Trump Says U.S. to End $4 Billion in Aid to Israel in Favor of New Deal
The president’s announcement on Election Day, which he said was part of an agreement reached months ago, was a sign of how quickly the politics surrounding Israel have shifted.
President Trump said on Tuesday that the bulk of American aid to Israel would be “cut off at the end of the year,” under an agreement reached with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu months ago. He described the Election Day declaration chiefly as a political effort to take a “bad talking point” away from the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Exactly. That is all it is and will never happen.
The move comes as Congress was already considering phasing out the aid and instead undertaking a far more integrated defense and technology partnership built around legally mandated defense industrial cooperation between the two nations. Such a partnership could be lucrative for Israel through joint projects with the Defense Department and American military contractors.
To flesh that out, an Israel Firster in Congress, from Indiana if I remember, had the idea to make Nazraeli aid just one more item in the U.S. Defense Budget, thus muting another "bad talking point" when Members of Congress had to vote separately vote to authorize the aid.
My understanding is that R Speaker Mike Johnson pushed any budget vote off until after the midterms, to be taken up by the lame duck Congress. If that understanding is correct, Nazrael will still get its $4B this year. The new Congress can then excise it for the fiscal 2028 budget. If the budget vote does not occur in the lame duck session, aid to Nazrael, whether separate or hidden away in the mammoth budge, will have no chance of passing with the new Congress.
This is still immensely significant. As the Times sub-lede gestures, this Israel, Nazrael, the Israel of indicted-at-home-and-abroad Netanyahoo and genocide has alienated the American people, and in record time. Israel Firsters in America, most prominently AIPAC and its claimed 6.5M members, both American Jews and gentiles, are a fifth column for Israel inside America. They have coopted and corrupted, bought and sold-out, Members of Congress and American presidents.
AIPAC's influence has substantially waned, so much so that wary political candidates must now carefully weigh its political contributions against the "bad talking point" that accepting AIPAC money has become. There are literally posters now with candidate name and the amount of money accepted from AIPAC. They look like wanted posters.
I have repeated ad nauseum, and will say once again and likely in the future, that blind Israel Firsters in the U.S., especially American Jews, because they make up only 2.4% of the American population--I don't know what they are doing, to be blunt. There is nowhere on earth except in Israel and in the United States of America where Jews are beloved, respected, even admired. They risk (which has not happened yet) turning the people of the United States against them as Jews, as people. Jews worldwide have been down this road many times for millennia. Why they are risking this again, for the thousandth time, in the United States is unfathomable to me and a question that only they can answer.
