag-palestine","tag-politics","tag-world-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}