How much tax dollars does California send to isreal
Executive summary
The most commonly cited figure is that California “sends” about $610 million a year in federal tax dollars to Israel—an attribution advanced by advocacy groups such as CAIR-California and repeated on campaign-style calculators that apportion national aid to states [1] [2] [3]. That claim rests on dividing the U.S. federal aid package to Israel among states based on relative federal tax receipts, but there is no single official federal or state dataset that directly reports a dollar-for-dollar “California to Israel” transfer, and expert sources warn tracing individual taxpayers’ contributions to specific foreign-aid recipients is methodologically fraught [4] [5].
1. What the $610 million number is and who publishes it
CAIR-California, and allied sites such as NotMyTaxDollars, state that of the roughly $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military assistance to Israel frequently cited by activists, California’s share is approximately $609–610 million annually—presented as “federal taxes collected from the State of California” that fund Israeli military activities [1] [2] [3]. These figures are framed by those organizations as an advocacy metric to show state-level consequences of federal foreign aid [1] [2].
2. The underlying national totals and official accounting
Independent and government-tracking sources show the United States provides Israel substantial and longstanding military and economic assistance, measured in billions annually and hundreds of billions cumulatively; Congressional Research Service summaries and policy outlets document decades of U.S. aid and note totals running into the tens of billions in recent years and roughly $298 billion (inflation-adjusted) obligated from 1946–2024 in some CRS summaries [6] [5]. The frequently-quoted annual figure for FY aid varies by year and congressional actions, and recent reporting and advocacy cite figures such as $3.8 billion annually or much larger supplemental packages passed in certain years [5] [2].
3. Why attributing a state share is an estimate, not an official accounting
Analysts caution that it is “very difficult to trace dollars” from an individual or state’s tax payments to a specific foreign-aid recipient because federal revenue is pooled and budget decisions are national; the National reporting explains the impossibility of a precise taxpayer-level or state-level tracing without a political decision to allocate aid that way [4]. CAIR’s $610 million calculation is therefore an allocation method—apportioning national aid to states based on population or tax contributions—rather than a line-item transfer recorded by Treasury or the State of California [1] [4].
4. Other California links to Israel beyond federal aid apportionment
California has also shipped state-organized humanitarian supplies to both Israel and Gaza, and cultivates institutional cooperation with Israeli research and business partners—actions that are distinct from federal foreign assistance and are documented by the Governor’s office and cultural/tech exchanges [7] [8]. Those state initiatives and private collaborations are additional ways California engages with Israel but are separate from the federal military-aid flows that advocacy groups apportion to states [7] [8].
5. Competing narratives and the political uses of the figure
Advocacy groups use the $610 million figure to press elected officials and mobilize constituents, framing it as “California taxpayer dollars” funding Israeli military operations [1] [2] [3], while policy and accounting-focused sources emphasize the aggregated, national nature of U.S. aid and the difficulty of assigning precise state-borne amounts [5] [6] [4]. Readers should treat the $610 million as a politically useful allocation estimate derived from national aid totals, not as a distinct payment routed directly from California’s state treasury to Israel; no provided source shows a federal or state ledger line that records an exact California-originated transfer to Israel [1] [4].
Conclusion
The concise answer: advocacy organizations report that about $609–610 million of federal tax revenues attributable to California are the state’s share of U.S. aid to Israel in a typical year, but that number is an estimate based on apportionment methods rather than an official, traceable payment recorded by federal or state accounting systems, and official analyses stress the difficulty of tracing individual or state tax dollars to specific foreign-aid recipients [1] [2] [3] [4] [6].