Trump’s $4bn aid-cut pledge caused panic in Israel’s defense establishment
The Democratic sweep in Tuesday’s US midterm elections may make it easier for Israel’s splintered opposition to overcome deep internal divisions and form a coalition government, by increasing the urgency of unseating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has tied himself closely to Donald Trump’s Republicans. As Israel took stock of the results, there was also a sense that the vote marked a longer-term shift in US politics that will make the job of any new Israeli leader far more difficult.
The stakes extend well beyond one election: the United States provides Israel with critical military and diplomatic support, and nurturing bipartisan ties in Washington was the cornerstone of Israeli foreign policy for decades.
Netanyahu broke with that decades-long approach to align himself with the Republicans in general and Trump in particular. The opposition had long attacked the decision as ill-judged; by the end of the week, its figures were warning that it had become dangerous.
“These people aren’t against Israel,” prominent opposition politician Yair Lapid said of the incoming Democratic lawmakers, urging his country to rebuild bridges. “They’re mainly against Netanyahu – for them, anything connected to him is toxic.”
“The easiest thing is to scream that ‘America is lost,’ because if it’s lost, you don’t have to work,” Lapid said. “That’s just not true. Not at all.” He laid out a plan to “rebuild trust” in Washington through a transatlantic charm offensive by officials of a prospective new Israeli government.
The proposal drew a swift rebuke from Brad Lander, a Democratic congressman-elect from New York. Lander, who is Jewish and describes himself as a liberal Zionist, was detained in the occupied West Bank last month while joining Palestinians trying to harvest olives.
“Minister Lapid: As someone who won a seat in Congress last night, and who cares about Israel: you’re not listening to what American voters – Jewish and non-Jewish – are saying,” Lander wrote in a direct response. “We aren’t starving for a barnstorming tour. We’re hungry to see respect for international law and human rights.”
In the exchange, Lander pointed to the arrest of journalist Abed Abu Shehada, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, as an example of how Israel violates international law. Abu Shehada was reportedly taken from his home by 15 masked security officials in a night-time raid, without an arrest warrant. Lawyers acting for Abu Shehada said interrogators have questioned him only about a podcast interview with a public figure. Lander drew a direct link between the case and the ICE “regime of detention without charges, based on secret evidence, designed to intimidate and chill speech” that he said US voters had rejected.
On Friday, Lander and two other incoming Jewish members of Congress, Daniel Bliss and Scott Wiener, wrote to Israel’s ambassador to the US calling for Abu Shehada’s immediate release. “Detaining a reporter for conducting an interview — the only issue that interrogators questioned him about — is a violation of international law,” Lander said when he published the letter. “It comes at a time when senior Israeli officials are trying to delegitimize the participation of Palestinian citizens in Israel’s recent elections.”
Republicans also drew a connection between the results and Israel. Soon after the results came in, Vice-President JD Vance put “our relationship with Israel” on a short list of reasons for voter fury. On election day, Trump made a last-ditch attempt to woo voters with a pledge to cut off $4bn in annual military aid to Israel.
The announcement caused panic in Israel’s defense establishment. “When the commander of the Israel air force hears something like that, he might slit his wrists,” one official told Channel 12 news, asking where Israel was going to come up with 15 billion shekels every year and what that would mean for the country’s future defense budget.
Netanyahu responded to Trump’s election-day pledge only on Friday, when his office issued a statement casting the proposed cut as a joint decision reflecting Israel’s economic strength — a demonstration, it said, of a “move from aid to partnership.”
Netanyahu has long presented his relationship with Trump, his fluent English and his experience in the United States as the basis of a claim to singular international standing, presenting himself as the only man able to guarantee Israel’s security in a hostile world. After Tuesday’s vote, the verdict among some Israeli commentators was blunt. “One thing is clear: we are losing America,” Ben Caspit wrote in Ma’ariv, a daily newspaper. “This isn’t a process; it isn’t happening in stages; it is happening all at once. It is an avalanche. It is a reverberating collapse of the foundation of Israel’s national defence doctrine. This isn’t a decree of fate. It is a decree of Netanyahu.”
Some advocates of change inside Israel found cause for hope in the Democrats’ victory — if the opposition can convert it into a new government. The opposition won 67 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, but more than a quarter of them went to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and some Jewish Israeli opposition parties have ruled out sitting with them.
Nadav Tamir, a former senior Israeli diplomat in the US who is now executive director of J Street Israel, argued in the Times of Israel that US administrations had for too long equated support for Israel with blind support for its government. That consensus is cracking, he wrote, though the majority of lawmakers from both parties still see Israel as a key US ally in the Middle East. External pressure from allies who support Israel’s security but view current policy as self-destructive might push the country toward necessary change, including a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. “Perhaps this will be the paradox of the new [US] Congress,” Tamir wrote. “It will be less willing to define support for Israel as automatic alignment with every policy of its government, but precisely for that reason, it may offer Israel more meaningful support in breaking out of the cycle of wars and building a future of security and prosperity.”