Against the backdrop of the ghastly scenes of starvation in Gaza, this week’s UN conference on reinvigorating a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is out of step with reality. Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and its increasingly brazen efforts to annex the West Bank have rendered the two-state solution—long on life support if not dead already—completely unviable. The more urgent and important challenge is to achieve a ceasefire and surge humanitarian aid. Conversations about a “political horizon” should come later.
Given its complicity in the situation in Gaza, the United States has a strong moral reason to pressure Israel into an immediate ceasefire, allowing aid to flow into Gaza. But it is also in the United States’ strategic interest to wield our significant leverage over Israel.
U.S. military support and assistance for Israel—a wealthy country, with a per capita GDP slightly higher than the United Kingdom’s—is a drain on U.S. resources and puts Americans in the region in danger. The United States has roughly 40,000 military personnel in the Middle East, and they have been attacked by Iran’s “axis of resistance” nearly 200 times since October 7. These attacks not only risk American lives but threaten to pull the United States into another forever war in the region.
Defense Priorities estimates that the United States spent more than $7 billion bombing Yemen’s Houthis, who have attacked ships in the Red Sea and struck Israel on numerous occasions to stop the war in Gaza. During the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, the U.S. military launched 14 percent of its entire stockpile of high-altitude missile interceptors to stop Iranian missiles. Brown’s Cost of War project estimates that the U.S. spent around $23 billion in military support for Israel just between October 7, 2023, and September 30, 2024.
Israel struck Iran while U.S.–Iran negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program were ongoing. Why should Washington tolerate an ally—one that the United States has provided with a whopping $310 billion in aid—deliberately subverting its diplomacy?
Moreover, the Israel–Palestine issue should not be a central foreign policy preoccupation of the United States; it’s a distraction from the real challenges the United States faces abroad and at home, including competition with China. The United States has surged ships, personnel, and materiel away from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East in the last 21 months. These military assets are in Asia to deter threats from China, the United States’ only near-peer competitor.
U.S. support for what many human rights and international organizations consider genocide—including some Israeli NGOs—is a powerful narrative tool for China and Russia. Both are working to undermine the U.S. rules-based order and point to U.S. support for Israel as evidence that the rules of this order only apply to the West’s adversaries. The United States has rightly condemned Russia for its brutality in Ukraine, yet it enables Israel’s in Gaza. The contradiction is obvious and glaring. The United States’ unfettered support for Israel is significantly hampering its ability to compete with China for global influence.
With all the United States provides Israel, what do we get in return? Not much, according to many analysts who favor U.S. foreign policy restraint. “The special [U.S.-Israel] relationship does not benefit Washington and is endangering U.S. interests across the globe,” the CATO Institute’s Jon Hoffman argues.
Washington has significant leverage over Jerusalem; it’s long past time to use it. Unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire and aid provision, the United States should cut off all assistance to Israel immediately. The United States should also stop shielding Israel from the diplomatic consequences of its war on Gaza, particularly in UN Security Council votes. These moves would represent a much-needed reorientation of the U.S.-Israel relationship, moving away from the status quo of unconditional support, regardless of the consequences.
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Ahead of the UN conference, France announced that it would officially recognize a Palestinian state in September, and this week the UK said it would make the same move if Israel does not make “substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza.” These pronouncements matter to a certain extent, but have little impact absent real pressure on Israel and certainly do not meet the urgency of the moment as mass starvation looms over Gaza.
The ball is in America’s court. Resetting the U.S.-Israel relationship to achieve a ceasefire could be the first step toward a political horizon to end the conflict. To be sure, this is a monumental challenge, but it’s a moral and strategic necessity for the United States. The Middle East is of declining strategic importance, and the combustible Israel–Palestine issue continues to entangle Washington in the region.
Exerting American leverage to end the inhumane suffering in Gaza is only the first step in right-sizing a broken U.S.-Israel relationship, moving toward a political horizon that brings peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians, and getting the U.S. out of the Middle East for good.
