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© Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Lander screamed at and verbally abused as he protested against Hindu nationalist rally in Madison Square Garden
The New York Democratic congressional nominee Brad Lander was screamed at and verbally abused by protesters over his stance on Israel as he protested against a Hindu nationalist politician speaking outside Madison Square Garden.
As Lander attended a demonstration on Saturday against the event, organized by the Hindu nationalist RSS movement and where Mohan Bhagwat, leader of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was speaking, he was confronted by several protesters demanding that he leave the rally.
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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
US targets Iran’s Larak Island in first exchange of fire in more than a month as Masoud Pezeshkian says America ‘has not fulfilled its commitments’
Coinciding with this week’s G20 meeting, the EU has issued a statement saying it will work with the US and other allied countries to maintain economic pressure against Iran.
“The EU welcomes efforts at ensuring that Iran ceases its destabilising activities and engages in peace negotiations with good faith, also through additional economic pressure, including through the US-led Operation Economic Outcast,” it said in reference to the pressure strategy the White House describes as “an unprecedented campaign to sever every remaining economic lifeline sustaining” the Islamic republic.
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© Photograph: Reuters
© Photograph: Reuters
© Photograph: Reuters
Iran responded to an assault on its Larak Island by targeting US bases in Jordan
Coinciding with this week’s G20 meeting, the EU has issued a statement saying it will work with the US and other allied countries to maintain economic pressure against Iran.
“The EU welcomes efforts at ensuring that Iran ceases its destabilising activities and engages in peace negotiations with good faith, also through additional economic pressure, including through the US-led Operation Economic Outcast,” it said in reference to the pressure strategy the White House describes as “an unprecedented campaign to sever every remaining economic lifeline sustaining” the Islamic republic.
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© Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
US says it attacked Larak Island to prevent launch of sea mines, prompting reprisals against airbases used by US forces, with tanker fire also reported in strait
Iran has launched retaliatory strikes on airbases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates after the US attacked Iranian rocket launchers in the strait of Hormuz, the first such hostilities in a month.
Hours later, Iranian state TV later reported that a supertanker had caught fire after hitting two naval mines while attempting to pass through the southern side of the strait. It did not identify the vessel or provide information about its crew.
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© Photograph: Maxar Tech/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Maxar Tech/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Maxar Tech/AFP/Getty Images
US attacks Iranian rocket launchers on island in strait of Hormuz and Tehran targets US bases in Jordan and UAE
The US has reverted to military attacks on Iran for the first time in a month, firing missiles and drones at Iranian rocket launchers on an island in the strait of Hormuz, prompting the Iranian military to attack US military bases in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.
US Central Command said it acted late on Sunday after it detected the Iranians planning to fire fresh mines into the strait. Last week Donald Trump claimed the US navy had cleared the strait of mines for the first time since the conflict started on 28 February, a claim the Iranians rejected as lies.
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© Photograph: Maxar Tech/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Maxar Tech/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Maxar Tech/AFP/Getty Images
Matt Bradley and crew assaulted while interviewing woman who said settlers had driven family out of home
A Palestinian woman and an NBC News team are reported to have been attacked and injured by masked Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday, amid worsening confrontations in the area.
Benjamin Netanyahu said he condemned the violence committed “by a handful of rioters”.
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© Photograph: mattmcbradley/NBC News
© Photograph: mattmcbradley/NBC News
© Photograph: mattmcbradley/NBC News
Matt Bradley and crew assaulted while interviewing woman who said settlers had driven family out of home
A Palestinian woman and an NBC News team are reported to have been attacked and injured by masked Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Saturday, amid worsening confrontations in the area.
Benjamin Netanyahu said he condemned the violence committed “by a handful of rioters”.
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© Photograph: mattmcbradley/NBC News
© Photograph: mattmcbradley/NBC News
© Photograph: mattmcbradley/NBC News
Ignore Iran, the Epstein files, and your wallet – not to mention Trump’s plummeting approval ratings
Don’t mention the war! Or the economy, for that matter. Or the Epstein files. Or Natalie Harp. Or “affordability”, which, as Donald Trump recently said at a rally, is a word that was “never used” by the media before he took office. Best not to talk about anything that affects ordinary people or embarrasses the president, really. Instead, let’s all rejoice in Trump’s latest triumph: renaming Lake Ontario, which is shared by Canada and the US, as Lake America.
