Why the U.S. Should Wind Down Military Aid to Israel
Key takeaways
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- Cutting or ending U.S. military assistance and sales to Israel is all the rage these days.
- Clearly, Democrats in the Senate have grown increasingly uncomfortable with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and its creeping annexation of the West Bank.
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Cutting or ending U.S. military assistance and sales to Israel is all the rage these days. In April, most Democratic senators voted against the sale of $295 million worth of armored bulldozers and $151 million of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel (the sale was approved anyway, with large Republican support). That was a dramatic shift. Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Sen. Bernie Sanders has tabled four proposals to prevent Washington from selling arms to Israel. The April vote marked the first time that a majority of Democratic senators joined him.
Clearly, Democrats in the Senate have grown increasingly uncomfortable with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and its creeping annexation of the West Bank. Yet proposals to leverage Israel’s annual allotment of U.S. assistance—$3.8 billion—to change its behavior and/or punish it predates both Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s annexationist government. During the United States’ presidential election cycle in 2020, Sanders proposed conditioning aid to force Netanyahu to negotiate with the Palestinians. During the same campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg indicated that he would cut aid if Israel annexed the West Bank, though he later walked it back, drawing fire from pro-Palestinian activists. Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared that “everything is on the table,” including suspending aid if Israel proceeded with annexation.