Trump opens door to selling F-35s to Saudi Arabia, rattles Israel in process

Washington just tossed a grenade into decades of Middle East military protocol.

On Monday, US President Donald Trump said he will approve the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, one of the most sensitive weapons transfers any American administration can make. The announcement landed a day before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrives in Washington, a timing that is… not subtle.

“We’ll be selling F-35s,” Trump told reporters. “They’ve been a great ally.”

It’s a major win for Riyadh, which has pushed for years to get its hands on the US’s top-tier stealth aircraft. And it’s an equally major headache for Israel, where officials are already sounding the alarm about the erosion of their legally protected “qualitative military edge,” the principle that, no matter what, Israel must remain the most advanced military in the region.

The US has safeguarded that edge since 1968. Trump’s announcement plows straight into that guardrail.

In Israel, the response was instant panic.
Former deputy army chief Yair Golan warned the sale could spark “an arms race in the Middle East” and accused the Netanyahu government of “squandering” the country’s long-held advantage.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir put it even more bluntly: “We cannot get confused. We must preserve our superiority.”

The F-35, built by Lockheed Martin, is the crown jewel of modern air power: stealthy, networked, and designed to outrun and out-see everything else in the sky. For decades, the US has refused to give that capability to Arab states without ironclad strategic justification.

So why now?

It’s part of Trump’s broader effort to push Saudi Arabia toward normalising relations with Israel under an expanded Abraham Accords umbrella — something Riyadh still insists must be tied to a Palestinian state, per the Arab Peace Initiative. But the offer of F-35s raises the stakes and the pressure.

Israel’s political class is reading the timing as a message all at once.