For decades, Israel has received more funding from the U.S. than almost any other country, apart from Washington’s aid to nations in active wars like Ukraine, Iraq and Afghanistan. Following the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, Congress provided $18 billion in military aid at a time when international bodies and human rights organizations accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. In 2016, the Obama administration approved a 10-year, $38 billion funding package for Israel that expires in 2028.
Now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Trump administration are planning to move future U.S. funding for Israel out of the State Department and into the so-called War Department budget. Integrating Israel in U.S. military spending would expand coordination between the two countries into virtually every area of defense research and development. This arrangement would make it difficult to track U.S. funding, conduct oversight, and limit options to oppose funding for Israel’s military in Congress.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Annelle Sheline, who resigned from the State Department in March 2024 in protest over President Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza. She now serves as a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Here she explains the danger this funding change would present and the likelihood of its approval by Congress as part of the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act.
The Israel lobby is trying very hard to shield this money that the U.S. sends to Israel and that’s the reason they want to move it from this process that is carried out under the State Department to the Pentagon procurement process where it would go into the vast and growing Pentagon budget, which now exceeds a trillion dollars each year, where there would be no kinds of legal attachments to it. Very limited visibility. And Congress wouldn’t get the chance to vote on it each year the way it currently does.
And this is very much an intentional effort to shield this massive amount of money that the U.S. sends Israel each year and to grow it. So again, this would be a tectonic shift in the way that this money is sent to Israel, the kind of visibility and accountability attached to it. And then also this has huge implications for American security because part of this, at present, the Israeli military continues to remain highly dependent on the United States. All of their planes, for example, are American-made and they can’t fly without ongoing parts and maintenance from the United States. And that theoretically gives the United States some degree of leverage.
If the U.S. president said, “We don’t want you dropping any more bombs on Gaza or Lebanon,” for that matter, we could insist that Israel no longer do so and say, “Look, we’re going to withhold our support for you. We’re not going to send any more security assistance. We’re not going to offer spare parts for your military because you’re violating our laws around these violations of human rights.” Another very alarming component of this, a separate component is on intelligence sharing. At present, the Defense Intelligence Agency recently leaked a report indicating that concerns about Israeli spying on the United States are at an all-time high. They’ve never been this concerned about Israeli efforts to conduct espionage on the United States and steal our most important government secrets. This was in the context of the Iran war. Israel not liking the fact that Trump was trying to negotiate an end to the war with Iran, despite the fact that that was very much in U.S. interests, in the interests of Americans who are suffering from the effects of inflation and higher gas prices, etc. whereas Israel wanted to keep that war going.
And so they were trying to gather information on us to find ways of keeping it going, which now clearly we see. The war has resumed. We are putting ourselves in a position of extreme vulnerability to, again, this country that has not shown itself to be trustworthy. It is really shocking that we see Congress voting in this manner. It passed the House already and now is going to go to the Senate. The members of the Senate Armed Services Committee approved their version of the $1.14 trillion defense policy bill back in June, but Senate Democrats have blocked it from moving to the floor over opposition to the war with Iran and concerns about defense spending growth. I don’t think they have yet scheduled it for a vote in the Senate. I suspect that the Senate will vote on it and I imagine it will pass. But our understanding is that many, many constituents have been calling both their House members and their senators expressing extreme opposition to this effort to transform the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
For more information, visit Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft at quincyinst.org.
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