On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to America-fy the lake’s name on US maps and documents, which is an excellent use of time and resources. I suppose we can at least be thankful that the president, who is trying to slap his own name on everything from airports to the Kennedy Center, didn’t decree that the body of water be called Lake Trump.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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© Photograph: Al Drago/Pool/Al Drago - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Al Drago/Pool/Al Drago - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Al Drago/Pool/Al Drago - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock
© Ugur Yildirim/Dia Photo, via Associated Press
From the first US and Israeli strikes six months ago to the battle for Hormuz, this timeline plots how Trump’s war on Iran quickly became a regional conflict with global economic consequences
On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel began large-scale strikes on Iran. Tehran responded by attacking Israeli and US allies across the Gulf.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of strikes, and the strait of Hormuz – a crucial waterway for transporting oil – was effectively closed soon after. The conflict quickly became a regional war with global economic consequences.
Donald Trump: EPA/Trump Vance transition team
US CENTCOM: AP
Abbas Araghchi: AP
Esmail Baqaei: Getty/Anadolu
Masoud Pezeshkian: AP
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf: Getty/NurPhoto
Iran flag: Alamy
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© Composite: Prina Shah for the Guardian / AP / AFP / Getty Images
© Composite: Prina Shah for the Guardian / AP / AFP / Getty Images
© Composite: Prina Shah for the Guardian / AP / AFP / Getty Images
Book was removed for review earlier this month following complaint but reinstated after petition and State Library letter to Waverley council
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A Sydney library has returned to its borrowing shelves a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide following a public campaign and an intervention from the State Library of New South Wales.
Waverley library removed the book “for review” earlier this month after the Jewish news outlet JWire reported it had approached the council.
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© Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian
© Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian
© Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian
© Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee — better known by its short name, AIPAC — bills itself as a bipartisan advocate “for policies that strengthen the US-Israel partnership.” In 2026, it’s become something else: a major — and seemingly, losing — issue in Democratic politics.
Progressive Democratic candidates in primaries across the country are explicitly calling out their opponents’ relationship with AIPAC, often using the connection as a rallying point to persuade voters about the problem of “dark money” in politics. Most recently, in Michigan, AIPAC spent about $30 million boosting Rep. Haley Stevens in her bid for the state’s Democratic Senate nomination. Her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, drew attention to it again and again. She lost.
As one of the biggest spenders in US elections, the group has gone well beyond its origins lobbying members of Congress to support its agenda. According to David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect, AIPAC is spending millions of dollars against candidates who speak out against Israel’s actions in Palestine — sometimes using advertisements that have nothing to do with Israel, and may appear unrelated to AIPAC.
Dayen spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the backlash surrounding AIPAC’s spending, the group’s complicated web of shell PACs, and what it all means for the Democratic Party’s quickly evolving stance on Israel.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What is AIPAC?
AIPAC started out as a lobbying organization. It was inaugurated in the 1950s. It has historically been seen as one of the more powerful lobbying organizations in Washington. And its goal is to strengthen and maintain the relationship between the US and Israel.
They have annual conventions where pretty much everybody across the political spectrum attends and gives speeches. But something changed about five years ago. AIPAC was not content to just lobby members of Congress. They wanted to influence who actually got to Washington. And they began to engage in the use of super PACs to run advertising and other forms of political engagement in campaigns, and particularly in primary campaigns that determine who actually gets to a general election.
Why did they want to influence who got to Washington? Maybe that sounds like an obvious question, but it wasn’t happening before, so why did it start happening?
One thing that happened is in 2018, we saw the rise of what is known as “The Squad,” and that included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib — people who had very strident views, particularly about the US-Israel relationship. Those progressive Democrats were very successful in winning safe seat races. And I’m not in their head, but it could be that AIPAC wanted to try to provide a counterweight, and stop that from happening, and use their resources — very prodigious resources — to spend money in these campaigns and to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Once upon a time, an endorsement from AIPAC was a powerful thing. It could be a huge benefit to a candidate. What exactly did it get you when AIPAC said, “This is our guy, this is our gal?”
