The memorial at the site of the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, November 2025. Photo: Oren Rozen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Today is the third anniversary of October 7, and the first on which no hostage is held in Gaza. This Long View begins with a paper presented in the Knesset 87 days before the massacre and turns to the warning that matters now, which concerns the alliance between Israel and the United States. Both countries vote within the month.
The 87-Day Warning
In July 2023 a paper presented in the Knesset was right about Gaza and changed nothing in time. Three years later the warning concerns Israel’s alliance with the United States, and the decisions fall between now and January.
On July 12, 2023, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser and I stood in the Knesset and presented his Forum paper to the two co-chairs of the Israel Victory Caucus, Ohad Tal of the coalition and Evgeny Sova of the opposition. The paper challenged what Israelis called “mowing the grass” in Gaza, the practice of striking Hamas every few years and letting it rearm in between. It proposed to disarm Hamas instead.
The paper named the assumption under the policy. Israel, Kuperwasser wrote, saw the challenge from Hamas as “a chronic problem that cannot be solved, and yet a minor threat” compared with Iran, Hezbollah and others. Israel, he said when the paper was released, had “ceded the initiative to the rulers of Gaza, seeking the longest possible intervals of relative calm between major eruptions of violence.”
A minister, former generals and members of both blocs spoke at the hearing, the Jerusalem Post reported that day. “There should be no difference between the coalition and opposition on this issue,” Sova said.
Pressed that day on the army’s estimate that an invasion of Gaza would cost the lives of 500 to 1,000 soldiers, Kuperwasser answered that the public needed to debate whether unending rounds of fighting were in fact the cheaper course.
One sentence in the paper reads now as a forecast: “The cost of adhering to the current strategy is rising, and the enemy may make better use of the time strategically.” Eighty-seven days later, Hamas murdered about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
The paper was right, and it changed nothing in time. Officials who did not act on it in July asked for it after October. I take one lesson from that for a research organization: an idea matters only if it reaches the people who decide before the event.
Today is the third anniversary of the massacre, and the first on which no hostage is held in Gaza. The last of them, Ran Gvili, a police officer killed in the fighting that morning, was brought home for burial in January.
At 6:29 this morning, the minute the attack began, families gathered at the site of the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, where Hamas killed 378 people and took 44 more to Gaza. The photograph at the top of this edition was taken there.
This essay is about the next warning. It concerns the alliance between Israel and the United States, and it is written on the anniversary because the decisions it describes come due in the next three months.
Israel votes on October 27. The United States votes on November 3. Jonathan Spyer, the Forum’s director of research, writes that it looks “possible and even probable” that the Israeli election “may produce no clear winner.”
Most of the polls bear him out. Surveys published this week by Kan, Channel 12 and Channel 13 give neither bloc the 61 seats needed to govern; Channel 14 gives the prime minister’s bloc 63.
Israeli law gives the member of the Knesset chosen to form a government 28 days, and the president may add up to 14 more. After the last election, in November 2022, 58 days passed before a government took office.
Washington has its own dates. The government is funded through December 11. The House has passed the bill that carries the $3.3 billion in military financing for Israel, by 217 votes to 209, and the Senate has not taken it up. Both chambers are due back on November 9 for a five-week session, and what they leave unfinished passes to a new Congress, whose term begins at noon on January 3.
Eighty-seven days from today is January 2, the last full day of this Congress. By then both countries will have voted, and Israel may still be without a new government. Most of the decisions described below fall inside that span.
Israel’s enemies have the same dates in front of them. Netanyahu told his cabinet on Tuesday that Hamas “will try to challenge us with the remainder of its forces ahead of the elections.” The war with Iran is in its eighth month. “One way or the other, we’ll be finished with it,” the President said today.
The Forum endorses no party or candidate in either country and takes direction from no government. What follows is written for whoever governs.
In April Jim Hanson, the Forum’s chief strategist, asked whether the United States and Israel are still allies. The year has given him reasons.
Pew reported that month that 60 percent of Americans view Israel unfavorably, up from 53 percent a year earlier and 42 percent in 2022. The share with a very unfavorable view has nearly tripled in four years, from 10 percent to 28.
Among adults under 50 the unfavorable figure is 84 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans. A year ago the Republican figure was 50. Those are the voters who will elect the Congresses of the 2030s and 2040s.
The numbers have reached the floor of the House. On July 15 members voted on an amendment to bar any money in the bill from going to Israel and to cut the $3.3 billion. It failed, 104 to 314.
The 104 were 103 Democrats, nearly half of the party’s members, and one Republican, the amendment’s sponsor. The Democratic leader voted no, and the party’s whip voted yes. A year earlier an amendment to cut $500 million for Israeli missile defense drew six votes.
The strain has shown between the two governments as well. In June Washington negotiated a memorandum with Tehran through Pakistan and Qatar. Israel was not a party.
ABC News reported that Israel asked to see the text and was refused; an administration official said Israel had never asked, and the President said he had given Israel a copy. The talks produced no final agreement, and the American blockade of Iran’s ports resumed on July 14.
