Exercise can be a humbling experience. 

A simple push-up can debase the most dignified humans, transforming them into helpless little halibuts, unable to unmoor their bellies from the floor. Squats and lunges can leave their victims crouching like tiny goblins or trembling against gravity’s will. Have you ever willingly watched yourself run at full speed? Only if you have self-esteem of steel.

But for certain people, the most physically demanding experience of their lives is not something they want to avoid, but an alluring temptation: a challenge too impossible to ignore, an irresistible dare that must be completed day after day. And they quench this desire — as well as the thirst for friendship and community; some vanity muscles; and mini vacations to the likes of Oslo, Brisbane, and Bangkok — in the sweaty, grunty, made-for-TikTok $200 million world known as Hyrox. 

What is Hyrox and why is everyone doing it without me?

HYROX is stylized in all caps. Capitalization makes it seem as if it’s a word that only exists to be yelled, an apt choice for an experience that seems to take inspiration from military training and/or the PE class you hated growing up.  

Since launching in Germany in 2017, Hyrox has become a worldwide phenomenon. As CNBC reported in June, it initially started with just 650 people and now is projected to capture roughly 1.5 million participants across 121 events in 34 countries around the world. Revenue, which comes from a combination of contest entry fees, sponsorships, merch, licensing for Hyrox-affiliated gyms, and other avenues, is expected to reach $270 million in 2026. This year, 42,000 tickets were sold to the New York City race in the event’s first 24 hours. In 2025, there were roughly 12,700 athletes registered for the event.     

Technically speaking, Hyrox is a timed competition that spans eight rounds; the person or team — athletes can compete as individuals, as doubles with a partner, or as part of a relay — with the fastest overall time wins.

Each round consists of a 1-kilometer run followed by a more “functional” strength-based move, often done using a machine. These exercises include: 1,000 meters on a SkiErg; a weighted 50-meter sled push; a weighted 50-meter sled pull; 80-meter burpee broad jumps; a 1,000-meter row; a 200-meter Farmers Carry (lugging around two heavy weights at your side while walking); 100 meters of lunges with a sandbag on your back; and 100 wall balls (squat thrusts that involve launching a medicine ball into the air as you stand). It’s run-exercise-run-exercise-run-exercise until all eight kilometers and all eight movements are completed.

But Hyrox is also, Hyroxers say, a lifestyle. Because the best way to succeed at Hyrox — and for many participants, winning or at least finishing with a decent time is the goal — is to train for it. That likely means going to Hyrox-affiliated gyms that prepare you for the different exercises, and training alongside other people who also plan to run the race. And that’s where it can get all-consuming.    

Abby Roskind, a 35-year-old project manager living in Washington, DC, who has finished two races, told me that Hyrox sort of subsumes your entire existence. Training for Hyrox, she said, involved 5:30 am workouts, an excruciating amount of time learning how to properly broad jump, daily soreness, and lots of complaining. 

“Because you are always with other people doing these things, it becomes a little bit of a hostile takeover of your life where you meet up with your ‘fitness’ friends, and then they become your actual friends, and all you end up doing when you’re not training for Hyrox is talking about Hyrox,” she said. 

Roskind and other Hyroxers told me that people who are very serious about wanting to do well in competition may go on a diet, cut alcohol before the race, or squeeze in extra workouts, which naturally leads to less dinners out, less meeting up for drinks, and, ultimately, less socializing. It makes sense that people going through this experience will want to talk about Hyrox since so much of their life centers on it, and that the best audience for a discussion on Hyrox strategy would be other people doing Hyrox. 

“It definitely didn’t come across as culty where it’s like, ‘Oh, welcome to my Scientology of Exercise and you’re going to do this,’” said LJ, a 34-year-old with one Hyrox under his belt. (LJ told me he was afraid of being “canceled” by fellow Hyroxers and maybe his friends for talking to Vox, so we agreed to let him use his first initials to maintain some anonymity.) LJ said that one of his friends had run races in Europe and talked him and a small group of others in their circle into competing this past year. They generally approach it as a fun, casual thing to do together.  

@sotrue.kristin

just a spectator, speculating😌 #hyrox #chicago #fyp #foryoupage #spectator

♬ WHERE IS MY HUSBAND! – RAYE

“But then when I got to the actual venue day of the race, I felt like Hillary Clinton walking through that apartment like, What the hell is going on here?” he said. “Because there are a lot of people where this is a big chunk of their life. I saw people walking around — I guess they [Hyrox] give out badges — showing all the badges that they had from all the different cities that they competed in.” 

