Twelve Senate Democrats Want Israel Weapons and Spy Partnerships Cut From the Military Bill

Every year Congress passes one giant bill that sets the rules for the U.S. military, and every year it gets loaded up in the last weeks before Christmas. This year’s version is close to the finish line, and a dozen Senate Democrats just tried to pull America’s closest Middle East ally out of it.

On Tuesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and 11 colleagues sent a letter to the top Republicans and Democrats in both chambers asking them to cut three sections from the final defense bill. All three would write closer U.S.-Israel military and intelligence ties into law. The signers are Patty Murray, Ron Wyden, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Brian Schatz, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Tammy Duckworth, Tina Smith, Peter Welch and Andy Kim, according to Van Hollen’s own release.

Van Hollen announced it himself, and he didn’t hide where the idea came from.

Three sections, one target

Two of the sections are twins. Section 1217 of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s bill and Section 219 of the bill the House already passed would both create a “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” In plain English, the two countries would share technology, build weapons together and do joint research in the fields that will decide the next war: SI, quantum computing, autonomous systems, cyberwarfare and biotechnology.

The third is Section 618 of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bill, which usually gets folded into the defense bill at the end. It tells the executive branch to “expand and enhance intelligence sharing with the Government of Israel” and says that sharing “shall not be suspended, reduced, or otherwise materially limited.”

That last line is what has the Democrats most upset. They wrote that it “would tie the President’s hands from limiting intelligence sharing with Israel, even when doing so may be necessary to protect U.S. national security.”

The Democrats’ case

The letter makes three arguments. First, that joint weapons work gives Israel leverage over America. “This is not hypothetical,” the senators wrote, claiming the Netanyahu government used an existing missile-defense deal “to block American Iron Dome batteries from reaching Ukraine.” Second, that the U.S. doesn’t co-produce many of these technologies “even with our closest partners, including NATO or other treaty allies.” Third, that a president doesn’t need a law to do any of this. “President Trump, at his own discretion, could choose to enter new agreements with Israel under existing law,” they wrote.

They also went after Benjamin Netanyahu by name. The letter quotes his note to Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman, who led a House resolution pushing a similar plan, in which Netanyahu said he was “glad to receive your proposed Congressional resolution endorsing my plan to shift the framework of the US-Israel defense cooperation from aid to partnership.”

To the senators, that’s a confession. To a lot of Americans, it reads like the opposite. “From aid to partnership” is the deal conservatives have asked for for years: less money handed over, more work done together that pays off for American industry and American troops. Israel is the country that has spent the last few years fighting Iran’s proxies on every border and sharing what it learns on the battlefield. Treating it like a risk instead of a partner is a strange read of who America’s friends are.

Why the timing matters

The defense bill is being worked out right now between the House and Senate, in the final weeks of the current Congress. The people who decide what stays in the final version are the leaders the letter was sent to, including Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi and House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers of Alabama, both Republicans.

That’s the real story. These provisions survived committee in the Senate and passed the House. If they make the final bill and get signed before Jan. 3, they become law, and the incoming Democratic majority would have to pass a new law to undo them. If they get dropped now, the next Congress gets to write the Israel policy from scratch.

Van Hollen has been at this since summer. In July he sent a letter to fellow senators urging them to block the defense bill from even coming up for a vote until these sections were dealt with. That effort didn’t stop the bill. Tuesday’s letter is a second try, aimed at the handful of people who control the final draft.

Who signed, and who didn’t

The list is worth reading closely. It includes the Senate’s best-known progressives, Sanders, Warren and Markey, but also Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who sits on Armed Services. It doesn’t include Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, whose own name was on the address line.

That gap matters in January. Democrats will run the Senate, and the party’s left wing is already pressing for a new direction. The Jerusalem Post covered the push as senators urging Congress “to block expanded military, intelligence sharing with Israel,” and that’s the fight this wing plans to carry into the next Congress.

For Republicans, the choice in the next few weeks is simple. Keep the partnership language in the final bill and lock in a closer alliance with Israel, or drop it and leave the question to a Senate run by the people who signed this letter. Wicker and Rogers have the pen until Jan. 3.