By Jonathan Stempel
May 10 (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes to wean Israel off U.S. military support within a decade as his country pushes to strengthen ties with Gulf states, he said in an interview that aired on Sunday.
“I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have,” Netanyahu told CBS News’ “60 Minutes” program.
Netanyahu said Israel receives about $3.8 billion of U.S. military aid a year. The U.S. has agreed to provide a total of $38 billion in military aid to Israel from 2018 to 2028.
But it is “absolutely” the right time to possibly reset the U.S.-Israeli financial relationship, Netanyahu said.
“I don’t want to wait for the next Congress,” he told CBS. “I want to start now.”
Israel has long had bipartisan consensus within the U.S. Congress for military aid, but support from lawmakers and the public has frayed since the outbreak of war in Gaza in October 2023.
Sixty percent of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, and 59% had little or no confidence in Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs, according to a Pew survey conducted in March. Both percentages were up seven percentage points from a year earlier.
Netanyahu said deteriorating support for Israel in the United States “correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media.”
He said several countries, which he did not identify, have “basically manipulated” social media in a way that “hurt us badly,” though he personally did not believe in censorship.
NO TIMETABLE IN IRAN
Support for U.S. President Donald Trump, a close ally of Netanyahu, has also ebbed since the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran on February 28.
The war has led to higher gasoline prices, which contributed to U.S. inflation rising on an annualized basis in March to the highest level since May 2023.
A significant factor behind higher fuel prices has been Iran’s throttling of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of the world’s oil normally passes.
Only after the war began did Israeli planners recognize Iran’s ability to close the strait, Netanyahu said. “It took a while for them to understand how big that risk is, which they understand now,” he said.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, Netanyahu declined to discuss Israel’s military plans or timetable in Iran, but he addressed the potential ramifications if Iran’s leadership changed.
“If this regime is indeed weakened or possibly toppled, I think it’s the end of Hezbollah, it’s the end of Hamas, it’s probably the end of the Houthis, because the whole scaffolding of the terrorist proxy network that Iran built collapses,” Netanyahu said.
Asked if it were possible to topple 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.)
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