The idea of someone, ostensibly with a day job, going from city to city to compete in Hyrox and then showing off commemorative brooches is what signaled to LJ that the workout he enjoyed could be experienced in a different, more serious way. In that moment, LJ saw Hyrox the way outsiders might. Still, for him, the positives of Hyrox — being in better shape; experiencing runner’s highs, friendships, and the rush of competition — outweighed the possible cult-by-association.

A lot of people want to feel like an elite athlete, and now we can pay for the experience

If you make a Hyroxer feel comfortable enough, you will find that they all love to talk about the parts of the race they hate the most. It’s the feeling of thick death rushing through their lungs as they stare down the number of meters left in the burpee broad jump section. It’s the judges who are there to make sure participants are getting low enough during the wall balls. It’s seemingly everything about the race. 

There’s a bottomless chasm between how much people love Hyrox and how much they love to talk about how much it actually sucks to do. The bridge that connects the two is getting to feel like an elite athlete.  

“Once you become an adult, how many times are you going to get a sticker?” James McMillian, a trainer and the president at Tone House, a strength and conditioning facility in New York City, asked me. “How many times are you going to get a reward? How many times are you going to get a medal? People just want to be part of something. They want to feel close to greatness.”

McMillian, who has completed six Hyrox races, said that the vast majority of us will never ever know what it’s like to be a GOAT like A’ja Wilson or Lionel Messi, but Hyrox lets racers microdose it: the discipline sticking to a training schedule (as opposed to just working out day after day), the adrenaline of competing on game day, and the high of thousands of people cheering for you. 

“They turned working out into an athletic sport,” McMillian said. “Making everyday people feel like an athlete and giving them that opportunity to compete like one — that’s a smart business.”

Because it turns out that people are more than willing to pay for that athlete feeling. 

While participants aren’t required to work out at Hyrox-affiliated gyms to run the race, Hyrox-specific classes can cost more than regular group fitness packages. One Hyroxer told me that their 10-class package was around $600. There’s also a microindustry developing around getting better times. You might, for example, purchase Hyrox-branded fitness trackers and training apps, Hyrox shoes, and Hyrox equipment for your home gym (like a Hyrox Official Competition Power Rope, $275; Official Competition Sandbag, $87; or HYROX Perform Turf, starting at $1,799).     

The actual competition varies in price depending on the race and location, but can cost upward of $200. Racers can also opt in for a $35 photo package, which means a professional will take shots of themselves looking muscular and sweaty during the race.

You don’t have to beat anyone else better or qualify to compete in Hyrox — you just have to buy a ticket in.

Then there’s Hyrox’s travel aspect. Hyrox is a benchmark and a goal, and race day is the culmination of all the training and sacrifice. It’s also where you get an official time. More competitive racers are training not just for their home city’s Hyrox, but to go to other races on the Hyrox calendar. 

The races are often in desirable destinations like Rome, Berlin, and Miami Beach, which can make Hyrox seem like vacation or, I guess, make a vacation seem more like Hyrox. If you’re traveling for Hyrox, that may mean paying for a plane or train ticket, or gasoline, and lodging. One Hyroxer I spoke to said that he spent roughly $1,500 on airfare and a hotel in addition to the official entry fees and photo options. Another said they spent roughly $500 in travel, saving money by splitting a hotel with a fellow racer. 

“Look, it’s the fitness space’s Eras Tour,” Bobby McMullen, a trainer and founder of the fitness app Adonis, told me. McMullen has completed four Hyrox races. “If you don’t get to do as well as you think, you’re like, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Vegas, I’ll go to Vegas,’” McMullen said. “Or if maybe you do really well and you’re like, ‘Oh, I want to go do that again.’”

“If you travel for Hyrox, just like if you travel for Taylor or if you travel for Disney, that’s fine,” McMullen added. “But the thing I learned about Disney adults is they’re rich. It’s so expensive. Same with Hyrox.” 