None of this ends an alliance. But an alliance needs support in both parties to last, and among Americans under 50, majorities in both parties now view Israel unfavorably.
“An idea matters only if it reaches the people who decide before the event.”
I expect the alliance to hold. A serious plan still covers the bad case, and two American allies have lived through one.
In March 1970 President Nixon decided to pull 20,000 troops out of South Korea, nearly a third of the American force there. By the middle of 1971 they were gone. Seoul answered by arming itself: a defense research agency in 1970, a heavy-industry drive in 1973, a rearmament plan in 1974.
South Korea is now the world’s ninth-largest arms exporter, and its largest customer is Poland, a NATO ally. The alliance is intact. About 28,500 American troops are still stationed there.
On January 1, 1979, Washington ended diplomatic relations with Taiwan and recognized Beijing. Taiwan’s friends in Congress wrote a law to stand in for the defense treaty it was losing. The House approved the final text of the Taiwan Relations Act by 339 votes to 50 on March 28, and the Senate by 85 to 4 the next day. That was 87 days after the break, and the law still governs American arms sales to the island.
Taiwan then made itself hard to abandon. Its leading chipmaker was founded in 1987, and about 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips are now made on the island.
The lessons are plain. South Korea built its own industry. Taiwan held its support in Congress when a White House turned cold. Both made themselves too useful to drop. Israel can do all three.
It begins from a stronger position than either had. The amendment that 104 members supported in July still lost by 210 votes, and Israel already builds weapons with American companies on American soil.
It can do a fourth thing as well, which is to add partners. As I wrote in June, “The answer to one unreliable ally is more allies, chosen better, not none.”
The pieces exist. In February lawmakers from Israel, Greece, Cyprus and the United States, a Republican and a Democrat among the Americans, met in one briefing hosted from the Knesset. The Forum’s argument since August is that Israel should join such pieces into one bloc, running from India through the Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean to Morocco.
The aid is the place to begin. Under the current agreement, signed in 2016, the United States provides Israel $3.3 billion a year in military financing and $500 million for missile defense. The agreement expires on September 30, 2028.
Israel’s prime minister wants to wind it down. “I want to taper off the military aid within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist in January. In May he told CBS: “I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.” Formal talks opened in June.
The danger is drift. A program that Israel’s own prime minister wants to end, and that 104 members of the House voted to end in a single stroke, will not last to 2028 on habit. If nothing is agreed to replace it, the alliance becomes an annual argument about money.
The Forum’s report From Subsidy to Sovereignty, published in May, describes the replacement. The framework the two governments are reported to be negotiating takes American military financing to zero by 2038. The report urges them to sign by the end of fiscal year 2027, before the current agreement expires, and to put three things where the grants were: weapons the two governments develop together, weapons their companies build together, and preferential access to dual-use technology.
One line would grow as the grants fall. The report would double the $500 million a year for missile defense, which pays for programs the two countries run together.
Israel can carry the change. By the report’s figures the grant now equals about half a percent of Israel’s economy, and Israeli defense exports reached $14.79 billion in 2024.
The model is already at work. Last November Raytheon and Rafael opened a plant in East Camden, Arkansas, that builds interceptors for Iron Dome and a version of the same missile for the U.S. Marine Corps. It opened with a $1.25 billion order.
An Israel that pays for its own arms and builds them with American workers has friends in both parties.
Netanyahu said he did not want to wait for the next Congress. That Congress takes office in January, and it will write the last budget under the current agreement. The risk in the coming weeks is that both capitals, busy with elections and then with coalition talks, leave the question to it.
The war with Iran has not produced the result I told audiences in March to expect, as I wrote on Sunday. The regime in Tehran still stands. Ali Khamenei is dead, and his son holds his office.
The pressure on it is real. American forces have turned back 130 ships since the blockade resumed, and the Treasury secretary says Iran loaded no crude onto tankers in September.
Tehran is still attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and its army spokesman said today that Iran would carry out “pre-emptive operations” if circumstances required. Its president called talks with Washington meaningless on Monday and said today that his government was engaged in them.
What remains is a problem of supply. The Forum’s July report, The Magazine War, put it in two sentences: “The region can defeat Iranian raids. It cannot yet outlast Iranian arsenals.” The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated in July that the American stock of Patriot interceptors had fallen by at least 65 percent since the war began. The Pentagon’s answer is that the military “has everything it needs.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimated last month that replacing the interceptors fired through August 1 would cost $13.1 billion, and that rebuilding the stockpile would probably take at least five years.
The administration has moved on production. Lockheed Martin delivered 620 Patriot interceptors last year and agreed in January to raise output to 2,000 a year; a second agreement quadruples production of the larger THAAD interceptor. Both will take years. The report’s companion essay argued for the faster remedy, which planners call left of launch: destroying launchers, drones and supply lines before they fire.
