For decades, the safest consensus position for a politician of either party looking to keep their job in Washington has been to support continued US aid to Israel. After this week, it looks increasingly clear a new political reality is emerging: that the relationship between the two countries needs to fundamentally change.
On the morning of Election Day, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would stop providing $US4 billion in aid to Israel in 2027, citing a desire to take a talking point away from progressive Democratic critics of Israel such as Abdul El-Sayed, who won a Senate seat last week in Michigan. On Wednesday, after the extent of GOP losses had become clear, Vice President JD Vance went further with a post on X that suggested support for Israel was a key reason for the defeat.
Trump’s announcement came as a surprise in both Washington and Jerusalem, though it remains unclear whether or when US military aid to Israel will actually come to an end, given that the funds in question are allocated by Congress, not the President. Still, the unilateral withdrawal of aid to Israel – once seen as a political third rail – is an indication of how much the bloody war in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the unpopular US-Israel war on Iran have both shifted the terrain.
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Decreasing or stopping this aid is now a position supported by the majority of Americans, according to a Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll, and backed by parties from left-wing progressives to mainstream Democratic leaders such as the presumptive incoming House speaker, Hakeem Jeffries (New York), to the White House. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has supported the idea.
In a call with reporters, a Democratic Senate aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss legislative plans still taking shape, acknowledged there was growing support for “actually treating Israel for what it is at this point. It is a net security provider to a number of other countries, and it is probably one of the most technologically advanced countries.”
As a new Congress begins to take shape – and as the 2028 presidential campaign begins in earnest – the contours of a new relationship with Israel are emerging.
A report released Monday by the lobbying group J Street puts forward some ideas. Founded in 2007 as the progressive alternative to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, J Street now argues that it represents the more mainstream position. For its part, AIPAC released a statement Wednesday congratulating the “hundreds of pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans who won their elections last night.”
“There’s been a seismic shift in the politics of Israel-Palestine since J Street was founded,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s founder and president. “Our positions and values have remained constant over these two decades, but what was well outside the mainstream two decades ago represents the centre of the political map today.”
The report goes beyond phasing out the $US3.8 billion in annual military aid and proposes conditioning future weapons sales – which Trump has vowed to continue – on whether Israel complies with US human rights law in Gaza and the West Bank. It also proposes ruling out future defence agreements between the two countries until Israel complies with the 2025 Gaza ceasefire agreement. In addition, it calls for an end to the US-Israeli war on Iran.
The report argues for US recognition of a Palestinian state and using sanctions to punish settlers who perpetrate violence in the West Bank as well as entities financing new settlement construction. It also proposes removing the Trump administration’s sanctions against the International Criminal Court for its investigations and indictments of Israeli officials, including Netanyahu.
Ilan Goldenberg, a senior vice president at J Street and former Pentagon staffer and adviser to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, argues that the recommendations could provide a blueprint for members of Congress looking to navigate between the “unconditional support approach” long promoted by groups such as AIPAC, which could alienate left-wing voters, and the explicitly anti-Zionist messaging among Congress’s new left flank, which could alienate moderates.
“The days of ‘Israel right or wrong’ are over,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East peace negotiator for four US administrations now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For more moderate Democrats today, he suggested, the stance may be “Israel isn’t always wrong.”
A watershed movement in this shift was the July speech that former Chicago mayor and potential presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel, a longtime supporter of Israel and former civilian volunteer in the Israel Defense Forces, gave in Tel Aviv warning that Israel’s current policies risked turning it into a “pariah.”
“This is a very conservative, very pro-Israel Democrat, and in that speech, he was laying down a set of measures that was actually to the left of where Bernie was in 2020,” said Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), now with the Center for International Policy.
As for the impact in Israel, both Yair Lapid and Gadi Eisenkot, leaders of the coalition of opposition parties seeking to unseat Netanyahu, posted messages following the US election arguing that they were the best qualified to reach out to Americans across the political spectrum and repair the damage done in the Netanyahu years.
Notably, neither Lapid nor Eisenkot backs significant changes to Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories or the war in Iran along the lines of J Street’s report. Eisenkot last week argued that Trump’s announcement of the cutoff of aid was a “massive failure” for the Netanyahu that demonstrates he can no longer be trusted with Israel’s security.
Reflecting on the Israeli political system’s reaction, Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres now with the US-based Israel Policy Forum, said, “I don’t think the people have internalized how bad things have become and the impact of the last four years in eroding every historic pillar of the relationship.”
Noah Robertson contributed to this report.
© 2026 , The Washington Post
