Israel, and its allies in Congress, want to replace military assistance with something much worse. Here’s what you need to know.
By Josh Paul, reposted from Zeteo, June 25, 2026
Currently, the U.S. gives Israel $3.3 billion a year in taxpayer-funded weapons financing. Ending that handout has been a principal demand of the pro-Palestine movement for years. Now, even voices, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Republican Senator (and Israel hawk) Lindsey Graham, are talking about winding it down. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
Well, yes, if that was all there is to it. But the problem is the proposal that’s being offered in place of the grant military assistance Israel currently receives – something called the U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. That plan – currently making its way through Congress as a part of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – is being sold as “business as usual”; nothing to see here, just continued cooperation between two technologically advanced militaries.
In my experience in over a decade in the arms transfer section of the State Department, giving access to America’s most sensitive defense technologies is never business as usual. So, how to think about this proposal?
This summer, millions of Americans will head to the beach. One of the enduring boardwalk attractions is the shell game – the mark is shown a pea, which is then hidden under one of three shells. If you can follow the movement fast enough to tap the right shell, you win the pot. But the game is rigged. What you see is not what you actually get.
Israel, and its allies in Congress, are currently engaged in just such a shell game. They want you to believe they’re winding down U.S. funding for Israel’s military – transitioning it to a more equal cooperative relationship that benefits all of us. But it’s a scam, and to beat it, you need to know how it works.
The U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation is captured in Section 219 of the version of the NDAA that will be making its way to the floor of the House of Representatives in the coming weeks. It does four main things you need to know about. Let’s break them down:
1. It directs the secretary of defense to identify “jointly developed or Israeli-origin technologies with operational utility for potential integration into United States systems and programs of record.”
A “Program of Record” is a technical term meaning long-term major procurements by the U.S. military for its own use. Essentially, this provision means that the future U.S. weapons system our forces rely on will depend on Israeli subcomponents. Today, Israel is dependent on U.S. weapons and components to keep almost every major system it uses operational, giving the U.S. significant leverage over Israel (if only it would ever use it) by the threat of being able to withhold those parts. Now imagine if the situation were flipped – if a major U.S. weapons system, such as an aircraft or a missile defense system, could not function without Israel approving the export of the necessary part.
The shell game: Today, Israel’s political influence in America is exerted through the ability of its allies, such as AIPAC, to shape decision-making through the role of money in elections; as that wanes, this provision creates a new route for Israel to exert influence: by creating dependency for the U.S. military.
2. It directs the establishment of “frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry.”
Let’s say a future Congress and president decided that having the U.S. military depend on Israeli technology was a bad idea. They could rescind the directive to integrate Israeli tech into DOD weapons systems, and – over time – develop U.S. alternatives to the foreign parts. That would be tough, but doable. (The recent effort to ‘unwind’ Turkey from the F-35 program is an example of both the difficulty and potentiality of this.)
Now imagine that this integration doesn’t simply rely on government-to-government agreements, but a network of contracts between private defense companies and research institutions in the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. government can’t simply dive in and tear up hundreds – perhaps thousands – of private contracts, and even if it could, the court challenges, and the costs to U.S. entities, would be extensive and take many years to sort through, while joint ventures and co-production would mean it’s not just private capital on the line – it’s also American jobs, making this even more politically difficult.
The shell game: Right now, when the U.S. “gives” Israel $3.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing, over $3 billion of that is used to buy weapons from the U.S. – Israel saves money it would otherwise have to spend on those arms, freeing up its budget for other purposes (it’s worth noting, for instance, that Israelis enjoy highly subsidized healthcare and higher education), but it doesn’t actually ‘see’ most of the U.S. money itself. Now imagine that Israel’s defense industry is given direct access to the $300+ billion Defense Department weapons procurement & research budgets – and can compete for that funding against U.S. industry, thanks to the coproduction aspect of this provision, which lets it bypass existing Buy America laws – laws meant to protect core U.S. industries from foreign competitors.
This is a windfall for the Israeli defense industry – and the Israeli economy writ large – that not only dwarfs the current arrangement in potential scale, but also, unlike the current grant assistance, is a direct infusion of U.S. funding into Israel’s economy. And instead of the current funding – which has to go through a highly visible, and increasingly contentious, annual Congressional approval process, this financial flow would be buried deep in the opaque Defense Department procurement and contracts process, sheltered from the political winds of Washington, DC.
