Earlier this year, as the United States and Israel ran roughshod over the sovereignty of countries the world over, independent researchers unearthed an obscure but crucial provision in the annual military policy bill. Buried in the text of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2027 was “The US-Israel Defense Cooperation Act,” a misnomer to be sure.
If enacted into law, the provision would radically transform the nature of military cooperation between the US and Israel. Most importantly, it would make it far more difficult for Congress and the American public to track, much less wield any influence over, Washington’s financial and military support for Israel.
The proposal comes at a pivotal moment. Israel’s support in the US has plummeted to a historic low due to its genocidal attacks on the Gaza Strip, its far-reaching campaign of repression in the West Bank, its occupation and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, and its brutal, illegal war on Iran. In July, the Pew Research Center released a poll that found 60% of American adults had an unfavorable view of Israel, a sharp increase from the years before Israel’s war on Gaza.
Against this backdrop of crumbling support for Israel, the House of Representatives passed the bill containing the provision in July. It is still awaiting Senate approval. If it gets greenlit, this new plan will fuse the US and Israeli militaries in unprecedented ways. For one, it would worryingly embed Israeli technology in American supply lines. On top of that, it would undoubtedly make it more difficult than ever to seek and impose accountability for Israel’s use and abuse of American funding and technology.
As criticism of this plan has mounted, its proponents have offered vague, obfuscating defenses. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has framed it as an evolution of the US-Israel relationship that would move away from “one-sided aid.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest political action committee donor during the 2024 US election, has described it as “a critical new provision to strengthen and streamline US-Israel defense technology cooperation.”
The provision’s backers, of course, are leaving out important details.
If implemented, the industrial integration plan would have serious strategic and economic implications, but its biggest impact would be political. Under current policy, Congress gets to vote on a military aid package to Israel that has come in at least $3.8 billion per year in recent times. The industrial integration effort, though, would effectively hide US support deep in the Pentagon budget, making it harder to ferret out, accurately quantify, or oppose. It would also pose serious strategic risks by further linking the US to Israel’s reckless, illegal conduct in the Middle East.
Since 2023 alone, that conduct has included the deaths of more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, nearly 9,000 people in Lebanon, and several thousand in Iran. And that is to say nothing of injuries, arrests, land theft, or destroyed homes, hospitals, and schools, to name a few.
As the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Ben Freeman has argued, the new provision “would arguably do more to intertwine the US military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (adjusted for inflation) in military assistance Israel has received from the US since its founding in 1948.” And he has a point. In place of an annual aid package in the billions of dollars, the new approach would, in Freeman’s words, lay “the groundwork for bilateral research and development of co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every other manner of US-Israeli military-industrial cooperation.”
Freeman breaks down the details of the extraordinary breadth of US-Israeli cooperation that would follow on the approval and implementation of the industrial integration plan, going beyond cooperation on missile defense to include “every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more.”
In other words, the proposed change in how the US supports Israeli industry could lead to Israel getting more US funding than it already receives under current aid policies, but the funds would come from the Pentagon, in the form of research and development and production contracts. These funding streams are much harder to track — and subject to far less regulation — than arms transfers and military aid, which on paper at least impose human rights vetting and give Congress a potential veto.
Those strictures have never been successfully used to limit arms and aid to Israel, but there is a growing cohort in Congress and the public seeking to use such tools to condition or terminate military aid to Israel because of its lawless conduct, carried out with US complicity.
It’s no surprise Netanyahu is a big booster of a plan to integrate the US and Israeli military industries as an alternative to the current approach of providing a large military aid package to Tel Aviv every year.
Proponents of holding Israel accountable for its actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and in the current war on Iran need to put maximum pressure on Congress to block the industrial integration plan. Otherwise it will be all the more difficult to end US involvement in, and responsibility for, the crimes committed by the Israeli military. What’s more, it will spell dire strategic and human consequences for America and the people of the Middle East. If it is allowed to stand, this plan could effectively give Israel both a blank check and a freehand, and Americans will have even less say in how their tax money funds militarism and war abroad.
