The United States and Israel: how the relationship works

The United States recognised the State of Israel eleven minutes after David Ben-Gurion proclaimed independence on 14 May 1948. In the decades since, no bilateral partnership has had a larger or more sustained effect on Israel's security, economy and diplomatic position. The relationship is not a formal alliance in the NATO sense. It is held together instead by a series of long-running instruments: a ten-year military aid framework, a Free Trade Agreement, a pattern of US diplomatic cover at the United Nations, and a deep web of legislative, intelligence and people-to-people ties.

This explainer sets out the foundations, the working instruments, and the recurring disagreements. It is a reference, not an editorial.

Strategic foundation

Harry Truman's 14 May 1948 statement extended de facto recognition to the provisional government of Israel. De jure recognition followed on 31 January 1949 after Israel held its first elections. Truman acted against the advice of his own State Department, which warned that recognition would damage US standing in the Arab world.

Through the 1950s and most of the 1960s the United States was not Israel's principal arms supplier. France and the United Kingdom played that role. The strategic shift came after the 1967 Six-Day War, when France imposed an arms embargo on Israel and the US gradually replaced it as the primary security partner. The 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which a US airlift of weapons proved decisive to Israel's recovery, locked in that position.

The relationship is sometimes described in formal terms as a "Major Non-NATO Ally" designation, granted by Congress in 1987 and confirmed in subsequent legislation. The label gives Israel access to certain US defence cooperation programmes but does not include a mutual-defence commitment.

The military aid framework

US military aid to Israel runs through a Memorandum of Understanding, signed roughly every ten years between the two governments. The current MoU was signed on 14 September 2016 by the Obama administration. It covers fiscal years 2019 to 2028 and commits the United States to USD 38 billion over ten years: USD 3.3 billion per year in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and USD 500 million per year in missile-defence assistance.

This is the largest single bilateral defence-aid commitment in US history. The previous MoU, signed in 2007, was worth USD 30 billion over ten years. Foreign Military Financing is granted, not lent: under the current framework, all of it must be spent on US-manufactured systems, though earlier MoUs allowed a portion to be spent on Israeli-made equipment.

Missile defence funding is a separate line and has supported the development and procurement of the Iron Dome short-range interceptor, David's Sling for medium-range threats, and the Arrow system for longer-range ballistic threats. Beyond the MoU itself, the US Congress has appropriated additional supplemental funding for missile defence in years of heavy use, and for emergency support during conflicts.

Trade and economic ties

The two countries signed a Free Trade Agreement in 1985, the first the United States concluded with any country. Bilateral goods and services trade today runs in the tens of billions of US dollars a year. The United States is consistently Israel's single largest trading partner, although the European Union as a bloc is larger.

Beyond trade, the United States is the largest source of foreign direct investment into Israel, particularly in the technology sector. Major US firms operate research and development centres in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, and US venture capital is a significant funder of the Israeli start-up ecosystem.

The United Nations and the veto record

The most visible diplomatic instrument in the relationship is the US veto at the United Nations Security Council. Since 1972, the United States has cast its veto 51 times specifically to block or modify draft resolutions critical of Israel, the latest published count as of April 2026.

The vetoes have covered settlements policy, military operations in Lebanon and Gaza, the Golan Heights, and, most heavily, repeated calls for a Gaza ceasefire during the war that began in October 2023. Between October 2023 and the October 2025 ceasefire, the United States vetoed five Security Council ceasefire or hostage-release resolutions on the Gaza war. The pattern has held under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, though the threshold at which the United States will withhold its veto and abstain has shifted over time.

Jerusalem and recognition decisions

For most of the relationship the United States maintained its embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv, declining to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital. That changed in two steps. On 6 December 2017 President Donald Trump announced that the United States would recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital and begin moving its embassy there. The embassy formally opened in Jerusalem on 14 May 2018, on the seventieth anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence.

The decision was a sharp departure from previous US practice and from the position of most UN member states, who maintain their embassies in Tel Aviv pending a final-status agreement on Jerusalem. Under the Biden administration the embassy remained in Jerusalem but the United States indicated it would also reopen a separate consulate in East Jerusalem to handle relations with the Palestinian Authority; that consulate has not been reopened.

Domestic American politics

Support for Israel within the United States rests on a coalition of evangelical Christian voters, the organised Jewish community, large parts of the foreign-policy establishment, and historically bipartisan legislative majorities. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), founded in 1963, has been the most visible lobby group, although it operates alongside others on both pro- and anti-Israel sides of the debate.

That bipartisan baseline has loosened in recent years. Polling now shows a clear partisan gap, with Republican voters expressing stronger sympathy for Israel than Democratic voters; the gap has widened since the start of the 2023 to 2025 Gaza war. Inside Congress, support for Israel remains a majority position in both parties, but a vocal minority on the Democratic left has begun to call for conditions on US military aid, which would be a substantial departure from past practice.