Hyrox is easy, sort of 

Here is a secret to the success of Hyrox that you may not believe: Despite its HARDCORE exterior and all of its supposed brutality, Hyrox is fairly accessible for a certain type of person, particularly millennials who have made fitness a part of their life for a couple of decades now, and who’ve dabbled in intense workout trends that included Tae Bo, CrossFit, Orange Theory, and Peloton. Think about it: Hyrox couldn’t do $270 million in business if it was too difficult for people with injuries, or if participants couldn’t finish, let alone do it over and over again.

Adherents claim there’s less injury risk compared to CrossFit because Hyrox exercises are relatively lower impact and don’t involve lifting heavy weights in complicated ways. Hyrox requires less training than preparing for something like a marathon, coaches and trainers told me. Unlike a triathlon, you don’t need to find access to water or risk drowning. The same cannot be said of an IRONMAN (another race, stylized in capitalizations that just feel very aggressive).

“For the New York marathon, I would have to start training right now,” McMillian, the coach and president at Tone House said. “I could start training a month and a half before and be able to finish.” 

To be clear, McMillian makes his living being fit. Though we did not put this to the test, I’m pretty sure he could squat two of me. McMillian competes in the pro division, the competition’s advanced tier. His definition of what’s physically doable is relative because McMillian looks like he could physically do anything. 

Still, he assured me that Hyrox’s barrier to entry is lower than it might seem. While prospective Hyrox racers also have the option of taking uniquely tailored classes at Hyrox-affiliated gyms (over 15,000 across the world) and group fitness studios, McMillian said you can do most of the race’s strength-based exercises or variations of them on your own, at any basic modern gym, making it somewhat more accessible. 

“What we noticed with our clients was that these are movements they’re already doing,” McMillian said. “All we have to do is make you better at those movements and teach you how to breathe during the movements, teach you the actual metrics on the rowers to be more efficient, teach you how to be a better runner instead of teaching you a whole new style of training. We’re already teaching you what you know how to do.”

Essentially, people already working out — and there are plenty of them — are well equipped to try Hyrox. Part of Hyrox’s appeal is that it’s a bigger, bolder version of the popular, grueling luxury fitness classes that already exist, or a more competitive version of what everyone’s already doing at Equinox. “It’s a little like, how good can you gym?” says Roskind, the DC-based project manager who’s competed in two Hyrox races. 

She wryly pointed out that being good at Hyrox is a little different than winning a tournament in a skill-based sport (e.g., tennis, soccer, basketball) or getting a qualifying time into a speed-based race like swimming or running. You don’t have to beat anyone else better or qualify to compete — you just have to buy a ticket in.

Being so good at the gym and spending money to compete against other people who are good at the gym is perhaps why some racers I spoke to seemed to temper their love of Hyrox with a scrim of self-deprecation. It’s as if they’re slightly embarrassed that this race may be a millennial-targeted fake Olympics, and it’s scored a direct hit with them. In mixed company, they might not want to say why they’re really going to Athens, Mexico City, or Dublin.

This may be the most relatable thing about Hyrox and the people who love it: Even when you’re really good at exercise, it can still find a way to be, at least, a little humbling.    

Los Angeles offers one of the most vivid examples of our nation’s broken housing system: a quintessentially American expanse of traffic-clogged roads and single-family homes, coupled with the highest home-price-to-household-income ratio of any major city in the country.

To moderate prices, LA urgently needs to build more homes by allowing more density in its neighborhoods — but much of the city’s leadership has vigorously opposed it. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the fight over SB 79, a landmark California law that overrides local zoning to permit taller, denser housing near major transit stops. LA’s city council and its incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, have opposed it and sought ways to avoid complying with it. 

Now, as Bass seeks reelection, mayoral candidate Nithya Raman — one of the city’s, and perhaps the country’s, strongest advocates for building more housing — wants to oust her.

Raman has gained unusual traction in a city long resistant to growth and has become a nationally prominent YIMBY. How to accommodate LA’s need for more housing, Raman told Vox in a recent interview, is “a question that the city has actually turned away from.” She believes she can do better.  

Earlier this summer, Raman advanced in LA’s mayoral primary, setting up a November runoff against Bass. The race has resonated far beyond Los Angeles, because Raman is making one of the defining problems in American life — the punishing non-affordability of our most productive cities — the centerpiece of her campaign. Its outcome could shape the future of housing in America’s most populous state and help determine whether LA can become the engine of California’s pro-housing turn, or its most potent obstacle. If she succeeds, she might cut a path forward for better housing policy in high-cost blue cities elsewhere.

