The argument used to come exclusively from Israel's harshest critics. End American military aid to Israel. Cut the cord. Let the alliance wither.
Now it is coming from the other direction.
In 2023, writers Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz of Tablet magazine published a piece called 'End U.S. Aid to Israel' — not as an indictment of the Jewish state, but as a defense of it. Their case: what looks like a gift comes with strings that distort politics in both countries and limit Israel's ability to defend itself the way its own leaders see fit. Earlier this summer, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed the idea of phasing out U.S. military aid to Israel. The argument has found its audience.
Siegel has now returned to the subject in a new essay, and his thesis is sharper than before. The 'special relationship,' he writes, has run into the hard limits of America's interests and political will. Half a century after being formed against the backdrop of the Cold War, it is coming apart — not because of any single betrayal or policy failure, but because the underlying political conditions that sustained it have shifted.
The evidence is not subtle. Support for Israel remains strong among President Donald Trump's base, but a rising faction of Republicans that includes Vice President J.D. Vance is converging with the baseline position of Democrats who see Israel as a political liability. The Israeli and American military establishments are, by Siegel's account, closer than ever — yet the estrangement between their countries' political elites grows. Trump's unusually strong personal ties to Israel have not reversed this trend. His Iran deal, which some supporters of Israel have read as a betrayal, is, in Siegel's framing, a symptom rather than a cause.
The harder point in the essay is this: those who refuse to face the reality of a weakening alliance are casting about for an American savior — imagining that the right adviser in Trump's ear, or a future Marco Rubio presidency, would restore what has already eroded. Siegel calls this a misreading of the moment.
His conclusion is deliberately counterintuitive. A greater degree of separation between the United States and Israel is not only inevitable, he argues — it is desirable. The challenges such a separation would create for a small country are real and significant. But so, he contends, are the opportunities it presents for Israel's growth.
With the Iran war stalled and Trump pushing a Gaza peace plan that is, by the essay's own description, heavy on promises but light on details, the timing of this argument is pointed.
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Say it plainly: the debate over U.S. military aid to Israel is no longer a fringe position held by the alliance's enemies. It is now a live question among some of its most serious friends. That shift deserves honest engagement, not reflexive dismissal.
The principle at stake is straightforward. Sovereign nations make better decisions — and better allies — when their strategic choices are their own. Aid that comes with conditions, political entanglements, and the constant management of a patron's domestic opinion is not simply a subsidy; it is a constraint. Whether Israel is better served by full strategic autonomy or by the security architecture the alliance provides is a genuine trade-off, and the record of the past two years has made it harder to argue the current arrangement is costless. The Signal does not pretend to resolve that question here. But we note, with some respect, that the people now asking it out loud are the ones who have been paying attention.
