F-35 fighter jets perform in an air show at the graduation ceremony of Israeli pilots at the Hatzerim air force base in the Negev desert near the southern Israeli city of Beersheva, on December 22, 2021. (Photo by Menahem KAHANA / AFP) (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images)
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently reiterated Israel’s opposition to any U.S. sale of fifth-generation Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II stealth strike fighters to Turkey. While the move marks the first time Israel has opposed a potential U.S. arms sale to a NATO member country, it is certainly far from the first time it has opposed an American export of fighter jets to the region.
“It would destroy the power balance in the Middle East, because Turkey, I think, has aggressive aspirations,” Netanyahu told CNN in a televised interview on July 7. “When you give them that power, you’re going to see aggression in its wake.”
He was speaking as Turkish officials express eagerness to return to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, from which Turkey was promptly expelled in 2019 for acquiring advanced Russian S-400 air defense missile systems despite repeated U.S. warnings. Ankara hopes that by removing these Russian systems from its soil, potentially transferring them to the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. will lift this ban and allow it to acquire jets for its air force. The U.S. had already built six F-35As for the Turkish Air Force before the 2019 ban, and Turkey still hopes to receive them.
Relations between Israel and Turkey have been strained for years and reached a new low after the war in Gaza and their fundamental disagreements over the future of Syria after Assad. In past decades, Turkey and Israel had cordial relations, and the prospect of Israel opposing any American arms sales to Turkey seemed unthinkable. Israel didn’t object as Turkey amassed the second-largest F-16 fleet in NATO. Israel even upgraded Turkey’s older F-4 Phantoms, and Turkey allowed the Israeli Air Force access to its vast airspace for training. That heyday is long gone. Now Israel views American fighter sales to Turkey with suspicion, much like it used to object to U.S. fighter sales to certain Arab countries in the past.
Forty-eight years before Netanyahu went on American television to oppose any Turkish F-35 sale, Israel was concerned about another sale of advanced combat aircraft to the region. When Saudi Arabia ordered 60 fourth-generation F-15C/D Eagle air superiority fighters, among the most advanced jets worldwide, to upgrade its air force, Israel expressed alarm. It declared that the sale would undermine its military edge over the region and could pose a security threat, especially if the aircraft came equipped with external fuel tanks and bomb racks.
Despite these objections, the sale went ahead, with Washington repeatedly affirming its commitment to Israel’s military edge. Israel received its first F-15s in 1976 and F-16s in 1980, before any other country in the region did. At the height of Israel’s opposition to the Saudi deal, President Jimmy Carter offered a compromise to placate Israel by offering it an additional 20 F-15s.
Still, it wouldn’t be the last time Israel would object to a Saudi F-15 sale. In 1992, it protested plans to sell Saudi Arabia 72 more advanced F-15XP fighters, which later became the F-15S, a variant of the F-15E Strike Eagle built for the kingdom. Again, it sought reassurances from the U.S. commitment to upholding its military edge.
In 1997, Saudi Arabia angrily pulled out of a potential $15 billion deal for 102 F-16s to replace its older fleet of F-5s after Netanyahu’s first government expressed alarm over the sale. To this day, the kingdom has never acquired the F-16.
Flash-forward to 2010, and Israel again had reservations about an unprecedented deal to sell 84 yet more advanced F-15SA (Saudi Advanced) warplanes and to upgrade 70 of those F-15S jets delivered in the intervening decades. Here again, a compromise was reached in which the U.S. pledged not to equip these cutting-edge 4.5-generation combat aircraft with long-range weapons and other capabilities Israel opposed. F-15SAs would hardly erode Israel’s qualitative military edge, since Israel would receive its first F-35s in 2016 and would have an exclusive, modifiable variant, the F-35I Adir.
Later in the decade, Israel expressed opposition to a sale of F-15SE Silent Eagles to Qatar, which had sought to expand its then modest fighter fleet to 72 jets, with Israeli officials citing the emirate’s support for Hamas. Interestingly, around the same time, it had concerns about the sale of F/A-18 Hornets to Kuwait but ultimately did not oppose it. While the F-15SE was discontinued, Qatar did receive 36 of the specialized F-15QA (Qatar Advanced), which, like the F-15SA, was a precursor for the F-15EX Eagle II introduced in 2024.