Just as core to Raman’s appeal is a commitment that’s often seen as at odds with housing abundance. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a forceful champion of tenant protections, including rent control. (Her relationship with the DSA is complicated, however.) She helped shape a stricter rent stabilization formula that was adopted in LA late last year, though it was strongly opposed by rental property owners. 

Many housing policy experts, as I recently wrote, believe rent control can worsen the housing affordability crisis it aims to solve, because it tends to reduce the supply of rental housing. But in high-cost cities and states, interest in it has been surging nonetheless. A rising cohort of progressive politicians, including Raman and Zohran Mamdani in New York City, believes cities must protect current renters from price shocks and displacement while adding housing supply. In doing so, they hope to mount the kind of political support that has long eluded YIMBYs.   

I spoke with Raman about how she thinks about these competing interests, and how she intends to combine them to make a meaningful dent where her predecessors have failed. I was struck by how cautiously she discussed one of the city’s most politically explosive housing policy questions — densifying single-family neighborhoods. Though she has previously pushed for legislation allowing midsize apartment buildings in some wealthier single-family neighborhoods, she emphasized gentler, more gradual change in our conversation. It reflected the core paradox facing housing reformers in LA and nationwide: the need for sweeping change, and the political pressure to make it feel gradual.

Our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below.

You’ve gotten an enormous amount of traction on housing issues in LA. If you win the election, then what? 

When I’m asking for-profit developers and affordable housing developers alike, “What is your biggest barrier to building in LA?” they say that the city of LA is their biggest barrier to building in LA. Whether it is extraordinarily long permit approval timelines, whether it is the failure of the Department of Water and Power [DWP] to be a good partner and to provide real predictability in the building process, both in timelines and in costs. The city of Los Angeles stands in the way of new housing. 

As mayor, I want to do everything in my power to change that. I want to set deadlines by which departments have to respond to applications. I want to bring DWP to the table early and to ensure that they’re a predictable partner for new development. I want to make sure that departments that need to talk to each other are talking to each other quickly and early on in the process, as opposed to providing conflicting answers and taking months and even years to respond. These are all within the power of the mayor to influence and things that this mayor has ignored.

Sometimes rent control and renters’ rights on one hand and new housing production on the other are treated as rival agendas, yet you have made them both central to your politics. What connects them for you?

I don’t think that you can have lower rental costs in a city like Los Angeles without having more housing being built. This is a city that has resisted the construction of new housing for decades, explicitly restricted new apartments from being built in many, many parts of the city for a very long time. We have among the fewest homes per adult of any major city in America and the highest rent-burdened population of any city in America, and to me those two facts are very deeply connected. We can’t really lower rents unless we have more housing here, and lower rents are a big part of how you protect renters.

LA has a rent control system, and you were a champion of a change that tightened that system last year. Do you worry at all that tighter rent control could do damage to housing supply through some of the well-documented mechanisms, like causing landlords to convert apartments to condos? Is that in tension with the goal of increasing housing supply?

Housing built after 1978 cannot be subject to rent stabilization [in LA]. So, making sure that renters in older buildings are protected and trying to incentivize new housing from being constructed to me are not in conflict with one another.

You talked about landlords potentially exiting the market. We’ve also heard concerns from apartment associations and from neighborhoods that there’s been increasing corporatization of housing, that smaller landlords are selling to larger corporate landlords, that being a mom-and-pop landlord is becoming increasingly unfeasible. What we’d love to see is more data on that. And, if that is actually happening, if we are driving landlords out of the market through these changes, if smaller landlords are selling to large corporate landlords, I want to know, and we should be looking at the impacts of this policy accordingly.

I’m very open to learning more. But, so far, what I see is that we have an extremely unaffordable city where all the data has shown us that rents have risen higher than incomes for a very long time. The regulations that we put in place are really trying to ensure that struggling renters are still able to stay in LA.

Is there one specific, concrete housing policy mistake made by Mayor Bass that you would point to? How would you have handled it differently?

There has been an overall lack of urgency in addressing housing supply in [Bass’s] administration, exemplified by the fact that we have not had a deputy mayor of housing for years.

