随着美国支持消退，以色列将失去什么？What Israel Stands to Lose as US Support Fades

If there were any doubts that America’s once-solid bonds to Israel are fraying, President Donald Trump laid them to rest on Nov. 3, the day Americans voted in congressional elections. The flow of some $4 billion annually in US military aid to Israel will stop, said Trump. He described the assistance as a “bad talking point” for his Republican Party, which in recent years has been more pro-Israel than the Democratic Party.

If Trump’s pledge changed any votes, it wasn’t enough to prevent his party from losing control of both chambers of Congress to the Democratic Party, the political home of an increasing number of leaders who are openly skeptical about or outright hostile to the Jewish state.

The change in tone among politicians in both parties reflects a shift in American popular opinion away from Israel. Together, the trends point to a future in which Israel is no longer able to lean on its superpower ally as it has for decades.

Polls of Americans conducted by the Pew Research Center since 2022 have found steadily increasing percentages of respondents who say they have an unfavorable view of both Israel’s government and people. In a survey conducted in early May, those shares were 62% and 42%, respectively, up from 43% and 25% in 2022.

After his party’s losses in the midterm election, Vice President JD Vance, in a social media post, quoted a pollster’s analysis about how Republicans could win back supporters who’d abandoned them. Number four on the list: “Change our relationship to Israel.”Polling by Gallup shows that the share of Americans sympathizing more with Israelis than with Palestinians began slipping in 2018, driven by declining support among Democrats. Critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blame him for accelerating that shift by aligning himself with Republicans.

Most dramatically, in an address to the US Congress in 2015, Netanyahu denounced what was then an emerging nuclear deal with Iran that was being championed by Democratic President Barack Obama.

A steeper dropoff in American support for Israel came after Israel launched its military offensive on the Gaza Strip in response to the attacks from there by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. According to the Hamas-controlled health authority, more than 74,000 Gazans died in the war.

Israeli officials say their operations targeted Hamas fighters, with the aim of freeing Israeli hostages and preventing another Oct. 7-style attack, and that the high toll among civilians in part reflects the fact that Hamas embeds itself among them. For many Americans, images of dead Palestinian children spoke louder.

Opposition to Israel’s offensive has been especially high among young people in the US, who also have a much less favorable view of the country’s government and people than older Americans. The generations have different historical perspectives. Older Americans can remember Israel as a young, vulnerable state facing existential threats from its neighbors, whereas young adults have grown up with it as the region’s dominant military power.

Negative sentiment toward Israel has been exacerbated by the war on Iran that the US launched with Israel in February. Polls show that a solid majority of Americans — some 57% — oppose the war. And in an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted in April, just over half of respondents said Israel had too much influence over Trump’s decision to launch it. The war resulted in increased prices for gasoline and diesel, which are among the affordability issues voters ranked high among their concerns going into the midterm election.

For the first two decades after its birth in 1948, Israel wasn’t an especially close ally of the US, which embargoed arms to the new nation while cultivating ties with oil-rich Arab states. But during the Cold War, the US increasingly saw Israel as an asset against Soviet expansion into the Middle East. The US supplied arms that enabled Israel to defeat Soviet-backed Arab armies in the 1967 war and it airlifted weapons to Israel in the 1973 war.

Over subsequent decades, the relationship evolved into a values-based alliance between two democracies. American Jews, who became successful and outspoken as anti-Semitism declined, lobbied Congress and the White House to keep Israel close. So did evangelical Christians, who believe Israel’s creation foretells the second coming of Christ. Their Republican leanings made support for Israel — originally a Democratic cause due to Jews’ links to the party and Israel’s early leftist orientation — bipartisan. The 1979 Iranian revolution and Arab terrorism, including the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, tended to make Americans unsympathetic to Israel’s enemies.

Still, recent decades weren’t without previous periods of tension in the relationship. Many of them centered around US reservations about the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories Palestinians want to make part of a future, independent state. (Israel removed its Gaza settlements in 2005.) The US generally has urged Israel to pursue diplomatic solutions rather than rely solely on its military force. Alarmed by civilian casualties in the latest Gaza war, then-President Joe Biden in 2024 paused shipments of heavy bombs to Israel.

US levels of foreign aid to Israel, which are determined by Congress, have been guided by a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding between the two governments that is due to expire in 2028. Under the MOU, the US pledges, subject to congressional approval, $3.8 billion a year in military financing grants and missile defense appropriations for Israel. Before the multifront war provoked by Oct. 7, that represented about 15% of Israel’s defense budget. During emergencies, Israel has received billions of dollars in additional US defense funds, including about $14 billion between October 2023 and September 2025.

Anticipating that the MOU might not be renewed, Netanyahu proposed replacing direct military grants with joint defense initiatives. His idea was that procurement stipends would taper to zero over a decade as the two countries shifted toward co-financing research, development and production of weaponry.