Recurring points of friction

The relationship is sometimes described as "unbreakable", but it has been the site of public disagreements throughout. The most persistent points of friction are these:

Settlements in the West Bank. Every US administration since the Carter presidency has treated Israeli settlements in the West Bank as either illegal or an obstacle to peace. The Trump administration in 2019 broke from that line, stating that settlements were not necessarily inconsistent with international law; the Biden administration reverted to the older position in 2024.

The Iran nuclear question. Israel publicly opposed the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers including the United States. Successive Israeli governments have continued to push for a harder US line on Iran, including military options.

The two-state framework. Most US administrations have endorsed a two-state outcome between Israel and the Palestinians. Israeli governments have varied in their commitment to that framework, with the current government (formed in late 2022) the most sceptical of it in Israel's history.

The Abraham Accords and the regional reshape

The Abraham Accords, signed at the White House on 15 September 2020, normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and between Israel and Bahrain. Morocco and Israel agreed to normalise on 10 December 2020, and Sudan and Israel agreed to normalise on 23 October 2020 (Sudan's domestic ratification remains held up by political instability through mid-2026).

The Accords were brokered by the United States and have continued to function as a framework for further regional integration, including the India-Israel-United Arab Emirates-United States (I2U2) grouping and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) announced at the G20 in 2023. Saudi Arabia remains the most-discussed potential next signatory. The Trump administration that took office in January 2025 has openly sought to expand the Accords to include Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon, but as of mid-2026 no further normalisation has been signed; Riyadh has continued to condition any deal on a concrete path to a Palestinian state.

The war from October 2023 and the 2025 ceasefire

The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the war that followed brought the US-Israel relationship under unusual public strain. The Biden administration provided substantial supplemental military aid and diplomatic cover, including multiple Security Council vetoes of ceasefire resolutions. Public US-Israel disagreement over humanitarian access, the conduct of military operations in Gaza, and post-war planning was more visible than in any recent conflict.

The Trump administration that took office in January 2025 brokered the ceasefire agreement signed by Israel and Hamas on 9 October 2025, which came into effect the following day and was endorsed by the UN Security Council on 17 November 2025. Phase one delivered the return of all living and deceased hostages from the 7 October 2023 attacks by 26 January 2026. Phase two, addressing demilitarisation in Gaza and the formation of a multinational Board of Peace, began in February 2026 and remains in progress; the ceasefire has held in formal terms but with frequent Israeli strikes against what it has described as imminent threats. The structural instruments of the relationship - the MoU, the FTA, the veto practice - have all held through the transition.

In one paragraph

The US-Israel relationship is held together by a small number of durable instruments: the ten-year MoU on military aid (currently USD 38 billion through 2028), a 1985 Free Trade Agreement, a UN Security Council veto practice that has run for more than five decades, and a domestic American political coalition that has supplied bipartisan legislative majorities (though not without strain). Around those instruments, US and Israeli policy diverge most often on settlements, Iran, and the two-state framework. The relationship has weathered each of those disagreements without changing its underlying shape.

---

Sources

[1]: Statement by the President Announcing Recognition of the State of Israel, Harry S. Truman Library, 14 May 1948. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/100/statement-president-announcing-recognition-state-israel

[2]: U.S. Recognition of the State of Israel, US National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/us-israel

[3]: "The State Department told Truman not to recognize Israel. He did it anyway." Forward, 2023. https://forward.com/news/546537/state-department-told-truman-recognize-israel-75-arab-jewish/

[4]: "U.S.-Israeli Relations: A Brief Overview." Congressional Research Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/

[5]: "The 1973 Yom Kippur War and the US Airlift." US Department of State, Office of the Historian. https://history.state.gov/

[6]: Major Non-NATO Ally designation, Foreign Assistance Act amendments. US Department of State. https://www.state.gov/

[7]: Ten-Year Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States and Israel, US Department of State (archived). https://2017-2021.state.gov/ten-year-memorandum-of-understanding-between-the-united-states-and-israel/

[8]: "FACT SHEET: Memorandum of Understanding Reached with Israel." Obama White House Archives, 14 September 2016. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/14/fact-sheet-memorandum-understanding-reached-israel/

[9]: "How much aid does the US give to Israel?" USAFacts. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-military-aid-does-the-us-give-to-israel/

[10]: US-Israel Free Trade Agreement, Office of the United States Trade Representative. https://ustr.gov/

[11]: "Foreign direct investment in Israel." Bank of Israel and CBS data. https://www.boi.org.il/

[12]: "Vetoed Draft Resolutions in the United Nations Security Council." UK Government / UNSC records. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80ef72e5274a2e87dbca67/RA_Newsletter_Nov_2015_Vetoed_draft_resolutions_in_the_UN_Security_Council_-_Sept_2015.pdf

[13]: "How the US has used its veto power at the UN in support of Israel." Al Jazeera, with UNSC voting records. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/26/how-the-us-has-used-its-veto-power-at-the-un-in-support-of-israel