This is a Warning

The Merger You Weren't Asked About

Jun 05, 2026

There is a line in the House version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that almost nobody read, and that is precisely the point. It is called Section 224, the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” It did not get a primetime hearing. It did not get a floor fight. It got buried in a record 1.15 trillion dollar defense bill, where the things that change your country quietly tend to live.

So let me tell you what it actually does, because the people who wrote it are counting on you not to find out.

For seventy-some years, the relationship between the United States and Israel ran on an aid model. Israel has received more than 200 billion dollars, inflation adjusted, in military assistance since 1948. You may agree with that. You may hate it. But here is the part that matters: it was visible. It came up for a vote. You could see the number, name the people who approved it, and hold them accountable. That is how a republic is supposed to handle the spending of your money.

Section 224 is a different animal. It lays the groundwork for joint weapons research, co-production, joint ventures, and shared development across artificial intelligence, quantum technology, autonomous systems, cyber, and biotech, and it proposes “network integration” and “data fusion” between the two militaries. Here is the tell: the bill never defines those last two terms. Ben Freeman of the Quincy Institute, the analyst who first flagged this provision, says that ambiguity is the whole problem. In plain English, the U.S. military’s data could become the Israeli military’s data, and nobody writing the bill will tell you where the line is. If fully enacted, this would be a tighter level of military integration than the United States maintains with any country on the planet, closer than our NATO treaty allies.

Now sit with what these systems actually are, because this is where it comes home.

The AI and surveillance technology Israel brings to this merger was not built in a lab and left on a shelf. It was field-tested on human beings. Human Rights Watch has documented that Israel’s AI targeting tools rely on systematic, mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza: watching where people go, rating residents to decide who is a target, tracking when a person is inside a particular building. The group concluded those tools are incompatible with international human rights law. That is the pedigree of the technology Section 224 proposes to fuse into American systems.

So ask the question the bill refuses to answer. When you import surveillance and targeting tools that were perfected by watching an entire population, and you fuse the data pipelines together, and you build the production plants on American soil, where does that capability point next? The bill does not say. The undefined scope is not sloppiness. It is the door left open on purpose. What is happening to Palestinians today is the proof of concept. The hardware and the code do not care which population they are pointed at. Once that machinery is wired into your country’s systems, the only thing standing between it and you is the goodwill of the people running it, and goodwill is not a civil liberty.

And before you tell yourself a partner would never turn that capability against American interests, remember the USS Liberty. In June of 1967, Israeli forces attacked an American intelligence ship in international waters, killing 34 American servicemen and wounding more than 170. Both governments officially ruled it a tragic case of mistaken identity. To this day, survivors of that attack and a number of former U.S. officials reject that explanation and insist it was deliberate. I am not here to tell you the case is closed, because it is not. I am telling you that the one time this question was tested with American lives on the line, the official story and the survivors’ story do not match, and our own government chose to let it go. That is the historical record you are being asked to wire your military into.

Because here is the truth about this relationship that nobody in leadership will say plainly: it is one-sided at best. The United States does more for that country than it does for the people it actually answers to. We send the aid, we send the weapons, now we are being asked to send the integration, and the favor does not run the other way. When American towns need disaster money, infrastructure, or schools that work, the answer is always that the budget is tight. When it is time to fund a foreign military, the money is always there.

How does that happen in a system that is supposed to seat Americans at the table? Through groups like AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel, whose business is lobbying your representatives to keep that foreign government’s interests at the front of the line. Here is a question worth sitting with, and you do not have to take it from me. Take it from Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, who said it on the record in 2024. Massie told an interviewer that every member of Congress but him has what he called an AIPAC “babysitter,” a contact, usually drawn from the member’s own district, who stays in regular touch on the group’s behalf. “When they come to DC, you have to go to lunch with them, and they’ve got your cell number,” he said. Whether you take his word for it is up to you. But this is a sitting Republican congressman describing his own colleagues, not an outside critic, and he is describing a level of access to American lawmakers that ordinary American voters can only dream of.

In that same interview, Massie raised the other question nobody in leadership wants asked. When an organization lobbies on behalf of a foreign government’s interests, the Foreign Agents Registration Act can require it to register as a foreign agent, disclose its funding, and label its materials, so the public knows whose agenda is being pushed. Massie pointed out that this is exactly what would be required of groups advocating for nearly any other country. Yet these groups operate as domestic lobbies under looser rules, on the argument that they are American organizations with American donors. Maybe you find that convincing. Maybe you do not. But you are entitled to ask it out loud: why does the operation most dedicated to advancing one foreign nation’s agenda get to skip the disclosure the foreign-agent law was written to require, and who benefits from you never asking?

And here is where it stops being abstract. On June 4, the House Armed Services Committee took up an amendment from Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, to strip Section 224 out of the bill. On the record, in that committee, Khanna told his colleagues: “Mr. Netanyahu actually wrote to the member of Congress to put this section 224 into the bill.” He framed the vote as plainly as it can be framed: a choice to keep the provision was a choice to let a foreign prime minister, in his words, “boss our president around.”

The provision’s defenders dispute Khanna’s account. The sponsors say Netanyahu never contacted them about Section 224, and they point out that the letter circulating online, a note from Netanyahu to Congressman Marlin Stutzman, concerns a separate resolution to shift from aid to partnership, not Section 224 itself. In that letter, Netanyahu does write that he is “heartened by your enthusiastic support for our plan” to replace U.S. military aid with “joint defense cooperation, codevelopment, coproduction and mutual investment” in missile defense, artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, and cybersecurity. Whether that letter is the gun Khanna says it is, you can judge for yourself. What is not in dispute is the vote. Khanna’s amendment failed. Every member of the committee but one, Representative Sara Jacobs, voted to keep Section 224 in the bill. Massie on the right had already vowed to strip it on the floor. The bipartisan opposition exists. It just lost.

A foreign prime minister called this provision “our plan.” A bipartisan handful of lawmakers tried to kill it. The rest of the committee voted to keep it, then told you it was about your security.

Now here is where I hold everybody to the same standard, because that is the whole brand of this report. This is not a Republican scheme or a Democratic scheme. Section 224 was put forward by Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Adam Smith, the panel’s ranking Democrat. Red and blue, same page. When the leadership of both teams quietly agrees while the public looks away, that is not bipartisanship. That is the merchandise being moved off the shelf before you can object. And the public would object: polling this spring found only 16 percent of Americans want to keep arming Israel with no new restrictions, while 38 percent want weapons transfers stopped entirely. The people you elected are deepening this entanglement at the exact moment the people they represent are pulling the other way.

Why do it quietly? As the Quincy Institute put it, the shift strips away the oversight that makes the relationship publicly accountable, moving it out of a visible aid vote and into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition. Deeper and harder to see, at the same time, by design. And once the plants open in American districts, as they already have in Mississippi and Arkansas, the politics lock in. Every plant becomes jobs, every job becomes a vote, every vote becomes a member of Congress who will never unwind the thing. You do not undo a merger like this. You inherit it. Your kids inherit it.

I am not telling you what to think about Israel. I am telling you that a decision this big, fusing your military’s data and importing surveillance tools tested on a captive population, should be made in the open, with your name on the vote, not slipped into a defense bill in the dark.

So here is what you do. The NDAA has not passed. It cleared committee; it has not cleared the House, and it has not cleared the Senate. Call your representative and both of your senators and ask one question: do you support Section 224, yes or no? Make them answer on the record. You can find them at house.gov and senate.gov. If you live in Georgia, that is two senators and one House member who work for you, not for anybody else.

The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed, for the people who designed it. Your job is not to get angry. Your job is to see it clearly, then move.

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