I mean, in practical terms, it probably got you $5,000 because that’s the limit on a corporate PAC. But because AIPAC was powerful and also a bipartisan organization, getting your name on the list of AIPAC endorsees was something that you could tout in your election. It was something that showed that you had a commitment to what has historically been an important bond between the US and Israel.
It certainly wasn’t as controversial in the years before 2023 as it is today. After October 7, we saw what a lot of people have termed a genocide against the Palestinian people. The changing attitudes around the US-Israel relationship more broadly, where large numbers of Americans now view that relationship negatively, have changed what the meaning of an AIPAC endorsement really is.
I know that you’ve dug into the numbers. What do we know about how much money AIPAC is specifically spending this midterm cycle?
It’s a hard question to answer. If you go by the Federal Election Commission disclosures, AIPAC has raised about a hundred million dollars this election cycle, and has spent in independent expenditures — that’s TV ads and mailers and these kinds of things — about $28 million.
But that is an undercount for a couple different reasons. When I say those numbers, I am going by the specific super PAC that AIPAC has created. It’s called United Democracy Project. United Democracy Project has sent money to other PACs — about $9 million worth.
Is this a lot of money?
I think the real innovation here is the transfer of money from, in this case, pro-Israel PACs, to these pop-up PACs, these shell PACs that are created specifically for a particular election and then funded through AIPAC and, in some cases, other other pro-Israel PACs.
They are sort of laundering this money through to other PACs, so those other PACs run the ads and it doesn’t look like it’s coming from AIPAC. A perfect example was the first real major primary state of the cycle, which was Illinois.
There were four open seats in the Chicago area that are pretty strongly blue. A Democrat is going to win the general election. And so these primaries were highly contested. AIPAC set up two PACs, one called Elect Chicago Women and the other called Affordable Chicago Now. And millions of dollars went from AIPAC’s super PAC, which is called United Democracy Project, into these two pop-up PACs.
And those two PACs then funded ads for four candidates in those four open seat races. Now, if you were watching that on television, you would say, “Hey, elect Chicago women. That sounds like a good idea. I’m gonna watch this ad” or “Affordable Chicago now. I like affordability.” The truth is that this money was coming from AIPAC into these ads and supporting candidates that were generally supportive of the US-Israel relationship.
Now, those four races — AIPAC won two of them and they lost two of them. And it was really interesting, I think, where they were successful, and where they weren’t. In one race up in the Evanston area, it became a big issue that AIPAC actually was behind these ads from Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now.
The [AIPAC] candidate, a state senator named Laura Fine, actually was harmed, I think, in the election by this fact that this got out, and that this became a major issue in the campaign. And she ended up finishing third in that primary, despite having millions of dollars supporting her. There were other races where this wasn’t sort of as explicit a factor in the election itself, and those candidates were able to win.
This all sounds quite shady and yet I wonder — how unusual is it for an interest group in politics to be doing something like this?
I think it’s pretty unusual. It’s not something I’ve seen a whole lot of. We saw it to a smaller degree in some other election cycles — two years ago, four years ago — but it has become a concerted strategy this time.
And so there are these pop-up PACS that are specific to a campaign, but also some established PACs that have been around for a while are receiving money from AIPAC and affiliated groups and using that in campaigns.
Emily’s List is a very well-known political organization that supports pro-choice women. They took [hundreds of thousands of dollars] from an organization called Democratic Majority for Israel that is not affiliated with AIPAC per se, but aligns on similar candidates.
There are other examples of this, more obscure examples. Like there’s a PAC called Crush MAGA PAC. And it’s affiliated with a different, I’m gonna sound crazy when I say this, but Crush MAGA PAC is affiliated with a different pack called Save Democracy, and Save Democracy has received $100,000 from United Democracy Project, which is AIPAC Super PAC. So sometimes the layers here are two or three or even four PACs deep.
