103 Democrats Just Did Netanyahu a Favor

Netanyahu has spent months saying America should end its military aid to Israel. On Wednesday, half the Democratic caucus voted to help him.

In April, a Democratic congressman from Illinois named Mike Quigley offered an amendment to fund the rebuilding of civilian infrastructure in Gaza. Four hundred million dollars for water and power. It was rejected in markup and vanished. There were no marches for it, and nobody primaried a colleague over it. Outside the committee room, almost no one learned it existed.

On Wednesday, the same Congress voted on a measure by Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, to strip $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel from next year’s State Department budget. It failed, 104 to 314. But 103 Democrats voted yes. Nancy Pelosi was among them. The party’s own whip, Katherine Clark, joined them while her leader, Hakeem Jeffries, voted no. When a similar measure came up two years ago, it drew 37 Democratic votes. Greg Casar, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said afterward that “nothing will be the same on this issue ever again.” He is right, and it is worth naming what changed.

First, the concessions, because the amendment’s critics had the facts on their side. This was a Republican wedge play. Massie had just lost his primary, and GOP leadership let his measure reach the floor while burying Democratic alternatives, including Quigley’s. The text was drafted so broadly it would have cut humanitarian programs and embassy operations along with the weapons. Jeffries called it overly broad, and he was correct. One House Democrat summarized the caucus mood to Axios: “I’m a lean yes, and even I think it’s a crappy amendment.”

That unfinished sentence explains the day better than any floor speech. A hundred and three members of Congress voted for a measure they privately called crap, because the cost of voting no had grown larger than the cost of voting for crap.

American military “assistance” has always been a way to buy influence. The Marshall Plan secured Western Europe’s orientation for a generation. The roughly $1.3 billion America sends Egypt every year is a pillar of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which has held for nearly half a century. Since 1948, America has given Israel more than $300 billion in assistance, adjusted for inflation, and in exchange America holds something no other country holds: the ability to pick up a phone in Washington and change a decision in Jerusalem.

That phone has been used three times since 2024. The Biden administration paused shipments of 2,000-pound bombs over the planned invasion of Rafah. Israel entered Rafah anyway, but it ran a smaller and more constrained operation. Then, in October, Donald Trump put his twenty-point plan on the table and refused to take an Israeli no. His envoy Steve Witkoff later described the decisive call to Netanyahu: the president had “no tolerance for anything other than this.” The twenty living hostages walked free on October 13. By January 26, the remains of every murdered hostage had come home. And this June, Israel and Lebanon signed a framework agreement in Washington, at a table the United States built, opening the first direct negotiations between the two countries in decades. In each case, Israel moved because Washington carries weight in Jerusalem. The aid relationship creates that influence. It also creates the landing space in Tel Aviv airport for 72 American aircrafts.

Now here is what the 103 seem not to know. Benjamin Netanyahu agrees with them. In May, he told 60 Minutes that he wants to “draw down to zero the American financial support.” This month, he compared the aid to welfare and said the phaseout should begin this year. In a letter to a Republican congressman, he described his goal as moving Israel from aid recipient to partner. Massie quoted Netanyahu approvingly while promoting his own amendment. The prime minister these Democrats most wanted to punish has spent the entire year requesting the punishment.

His position is rational. The aid is about $3.8 billion a year, between 15 and 20 percent of Israel’s defense budget in a typical year. Israel has the strongest economy in the Middle East outside the oil states. Losing the money would sting the treasury. Losing the relationship behind the money would liberate the government. Every future American demand, about the West Bank or about the crossings into Gaza, would arrive in Jerusalem with nothing backing it up.

This is why the aid question, taken by itself, scrambles every familiar line. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has circulated a proposal to end the aid. Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Democratic politician who was Obama’s chief of staff, auditioning for a presidential run, told Bill Maher’s audience in April that “the days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel militarily– that’s over.” He flew to Tel Aviv this month to repeat it on Israeli soil. Israelis debate the aid too. Security hawks in my country have wanted out of the dependency for years, on sovereignty grounds, and it is a serious argument. As an Israeli, I can live with either outcome. Whether American taxpayers should subsidize Israeli weapons purchases is a question for American taxpayers. That fight was never mine.

The contradiction is mine. The coalition that voted yes on Wednesday is the same coalition demanding that Israel change its conduct: end the war permanently, stop the strikes in Lebanon, rein in the settlement outposts, open the crossings. I have made several of those demands myself. I am exactly the reader this movement claims it wants to reach, and I am telling you the two positions cancel each other. A demand without enforcement is a press release. The only enforcement that has moved an Israeli government in my lifetime is the weight of the American relationship, and Wednesday’s vote was a vote to begin dismantling it.

Why would a movement that says it wants to change Israeli behavior work to destroy its own capacity to change Israeli behavior? Because the vote was addressed to an American audience. It was a cleansing ritual, performed for the people watching at home, with Jerusalem as the backdrop. The Quigley amendment offered Democrats a way to build something for Palestinians, and it could not fill a committee room. The Massie amendment offered them a way to stop feeling implicated, and it filled the House floor. Building a water plant takes a decade and absolves nobody. A yes vote takes an afternoon.

I understand the pull. Seventy-four percent of Democratic voters now oppose further military and economic aid to Israel, and on Wednesday their representatives heard them. But a politics organized around distance from Jews, rather than around outcomes for anyone, has a long and well-documented history.Jews have learned to read it early. It also has never built a thing for the people it claims to champion. Gaza remains rubble, with a reconstruction bill the UN puts at $70 billion, and the amendment Democrats rallied around this week would not have moved a dollar of it. The party that spent Wednesday on a doomed measure could have spent the same week forcing every camera in Washington toward Quigley’s.

The twenty living hostages have been home for nine months. They are home because America still had standing in Jerusalem when it mattered, and a president willing to spend it. If Gaza is ever rebuilt, the money and the pressure will likely have to travel that same road, from American insistence to a signature in the region. Wednesday’s vote laid nothing on that road. It offered the people of Gaza nothing they can drink, and nothing they can live in, and it offered the Israeli government the one thing it has spent all year asking America for. The biggest vote against Israel aid in a generation just went to the floor of the House. The man it aimed to punish agrees with it.