With Support for Israel Collapsed, Congress is Trying to Give Them the U.S. Military
Netanyahu calls it "Aid to Partnership." It is ownership.
For more than a millennium, an “antisemitic trope” has plagued the Jewish people in every nation they’ve sojourned in the diaspora: the anti-Jewish stereotype is that despite being a tiny minority, through cunning schemes, they’ve been able to take over the power structure of their host nation and do what is in their own best interests, against the will and interests of the nation’s Citizens. And now, through the powerful Israel Lobby in the United States, the U.S. Congress has found a workaround for collapsed public support for the Israeli war machine: instead of having to vote to appropriate financial support for the IDF every few years - which would make congressmen unpopular (and unelectable) with their constituents - just give the very same nation caught spying on us repeatedly, and repeatedly supplying our enemies with our secrets and technology, permanent ownership of the research, development, and procurement of the essential war-fighting technologies of the future. Maybe all those conspiracy theories exist for a reason. Just kidding. Of course, they do.
And now, they don’t have to pay spies like Jonathan Pollard to steal our military secrets. They will get it for free. The plan is being billed as “partnership.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down for a Fox News interview this week, and when a host asked him a direct and pointed question about the future of the American military, he gave a direct answer. When asked whether the drawdown of American foreign aid to Israel would be offset by “some sort of merger between our Pentagon and your military,” Netanyahu did not deflect. He said “Yes.” Then he kept talking, laying out, in his own words, a vision in which the United States and Israel “co-invest in emerging military technology as equal partners,” sharing the intellectual property and the payoff, in a new arrangement he has taken to calling “aid to partnership.”
Americans, beware. It is, in no uncertain terms, aid to ownership. Not partnership.
That interview aired this week on Fox, the network conservatives still “trust more than any other,” as their commercials promise, which means millions of Americans just watched the leader of a foreign nation describe, on camera, an arrangement that would fuse significant portions of the American military’s future with his own country’s defense establishment. This is not a rumor picked up from an anonymous staffer or a leaked memo, but rather the Prime Minister of Israel on American television telling us that instead of writing Israel an annual welfare check for 3.8 billion, they would co-own the research, development, and procurement of the six categories of warfare technologies that will lead us into the next 50 years of war fighting.
The stakes here are as large as anything Congress has quietly considered in a generation. Buried inside the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act sits a provision that would do exactly what Netanyahu described: merge American and Israeli military research and development into a single pipeline covering the most important weapons technologies of the next fifty years. Congress has tried twice now to strip it out and failed both times. Netanyahu just told the American public, in plain language, why it matters to him personally that the provision survives.
THE INTERVIEW AND THE ADMISSION
Netanyahu went on to explain the mechanics as he sees them. “So, we take away the money that is given to Israel, which is one part, but the other part is we coinvest in equal measures in the new technologies that are needed to give our military and your military the advantage. There are some unbelievable projects,” He added a line about the talent exchange too, saying “the meshing of our two countries of talent would strengthen America’s competitive position both in the economic marketplace and in the military battlefield in many important ways.”
Netanyahu has been laying this groundwork in public for months. Back in the spring he sat for a 60 Minutes interview and told correspondent Major Garrett he wanted to “wean” Israel off American military assistance entirely, saying he’d told President Trump the same thing directly. “I want to draw down the American support for Israel to zero,” he said then. “We’ve come of age.” He pointed to Israel’s currency, its stock market, and what he called its “high-tech juggernaut economy” as the reason Israel no longer needs a check from Washington the way it once did. That interview was the first public signal. The Fox interview this week confirms that specific legislation now exists to make it happen.
He put it in writing too. On June 1, Netanyahu sent a letter to Congressman Marlin Stutzman of Indiana thanking him for supporting the plan to reshape the US-Israel military relationship. “Israel deeply appreciates the financial component of the military aid the United States has generously provided us over the years,” he wrote. “The time has now arrived for us to move from aid recipient to partner.” He also told an Israeli audience directly, in a separate appearance, that he wants the American aid phaseout to start immediately. “I want to stop American aid,” he said. “We can finance ourselves.”
That’s how growing up works, right? Your child turns of age, is ready to leave home and live on their own. So you add him to your bank accounts, the titles of your cars, and the deed to your house. Right? Is that not how “coming of age” works? No, it doesn’t. You let them pack a bag, drive away in their own car, having paid the insurance themselves, and move into their own apartment somewhere across town and stand on their own two feet. You don’t make them co-owners in your business ventures. We don’t cut agricultural aid to Ethiopia and then make them partners in the USDA.