Whether to strike again is one of the decisions that falls before January. Israel’s defense minister said last month of Iran: “We struck it twice, and when necessary, we will strike it a third time.”
The Forum’s forecast log puts the chance of a large Israeli strike on Iran by December 31 at 55 to 70 percent. It puts the chance of a sustained American air campaign at 20 to 30 percent before the midterms and 45 to 50 percent between the midterms and the end of the year, and the chance that Iran formally announces its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty by December 31 at 20 to 25 percent.
Those figures are estimates, published so that readers can hold the Forum to them. What they say is that the largest decision of this war may be made while Israel is between governments and Washington is between Congresses.
Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies: Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. The harder case is the governments that call themselves American allies while working against America’s position in the region.
Turkey has been in NATO since 1952. Its president said 18 days after the massacre that Hamas is “a liberation group” and not a terrorist organization. When the Treasury Department sanctioned a real-estate investment company based in Turkey in 2022, it said that Hamas elements held about 75 percent of the company’s issued capital as of 2018.
Qatar hosts Al Udeid, for two decades America’s largest base in the Middle East, which Iran has attacked repeatedly in this war. Qatar also hosts Hamas, whose leader, Khalil al-Hayya, lives there. The day after the massacre, the Forum urged Washington to use its leverage over Qatar. Three years later the leaders of Hamas are still in Doha.
Neither government is a bystander to the next three months. Qatar is carrying the messages between Washington and Tehran. Turkey agreed on Monday with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to deploy forces to the kingdom under the defense pact the three signed in August.
The Forum documents this from the public record. In June it profiled 21 Turkish think tanks and foundations and found that four of the five groups they fall into treat the United States as a threat, a competitor or a power to hedge against. American universities have disclosed $8.98 billion in gifts and contracts from Qatar to the Department of Education.
The Soufan Center, a research group in New York, reported an annual fee of $500,000 from a Qatari security academy in its 2024 financial statements, 48 percent of its revenue that year. By the Forum’s review of 15 years of its publications, the Center has never said in its own voice that Qatar finances terrorism.
The same method works at home. City records, including nearly 2,000 pages of e-mails obtained by the Forum, show that the definition of “Islamophobia” San Diego’s council adopted last month, 8 to 0, was drafted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Federal prosecutors named that organization, without charging it, as a co-conspirator in a Hamas-financing case.
The answer in each case is the same: exposure, transparency and the law.
October 7 was also an attack on Americans. The State Department says 46 Americans were among the dead and 12 among the hostages. The President wrote today: “We will NEVER forget October 7th.”
The Americans who doubt the alliance are not all hostile to Israel. Many are tired of a war in its eighth month. In a Marquette Law School poll in September, 13 percent said the United States had achieved its goals in it.
A grant to a foreign army is the easiest thing for a tired public to cut. That is one more reason for the two governments to replace the grant themselves, on their own terms and their own schedule.
The case against the alliance, on the left and now on the right, is that Israel’s wars are not America’s. The dead of that morning are the first answer. The second is what a lapse would bring. An Israel without American backing would go on fighting Iran and its clients, because it has no choice, and Washington would have less say in how.
A regime in Tehran that had outlasted the alliance would have little reason to stop short of a bomb, and the Gulf governments that host American forces would have to make their own terms with it. I do not think the United States would then be free of the region. I think it would be back within a few years, with fewer friends there and more to do.
So the choice is not between this alliance and peace. It is between an alliance the two countries rebuild on purpose and one that wears away while both are busy with elections. Rebuilding means a signed successor to the aid agreement, weapons built together in places like East Camden, interceptor lines that can last through a long war, partners from India to Morocco, and daylight on the governments that take American protection and shelter Hamas.
In July 2023 a warning waited 87 days and was overtaken. In 1979 a Congress that meant to act needed no more time than that. The same span, measured from this morning, ends on January 2.
Three years ago the Forum was right and was not heard in time. It means to be heard before the next decision is made, in Jerusalem and in Washington.
The Americans killed on October 7, 2023, by the State Department’s figures. The department’s figure for Americans among the hostages taken to Gaza that day is 12. The Justice Department, in a case it announced last October, put the American dead at 49.
The Forum work behind this essay is open to every reader: Yossi Kuperwasser’s 2023 paper, Disarmament of Gaza; From Subsidy to Sovereignty; The Magazine War and its companion, Hunt the Archer, Not the Arrow; and Jonathan Spyer on the Israeli election. On Israel’s other partners, Imran Khurshid covers India, Amine Ayoub Morocco, and Nicoletta Kouroushi Greece and Cyprus. The daily brief returns this week. New readers can orient with the Field Guide; the MEF Dispatch, our summary of new articles and analysis from meforum.org, is one click: Subscribe to the MEF Dispatch.
Clear this evening. When it should not be, write [email protected]; corrections run here, in print.
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Reply question: which decision facing Jerusalem or Washington before January matters most, and why? Replies land in my inbox; the best-argued ones run in the next mailbag.
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