3. It directs those areas of cooperation to take place in a list of 10 domains, including the most sensitive areas of U.S. defense technology, such as AI, quantum, directed energy, data fusion, and biotechnology.
The U.S. does not share its most sensitive military technologies with just anyone. There is a complex regulatory framework – the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) that limits foreign access to the “crown jewels” of our defense capabilities. A recent agreement with Australia and the UK has expanded areas of research in some of these ‘domains,’ but the list of technologies in Section 219 goes well beyond the discrete areas covered by that agreement – and Israel differs from Five Eyes partners like Australia and the UK in terms of both lack of strategic alignment with the U.S., as well as its willingness – and that of its defense industry – to bend, or even break, the rules when it comes to coveted technologies and industrial secrets.
The threat Israeli surveillance technologies can pose is well documented, but one of the most pernicious risks in the set of capabilities captured in this provision is biotech. It’s true that Israel has a burgeoning biotech sector; it’s also true that Israel is one of only four countries that have never signed, let alone ratified, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), a global instrument that bans offensive biological weapons – and there is plenty of reason to believe Israel may operate such a program. Deepening U.S. cooperation in this area with a country that is not a party to the BWC would be unprecedented, dangerous, and may be a violation of the U.S. government’s own commitments under the Convention.
The shell game: By opening up a range of emerging technologies to Israel, the U.S isn’t just sharing critical research; it is giving Israeli companies, which exist in a less constrained regulatory environment, the opportunity to spin these capabilities off into the commercial sector, creating further economic benefit for Israel’s industry on the back of American technology.
4. It instructs the secretary of defense to appoint an ‘executive agent’ to ride herd over the program, pushing it to implementation (parallel legislation making its way through the Senate does not include this executive agent, but instead tells the secretary of defense to consult with the Israeli minister of defense, including on what Israeli technologies might be best integrated into U.S. systems).
Per DoD Directive 5101.01, an executive agent holds authority that takes precedence over other DoD component heads performing related functions. So, this language would create an official responsible for pushing the initiative who may be able to overrule the decisions of DoD officials who object or express concerns – think the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA), responsible for protecting our most sensitive military technologies, or the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), responsible for rooting out foreign espionage efforts.
The Senate version of the bill thankfully does not include an executive agent – although its requirement for the secretary of defense to consult with his Israeli counterpart in determining the Israeli technologies to be integrated into U.S. systems is barely any less eyebrow-raising.
The shell game: Under the current grant funding mechanism, the U.S. and Israel meet every year to review the funding, and for Israel to explain how it plans to use the money, and why. That process is led by an undersecretary in the State Department, whose ultimate purview is to ensure that U.S. funding aligns with U.S. foreign policy goals. Under Section 219, that oversight would go away; instead, it would be replaced by a single bureaucrat whose only mission would be to deepen and expand the cooperation. Israel would not have to explain its strategic objectives, and the need to ensure U.S. funding is aligned with U.S. foreign policy goals would vanish entirely.
Some argue that Israel has some “exciting” military technologies from which the U.S. could benefit. Well, perhaps. But nothing is stopping the Defense Department from buying those technologies today, and yet the U.S. imports less defense tech from Israel today than it does from countries like Japan or Italy. If this proposal were based on the merits of DoD’s technology needs, surely those countries would make more sense as a starting point for such collaboration than Israel?
At the end of the day, this is not about U.S. interests; it is about timing. When it comes to the continued viability of U.S. handouts to the Israeli military, everyone can see the writing on the wall: the days of Congress continuing to write a blank check every year are limited. Indeed, if Democrats recapture the House this November, they may be ending even sooner than expected. Section 219 presents a panacea for those who want to shield the relationship from political change: it lets American politicians say they are ending the handouts, it lets Israel retain (perhaps even expand) its influence over America’s military, and it lets Benjamin Netanyahu go into an election this fall with a financial windfall for his country’s economy.
But this is all a sleight of hand, and the shill here is Americans. The American people do not want our nation bound increasingly tightly to a country so willing to use its might to commit atrocities, and it is not in our national interest to expose so much of our most sensitive military technologies to – and create a new area of leverage for – a foreign nation.
When it comes to the shell game, the safe bet isn’t to follow the ball – it’s not to play at all.
Josh Paul is the co-founder of A New Policy, which was founded in October 2024 with the goal of reshaping US policies toward Israel and Palestine and bringing them in line with America’s interests. Paul resigned from the Biden administration over its policy of unconditional support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
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