Despite Israel’s objections to these sales, the Israeli Haaretz newspaper revealed this June that Israeli firms won subcontracts to supply advanced helmets and night-vision goggles for these F-15SA and F-15QAs. Furthermore, despite criticism of Qatar, Israel’s Elbit supplied C-MUSIC air defense systems, designed to deflect shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles with a powerful laser beam, for planes used by Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
Israel still hasn’t normalized relations with either Qatar or Saudi Arabia. In late 2025, Saudi Arabia requested up to 48 F-35s. While the standard F-35A models Riyadh would ultimately receive are less advanced than Israel’s exclusive F-35I, the Israeli military still expressed concerns that any Saudi F-35 deal would erode its air superiority over the region. Politically, the Netanyahu government reportedly wanted Trump to condition a Saudi F-35 sale on Riyadh normalizing ties with Israel, as the UAE did under the Abraham Accords in 2020.
Despite the UAE agreeing to formally normalize relations, Netanyahu declared in August of that year that Israel would still oppose any sale of F-35s to the UAE to preserve its military edge. At that time, the UAE sought 50 F-35s to upgrade its air force. The Trump administration approved that request at the end of its first term shortly after normalization. Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz recalled that past U.S. administrations had gone “against our interests” when it came to selling advanced F-15s to Saudi Arabia and, in the UAE’s case, F-16s. Still, he correctly acknowledged that any F-35s the UAE ultimately received would pose a far greater threat to Iran than they ever would to Israel.
In the 1990s, in the first-ever deal of its kind, the UAE sought a tailor-made F-16 variant, the exclusive F-16E/F Block 60 “Desert Falcon,” more advanced than any flown by the U.S. or Israeli Air Force. Abu Dhabi ordered 80. Israel was unusually quiet about that landmark deal. In 2018, The New Yorker revealed that Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff met “off the record, unofficially” with Emirati officials in 1994 and expressed mutual agreement on the threat Iran was posing to the region. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin then told the White House that his country had no objection to an F-16 sale. The historic arms deal proceeded without issue.
Ultimately, Abu Dhabi suspended its F-35 bid early in the Biden administration after Washington questioned its growing military and technology cooperation with China. It hasn’t sought to revive it under Trump’s current term. Israel-UAE ties were strengthened during the 2026 U.S.-Israel war with Iran after Israel deployed an Iron Dome air defense system and troops on Emirati territory to bolster its air defense against Iranian attacks.
Decades earlier, Israel reached its first peace treaty with a major Arab state, Egypt, with which it had, unlike the UAE, previously fought several major wars. Egypt sought to equip its military, then largely made up of Soviet-made hardware, with American equipment, ordering F-16s and M60 tanks in the early 1980s.
The Carter administration agreed in principle to sell Cairo the more advanced and expensive F-15. However, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat decided in 1980 to postpone any F-15 acquisition. “Although U.S. officials refused to say so publicly, the arrangement represents an attempt to satisfy Sadat’s symbolic need to claim access to sophisticated U.S. weapons without arousing Israel’s opposition to the point where its supporters in Congress would fight strongly against a U.S. plan for reequipping and modernizing the Egyptian armed forces,” The Washington Post reported at the time.
To this day, Egypt hasn’t acquired the F-15. Twenty-two years after Sadat postponed an Eagle acquisition, Haaretz reported that the U.S. and Israel “reached a series of understandings” on U.S. arms sales to Egypt that included not selling F-15s to Cairo nor even beyond visual range AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles for its less advanced F-16s.
Perhaps echoing the Carter administration’s agreement in principle to sell Egypt F-15s in 1980, President Trump in 2018 verbally committed to selling 20 F-35As to Cairo. However, swift opposition from both the Department of Defense and “rumored Israeli pressures” ensured it never got off the ground. The same year, Egypt ordered Su-35 Flankers from Russia but later canceled that deal under the threat of U.S. sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.
It was Israel in 2022, then under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s short-lived government, that reportedly encouraged the Biden administration to finally sell F-15s to Egypt. That same year, General Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said he believed the U.S. would finally supply Cairo with Eagles.
Interestingly, Netanyahu reportedly said this February that Israel “needs to prevent it [Egypt’s military] from becoming too strong.”