A very senior defense official told me something this week that most Americans arguing about Israel have not caught up to. Israel’s goal in the new defense talks with Washington, he said, is to move from the status of “aid” to the status of “partnership.”
Our senior military correspondent, Yonah Jeremy Bob, gave the idea a name: not an MOU, an MOP. A memorandum of partnership.
Remember that term, because Washington is about to have a loud fight over “ending aid to Israel,” and almost nobody in the fight has noticed that both governments already want it to end.
The current memorandum of understanding, $38 billion over 10 years, expires in 2028. Talks on its replacement opened last month, led on our side by Defense Ministry Director-General Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amir Baram and Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter. The ministry’s announcement said the goal is to “gradually transition from aid to a completely reciprocal partnership.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it in writing with a letter backing a resolution by Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Indiana) to phase out the annual $3.8b.: “The time has now arrived for us to move from aid recipient to partner.”
Even Gil Pinchas, the military’s outgoing chief financial adviser, waved off the “free money” as the least important part of the relationship.
So, the coming fight in Washington is over the wrong question. The aid era ends either way. What matters is what replaces it, and whether Americans have any idea what they get out of the deal.
For 50 years, the alliance has been sold in the vocabulary of charity. Aid. Assistance. Generosity. That vocabulary was never accurate, and it has become the relationship’s biggest political weakness. If it is charity, it is a gift, and gifts get withdrawn when the giver’s mood changes.
The mood is changing.
Everyone is attacking the same deal
Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff, US ambassador to Japan, and possible 2028 presidential candidate, came to Tel Aviv this week and gave the mainstream Democratic version: Israel is rich, US voters are drifting, end the subsidies, sell Israel weapons like any other ally.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), from the America First flank, attacked the new US-Israel defense technology initiative. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), a progressive, attacked it from the other side.
The Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank that advocates a smaller US footprint abroad, warns of a “disappearing aid check” and visible grants reorganized into Pentagon procurement pipelines that are harder to monitor.
Pro-Palestinian activists say co-production is just a new pipe for taxpayer money to Israeli defense firms.
Read those critiques again. Not one of them claims the relationship is shrinking. Quincy, the sharpest of the bunch, argues the opposite: The partnership is getting deeper, more industrial, less visible. On the description, the critics are right. They just skip the only question that matters in alliance politics. Is it a good deal for America?
The polling explains the urgency. A survey this month by AP-NORC, the Associated Press’s polling arm, found that 31% of Americans, including roughly half of Democrats, say Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide.
Israel denies the accusation, Washington denies it, and I reject it. But the political fact stands. The generation that took this alliance for granted is leaving the stage. The one replacing it wants a transactional case. Israel had better have one.
Two numbers before we go further
The loudest American argument against the MOU has nothing to do with strategy: Why send billions to Israel when Americans cannot afford health care?
Fair anger, bad math. US health spending hit $5.3 trillion in 2024. The MOU is $3.8b. a year, roughly 0.07% of that. Real money, worth scrutinizing, and irrelevant to why an insulin prescription costs what it costs.
Second number: where the money goes. Almost none of it is cash handed to Jerusalem. The financing gets spent overwhelmingly on American aircraft, munitions, and components, and the agreement phases out Israel’s right to spend any of it at home. By 2028, essentially every dollar lands in US factories and US jobs.
Strip away the charity language and the MOU starts to look like an American industrial policy tool that arms an ally and buys Washington influence over Israeli procurement and strategy that no treaty could.
What America gets
Israel has learned air defense because it has been attacked. The US has unmatched military scale, but no American system has faced what Israeli defenses have faced: rockets from Gaza, missiles from Lebanon, drones from Yemen, ballistic missiles from Iran, and mixed barrages built to saturate and exhaust layered defenses.
Trump’s “Golden Dome” homeland-defense concept drew directly on Israel’s multitiered architecture. America can simulate missile barrages. Israel has had to intercept them over its own cities. That education flows to Washington at a fraction of what it would cost to buy alone.
Cyber runs on the same asymmetry. The US is the dominant cyber power. Israel has built rare strength in specific niches because it is attacked constantly, and the best-known example of the combination, according to foreign reports, remains the operation against Iran’s nuclear program, which The Washington Post attributed to US and Israeli experts working together.
AI-enabled warfare is the uncomfortable one. Israel’s battlefield use of decision-support and digital command systems raises hard legal and moral questions, and it should. But that is exactly why the experience matters to the Pentagon: real data on what worked, what failed, and what must be constrained, before America faces a peer war. Some of these lessons should be copied. Some should be restrained. All should be studied.
And the quietest item on the ledger may be the biggest. Israel has no NATO-style treaty. No American soldier is obligated to defend Tel Aviv. Israel absorbs the pressure from Iran and its proxies directly – in a region Washington cannot ignore but no longer wants to garrison. A weaker Israel would not make the Middle East calmer. It would make America’s choices harder.
Where the critics are right
The move from visible grants to industrial integration could weaken oversight. Take that seriously. A deeper partnership needs more accountability, not less: congressional review, reporting requirements, end-use monitoring. A democracy asking allies for support has to be able to explain how it fights.
And we should be honest about our own side of the ledger. Dependence on Washington is a vulnerability. Future administrations may attach conditions Israel cannot accept. A serious country builds its own production capacity, and Washington will respect Israel more for doing it, not less.
The bottom line
Sell the next agreement as charity, and it will lose, because charity is the weakest possible case for $3.8b. a year in a country arguing about insulin prices. The stronger case has been sitting in plain sight the whole time: a strategic investment with a measurable American return in production, technology, intelligence, deterrence, and battlefield learning. That case holds up in front of any audience, including the skeptics.
Israel should stop talking like a needy recipient. America should stop pretending this is philanthropy. Both governments have decided the aid era is over. Now they should have the confidence to name what comes next.
Not an MOU, an MOP.