America has never given Israel a friend like this in the White House. The question is what Israel does with the window before it closes.
Every American president since Harry Truman has said he supports Israel. Truman recognized the state eleven minutes after it declared independence.
Eisenhower pressured Israel to withdraw from Sinai.
Johnson looked the other way during the Six Day War and then slow-walked arms.
Nixon airlifted weapons during the Yom Kippur War while simultaneously using them as leverage over Jerusalem.
Carter forced Menachem Begin to the table at Camp David.
Reagan sold AWACS to Saudi Arabia over Israel’s strenuous objection.
Bush 41 withheld loan guarantees to pressure settlements. Clinton tried. Bush 43 tried harder.
Obama gave Iran a nuclear agreement, abstained on a UN Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements illegal in his final weeks in office, and sent $400 million in cash to Tehran on pallets.
Biden imposed conditions on weapons transfers mid-war and withheld them at crucial points in the war.
Every one of them said they were Israel’s friend. Some of them meant it. None of them meant it like President Donald Trump.
What President Trump Actually Did
The record deserves to be stated plainly, because it is worthy of tremendous gratitude - gratitude that the overwhelming number of American Jews in particular do not express nearly enough.
-President Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem - something every president since 1995 had promised and none had done.
-He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reversing decades of American policy.
-He killed the Iran nuclear deal that Obama had used American diplomatic capital to construct and that Biden had spent two years trying to resurrect.
-He recognized a form of Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria by declaring that American law does not categorically prohibit civilian settlement there.
-He threatened the International Criminal Court with sanctions over its indictment of Israeli officials.
-He released weapons shipments that Biden had frozen.
-And in 2026, after bombing Iran's nuclear sites in 2025, he deployed American bombers to strike Iranian nuclear facilities alongside Israel - the most consequential military action against Iran’s nuclear program in history, an action that included the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei.
The ceasefire reached in early April 2026 is fragile. Iran is already working to clear debris from its missile bases. Negotiations led by Vice President Vance are off and on, with Iran still holding enriched uranium sufficient for eleven nuclear bombs. President Trump has been unambiguous, rejecting Iran's "peace plans" because they call to postpone the nuclear issue: “We’re going to get the dust back."
No American president has ever spoken about Iran’s nuclear program like that. No American president has ever acted on it like that.
The Clock
President Trump is 78 years old. His second term ends in January 2029. The Democratic Party that will contest that election has moved in one direction on Israel since 2016 - and it has not been toward support. The progressive wing that now sets the party’s ideological agenda openly supports BDS. The Democrat mayors of America’s largest cities are, in a striking number of cases, either hostile to Israel or indifferent to it. A recent Democrat in the White House spent his final weeks in office abstaining on a UN resolution that declared Israeli construction in Jerusalem illegal.
The next Democrat in the White House will not be Obama. He will most likely be to Obama’s left, facing a base that has normalized the phrase “globalize the intifada," that treats BDS as mainstream, and that has spent the better part of a decade moving further from Israel on every issue. The conditions Biden imposed on weapons transfers will return. The Iran nuclear deal will be resurrected. The ICC indictment of Israeli officials that President Trump threatened to sanction the court over will be welcomed.
Israel has, at best, three years of the most favorable American administration it has ever known. Our nation must use the time wisely.
Use the Window
The most important thing Israel can do with this window is what Prime Minister Netanyahu said in January 2026 he wants to do - and must now actually execute. In an interview with The Economist, he said Israel should “taper off" the $3.8 billion in annual American military aid to zero over the next decade, moving the relationship “from aid to partnership," although the US aid is far from a one-way street. Stiill, he is right. And this should not be a political debate in Israel - across the spectrum, Israeli leaders must move in this direction for the country’s continued independence.
Because despite Israel's enhancement of US weaponry, the $3.8 billion - $3.3 billion in direct military financing and $500 million for joint missile defense - is not free. It comes with strings that are invisible when a friend holds them and become chains when an adversary does. Henry Kissinger said the quiet part out loud after the 1973 Yom Kippur War airlift: “The Israelis now know how dependent they are on the United States, and that means they are going to listen to us." Every American administration since has understood this. Aid is leverage.
Israel’s GDP per capita stands at $54,177 - higher than the United Kingdom, higher than Japan, higher than France. Its defense exports reached nearly $15 billion in 2024. Its domestic defense industry - Rafael, Elbit, IAI - produces technology that America buys. The $3.8 billion represents less than 1% of Israel’s GDP. A country with Israel’s economic and military profile can fund its own defense. For the sake of its independence, it must.
Permanent Facts on the Ground
The window is also strategic. President Trump will not punish Israel for actions that any future American administration will call unacceptable. This is not a permanent condition. It is a three-year window.
The Golan is recognized. Good - it is done. The embassy is in Jerusalem. Good - it is done.
What remains undone is the application of Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the major "settlement blocs" - territories that Israel’s security establishment has said for decades are non-negotiable, that every serious Israeli government has treated as permanent, but that no Israeli government has been willing to formalize while an American president was watching.
This American president is not watching with disapproval. He is watching with support. The window to create facts that no future administration can reverse is open. The Golan Heights is the model. What was done cannot be undone. What is not done will be relitigated in 2029 by an administration that will demand Israeli concessions as the price of American support.
Gratitude Is Not a Strategy
Israel should be grateful for President Trump. It has no better friend in the history of American presidents, and it should say so clearly and often. Gratitude, however, is not a strategy. The strategic lesson of the Trump years is not that America can be relied upon - it is that Israel has been fortunate enough to have a friend in the White House at a critical moment, and that it should use that fortune to make itself permanently less reliant on whoever comes next.
Zeev Jabotinsky’s iron wall was never about American support. It was about Jewish strength - the kind that does not require a patron, that deters enemies on its own terms, that builds facts that outlast any single administration. The Israel that fights Iran with American bombers alongside it is stronger than the Israel that fights alone. But the Israel that still needs $3.8 billion annually from Washington in 2029 - when the next Democrat takes office and reattaches every string that Biden attached and Obama attached before him - will have wasted the window.
Use the window. Wean off the aid. Apply the sovereignty. Build the domestic defense industry to full self-sufficiency. Move the relationship from client to partner on Israel’s terms while a president is in office who wants exactly that.
President Trump won’t be there forever. Act like it.
Ronn Torossian is an Israeli-American entrepreneur and communal leader.