Ending US Aid Is Proof the Alliance Worked

On Tuesday morning, as Americans headed to the polls, President Donald Trump told Fox News that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed that the United States would stop providing Israel with roughly $4 billion a year. Israel, he said, has “become a very successful country.” “They don’t need it.” America, he added, will still “help Israel if they need it.”

The details remain unclear. The current aid agreement runs through 2028, and Israeli officials were reportedly caught off guard by the timing. But the direction is not new, and it is not a betrayal. Netanyahu told The Economist in January that he wanted to taper off military aid within ten years, all the way to zero. Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, has said that “the nature of any MOU or collaborative effort is going to change,” moving toward joint research and development rather than reliance on American weapons. The President has now taken Jerusalem at its word.

From survival to partnership

American aid to Israel began as help for a refugee nation. In January 1949, months after independence, the Export-Import Bank extended Israel a $100 million loan, followed by $35 million more in 1950. In the early 1950s, Congress approved grants for refugee relief and resettlement as the young state absorbed Holocaust survivors and Jews expelled from Arab lands. From 1949 through 1965, US aid averaged about $63 million a year, more than 95 percent of it economic.

Military grants came only with the emergency package after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Then peace changed the scale. When Israel signed its treaty with Egypt in 1979 and agreed to withdraw from the Sinai, Congress approved an extraordinary assistance package for both countries. From 1987, Israel received $1.2 billion in economic grants and $1.8 billion in military grants every year.

Then Israel did something few aid recipients ever do: it began to give the money back. In July 1996, Netanyahu told a joint session of Congress that Israel would begin reducing its need for economic aid. Three years later, President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak put the plan in writing, cutting Israel’s $1.2 billion in annual economic aid by $120 million a year. By fiscal 2008, civilian aid was gone entirely. A Likud prime minister proposed it and a Labor prime minister signed it. The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, signed under President Obama, provides $38 billion over ten years, most of it spent on American-made weapons.

A measure of strength

So this would not be the first time Israel told Washington, with gratitude, that it could stand on its own. Ending economic aid did not weaken Israel. It coincided with one of the great growth stories of our time. The same logic now applies to defense.
Israel’s economy reached roughly $610 billion in 2025, according to the IMF. Annual US military aid is well under one percent of that. Last year, Israel’s defense exports hit a record $19.2 billion, the fifth consecutive record and five times the value of American aid.

A country that sells nearly $20 billion of defense technology a year is not a dependent. It is a partner. The new framework now under negotiation, built around joint research, development and co-production, reflects that reality. And because aid dollars must be spent in America, ending them gives Israel more freedom to invest in its own industry.

Taking Israel off the ballot

There is a second benefit, equally important. Aid to Israel has become one of the most divisive issues in American politics. In July, 103 House Democrats, nearly half the caucus, voted for an amendment to strip $3.3 billion in aid to Israel. It failed, but a decade ago such a vote would have been unthinkable.

That is dangerous for Israel. Support for the Jewish state has always rested on bipartisan consensus. When that support is reduced to a line item in an appropriations bill, every budget fight becomes a referendum on Israel, and every young voter hears that Israel is a burden on the taxpayer. The charge that Israel lives off American handouts has become the entry point for those who want to sever the relationship altogether.

Remove the check, and the argument loses its force. What remains is the substance: shared intelligence, joint missile defense, combined operations against Iran, and trade. These are interests that serve Americans directly, and they are far harder to demagogue. When Israel buys American weapons with its own money, it becomes a customer supporting American jobs, not a recipient of American charity.

The transition must be handled carefully. Israel’s qualitative military edge, which US law requires Washington to maintain, must be protected. An abrupt cutoff, while threats from Iran and Lebanon remain unresolved, would be a mistake. But the direction is right.

Seventy-seven years ago, America helped a struggling refugee state survive. Today that state stands among the most capable nations on earth. Ending aid is not a break in the alliance. It is proof that it worked.