And it can be really hard to untangle all this and figure out where the money has come from, because AIPAC certainly isn’t saying, “We’re funding that campaign.” They’re releasing disclosures as required by the Federal Election Commission, but they’re not saying where the money is earmarked for, if it’s for a specific race, if it’s for a specific candidate.
AIPAC at times has responded to criticism of it by appearing to conflate it with criticism of Israel or criticism of Jews. Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders comes out with a statement. He denounces Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for what he says is the “extermination of Gaza.” He calls for an end to military aid to Israel. He says people are starving to death.
AIPAC attacks Sanders’s statement, calling it a hate-filled rant and blood libel, and pointing out that in his statement, he didn’t mention Hamas’s attack on Israel. So AIPAC is now public in a way that historically it has not been. And it is tying criticism of Israel to antisemitic sentiment. Does this help or hurt AIPAC’s cause, do you think?
It depends on the messenger, but the issue is that there’s a very straight line between how this money is being used, transferred, spent, concealed, and a broader critique that I think a lot of Democrats have about money in politics. And so when AIPAC decides, “Okay, we’re going respond to criticism that is rooted in what AIPAC believes, and the conditions in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, et cetera,” to saying, you know, “Any criticism of what we’re doing is antisemitic — I think people who see this as a broader problem about money in politics see that as an extremely cynical take.”
I don’t think that really connects to one of the big reasons why people are really objecting to this, which is that they don’t want to see their politicians essentially bought.
But it’s additionally fraught because there are antisemitic tropes where, you know, a cabal of Jews is secretly controlling the government and finance, right? It feels triply complicated.
Look, I’m Jewish, and in having to cover this, I have to try to follow money from Jewish groups from one place to another, and that can certainly be uncomfortable. And it does add some weight to this issue.
But I feel like we are talking here not about somebody’s religion, but about a policy. And it’s a twofold policy. One is the policy of the US government funding, to the tune of billions of dollars, the destruction of an entire region, and also the policy of allowing super PACs to dictate who ends up making decisions in Washington.
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
President Donald Trump may have to settle for the hand-me-down Nobel Prize medal that he scored several months ago. Despite their best efforts, his envoys don’t seem to be having much luck advancing a peace deal in Gaza.
Over the weekend — just days after Trump announced a “HISTORIC” agreement to gradually disarm Hamas and stand down Israeli troops — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the framework.
The plan, brokered by Trump’s Board of Peace, would have seen both sides ramp down in tandem. But that’s apparently a nonstarter for Netanyahu, who said Hamas must disarm before Israeli troops withdraw. Israel still controls about 70 percent of the Gaza Strip, according to NPR — and has continued launching attacks in the territory, even after an October ceasefire.
It’s the latest setback in what has been a long and ugly conflict — a conflict that has turned many Americans against their longtime ally, Israel. Against that backdrop, some Democratic lawmakers and pro-Palestinian activists are advancing a once-fringe policy in the hopes of forcing Israel to end the war in Gaza and change its course in the occupied West Bank: cutting off military aid to Israel.
It’s an intuitive approach to behavior modification, familiar to any parent who has denied a child a desired toy or treat: withhold something they want until they behave. But Israel, in this admittedly imperfect metaphor, is not a toddler. It’s a full-grown adult with a $600 billion economy and a mind of its own…and it can absolutely buy its own drones and missile-defense systems.
Here’s a statistic that really drove that point home for me: In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on its military, plus US aid. To sustain that level of military investment without US support, Israel would need to allocate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. Not exactly a massive change.
There are other valid arguments for the US to end Israeli aid, of course. (Among the most common: to avoid complicity in war crimes and possible genocide in the Gaza Strip.) But if US lawmakers hope to force Israel’s hand, on the two-state solution or anything else, then cutting military aid probably won’t provide enough leverage.
➨ About that organic chicken…many consumers shell out twice as much for organic poultry because they believe it was raised humanely. But while an organic certification does, on paper, require more space, fresh air and outdoor access for chickens, farms that supply Costco and other major retailers have been accused of serious animal welfare violations.
In recent months, two ideas that were once on the fringes of Democratic policy thinking — cutting off financial support and stopping arms transfers to Israel — have gone mainstream.
