In the Shadow of Elections
In July, nearly half of House Democrats voted for an amendment to cut off aid to Israel. It failed, as every such amendment has failed, but the margin is the story. A vote that once would have collected a few dozen signatures now draws close to half of one party’s caucus. The polling behind it is starker. Quinnipiac found in June that 66 percent of Democrats, and 48 percent of all voters, believe the United States is too supportive of Israel, against 20 and 16 percent when the question was first asked in 2017.
Washington’s systemic incentives have not changed. Iran remains the central strategic problem; the Gulf balance still depends on an Israel that can deter, and the intelligence and missile-defense relationship runs in both directions. What has changed is the domestic filter through which those incentives become policy. Israeli planning still assumes a patron whose support is structural. It is closer to conditional, and the conditions will be set by whoever holds the White House and Congress in a given year.
Israelis tend to read this as a Democratic problem, which a Republican midterm will contain. The evidence does not support that comfort. AP-NORC found 58 percent of Democrats calling American support excessive, up from 45 percent in January 2024. Republicans are far steadier, with only about two in ten saying the United States is too supportive, though Republicans under 45 are more likely to say so. The age gradient matters more than the party line. Support has declined in every age group and fallen most steeply among the young, which means the cohort that will staff committees and run campaigns in 2035 is the one least disposed to treat Israel as a given. Vice President Vance has criticized Israeli leaders who voiced frustration with Trump, while critics of Israel beat establishment-backed Democrats in primaries in New York and Colorado. Neither fact is a trend by itself. Together they describe a coalition that no longer polices its own boundaries.
The second comfort is Netanyahu. Only about a fifth of Americans view him favorably, and Senator Chris Coons, the senior Democrat on Foreign Relations, has said he hopes Israel’s October elections open a chapter beyond Netanyahu and restore bipartisan support. There is something to this. The prime minister’s closeness to the Republican Party accelerated the partisan sorting. But a successor would inherit the war in Gaza, the Iran conflict, and a generation of Americans whose first political memory of Israel is the war in Gaza. Removing the lightning rod does not remove the storm.
France offers the sharpest precedent. Until 1967, Paris was Israel’s principal arms supplier. Mirage jets, the reactor at Dimona, and the coordination at Suez all came from a France that had its own reasons, chiefly the Algerian war and a shared hostility to Nasser. Those reasons vanished with Algerian independence in 1962. De Gaulle declared an embargo on the frontline states as the Six-Day War began and tightened it into a full embargo after the Israeli raid on Beirut airport in December 1968. France did not betray Israel so much as follow its interests somewhere else.
The detail worth keeping is that Israel had already begun to move. The first American Hawk missiles arrived in 1962, Skyhawks in 1966, and Johnson approved the Phantom sale in 1968, before the final French break. Israeli planners hedged while the patron was still generous, and so the embargo, when it came, cost money and pride but not survival. That is the lesson, and it is a demanding one: diversification has to begin while the relationship still looks sound, because afterwards nobody will sell on good terms to a customer with no alternative.
But the analogy then fails in two places. Israel found a successor patron in the 1960s, and none exists today. European states cannot supply the quantities or the systems, and India, valuable as a partner, is a customer and a manufacturer, not a guarantor. Second, the French rupture was one man’s decision, reversible in principle by his successor. The American shift is diffuse and generational, with no single decision to lobby against and no moment to wait out. A negotiator can persuade a president. Nobody persuades a cohort.
The timing is concrete. The current ten-year memorandum, worth $3.8 billion a year in military aid, runs through fiscal 2028, and its successor will be negotiated in a Congress elected under these conditions. Israel should enter that negotiation with fewer assumptions and more options. That means deepening the Gulf security relationships that the Abraham Accords made possible, building the Indian and Eastern European defense-industrial ties that are now small but growing, and treating domestic production capacity as strategic rather than commercial. It also means accepting that some of the aid may eventually be traded for autonomy, rather than defended as an entitlement in a fight that Israel’s friends are losing in the polls.
None of this requires pessimism about the alliance. It requires treating the alliance as a policy.