Americans are turning against Israel’s war. According to a confidential CIA assessment of Israel described to the outlet Capital & Empire, Israeli officials know it — and they have a plan for what happens next. Netanyahu wants to make US and Israeli military integration permanent.
The plan is not to win the argument. It’s to make the argument irrelevant.
What the CIA Assessment of Israel Reportedly Says
Reporter Aída Chávez wrote on July 29 that a new assessment, authored primarily by the CIA and circulated that week, describes an Israeli strategy to embed itself so deeply into America’s military, intelligence, and defense industry that a future president would struggle to pull back even if voters demanded it.
Several U.S. officials described the document to her.
The reported logic is straightforward. Direct military aid is a line item. Line items are visible, and visible things can be cut by a Congress that reads polling.
Joint weapons programs, shared intelligence pipelines, and Israeli technology built into American systems are none of those things.
They’re plumbing. You don’t cut plumbing in a budget vote — you’d have to demolish the walls to get to it and rip it out.
The assessment reportedly describes discussions about expanding intelligence cooperation and the possibility of a permanent U.S. military base on Israeli soil.
It also says Israeli officials have been courting prominent figures in the American tech sector to build long-term financial and political backing. No individuals are named.
A necessary caveat: nobody outside a small circle has seen this document. It has not been released, and the CIA did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation, which picked up the story on August 9.
Everything above comes from anonymous sources. Treat it as a serious claim from a credentialed reporter that remains, for now, unconfirmed.
It’s still worth your attention, regardless: the parts you can verify are already public and already documented.
The Verified Parts
Start with Benjamin Netanyahu, on the record.
In a May 10 60 Minutes interview, he told CBS’s Major Garrett, “I want to draw down the American support to Israel to zero,” describing a phase-out over roughly ten years.
Most coverage framed that as a confidence flex — Israel outgrowing the need for a handout.
The reported assessment reads it as the opposite: not a withdrawal from American support, but a move from visible support to support the American public can’t see.
Look at what the House did on July 22. Buried in the $1.15 trillion FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed 216–212, is Section 219.
Previously known as Section 224, it was changed to Section 219 after the public became aware of it.
It’s a provision that will create a permanent U.S.–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative inside the Pentagon, with a designated executive agent whose job is to synchronize and accelerate joint research, testing, and industrial cooperation.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who tried to strip the provision, called it “a betrayal of our sovereignty.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) described the proposal as “an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy.”
Representative Ro Khanna spoke in committee urging his colleagues not to vote for the NDAA with this provision in it. He mentioned how a majority of the country does not want this.
It was difficult to make sense of a move to combine the two militaries, allowing Israel access into our classified computer system, after the intelligence communities said that Israel’s spying had risen to the highest level warning possible.
Israel was caught spying on high-level elected officials. So why would we allow them to access our national security secrets?
Six Democrats — Reps. Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Vicente Gonzalez, Adam Gray, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — voted with Republicans to pass the bill. It now goes to the Senate.
And look at the money. A July report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, The Eighth Front, found the Israeli government has spent more than $1 billion on public diplomacy since October 2023, including over $100 million routed through firms registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Israel is on track to become the single largest FARA spender in the United States this year.
That spending buys unusual things. Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, holds a $46.5 million contract — the largest active Israeli FARA contract — to build networks of websites engineered to shape how AI chatbots describe Israel.
His firm’s agreement specifies that roughly 80% of the content target Gen Z, on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Separately, AIPAC and allied groups poured roughly $9 million into May’s Kentucky primary to end Massie’s career, the most expensive House primary in history.
AIPAC is funded by Americans and doesn’t register under FARA — which is precisely what makes it effective.
Why They’re in a Hurry
Because the ground is moving. An April Pew Research Center survey found about 60% of U.S. adults hold an unfavorable view of Israel — up from 53% a year earlier and 42% in 2022.
59% say they have little or no confidence in Netanyahu. Among Democrats and Republicans under 50, majorities view both negatively.
A billion dollars in messaging did not move those numbers. It couldn’t, because the problem was never the messaging.
Americans watched Gaza get destroyed, watched more than 70,000 Palestinians die, watched their own government spend billions on it, and drew conclusions.
How can anyone look at photos of Palestinian children starving to death in Gaza and not hold an unfavorable view of the Israeli government?
To be clear: this is about a foreign government’s lobbying strategy and about American lawmakers who take its money.
It is not about Jewish people, and anyone who tries to conflate the people with the far-right government of Israel is doing Netanyahu’s job for him.
Some of the loudest voices against this integration are Jewish — Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, the students who got suspended for saying so first.
The Senate Will Decide the Fate of Section 219
Strip away the intelligence-community intrigue and one fact remains: a democracy is supposed to be able to change its mind.
60% of the country now holds an unfavorable view of Israel’s government. In a functioning democratic system, that shift would show up in policy within an election cycle or two.
What Section 219 does — what the reported CIA assessment of Israel says Netanyahu is pursuing on purpose — is build a relationship that survives that shift in public opinion.
Structures that outlast voters aren’t foreign policy.
The Senate has its version of the NDAA to write. That’s where this will be decided, so continue to contact your Senator and tell them: “Don’t pass the NDAA until Section 219 is removed.”
