November 3, 2026
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States will stop providing $4 billion in aid each year to Israel in 2027 as the longtime allies move toward a relationship centered more on arms sales and defense cooperation, President Donald Trump said Tuesday.
The Republican president told Fox News Channel during a phone call on Election Day for the midterms that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approached him about the idea and that they have been talking about it for a couple of years.
Trump said Israel no longer needs the aid and is capable of purchasing military equipment itself. He also said the nearly $4 billion annual commitment is a significant amount for the U.S. to spend. Trump added that U.S. aid to Israel has become a Democratic talking point for candidates such as Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a vocal critic of Israel.
Even conservatives who have supported Trump in the past have taken issue with U.S. support for Israel, with prominent commentators like Tucker Carlson openly questioning the value of the relationship.
“You can consider it barter. You can consider military aid or cash,” Trump said. “Look, we give them $4 billion of things and money, and they don’t need it. And I was approached by Bibi Netanyahu, and we’ve been talking about it for a couple of years because it’s a lot of money.”
The United States has provided Israel with billions of dollars in military assistance under a longstanding security partnership.
In 2016, President Barack Obama, a Democrat, signed a security agreement with Israel to provide its military $38 billion over 10 years, amounting to $3.8 billion a year. Under the agreement, Israel’s ability to spend part of the funds on Israeli military products was to be phased out, and eventually all of the money would be spent on American military industries.
Netanyahu has talked about the need to wean Israel off the aid in the past as Israel’s economy and defense industry have grown, and has said that American aid would end at some point.
He told The Economist in January that he wanted to “taper off” U.S. military aid in the next 10 years and that such a change was “in the works.”
Congress will have a large say in what happens.
Behind the scenes, there have been discussions about restructuring the U.S.-Israel arrangement in the long term into more of a partnership between the two countries’ defense technology and weapons manufacturing industries.
The 2027 National Defense Authorization Act includes a provision that would expand U.S.-Israeli cooperation on the development of new defense technology and identify opportunities to integrate Israeli defense technology into the U.S. military. The NDAA has not yet been approved by Congress.
There has been some concern from the Israeli side that such a shift in the relationship could result in the Israelis giving up their intellectual property while still facing constraints by the U.S., according to a person who is familiar with the diplomatic discussions but was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The optics of the aid had also become an issue, according to Trump, who singled out El-Sayed for using it as a talking point.
“The left uses the $4 billion payment — that everybody knows about, it’s no secret — as a signal of unfairness,” Trump said Tuesday on Fox. “And we can’t allow that to happen. I don’t like that, because it’s too easy. It’s almost too easy a target. And Bibi and I have been talking, and we’ve agreed. He was very understanding of it.”
Phasing out direct military aid to Israel has long been a subject of debate in both countries and has gained traction in recent years as Israel has become increasingly capable of financing its own defense needs.
The shift would not necessarily end U.S.-Israeli military cooperation. Instead, the relationship could increasingly rely on Israeli purchases of American weapons, joint defense development, and cooperation between the two countries’ defense industries.
Much of the assistance the U.S. currently provides Israel comes in the form of foreign military financing, or FMF, that gives Israel the money but requires it to spend the money on American-produced weaponry, meaning the funds are returned to the U.S. economy through purchases from American defense companies.
If Israel replaces some or all of that assistance with direct purchases of American military equipment, U.S. defense contractors could continue to benefit from the relationship.
Even if aid were to be suddenly cut off, there would still be many years of previous purchases in the pipeline waiting to be delivered. Most purchases take years from the sale to construction and then delivery.
An academic study published last year showed that the U.S., under the administrations of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and Trump, provided at least $21.7 billion in military assistance to Israel after the start of the Gaza war in 2023. The study was published on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in Israel that provoked the conflict.
Another study, also published last year by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs, said the U.S. had spent roughly $10 billion more on security aid and operations in the broader Middle East in the previous two years.
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