Netanyahu fights for survival as Eisenkot promises to rebuild ties with Washington
President Trump said U.S. military aid to Israel would stop by the end of this year — an announcement that caught officials in Israel by surprise. The statement came on Election Day, and the midterm results that followed handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. The shifts land while Israel still lacks a clear winner from its own election last week, a contest that left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fighting for political survival. Israel has long prepared for an alliance that relies less on its most important ally, but Israelis are watching the relationship change faster than they expected.
Trump made the comment on Fox News on Tuesday, while voters were still streaming into polling stations. He said cutting off the funding would deprive Democrats of a talking point after candidates such as Michigan Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed campaigned on ending the assistance, which they say takes taxpayer money to fund the war in Gaza.
When the results showed the scale of the Republican defeat, Vice President JD Vance cited voter exasperation with the war in Iran and the U.S. relationship with Israel.
Even with Democrats taking control of the House and Senate, Israel retains significant support in Congress, including for providing weapons to Washington’s closest Middle East ally, analysts say. But the results have swelled the ranks of Democrats more inclined to try to block weapons or impose conditions on aid, they added.
“Future financial assistance could face greater restrictions, and Congress may demand much closer oversight of how American weapons and military aid are used, particularly in relation to Israeli policy toward the Palestinians,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israel-based think tank. Future U.S. administrations, he said, are likely to be less willing to veto United Nations resolutions critical of Israel, block international initiatives or use their diplomatic influence to protect Israeli policies they disagree with. The United States, he added, “could distinguish much more sharply between defending Israel against an attack and supporting military operations initiated by Israel.”
Israel’s leadership crisis compounds the external pressure. The election last week produced no clear winner, and both Netanyahu’s party and that of his challenger — former military chief and political newcomer Gadi Eisenkot — fell short of a majority. The country’s president will choose one of the two to attempt to form a governing coalition, and Eisenkot appears likely to get the first opportunity because more lawmakers have endorsed him, though obstacles remain, including whether he would accept support from Arab or ultra-Orthodox parties. Throughout the campaign, Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, promoted his close relationship with Trump as a selling point.
Eisenkot promised to rebuild the relationship, which he described as more than an alliance. “Under my leadership, we will renew and deepen that partnership, strengthen the bipartisan foundations that have long sustained it, and work with our allies to advance a Middle East defined not simply by the absence of conflict, but by the presence of opportunity and cooperation,” Eisenkot said.
Netanyahu has not commented on the U.S. midterm results, and his office did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, said the politics have turned against the prime minister on both sides of the aisle. “Netanyahu is now poisoned to virtually every Democrat and many Republicans too, who, as Vance did, associate the war with their defeat,” Shapiro said. “It’s almost a kind of an emergency situation for Israel—if they want to preserve this relationship, it can’t be with Netanyahu.”
The new terrain surfaced in an exchange between the two countries’ politicians. After opposition member Yair Lapid said in a social-media post Wednesday that Israel needed to rebuild its political support with a “tour” of the United States, Brad Lander, a Democratic congressman-elect from New York, responded in a post: “We aren’t starving for a barnstorming tour. We’re hungry to see respect for international law and human rights.”
Officials in both countries had already recognized that the relationship needed reassessing. Support among Democrats plummeted amid the war in Gaza, which was sparked by the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Across almost two decades in power, Netanyahu cultivated ties with Republicans, while critics of his government say it neglected to forge links with the Democratic Party. This week’s events, though, showed the trouble runs deeper than that partisan divide.
In Tel Aviv, the shift dominated conversations in cafes and parks. “In Israel, there’s unfathomable panic,” said Josh Krasna, a former Israeli diplomat and senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center, an Israeli think tank. “Israelis are trained to believe that the Americans will always be our friend, and in a way this was a wake-up call.” One Jewish American voter who lives in Israel said he was so afraid of the country’s sinking global stature that, for the first time ever, he voted not for the party he preferred but for the people he believed would best serve Israel; he did not say whom he chose. Even progressive Israelis in the mostly liberal city said they feared what a Democratic Congress might bring.
The alliance has weathered turbulence before. Krasna said the first major test came in 1956, when the Eisenhower administration threatened sanctions against Israel over its invasion of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula amid a crisis over the Suez Canal — an episode Iran has seized on in recent days to draw comparisons with the current situation. Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, compared the U.S. position in the Strait of Hormuz to that faced by Britain, France and Israel in the failed Suez effort. “The 1956 Suez crisis unveiled the limits of British power; history sometimes turns in strategic chokepoints,” Mohebbi wrote. The bonds deepened in the decades that followed, particularly in the 1970s under President Richard Nixon, who saw Israel as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East even as his tapes later showed his disdain for Jewish people. Washington later stood by its ally when efforts to build peace between Israel and the Palestinians collapsed at the turn of the millennium, giving way to the violent second intifada uprising.
Whoever emerges as Israel’s next leader will confront an incoming Congress and a White House that both want to reset America’s relationship with Israel, while the country contends with unresolved wars in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza. “On Oct. 7, we learned a hard lesson, that we need to listen to our enemies—just hear them and listen to them,” said Avner Golov, a former Israeli national-security official who is now a vice president at MIND Israel, a think tank based in Tel Aviv. “Now we’ve learned that we need to do the same with our friends.”