“The experience of the Obama years has sharpened the perception among pro-Israel Americans that aid can cut against Israel by giving presidents with bad ideas more leverage than they would otherwise have,” said Noah Pollak, the executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI). Pollak’s group has been one of Obama’s toughest critics, running television advertisements in 2012 that blamed Obama for dithering as Iran continued to enrich uranium…

Pollak is not alone. Elliott Abrams—a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush and leading pro-Israel writer and policy analyst—told The Daily Beast, “My view is over time it would be healthy for the relationship if the aid diminished. Israel should be less dependent on American financial assistance and should become the kind of ally that we have in Australia, Canada or the United Kingdom, an intimate military relationship and alliance, but no military aid.”

This is also the view expressed by leading Israeli politicians. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister of economics and the leader of the right-wing Israel Home party, said in 2013, “Today, U.S. military aid is roughly 1 percent of Israel’s economy. I think, generally, we need to free ourselves from it. We have to do it responsibly, since I’m not aware of all the aspects of the budget, I don’t want to say ‘Let’s just give it up,’ but our situation today is very different from what it was 20 and 30 years ago.”