The city has actually opposed and written letters to state officials pushing back against new mandates to build more housing. Instead of telling Sacramento, “How do you want to build that housing?” and trying to shape state laws to suit us — the largest housing market in the entire state — those laws should be written with our input, not written with our opposition. 

I think the most stark example [of Bass’s failures on housing] is this: We’ve had 100 percent affordable housing projects like Venice Dell that are fully funded, that the city has sued and opposed and stalled for years.

“I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing.”

To what degree do you think that LA voters see the housing affordability crisis as a problem caused by a lack of supply — a housing shortage? 

I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing. It’s not universally necessarily agreed upon, but I think if you were to ask people, “Is there a housing shortage? Is there a shortage of housing you can afford?” everybody would say yes.

Why should renters trust private developers?

I think that renters should trust the city to regulate private development such that we actually are building what we need here in LA and such that new building is actually enhancing what people love about their neighborhoods. I don’t think it’s the job of renters to trust developers. They need to trust that their city is going to make sure that we’re working hard to build neighborhoods that are beautiful, and welcoming, and beneficial, and can help families thrive. 

That’s part of why I talk about production and protection always in the same breath. If you see that new construction is going to displace you, I think you’re less inclined to support it or to accept it. But if you feel secure in your current housing, and you know that you’ll be able to stay there, then new housing is less of a threat and can actually be a boon for a neighborhood.

That relates to an argument I’ve heard a lot: that tenants who feel protected from displacement by rent control and eviction protections will be less afraid of new development and more willing to support it. Have you seen evidence of that happening in LA?

There is a very broad coalition of people who are fighting for more housing now, a much broader coalition than I’ve seen in many other places. And it includes renters’ rights organizations that have historically been some of the strongest advocates for tenant protections. They’re actually in council chambers testifying around the need for more density across the entire city, particularly around transit hubs. 

Do you see rent control as a temporary bandaid on a broken housing market, or is it something that should have a permanent place in housing policy?

I think protections against rent gouging are really important, and I think regulation in the housing market is really important. As a city, we have to be very careful about how we regulate these markets so that we are eliciting the best results and outcomes for our residents. I’m going to follow the research, and I’ll always engage with these issues closely. 

The Democratic Socialists of America, of which you are a part, has talked about wanting to “de-commodify” housing and take it out of the private market. The DSA’s Housing Justice Commission says, “the housing market is not necessary.” Do you think that’s a good idea? 

My approach to these issues is driven by how I can help Angelenos who are dealing with spiraling costs that’s driving working families out of the city. The city saw, I believe, a 16 percent drop in people under 18 over the past few years, because families cannot afford to live here anymore. That is a travesty for the city of Los Angeles. 

My question as I approach this is about what I can do to ensure that we can keep people here. We can build new housing through publicly funded housing. I want to be able to make sure that people who will never be served by the private real estate market have support from the city to rely on that can help them stay, whether that’s in the form of housing vouchers, whether that’s in the form of social housing, whether that’s in the form of permanent supportive housing or new public housing.

I’m supportive of measures that are bringing public dollars to the table to build. However, the money that we have available to us will never be able to satisfy the extraordinary demand that there is for new housing in Los Angeles. So now, we have to rely on the private real estate market to make housing available and affordable to a much larger number of Angelenos. 

Rent control primarily protects tenants who already occupy apartments that are covered by rent control. But building more housing is partly about people who don’t yet have a foothold in LA and who would move there if they could afford it. Is it possible to build a housing politics that gives those future residents real weight, even though they don’t vote in city elections?

I think that’s the question of this election in many ways. That’s been the question of my politics. But it’s not just about the future; it is also about our present. It’s also about parents whose children can’t live near them anymore, because it’s too unaffordable here. It’s about rising homelessness, which is inextricably connected to the cost of housing. All the impacts of not having housing are already felt by Angelenos. 

So much of LA is single-family homes, and there’s been research finding that the city’s housing shortage can’t be filled without densifying single-family neighborhoods. Is that politically possible?

Some of the largest numbers of new units being built are actually ADUs, which are densifying single-family neighborhoods. And duplexes and triplexes and other kinds of interventions are in many places already legal to build. That’s been happening and, largely, been non-controversial in neighborhoods. 

Around certain transit hubs, I think potentially greater density will be allowed in single-family neighborhoods through SB 79. So I think some single-family neighborhoods will have to change. But what I’m seeing in LA is a gradual process of adding more density that I think, in many ways, can be even beneficial for homeowners, because they’re able to make additional income or accommodate more people on their lots.

