The House Initiative to Further Integrate the U.S. and Israeli Militaries Is Not in Our National Interest

Section 219 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has received much less attention than it deserves. This initiative would transform the U.S.-Israel military relationship from a donor-and-recipient model to an entrenched form of defense-industrial integration.

Titled the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” Section 219 (formerly Section 224; numbering may change again) would incorporate Israeli technologies directly into U.S. research-and-development processes, especially in fast-moving and highly sensitive areas of technology. Some of the proposed areas of cooperation include biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cyber defense, and missile and air defense technologies. The list also includes elastic terms such as network integration and defense industrial base cooperation and co-production, leaving the Department of Defense and its components with broad discretion to interpret and implement them.

This initiative directs the secretary of defense to appoint an executive agent (EA), who would be responsible for accelerating and expanding defense technology cooperation between the United States and Israel across a wide range of military programs. What’s more, the EA’s authority would take precedence over that of other Department of Defense component heads performing related duties, giving the agent the power to overrule some decisions of other DOD components.

The current 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Israel was negotiated in 2016 at $3.8 billion a year, not to mention the billions in aid that the United States has given to both Egypt and Jordan to uphold their peace agreements. The MOU represents a security commitment to provide a certain level of annual funding, but the money still must be approved by Congress each year before it can be released to Israel. Section 219 would eliminate that oversight.

The aid “would no longer be coming through the State Department where it is designated as security assistance,” said Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, in a recent panel discussion. “Instead, it would be balled up in Pentagon funding, and as we all know, the Pentagon has never passed an audit.”

Section 219 would also be both complicated and costly to reverse. And should the initiative pass and begin to create jobs across congressional districts throughout the country—no doubt the objective—it becomes all but impossible for those representatives to vote to overturn it.

How Did We Get Here?

The Israeli government has been well aware of how sharply toward that country have declined in recent years—the result of genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and a scorched-earth policy in southern Lebanon. This collapse in U.S. public support has made the traditional aid model politically vulnerable. Phasing it out and replacing it with what is touted as a symbiotic arrangement would allow the Israeli government and its stateside supporters to claim that the aid is winding down, while preserving and potentially expanding the military integration through an embedded and opaque system.

In light of this—coupled with the Israeli resolve to implement policies free from any U.S. pressure—Knesset member Amit Halevi of the Likud party launched an initiative in Washington in early 2025. It aimed to transition the U.S.-Israel military relationship from one of aid dependence to that of a strategic partnership, calling for jointly funded research-and-development projects in defense, cybersecurity and intelligence.

Halevi’s initiative was championed by policy papers from the Heritage Foundation and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, among other organizations, that advocated for stronger bilateral ties and presented a host of possibilities for defense and technological collaboration.

The Initiative Reaches Capitol Hill

In response, Congress introduced this initiative in February 2026 as a stand-alone bill titled the U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act, sponsored by Representatives Ronny Jackson (R-TX) and Don Davis (D-NC), and by Senators Ted Budd (R-NC) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). That bill stalled, but many of its provisions quietly found their way into Section 219 of the NDAA.

Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) strongly opposed this section and introduced a bipartisan amendment seeking to strip it from the NDAA, warning that it would “compromise American sovereignty.” The House Rules Committee blocked it, though, preventing the amendment from reaching the floor for a vote.

This past week, the Senate voted on whether to begin debating the full NDAA bill, including its version of the U.S.-Israel military integration initiative—Section 1217—as well as funding for the Iran war. But the motion failed 50-46, needing 60 votes to advance.

As if the integration initiative were not enough, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) introduced a companion provision, Section 622, that would “expand and enhance intelligence sharing” with Israel, and it includes language that makes it difficult for the president to place limits on that sharing. This at a time when the Pentagon has classified Israel as a “critical” counterintelligence threat.

Netanyahu Owns It

“I was glad to receive your proposed Congressional resolution endorsing my plan to shift the framework for U.S.-Israel defense cooperation from aid to partnership.”

So begins Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s letter to Representative Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), who introduced a non-binding resolution this past May expressing support for U.S.-Israel military integration. The measure resulted from discussions Stutzman had with Netanyahu and other Israeli officials in Jerusalem, according to the congressman.

“The idea is to take the relationship between two great allies, the United States and Israel, to a more mature relationship with a trade agreement, a defense agreement, rather than supplemental aid from the United States to Israel,” Stutzman told The Jerusalem Post.

But the interests of the United States and Israel have never been so clearly at odds. In the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump is consumed by the economic consequences of its closure, whereas Netanyahu views that as a secondary concern. Meanwhile, the nuclear deal with Iran is front and center for the prime minister, who’s calling for the total dismantlement of the nuclear program, a ban on further enrichment, and sweeping inspections. The president would settle for less. As for Israel’s relentless campaign in southern Lebanon, Trump was perhaps at his most candid when he said, “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody.”

The United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative continues to advance in the House following passage of the NDAA, while it remains in play in the Senate. But with fundamental differences in U.S. and Israeli national interests and an American public increasingly wary of providing Israel with unconditional military and diplomatic support, it should not become law.Email