For four decades, one of the most dependable sentences in American foreign policy was that support for Israel is bipartisan. The 3 November midterms did not abolish that sentence, but they emptied it of much of its meaning. Democrats flipped seven Senate seats to take the chamber, and are on course for their largest House majority in nearly two decades, with two Senate races in Mississippi and Alaska still to be called. On paper, the party that has moved furthest on Israel now holds the committee gavels, the subpoena power and the appropriations pen.
Yet the most consequential development for US–Israel relations this week did not happen at the ballot box. It happened on the morning of the vote, when Donald Trump said on Fox News that the roughly $4 billion in annual US military aid to Israel would end after this year, presenting it as a deal already agreed with Benjamin Netanyahu. Read together, the two events point to a conclusion that most post-election commentary has missed: Democrats have won the lever at the very moment the machine it was attached to is being dismantled. That does not mean Washington’s Israel policy will stay the same. It means the contest over that policy is about to move onto new terrain, and on that terrain Congress is structurally weaker than its new majority suggests.
A vote count that changed before the majority did
The Democratic shift on Israel predates Tuesday. In April, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted against a sale of bulldozers to Israel, and 36 opposed a sale of 1,000-pound bombs. In the House, 103 Democrats backed an amendment to cut $3 billion in aid, against 93 who opposed it. These were minority votes with no prospect of passing. They were signals rather than policy. The incoming class reinforces the trend at its edges: Abdul El-Sayed, who won in Michigan, becomes the first Muslim American elected to the Senate after a campaign in which his criticism of Israeli policy was central.
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