Foreign policy
El-Sayed generally opposes United States military aid to foreign countries, but has cited US actions during Russia's invasion of Ukraine and in Serbia during the 1990s as examples of beneficial US intervention.
In 2026, El-Sayed said the US should not fund foreign militaries at all, and in particular he identified Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
The New York Times called El-Sayed a "fierce critic of Israel". He has criticized Israel over the war and genocide in Gaza. He has also criticized US military funding to Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Israeli influence in US politics.
In a January 2024 podcast, he called the war in the Gaza Strip a public health catastrophe and called for a ceasefire. El-Sayed has called the Gaza genocide a morality test, asking: "If you can't call it what it is, which is a genocide, then how are you going to stand up to Donald Trump? How are you going to stand up to pharma CEOs?"
In April 2026, El-Sayed said in a CNN interview: "Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil. It's not how evil is this one versus that one. Hamas: evil. Israeli government: evil. We can say both."
El-Sayed opposes Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. In April 2026, when asked by The Free Press writer Olivia Reingold whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, he replied, "What do you mean by Jewish state?" After Reingold failed to answer, he said, "If you can't define the question, I'm not going to answer your question."
El-Sayed believes Israel is an ethno-state and has said, "I don't believe in ethno-states, and I certainly don't believe that our country is responsible to sustain ethno-states." He has said his rejection of ethno-nationalism has nothing to do with whether a country has a "right to exist", saying he "just [disputes] the idea that you should have an ethno-state" and objects to Egyptian and Saudi Arabian ethno-nationalism in the same way he objects to Zionism.
El-Sayed attributed the 2026 Iran war to AIPAC's influence in US politics. He called Israel a "rogue state" that is committing "human rights abuses, genocide, and apartheid" and said the U.S. should "stop funding the Israeli military unilateral blank checks".
In March 2022, El-Sayed called the Russo-Ukrainian war "a war between democracy and autocracy, between self-government and fascism", condemning Russian president Vladimir Putin as an "authoritarian dictator".
In April 2025, El-Sayed said that U.S. military aid to Ukraine is different from aid to Israel, as the former is in accordance with several multinational organizations. In September 2025, he said that military aid to Ukraine was about "enforcing the rules of the rules-based international order in accordance with our allies".
