Two elections in eight days sent leaders the same message, and neither country got a clean answer.
On November 3, American voters delivered a landslide. Democrats flipped eight Senate seats and now hold a 55-44 majority. They have won the House as well, with fewer than twenty races still uncalled, and they are on track to match or pass the 257 seats Democrats won in 2008. They won Senate seats in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024, including Texas, for the first time since 1988. The president is trying to distance himself from the result.
A week earlier, Israelis voted on October 27 and could not decide. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud won 27 seats, the most of any party, but his right-wing and ultra-Orthodox bloc holds only 53 of 120, eight short of a majority and down from 64 in 2022. Gadi Eisenkot’s centrist bloc holds 48, and Arab parties hold a record 19. On November 8, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog gave Eisenkot the first chance to form a government after 67 lawmakers endorsed him, against 46 for Netanyahu, who stays on as caretaker prime minister in the meanwhile.
Israel’s system explains why. Voters choose a party list, and seats are divided proportionally nationwide, so no party has ever won a majority alone. Israel’s president asks the candidate with the best chance of assembling 61 seats to form a government, which usually means the leader of the largest party, though not this time. That candidate gets 28 days, extendable by 14. If the candidate fails, another gets a turn, and if that fails too, the country goes to a new election. The 67 endorsements include Arab-led parties, but Eisenkot has ruled out governing with them, so they are not likely to be part of his majority. His clearest path to 61 runs through the two ultra-Orthodox parties that sit in Netanyahu’s bloc. Otherwise he would need a minority government that survives a no-confidence vote. If he fails, Netanyahu is next in line. Each side needs people it has sworn it will not work with.
Voters in both countries have just withheld a mandate. Washington and Jerusalem are, meanwhile, binding their militaries together in a way that is harder to undo than any election. The first signal came on Monday in Paris, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Israel is rich enough to buy American weapons and that President Trump wants U.S. military financing to end “as soon as possible.” That financing is about $3.8 billion a year under a 10-year agreement that expires in September 2028: $3.3 billion for weapons purchases and $500 million for missile defense.
Rubio said the terms are being worked out in a new memorandum of understanding, that Israel could “absolutely” stop receiving aid by the end of the year if it chose, and that the deal could include joint weapons production. “We’ll negotiate the timeline,” he said. Trump had said the week before that the two countries had agreed to end the aid by the end of 2026, which according to The Times of Israel surprised officials on both sides. Netanyahu has proposed phasing it out over about a decade.
That sounds like distance. Read together with the defense bill, it looks more like a change of form: military grants give way to joint production and shared technology. Critics of the aid may welcome the end of grants. The question is what replaces them, and who gets a say. The vehicle is the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The House passed the FY2027 bill, 216 to 212, with $750 million for joint programs with Israel, including $500 million for missile defense, the figure the current agreement already commits, plus counter-drone, tunnel, and emerging-technology work. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version carries its own provisions for the military support of Israel.
Both include the Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, which would make the Pentagon designate an executive agent to coordinate joint research, testing, integration, and industrial cooperation—which would move coordination out of the realm of foreign aid and into the more opaque world of Pentagon contracts. The House bill also expands intelligence sharing with Israel and creates an Abraham Accords defense initiative. And U.S. taxpayers pay the bill.
The Senate has not passed its version. A July vote to begin debate failed 50 to 46, and the final text is expected to be a compromise drafted by the Armed Services Committee leaders in the lame-duck session, competing for floor time with a December 11 government funding deadline. What that text will contain on Israel is not yet clear.
Supporters, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), say that the provisions make existing cooperation more efficient and were co-sponsored by members of both parties. They also argue that the United States gets a multiple return in technology and lessons from combat. Critics disagree. Representatives across the aisle, Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA), tried to strike the section and failed. Massie warned that writing it into law would make it harder for a future administration to reverse it.
The lobby from AIPAC that praised these provisions had a poor election. According to an analysis from Responsible Statecraft, its super PAC and affiliated groups spent about $84 million this cycle, and nearly two-thirds of it, about $55 million, went to candidates who lost. The largest effort, more than $31 million, failed to stop Abdul El-Sayed from winning Michigan’s Senate seat in both the primary and the general election. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice,” he told AIPAC in his victory speech. James Talarico won Texas after saying he had never taken AIPAC’s money and would not take it in his campaign. A Democratic strategist told Agence France-Presse that campaigns that once coveted AIPAC’s support now see it as a liability. Opinion is moving too: in the Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey, Americans’ favorability toward Israel averaged 44 out of 100 this year, a record low, down from 58 in 2022, and among Democrats it fell from 52 to 30.
Voters in both countries have just reopened the question of who governs and on what terms. A provision written into a defense bill by a Congress whose majority is about to change closes it for them. The final bill is expected to come together before the new Congress is sworn in.
The rebuke, though, is not symbolic. The new Democratic majority takes office in January, and the final NDAA text is not yet settled. Constituents who want their representatives to explain what the Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative does, and whether it should carry a review date, still have a few weeks to ask.