In recent months, two ideas that were once on the fringes of Democratic policy thinking — cutting off financial support and stopping arms transfers to Israel — have gone mainstream.

Nearly half of House Democrats voted to end aid to Israel last month, while roughly 40 percent of the caucus has called for blocking the sale of offensive weapons to the Israeli government until it persuades Congress that it will not use American bombs to perpetrate war crimes. 

Many of the party’s 2028 hopefuls have also embraced these general concepts. Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and consummate centrist, recently suggested that America should end aid to Israel and condition arms sales on its compliance with US law. Progressive Sen. Chris Van Hollen has gone several steps further, saying that Israel should be barred from accessing US-made offensive weapons until it “agrees to a time-bound plan to end the occupation and enact a two-state solution.”

If recent elections are any indication, these ideas will only grow more prominent in the coming years. Over the past two months, a slew of Democratic candidates — often with establishment backing and largely progressive voting records — lost to left-wing rivals who promised to take a more adversarial posture towards Israel. Rep. Haley Stevens’s apparent defeat at the hands of the staunchly pro-Palestinian Abdul El-Sayed in this week’s Democratic Senate primary is the latest and perhaps most consequential example of this trend.

The Democratic Party’s burgeoning support for restricting aid and arms transfers to Israel is well-founded. In prosecuting its war with Hamas, the Israeli government has subjected Gaza’s civilian population to grotesque and illegal forms of collective punishment (if not genocide). Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israel is expanding illegal settlements and allowing Jewish settlers to violently dispossess Palestinian residents. In this context, supplying Israel with money and weapons is contrary to both America’s moral obligations and security interests. It is wrong to subsidize or provision any foreign military’s assaults on human rights. And doing so undermines global respect for both the United States and the concept of international law.

For many Democrats, however, the purpose of cutting off aid and weapons to Israel is not merely to end America’s complicity in its crimes. Rather, the objective is to effect a radical change in Israeli policy — and ultimately, a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Such Democrats believe that the Israeli government will not seriously pursue a two-state solution (much less, a binational democratic state) unless it is forced to do so. Fortunately, in this view, Israel’s reliance on American aid and military technology provides the US with potent leverage over its internal policies: If America ceases to provide the Israeli military with cash and offensive weapons, then Tel Aviv will eventually have little choice but to start upholding its end of the two-state bargain.

But this is probably too optimistic. Ending aid and conditioning arms sales may be preconditions for realigning Israeli policy. But coercing its government into an acceptance of Palestinian statehood would likely require measures far more sweeping — and controversial — than those that congressional Democrats are presently entertaining.

Israel doesn’t need our money 

Of all the Democratic Party’s proposals for disciplining Israel, ending US aid may be the most politically palatable — yet least effective.

The notion that the United States should stop giving Israel $3.8 billion each year has some appeal on the left, right, and center. Which is not surprising: One doesn’t need to be passionately pro-Palestinian to be skeptical of America giving billions in aid to a rich, foreign country. In his Senate race, El-Sayed tried to tap into this isolationist sentiment, describing his plans for slashing aid to Israel — and increasing benefits for US citizens — as an “America First” agenda.

Unfortunately, ending aid would have little impact on Israeli policy. And for the very reason that such assistance is hard to justify, even to those who care little about the Palestinians: Israel is a wealthy nation that can fund its own military.

In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on the military, not counting its use of American aid. To sustain its 2025 level of defense funding — without American aid — Israel would need to dedicate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. This increase might be slightly inconvenient for Israeli taxpayers. But it’s clearly doable. 

And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do it. 

Or so he told 60 Minutes in May, saying that he would like to “draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.” In the view of some Israeli analysts, forgoing US aid would give Israel a freer hand to pursue its security objectives as it sees fit without worrying about a backlash from politicians thousands of miles away. The American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel J. Samet and former IDF Maj. Raphael BenLevi spelled out the logic of this position back in 2023, writing, “As long as aid continues, the temptation to dictate Israel’s policies will be too strong for Washington to resist, while Israeli officials will be inclined to seek approval for every action they take.”