So Americans are not dealing with a foreign leader who dropped an offhand comment in an interview. They are dealing with a foreign leader who has spent months building a public and private case, to his own citizens, to a sitting congressman, and now to the American television audience, for a specific piece of legislation that most of the country has never heard of.
SECTION 219, THE BILL HE’S TALKING ABOUT
The mechanism Netanyahu described has a name, and it is currently in the National Defense Authorization Act. It was originally numbered Section 224 when it first appeared in committee. It has since been renumbered Section 219, though nothing about its substance changed in the renumbering. It carries the bureaucratically bland title “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” the kind of name Washington reaches for whenever it is doing something it would rather not have to defend on the evening news.
What the provision actually does is direct the Secretary of Defense to appoint a dedicated official, an executive agent, whose sole job is to synchronize American and Israeli defense development across six frontier technology domains. Those domains are artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems, quantum computing, cybersecurity and full network data integration, directed energy weapons, counter-drone systems, and biotechnology. Every one of those six domains is where serious defense planners already agree the next generation of warfare will be decided. This is not a proposal to share intelligence briefings or run joint training exercises the way normal allies do. This is co-development from the research stage forward, meaning Israeli engineers sit at the table before an American weapon system even exists on paper.
Quincy Institute analyst Ben Freeman reviewed the provision’s language and told the Daily Caller News Foundation exactly what it would do institutionally. The language “would install an ‘executive agent’ in the DoD to expand and accelerate US-Israel defense integration,” he said, calling the position “a promoter for the Israeli military industrial complex, installed in the Pentagon with precedence over other DoD component heads.” He went further on what happens to the information itself once the systems are fused. “Our data would literally become Israel’s data.”
Keep in mind. This is the nation that has given our nuclear secrets to Russia and sold our weapons tech to China.
The Senate has its own companion version sitting in Section 1217, carrying the acronym-engineered title “United States-Israel Framework for Upgraded Technologies, Unified Research, and Enhanced Security Act.” A related bill called the FUTURES Act, introduced back in February, would authorize $450 million over three years for the same purpose, though that particular bill has stalled without progress. The core language survives inside the NDAA regardless.
THE FIGHT IN CONGRESS
Two lawmakers who agree on almost nothing else joined forces to try to kill this provision, and it is worth laying out exactly how that fight has gone, because the sequence matters and it has been reported with real sloppiness elsewhere. Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California, first tried to strip the provision during the House Armed Services Committee’s markup of the bill back in the spring. That committee voted to keep the language in the bill, rejecting Khanna’s effort at that stage.
Khanna and Congressman Thomas Massie, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky Republican, then teamed up on a second attempt, this one aimed at the House floor rather than committee. Their plan was to force a floor vote on an amendment to strip the provision entirely once the full NDAA reached the floor. Getting that amendment onto the floor required the House Rules Committee to rule it “in order,” since the Rules Committee controls which of the more than one thousand proposed amendments to a defense bill actually get a vote. The Rules Committee declined to allow it. No debate. No vote. The Massie-Khanna amendment simply never made the list.
That should have been the end of the story for this legislative session, and it very nearly was, except for what happened next. Before the House could even proceed to debating the underlying NDAA itself, it had to pass a separate procedural resolution setting the terms for that debate. On June 30, that resolution failed on the House floor by a vote of 198 to 224. The defeat of the procedural rule meant the House never reached the stage where any amendment, including the one Massie and Khanna wanted, could receive a vote of any kind. The bill is now stuck, awaiting a second attempt at a procedural resolution before it can move forward again.
Massie has already said he intends to use that second opportunity. Writing on July 6, he laid it out. “My amendment to strip section 219 from the NDAA was rejected last week by the Rules Committee without even a debate, but their rule for the NDAA didn’t pass the House,” he wrote. “When we reconvene, I will offer my amdt again to strip the merger of our military supply chain with Israel’s.” He had said something similar before any of this played out, warning back when the provision still carried its original number that he would fight it on the floor if it survived committee. “If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor,” he wrote then. “We are a sovereign country.”
Those five words, “we are a sovereign country,” were apparently too much for some of his Republican colleagues to hear without reaching for an accusation. Congressman Derrick Van Orden responded to Massie’s stated position by accusing him of antisemitism. Asking whether the United States should retain sole command of its own weapons programs has somehow become the thing you get smeared for asking.
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