Nearly half of House Democrats voted to end aid to Israel last month, while roughly 40 percent of the caucus has called for blocking the sale of offensive weapons to the Israeli government until it persuades Congress that it will not use American bombs to perpetrate war crimes.
Many of the party’s 2028 hopefuls have also embraced these general concepts. Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and consummate centrist, recently suggested that America should end aid to Israel and condition arms sales on its compliance with US law. Progressive Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has gone several steps further, saying that Israel should be barred from accessing US-made offensive weapons until it “agrees to a time-bound plan to end the occupation and enact a two-state solution.”
If recent elections are any indication, these ideas will only grow more prominent in the coming years. Over the past two months, a slew of Democratic candidates — often with establishment backing and largely progressive voting records — lost to left-wing rivals who promised to take a more adversarial posture toward Israel. Rep. Haley Stevens’s apparent defeat at the hands of the staunchly pro-Palestinian Abdul El-Sayed in this week’s Democratic Senate primary is the latest and perhaps most consequential example of this trend.
The Democratic Party’s burgeoning support for restricting aid and arms transfers to Israel is well-founded. In prosecuting its war with Hamas, the Israeli government has subjected Gaza’s civilian population to grotesque and illegal forms of collective punishment (if not genocide). Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel is expanding illegal settlements and allowing Jewish settlers to violently dispossess Palestinian residents. In this context, supplying Israel with money and weapons is contrary to both America’s moral obligations and security interests. It is wrong to subsidize or provision any foreign military’s assaults on human rights. And doing so undermines global respect for both the United States and the concept of international law.
For many Democrats, however, the purpose of cutting off aid and weapons to Israel is not merely to end America’s complicity in its crimes. Rather, the objective is to effect a radical change in Israeli policy — and ultimately, a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Such Democrats believe that the Israeli government will not seriously pursue a two-state solution (much less, a binational democratic state) unless it is forced to do so. Fortunately, in this view, Israel’s reliance on American aid and military technology provides the US with potent leverage over its internal policies: If America ceases to provide the Israeli military with cash and offensive weapons, then Tel Aviv will eventually have little choice but to start upholding its end of the two-state bargain.
But this is probably too optimistic. Ending aid and conditioning arms sales may be preconditions for realigning Israeli policy. But coercing its government into an acceptance of Palestinian statehood would likely require measures far more sweeping — and controversial — than those that congressional Democrats are presently entertaining.
Of all the Democratic Party’s proposals for disciplining Israel, ending US aid may be the most politically palatable — yet least effective.
The notion that the United States should stop giving Israel $3.8 billion each year has some appeal on the left, right, and center. Which is not surprising: One doesn’t need to be passionately pro-Palestinian to be skeptical of America giving billions in aid to a rich, foreign country. In his Senate race, El-Sayed tried to tap into this isolationist sentiment, describing his plans for slashing aid to Israel — and increasing benefits for US citizens — as an “America First” agenda.
Unfortunately, ending aid would have little impact on Israeli policy. And for the very reason that such assistance is hard to justify, even to those who care little about the Palestinians: Israel is a wealthy nation that can fund its own military.
In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on the military, not counting its use of American aid. To sustain its 2025 level of defense funding — without American aid — Israel would need to dedicate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. This increase might be slightly inconvenient for Israeli taxpayers. But it’s clearly doable.
And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do it.
Or so he told 60 Minutes in May, saying that he would like to “draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.” In the view of some Israeli analysts, forgoing US aid would give Israel a freer hand to pursue its security objectives as it sees fit without worrying about a backlash from politicians thousands of miles away. The American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel J. Samet and former Israeli Defense Forces Maj. Raphael BenLevi spelled out the logic of this position back in 2023, writing, “As long as aid continues, the temptation to dictate Israel’s policies will be too strong for Washington to resist, while Israeli officials will be inclined to seek approval for every action they take.”
This doesn’t mean that the US should continue funding Israel’s military; revoking such aid could improve America’s global image while saving taxpayers a little money. By itself, however, canceling all military grants to Israel would not force its government to make any real changes in its security strategies, much less to accept Palestinian statehood.