This doesn’t mean that the US should continue funding Israel’s military; revoking such aid could improve America’s global image while saving taxpayers a little money. By itself, however, canceling all military grants to Israel would not force its government to make any real changes in its security strategies, much less to accept Palestinian statehood.

Blocking bombs would have a bigger impact 

Although Israel does not need America’s dollars, it does currently require our weaponry. Between 2021 and 2025, the United States supplied 68 percent of Israel’s imported major arms.

Israel can domestically manufacture many of these weapons — including drones, missiles, air-defense systems, armored vehicles, and aerial, artillery, and tank munitions. But its arms industry is not capable of churning all of these out at the rate required by its intensive, multifront wars since October 7, 2023. 

Meanwhile, Israel is wholly reliant on America for its combat aircraft fleet. They don’t make F-15s, F-16s, or F-35s in Haifa. Critically, this doesn’t just leave Israel dependent on the US for new fighter jets but also for the maintenance of its existing ones. 

“The F-35 is a system that is deeply reliant on just-in-time delivery of spare parts,” Josh Paul, a former Biden State Department official who resigned in protest of American arms transfers to Israel, told me. “And were the US to say we’re not going to provide you those spare parts, it wouldn’t be more than one or two months before Israel’s F-35s would not fly, certainly at the current operational paces.”

Thus, conditionally freezing sales of US military equipment to Israel would place real constraints on its martial capabilities. Although, the scale of those constraints depends a lot on the details of US policy. 

The most prominent proposal for an arms embargo in Congress, the Block the Bombs Act, would freeze the transfer of select classes of weaponry, including bunker-busting bombs and precision missiles. This policy might force Israel to scale back or delay certain aerial campaigns. In the long run, however, Israel has domestic substitutes for these weapons. 

By contrast, were the US to choke off military supplies more broadly — leaving the Israeli air force bereft of fighter jets and component parts — the implications for Israeli security strategy would be far more profound.

In either scenario, however, it seems unlikely that the Israeli government would respond to an embargo by agreeing to cede territory or autonomy to the Palestinians, in service of a two-state solution. 

The reasons for this are twofold. First, although an embargo would substantially diminish Israel’s military capabilities, those capacities would remain formidable. As already noted, Israel domestically produces a great deal of military hardware — so much, it actually exported more arms than all but six countries between 2021 and 2025. 

What’s more, the Israeli government has already launched an effort to achieve “munitions independence.” This entails a $110 billion investment into its arms industry, including initiatives to increase Israeli production of aerial munitions, heavy bombs, and artillery shells.

At the same time, Israel is also developing a plan for expanding its domestic raw materials industry, so that it enjoys sovereignty over the inputs necessary for arms production.

Given all this, even without access to American weapons, Israel would still be able to militarily dominate the West Bank and Gaza. 

“Israel’s dependence on US weapons is more about its position in the region; its capacity to deter Iran and so forth, not in the Palestinian context,” Paul said. “Cut off Israel’s access to US weapons, and it would still have overwhelming military superiority over any Palestinian resistance group.”

Further, in the face of a US arms embargo, Israel would not only remain capable of sustaining its subjugation of the Palestinians; it would also likely retain the will to do so. 

Israeli opinion on politics in general — and the Palestinian issue in particular — has been drifting rightward for decades. In a 2025 Gallup poll, 27 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution while 63 percent opposed one. And opposition to Palestinian statehood is even more pronounced among Jewish Israelis, who dominate the nation’s politics. In a Pew survey from last year, only 16 percent of Israeli Jews agreed that peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was possible — down from 46 percent in 2013. Support for a binational, democratic state of Israel-Palestine — the “one-state solution” favored by many on the American left — is all-but non-existent among Israeli Jews, with only 1 percent backing the policy in a 2025 poll.

Israeli political leaders share its electorate’s opposition to Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu’s leading rival in Israel’s upcoming election, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, recently told an interviewer, “I have never said two states for two peoples, because I understand the depth of this religious-national-social conflict, and anyone who talks about ‘peace now’ and two states doesn’t understand the conflict.”

Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian sovereignty do shift with events; after the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks, skepticism of a two-state solution among Jewish Israelis spiked. It is therefore conceivable that Israelis might become more open to Palestinian statehood, were the people of Gaza and the West Bank to unify behind conciliatory political leaders, who were prepared to accept the existence of a Jewish state within Israel’s legal borders. But that is an unlikely prospect in the near or medium term — and one that Israel’s criminality makes evermore remote. 

