Trump pulls plug on US aid to Israel

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States will stop giving Israel roughly $4 billion a year in military aid at the end of 2026 — an Election Day announcement that caught Israeli defense and finance officials off guard and that runs years ahead of the timetable Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly described.

“As far as paying Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal — we give Israel $4 billion a year — we made a deal months ago that we’re stopping,” Trump told Fox News in a phone interview on the morning of the midterm elections, according to the Times of Israel.

“They’re fine with it because they’ve become a very successful country. They don’t need it,” he said. “We’ll help Israel if they need it. They’ve been a great ally, and we’ve been the greatest of all allies.”

Israel will still be able to buy American weapons, Trump said. “They can buy whatever they want. So can Europe. We make the greatest weapons in the world.”

Trump told Fox that Netanyahu had approached him and that the two had discussed the idea for a couple of years, the Associated Press reported. “You can consider it barter,” he said.

“And can I be honest with you, [Netanyahu] brought it up,” Trump said. “He said, ‘I think it would be appropriate if we do not receive aid.’ Because he understands that this is one of the points of contention.”

Bad talking point

Trump also cast the move as a way to disarm Israel’s critics, singling out Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democratic elected to US Senate on Tuesday who is an outspoken critic of Israel.

“Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it,” Trump said, according to TOI. “The left uses the $4 billion payment — that everybody knows about, it’s no secret — as a signal of unfairness,” he added, per AP. “It’s almost too easy a target.”

The timing, TOI noted, shows how toxic aid to Israel has become in both parties. Commentators such as Tucker Carlson have questioned the alliance on the right, and a June Quinnipiac University poll found that 48% of voters, and 66% of Democrats, believe the US is too supportive of Israel — up from 16% and 20% when the question was first asked in 2017.

“It’s an open question if this was about politics, but it isn’t going to change Republican voters, and it certainly isn’t going to change Democratic voters,” said David Schenker, Trump’s top Middle East diplomat in his first term and now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

‘Certainly not today’

In Jerusalem, officials said they had not been warned. “No formal document was submitted from the Prime Minister’s Office regarding the end of aid,” a Finance Ministry official told the Walla news site. “The ministry was aware of the intention to end it, but was surprised by the intention to do so immediately.”

“We did not expect this announcement, certainly not today,” a senior defense official told the Kan public broadcaster.

There was no comment from Netanyahu’s office as of Tuesday evening Israel time, AP reported. The prime minister posted twice on social media that day, but about allegations of foreign interference in Israel’s elections, not about Trump’s remarks.

His political opponents pounced. Gadi Eisenkot, chairman of the Yashar party and a former military chief, said that “the fact that the defense establishment, along with Israeli citizens, is learning through the media about a change in the strategic relationship shows just how much Netanyahu’s conduct poses a real danger. He can no longer be trusted and must be replaced.”

Yair Golan, chairman of the Democrats party, called the move “heavy damage to Israel’s security.” “A responsible prime minister would have fought to increase American aid, not eliminate it,” he wrote. Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman posted that “the price of Trump’s support for Netanyahu [is] 3.8 billion dollars a year.”

Calendar doesn’t match

Trump’s timeline is hard to square with the existing agreement. The 10-year memorandum of understanding signed by President Barack Obama in 2016 provides Israel $38 billion — $3.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million for missile defense — and does not expire until the end of September 2028. TOI called Trump’s declaration almost certainly false; AP said an abrupt shift would be all but impossible and that Congress will have a large say. The memorandum is not a binding treaty, however, and each year’s funding depends on congressional appropriations, the Jerusalem Post noted.

Netanyahu has repeatedly said he wants to end the aid — but gradually. He told The Economist in January he hoped to “taper off” US military aid over the next decade, and told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May he wanted it to reach “zero.”

Just last week, he warned Israelis in a TV interview that the multibillion-dollar packages “won’t keep coming.” “America has changed. Not because Israel has [changed]. It’s over, and it will be over. It’s just a matter of time,” he said.

Part of Israel’s push stems from frustration during the Gaza war, when the Biden administration and other allies held up some arms shipments. Aid has also shrunk relative to Israel’s 2025 defense budget of NIS 136 billion, about $36.9 billion.

Mixed reviews at home

American Jewish groups split. Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, which has traditionally backed Trump, asked “why the US isn’t also ending the over $4 billion in annual US aid to the Arab Muslim countries of Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority entity.”

Republican Jewish Coalition CEO Matt Brooks said the relationship was “stronger than ever” under Trump and that weaning Israel off aid “is not unexpected and is something that has been openly discussed in partnership and coordination between the governments of the United States and Israel.”

J Street’s chief policy officer, Ilan Goldenberg, wrote on X that the episode shows “how much things have moved politically, and simultaneously how much we can’t trust what he says to actually happen.”

Brett McGurk, a former Biden administration national security official, noted on X that nearly all the money is spent on American weapons and that phasing it out early “may be time but the debate should start with accurate facts and figures.”

What comes next

Ending the aid raises complications, AP reported. The US committed to security assistance for Israel and Egypt under their 1979 peace treaty, and because the money must be spent on American materiel, US defense contractors could feel the loss.

The two governments have discussed restructuring ties into a defense-technology partnership. The pending 2027 National Defense Authorization Act would expand joint development — a provision Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said would cost the US sovereignty. Some Israelis worry they could surrender intellectual property while still facing American constraints, a person familiar with the talks told AP.

“This has been coming for a long time,” Schenker said. “The real question for me is whether weapons deliveries will be affected. Will Israel be prioritized?”