A letter from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has exposed the driving force behind the push to restructure US-Israel military relations. In Netanyahu’s own words, it is “my plan”.
The letter, shared widely on social media, reveals that the transition away from American military aid to Israel is not a US-led reform, but an Israeli initiative delivered to Congress for legislative packaging. Its purpose is not to reduce American entanglement with Israel, but to replace visible financial assistance with a far deeper and less accountable form of military integration.
Dated 1 June, 2026 and addressed to Israeli lobby funded Congressman Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, the letter was released alongside a press statement announcing a House resolution introduced by Stutzman on 3 June.
In the letter, Netanyahu writes that he is “heartened” by Stutzman’s support for a plan to “develop a new Memorandum of Understanding with the United States government” that will draw down “US financial military assistance over the next decade” and replace it with “a new framework of joint defence cooperation, codevelopment, coproduction and mutual investment” in areas including advanced missile defence, artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, cybersecurity and next-generation military platforms.
Netanyahu met Stutzman in Jerusalem on 27 May, 2026, one week before the resolution was introduced. Stutzman’s office said the resolution was introduced after the meeting and after Netanyahu gave his “enthusiastic support” for the legislation. The sequence suggests that the legislation was not simply a congressional initiative endorsed by Israel, but an Israeli initiative channelled through Congress.
The framing of ending US aid has been welcomed in some quarters as a sign that Israel is becoming self-sufficient and that the United States is reducing its financial exposure to a country facing international isolation and war crimes proceedings. That reading is contradicted by the letter’s contents and by parallel legislation advancing through Congress.
The House version of the 2027 National Defence Authorization Act includes a provision titled the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” — Section 224 — which would require the US secretary of defence to designate a senior official responsible for coordinating defence technology cooperation between the two countries. Al Jazeera reported that the provision could tie the US and Israeli militaries “far more closely together,” deepening cooperation on weapons research, production and technology.
The provision covers bilateral research, development, testing, evaluation, integration and industrial cooperation. It would lay the groundwork for joint weapons development, co-production, licensing agreements and military-industrial joint ventures across artificial intelligence, quantum technology, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber and biotechnology. Responsible Statecraft reported that Section 224 also includes “network integration” and “data fusion,” raising fears that US military data could become increasingly accessible to Israel’s military establishment.
Analysts have explained that the practical effect of the proposed restructuring would be to shift US support for Israel from a visible annual aid package — one that can be debated, conditioned or reduced by Congress — into the far more opaque machinery of Pentagon procurement, classified technology programmes and private defence contracts dispersed across congressional districts. Support for Israel would no longer appear simply as a line item; it would become embedded in the American defence industrial base itself.
The political context for the manoeuvre is significant. US aid to Israel has become increasingly unpopular, particularly since Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its widening regional wars. A New York Times/Siena poll found that 57 per cent of Americans oppose providing economic and military aid to Israel, while 37 per cent support it. The same survey found that 37 per cent sympathise more with Palestinians, compared with 35 per cent who sympathise more with Israelis.
Gallup has also found that, for the first time in its trend, Israelis no longer hold an advantage over Palestinians in American sympathies, with 41 per cent sympathising more with Palestinians and 36 per cent with Israelis. Among Americans aged 18 to 34, a majority — 53 per cent — now sympathise more with Palestinians.
Other polling points in the same direction. Pew Research found that 59 per cent of Americans have an unfavourable view of the Israeli government, while 52 per cent have a favourable view of the Palestinian people. Gallup found that 57 per cent of US adults support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, close to the highest level it has recorded.
This collapse in public support has made the traditional aid model politically vulnerable. The current ten-year Memorandum of Understanding, signed in 2016, provides Israel with $38 billion in US military assistance and expires in 2028. Replacing it with defence industrial integration would allow Israel’s supporters in Washington to claim that aid is being wound down, while preserving — and potentially expanding — the military relationship through a more durable and less transparent structure.