Absent such a development, a US arms embargo is unlikely to realign Israeli politics fundamentally. Historically, when great powers have tried to force weaker states to shift their policies through coercion, the latter often resist, even at a high cost. Iran’s refusal to submit to US demands on its regional policies and weapons programs, amid years of devastating sanctions and months of bombardment, may be today’s most salient example. 

The Iranian regime’s recalcitrance may partly reflect its authoritarian character. But democratic states have also routinely bucked the strong-arming of foreign powers. For example, in the 1980s, New Zealand barred the United States from docking nuclear-powered or armed ships at its ports. The US tried to coerce the Kiwis into reversing this policy by suspending America’s commitment to defend New Zealand from military attack in 1986. But New Zealanders remained undaunted; indeed, support for the anti-nuclear policy grew over the ensuing years.

What getting tough on Israel would really look like

This is not to say that no amount of sustained American coercion could shift Israel’s political calculus on its conflict with the Palestinians. But the scale and duration of US pressure would likely need to be much greater than what congressional Democrats are presently contemplating. 

Specifically, such a campaign would likely require an arms embargo more far-reaching than the one proposed by the Block the Bombs Act, along with sweeping economic sanctions, and the withdrawal of American diplomatic protection at the United Nations. 

The Biden administration created the architecture for such a sanctions policy when it froze the US-held assets and visas of Israeli settlers who’d perpetrated acts of violence in the West Bank, along with those who had materially assisted them. These sanctions could be expanded to cover all involved in settlement expansion, including construction companies, banks, financial institutions and government agencies that facilitate the colonization of Palestinian territory. Should this prove insufficient to change Israeli policy, America could apply sanctions to those populating and serving already-existing Israeli settlements.

For reasons previously noted, Israel’s first response to all of this is liable to be resistance. To the extent that these measures were politically controversial within the US — and opposed by the Republican Party — Israel would probably seek to undermine and wait out a Democratic government that implemented them, rather than making substantial concessions to Palestinian autonomy. 

America’s pressure campaign may therefore need to be sustained for a prolonged period — and enjoy a measure of bipartisan support — before having any transformative impact on Israeli policy. 

This could be challenging. As El-Sayed’s “America First” message indicates, many Americans favor cutting off aid to Israel because they want to disengage from Middle Eastern conflicts and focus attention on domestic problems. But the case for blocking arms sales, sanctioning large financial institutions — and, more broadly, expending political capital and energy on a protracted fight over a foreign country’s internal policies — cannot rest on mere isolationism.  

An effective pressure campaign would also require long-term resolve across multiple administrations, who may be tempted to re-engage with Israel if the US runs into new challenges abroad in which Israeli intelligence, military assets, diplomatic ties, or technology might be useful. When Joe Biden took office, he initially sought to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” over the regime’s appalling record on human rights, only to come calling to its leaders in person, in order to secure its cooperation with regional issues and the global energy supply. Since then, President Trump has drawn the two nations even closer.  

In any case, for now, the idea of not merely cutting off aid and select “offensive” weapons to Israel — but rather, forbidding the sale of all military goods to its government, sanctioning all involved in settling the occupied West Bank, and withdrawing US diplomatic support at the UN — remains too radical an agenda for most congressional progressives, much less their Republican colleagues.

Even if Democrats can’t change Israeli policy, they can reduce American complicity

None of this means that ending US aid to Israel — or restricting the sale of offensive weapons to its military — aren’t worthy objectives. Such measures could constrain Israel’s capacity to bomb civilian infrastructure and launch wars of choice. They just might not be sufficient to singlehandedly overwhelm Israeli resistance to Palestinian sovereignty.

Regardless, the congressional left’s Israel agenda would improve America’s moral health and global image. And this should arguably be US lawmakers’ priority. 

“The United States played an enormous role in creating Israel’s conventional military advantage as a player in the Middle East,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the nonprofit Arms Control Association, told me. “And in the face of the devastation that the Israeli government has wrought in Gaza and now on the West Bank — which involves, by any objective measure, serious war crimes — the United States needs to exert its leverage, so as not to be complicit in such behavior. Whether that changes Israeli policy regarding a two-state solution, or its ongoing treatment of Palestinians in occupied territories, is ultimately a separate question.”