But then Trump spoke of an imminent aid cutoff. If Congress goes along with that, it would leave Israel facing $20 billion to $25 billion in pending weapons orders that it may now have to cover out of its own pocket.

US forces have directly defended Israel from aerial attacks. During the 1991 US-led war reversing Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait, Washington sent Israel Patriot anti-missile batteries and their American crews to defend against attacks from Iraq. In 2024, the US military intercepted drones and missiles that Iran shot at Israel in both April and October when the long-running shadow war between the two countries erupted into direct confrontation.

Closeness with the US has given Israel access to top-of-the-shelf American military hardware, including the F-35 fighter jet. In addition, the Israelis have been able to rely on their ally for help maintaining military equipment and for spare parts, fuel and ammunition resupply. Some of these items have been prepositioned, in bulk, in Israeli depots to enable swift access when conflict breaks out.

US hardware underpins what is known as Israel’s “qualitative military edge.”A 2008 amendment to the US Arms Export Control Act precludes arms sales to other countries that would adversely affect Israel’s edge, which is defined as its ability to “defeat any credible conventional military threat.”A 2012 law established that it is official US policy “to help the government of Israel preserve” this advantage. In an environment in which Israel’s government is out of favor in Washington, the “help” offered could become meager. And these laws, like all laws, could be amended.

Winning wars — or preventing them — also depends on intelligence, which the US has provided Israel as part of a reciprocal arrangement. Washington’s global footprint and its constellation of spy satellites have given Israel a strategic and tactical edge.

The US military’s decision in 2021 to move responsibility for Israel from its European Command to its Central Command allowed the Jewish state to share intelligence indirectly with standoffish neighbors such as Saudi Arabia. That’s helped pave the way to forging expanded bilateral ties with such countries, as envisaged by Trump’s Abraham Accords.

When diplomacy has failed or faltered for Israel, it has looked to the US as a bulwark in an unfriendly United Nations. There, the US has frequently vetoed Security Council resolutions against Israel and has stood by its ally in smaller forums.

The alliance has amplified Israel’s projection of power in a Middle East that the US had dominated since the end of the Cold War. Any enemy considering an attack on the Jewish state must be mindful of potential US retaliation. During the Iran war, the stationing in Israel of US refueling jets and troops, the docking of US Navy ships at Haifa port, and the presence of a strategic US radar in the Negev desert have underscored that striking Israel would also likely rouse the US.

Also, US investors accounted for nearly 90% of foreign direct investment in Israel in 2025. While American investment has proved resilient through political turmoil and war, deteriorating bilateral relations could, in an extreme scenario, dampen investor appetite or create new barriers to investment.

A year ago, Netanyahu announced a plan to build an independent arms industry in Israel, saying, “We want to reduce our dependence on anyone, including our allies.”When it comes to producing large, complex weapons especially, the economies of scale in the US generally result in cheaper prices than a small country such as Israel can achieve. Netanyahu gave an eye-watering estimate of what his plan would cost: $450 billion skekels ($142 billion) over the next decade.

And there are some things money cannot buy, or not easily anyway. Israeli defense experts say that replacing US-supplied aircraft, for example, would be an extraordinarily tall order. Israel attempted to built its own advanced fighter jet, the Lavi, in the 1980s. The program was canceled in 1987 due to soaring development costs and intense US pressure amid concerns the Lavi might compete with American aircraft in sales to third countries.

National self-sufficiency can only go so far given that even locally assembled weapons platforms are often built using US components and software that almost no nation can entirely replace on its own.

Netanyahu has floated cultivating non-Western major powers, such as India, as supplemental — or even alternative — strategic allies to reduce Israel’s reliance on the US. That idea has gained urgency as friction with Washington grows alongside a broader push by Western European nations to impose sanctions on Israel over its conduct in Gaza and settlement expansion in the West Bank.

Expanding trade and defense ties with powers such as India offers cushioning, but it fails to solve Israel’s diplomatic vulnerability. Without the US, Israel lacks a single reliable protector among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the only nations with veto power there. Neither the UK nor France, both aligned with the European push for sanctions, would exercise a veto to shield Israel. Meanwhile, Russia and China regularly sponsor or support anti-Israel resolutions and align closely with Israel’s regional adversaries, notably Iran.

After Israel’s Oct. 27 general election, opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot has been given the first chance to form a new government and thus emerge as prime minister. If he succeeds, his policies wouldn’t immediately take the country in an entirely different direction from Netanyahu’s.

Eisenkot, a former chief commander of Israel’s military, is hawkish on security issues. Like Netanyahu, he is against the formation of a Palestinian state. However, he opposes the Netanyahu government’s aggressive strategy of expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank and has denounced settler violence and vowed to crack down on it. He has said he’d seek diplomatic solutions with Israel’s neighbors in exchange for troop withdrawals.

Eisenkot supported the US-Israeli assault on Iran. However, he rejects Netanyahu’s notion that military intervention can topple the regime in Iran and is more focused on eliminating the country’s nuclear program.