Although Israel does not need America’s dollars, it does currently require our weaponry. Between 2021 and 2025, the United States supplied 68 percent of Israel’s imported major arms.
Israel can domestically manufacture many of these weapons — including drones, missiles, air-defense systems, armored vehicles, and aerial, artillery, and tank munitions. But its arms industry is not capable of churning all of these out at the rate required by its intensive, multifront wars since October 7, 2023.
Meanwhile, Israel is wholly reliant on America for its combat aircraft fleet. They don’t make F-15s, F-16s, or F-35s in Haifa. Critically, this doesn’t just leave Israel dependent on the US for new fighter jets but also for the maintenance of its existing ones.
“The F-35 is a system that is deeply reliant on just-in-time delivery of spare parts,” Josh Paul, a former Biden State Department official who resigned in protest of American arms transfers to Israel, told me. “And were the US to say we’re not going to provide you those spare parts, it wouldn’t be more than one or two months before Israel’s F-35s would not fly, certainly at the current operational paces.”
Thus, conditionally freezing sales of US military equipment to Israel would place real constraints on its martial capabilities. Although, the scale of those constraints depends a lot on the details of US policy.
The most prominent proposal for an arms embargo in Congress, the Block the Bombs Act, would freeze the transfer of select classes of weaponry, including bunker-busting bombs and precision missiles. This policy might force Israel to scale back or delay certain aerial campaigns. In the long run, however, Israel has domestic substitutes for these weapons.
By contrast, were the US to choke off military supplies more broadly — leaving the Israeli air force bereft of fighter jets and component parts — the implications for Israeli security strategy would be far more profound.
In either scenario, however, it seems unlikely that the Israeli government would respond to an embargo by agreeing to cede territory or autonomy to the Palestinians, in service of a two-state solution.
The reasons for this are twofold. First, although an embargo would substantially diminish Israel’s military capabilities, those capacities would remain formidable. As already noted, Israel domestically produces a great deal of military hardware — so much, it actually exported more arms than all but six countries between 2021 and 2025.
What’s more, the Israeli government has already launched an effort to achieve “munitions independence.” This entails a $110 billion investment into its arms industry, including initiatives to increase Israeli production of aerial munitions, heavy bombs, and artillery shells.
At the same time, Israel is also developing a plan for expanding its domestic raw materials industry, so that it enjoys sovereignty over the inputs necessary for arms production.
Given all this, even without access to American weapons, Israel would still be able to militarily dominate the West Bank and Gaza.
“Israel’s dependence on US weapons is more about its position in the region; its capacity to deter Iran and so forth, not in the Palestinian context,” Paul said. “Cut off Israel’s access to US weapons, and it would still have overwhelming military superiority over any Palestinian resistance group.”
Further, in the face of a US arms embargo, Israel would not only remain capable of sustaining its subjugation of the Palestinians; it would also likely retain the will to do so.
Israeli opinion on politics in general — and the Palestinian issue in particular — has been drifting rightward for decades. In a 2025 Gallup poll, 27 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution while 63 percent opposed one. And opposition to Palestinian statehood is even more pronounced among Jewish Israelis, who dominate the nation’s politics. In a Pew survey from last year, only 16 percent of Israeli Jews agreed that peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was possible — down from 46 percent in 2013. Support for a binational, democratic state of Israel-Palestine — the “one-state solution” favored by many on the American left — is all-but non-existent among Israeli Jews, with only 1 percent backing the policy in a 2025 poll.
Israeli political leaders share its electorate’s opposition to Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu’s leading rival in Israel’s upcoming election, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, recently told an interviewer, “I have never said two states for two peoples, because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about ‘peace now’ and two states doesn’t understand the conflict.”
Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian sovereignty do shift with events; after the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks, skepticism of a two-state solution among Jewish Israelis spiked. It is therefore conceivable that Israelis might become more open to Palestinian statehood, were the people of Gaza and the West Bank to unify behind conciliatory political leaders, who were prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish state within Israel’s legal borders. But that is an unlikely prospect in the near or medium term — and one that Israel’s criminality makes evermore remote.
