Jonathan Stempel
May 10 (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that he hopes to wean Israel from U.S. military support within a decade as it strives to strengthen ties with Gulf states.
“I want to reduce U.S. financial support, the financial component of our military cooperation, to zero,” Netanyahu told CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”
Netanyahu said that Israel receives about $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid every year. The United States has agreed to provide military assistance to Israel totaling $38 billion from 2018 to 2028.
But Netanyahu said now was “absolutely” the right time to reset the U.S.-Israeli financial relationship.
“I don’t want to wait for the next Congress,” he told CBS. “I want to start now.”
Israel has long had a bipartisan consensus within the U.S. Congress on military aid, but support from lawmakers and the public has been waning since the Gaza war broke out in October 2023.
A Pew Research Center survey in March showed that 60% of U.S. adults have a negative view of Israel and 59% have little or no confidence that Netanyahu will do the right thing in world affairs. Both percentages were up seven percentage points from the same period last year.
Netanyahu said deteriorating U.S. support for Israel is “almost 100 percent related to the exponential growth of social media.”
He said some countries, which he did not name, had essentially manipulated social media in a way that “seriously harmed us”, although he personally did not believe in censorship.
Iran has no timetable
Approval ratings for U.S. President Donald Trump, a close ally of Netanyahu, have also declined since the United States and Israel launched war against Iran on February 28.
The war has led to higher gasoline prices, causing U.S. inflation in March to rise to the highest annual rate since May 2023.
A big factor in rising fuel prices is Iran’s restrictions on traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil normally passes.
Netanyahu said it was not until after the war began that Israeli planners recognized Iran’s ability to close the strait. “It took them a while to understand how big the risk was, and now they do,” he said.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, Netanyahu declined to discuss Israel’s military plans or timeline in Iran, but he spoke of possible consequences if there were changes in Iran’s leadership.
“If this regime is indeed weakened or potentially overthrown, I think that’s the end of Hezbollah, that’s the end of Hamas, and it could be the end of the Houthis because the whole scaffolding of the terrorist proxy network that Iran has built falls apart,” Netanyahu said.
Asked if it was possible to overthrow the Iranian regime, Netanyahu said: “Is it possible? Yes. Is it guaranteed? No.”
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Sergio Non, Paul Simao and Lincoln Feast.)