(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) The United States and Israel are negotiating a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that would extend US military aid to Israel through 2033 and increase US funding for Israeli missile development, despite President Donald Trump claiming he would end the aid by 2027, according to a report from the Israeli news site Ynet.
The US currently provides Israel with a minimum of $3.8 billion in military aid each year under an MoU negotiated under the Obama administration that expires in 2028. It includes $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing, a State Department program that provides foreign governments with funds to purchase US arms, and $500 million through the Pentagon for missile defense funding.
The Ynet report said that the plan would be to halve the 10-year MoU term to five years and keep the FMF funding at $3.3 billion per year while increasing the $500 million missile fund to an unspecified amount. The idea would be to phase out the aid after the five years, which aligns with a plan backed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift the US-Israel relationship “from aid to partnership.”
The purpose of the Netanyahu plan is to further integrate the US and Israeli military industries, and it is being advanced through Section 219, an amendment tucked into the House’s version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. The Senate’s version of the NDAA includes a similar amendment, though so far the two chambers haven’t negotiated the final bill.
Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute recently warned that if the integration moves forward, Israel could “end up getting WAY more” than the $3.8 billion it receives annually from the US and that the funds would “just be buried in the DoD budget.” Freeman made the comments after Trump declared on Election Day that he and Netanyahu agreed the US would end military aid by the end of the year.
The Ynet report said that the US and Israel are hoping to finalize the new MoU before the new Congress is sworn in this January and that the negotiations have involved representatives working on behalf of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and officials from Israel’s Defense Ministry and its embassy in Washington.
Since October 7, 2023, the US has provided significantly more military aid than the annual $3.8 billion package to support its genocidal campaign in Gaza and its other various wars in the region. On top of the direct financial aid, the US has also fired $11 billion worth of interceptors defending Israel from missile attacks during the wars with Iran, and has reportedly deployed an additional Patriot missile defense system to Israel to prepare for the next potential escalation.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
