Senator Chris Coons cast two votes on the same April day that explain the problem now facing the new Democratic majority. On one hand, he voted to end the American war against Iran. On the other, he voted against blocking American arms sales to Israel, including a $152 million package of 1,000-pound bombs. He explained afterward that he wanted the Iran war over but did not want to abandon Israel. It was an honest position. By spring it may be an impossible one.
Democrats won both chambers on Tuesday, with ending the Iran war high on their list. House Democrats plan to pass an Iran war resolution in their first week in January. Yet Hakeem Jeffries, who voted in July against ending military aid to Israel, is said by his allies to want to avoid votes on Israel policy wherever possible. The conflict he wants to stop began on February 28 with joint American and Israeli strikes. A Congress that tries to end one half of a joint war while declining to discuss the other half will end neither.
Donald Trump has made avoidance harder still. On election day, in a Fox News interview, Trump announced that “by the end of this year we won’t be paying Israel” and said Benjamin Netanyahu had proposed it. Trump asked, “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed?” a reference to Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat who on Tuesday beat Mike Rogers, 52.5 percent to 45.5 percent, to become the first Muslim elected to the Senate. A day later, his vice president, JD Vance, cited polling that showed the voters Republicans lost wanted to end the war and “change our relationship to Israel.” Trump called it “largely true.”
The president cannot end the aid on his own. The 2016 memorandum commits $38 billion over fiscal years 2019 to 2028, $33 billion in foreign military financing, and $5 billion for missile defense, and Congress effectively wrote the financing levels into the 2021 defense authorization. A State Department letter reported by The Wall Street Journal indicated that about $10 billion would still be needed after 2028 to cover weapons already on order. Whatever Trump meant, the money is appropriated by Congress, and from January that means a Democratic Congress. Jeffries can postpone a war-powers debate about Israel. He cannot postpone a spending bill.
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The difficulty is practical before it is political. Israel’s war against Iran is fought partly with American weapons and defended partly by American missiles. In June 2025, during the twelve-day war, the United States fired more than 150 THAAD interceptors, about a quarter of its stock at the time, largely in Israel’s defense, according to CSIS figures reported by Semafor. This March, American officials told the same outlet that Israel was critically low on its own interceptors.
Now imagine the resolution Democrats say they will pass. It directs the president to end hostilities against Iran that Congress has not authorized. American bombers stand down. Israel, which is not bound by an American statute, continues to strike, using bomb bodies the administration rushed to it by bypassing congressional review on emergency grounds. Iran retaliates against Israel, American batteries fire to intercept the missiles, and Iran’s mines keep tankers burning in Hormuz. Is that American interceptor fire a hostility under the resolution? Either the resolution says so, which makes it a vote on Israel’s defense, or it exempts Israel, which leaves the war running with American hardware in it. There is no third version in which Democrats end the war without ever mentioning Israel.
The caucus numbers explain why Jeffries would rather not choose. When Bernie Sanders forced votes in April on two arms sales to Israel, 40 of the Senate’s 47 Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of bulldozers, a record share. On the bombs, 36 voted to block and 11 did not. Chuck Schumer, now in line to become majority leader, was among the 7 who opposed both blocks. In the House, an amendment to cut Israel aid failed 314 to 104 in July, with nearly half of Democrats in favor. And John Fetterman has said that a decisive party turn against Israel is the one thing that could make him leave the Democratic caucus.
Israel’s own politics will sharpen the split. Netanyahu’s bloc won 53 seats in the October 27 election. On Thursday, as President Isaac Herzog finished his consultations, his challenger Gadi Eisenkot collected 67 recommendations to Netanyahu’s 46, which puts Eisenkot first in line to form a government. Netanyahu stays on as caretaker while those talks run, and a Democratic Congress trying to end an American war alongside a caretaker prime minister with every reason to keep fighting is a recipe for open confrontation. Eisenkot has pledged to renew a bipartisan alliance with Washington. A government led by him would make the Democrats’ choice easier to explain. It would not make it easier to avoid.
Avoidance will not survive the first draft of a war-powers resolution, still less the first appropriations bill. The better course is to write the Israel question into the text deliberately, in a form most of the caucus can defend. A workable resolution would do three things. It would end American offensive operations against Iran. It would explicitly fund American missile defense for Israel and the Gulf states, including the $500 million a year the memorandum sets aside for Israel’s missile defense, so that no Democrat can be accused of leaving an ally exposed. And it would restore congressional review of the offensive munitions sent under emergency waivers, requiring the president to certify that transfers are not being used to widen a war Congress has voted to end.
That last clause is a vote on Israel, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Republicans will call it abandonment. Senator Jim Risch was already warning in April that such votes tell the world America is prepared to leave Israel vulnerable. But that line is harder to deliver this month, when the Republican president is the one promising to stop Israel’s aid, and Ted Cruz, one of the war’s loudest backers, says it “should have been brief, decisive, and over.” ” A resolution that defends Israel’s cities while declining to fund an open-ended offensive sits close to the position Coons described in April, and it is easier to explain to voters than one that pretends Israel is not a party to the war.
The first war-powers text of the new Congress will appear within days of January 3. If it says nothing about Israel, read it as a statement of good intentions rather than a plan to end anything.