Absent such a development, a US arms embargo is unlikely to realign Israeli politics fundamentally. Historically, when great powers have tried to force weaker states to shift their policies through coercion, the latter often resist, even at a high cost. Iran’s refusal to submit to US demands on its regional policies and weapons programs, amid years of devastating sanctions and months of bombardment, may be today’s most salient example.
The Iranian regime’s recalcitrance may partly reflect its authoritarian character. But democratic states have also routinely bucked the strong-arming of foreign powers. For example, in the 1980s, New Zealand barred the United States from docking nuclear-powered or armed ships at its ports. The US tried to coerce the Kiwis into reversing this policy by suspending America’s commitment to defend New Zealand from military attack in 1986. But New Zealanders remained undaunted; indeed, support for the anti-nuclear policy grew over the ensuing years.
This is not to say that no amount of sustained American coercion could shift Israel’s political calculus on its conflict with the Palestinians. But the scale and duration of US pressure would likely need to be much greater than what congressional Democrats are presently contemplating.
Specifically, such a campaign would likely require an arms embargo more far-reaching than the one proposed by the Block the Bombs Act, along with sweeping economic sanctions, and the withdrawal of American diplomatic protection at the United Nations.
The Biden administration created the architecture for such a sanctions policy when it froze the US-held assets and visas of Israeli settlers who’d perpetrated acts of violence in the West Bank, along with those who had materially assisted them. These sanctions could be expanded to cover all involved in settlement expansion, including construction companies, banks, financial institutions and government agencies that facilitate the colonization of Palestinian territory. Should this prove insufficient to change Israeli policy, America could apply sanctions to those populating and serving already-existing Israeli settlements.
For reasons previously noted, Israel’s first response to all of this is liable to be resistance. To the extent that these measures were politically controversial within the US — and opposed by the Republican Party — Israel would probably seek to undermine and wait out a Democratic government that implemented them, rather than making substantial concessions to Palestinian autonomy.
America’s pressure campaign may therefore need to be sustained for a prolonged period — and enjoy a measure of bipartisan support — before having any transformative impact on Israeli policy.
This could be challenging. As El-Sayed’s “America First” message indicates, many Americans favor cutting off aid to Israel because they want to disengage from Middle Eastern conflicts and focus attention on domestic problems. But the case for blocking arms sales, sanctioning large financial institutions — and, more broadly, expending political capital and energy on a protracted fight over a foreign country’s internal policies — cannot rest on mere isolationism.
An effective pressure campaign would also require long-term resolve across multiple administrations, who may be tempted to reengage with Israel if the US runs into new challenges abroad in which Israeli intelligence, military assets, diplomatic ties, or technology might be useful. When Joe Biden took office, he initially sought to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” over the regime’s appalling record on human rights, only to come calling to its leaders in person, in order to secure its cooperation with regional issues and the global energy supply. Since then, President Trump has drawn the two nations even closer.
In any case, for now, the idea of not merely cutting off aid and select “offensive” weapons to Israel — but rather, forbidding the sale of all military goods to its government, sanctioning all involved in settling the occupied West Bank, and withdrawing US diplomatic support at the UN — remains too radical an agenda for most congressional progressives, much less their Republican colleagues.
None of this means that ending US aid to Israel — or restricting the sale of offensive weapons to its military — aren’t worthy objectives. Such measures could constrain Israel’s capacity to bomb civilian infrastructure and launch wars of choice. They just might not be sufficient to singlehandedly overwhelm Israeli resistance to Palestinian sovereignty.
Regardless, the congressional left’s Israel agenda would improve America’s moral health and global image. And this should arguably be US lawmakers’ priority.
“The United States played an enormous role in creating Israel’s conventional military advantage as a player in the Middle East,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the nonprofit Arms Control Association, told me. “And in the face of the devastation that the Israeli government has wrought in Gaza and now on the West Bank — which involves, by any objective measure, serious war crimes — the United States needs to exert its leverage, so as not to be complicit in such behavior. Whether that changes Israeli policy regarding a two-state solution, or its ongoing treatment of Palestinians in occupied territories, is ultimately a separate question.”
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