Losing America

Israel is losing America. It doesn't have to.

America has been Israel’s most important relationship for over half a century. The numbers suggest that relationship is breaking.

This week, CNN’s Harry Enten ran the data. Israel’s net favorability has dropped below 50 among Republicans under 50. It has gone negative among moderate Republicans — a group that was, until recently, among Israel’s most reliable supporters. Among men under 50, the numbers are collapsing. Among non-liberal Democrats, the same. Netanyahu’s personal favorability in the United States is underwater.

The story did not begin on October 7. It began a decade earlier, and October 7 poured fuel on something already burning.

How We Got Here

In March 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a joint session of Congress — invited by Republican Speaker John Boehner, without coordinating with the Obama White House — and delivered a speech against the Iran nuclear deal. Netanyahu knew he couldn’t change the outcome but made the calculation anyway: Republican support was worth more than bipartisan support. He chose a side.

For a while, it worked. But a relationship built on one party is not a strategic asset — it is a liability, and in America’s two-party system, liabilities get activated the moment the other party wins.

The years that followed deepened the damage. Trump — viewed by millions of Democrats as an authoritarian threat to American democracy — was embraced by Netanyahu and Israeli society as a near-messianic figure. They named a town after him, city squares too. Billboards across the country read “Thank you, Mr. President.” Ramat Trump appears on Israeli television every time Hezbollah fires rockets at the north.

The embrace wasn’t just cultural. The Netanyahu government compounded it with political choices that alienated Democrats who still supported Israel: settlement announcements timed to embarrass Democratic leaders during their visits, democratic backsliding at home, and creeping annexation of the West Bank. Americans may not follow the details of Israeli domestic policy. But they saw billions of dollars of their aid going to a country that had picked a side in their politics.

The Trump variable cuts differently depending on where you stand. For Israelis, Trump delivered more than any American president before him — moving the embassy, recognizing the Golan, attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, launching a joint military campaign that went further than any previous administration was willing to go. The irony is that in Israel, Trump remains genuinely popular — far more so than Netanyahu himself, whose standing collapsed after October 7, the hostage failures, and years of corruption.

The damage this did ran in two directions simultaneously. Among a growing slice of Republicans, a different dynamic took hold: the perception that Netanyahu had drawn Trump into a Middle East war that served Israeli interests more than American ones. It’s a grievance that feeds directly into antisemitic tropes about Jewish control of government and media — the oldest conspiracy theories dressed in the language of America First. Israel didn’t just lose the left because of Netanyahu. It started losing parts of the right to something else entirely.

The Other Forces

Netanyahu and his government accelerated the damage. But they didn’t build the infrastructure alone.

For years, Gulf money — much of it Qatari — has flowed into American universities, funding academic departments, think tanks, and advocacy organizations. Whether that funding drove the ideological shift or merely accelerated something already growing is debated. What isn’t debated is the result: a generation of students arrived on campus with no prior connection to Israel — even Jewish students with deep ties to it — and left four years later having absorbed a framework in which Zionism is categorically a form of settler-colonialism, not a political position to be debated but an illegitimate movement built on ethnic and racial supremacy.

I watched this happen at McGill, over a decade ago. Friends who arrived with no view on the conflict graduated convinced that Israel was a white colonial entity. Most of them had never met an Israeli other than me. We are no longer in touch.

That was before TikTok. Before the algorithm could deliver the same framework to millions of eighteen-year-olds in sixty seconds, with no professor, no syllabus, no counterargument — just the next video.

Bipartisan polarization did the rest. In an era when everything is sorted by party, Israel’s alignment with Republicans made it a target for the left — the logic of negative partisanship doing some of the work. But not all of it. What Israel was doing — in Gaza, in the West Bank, with its most extreme ministers — gave people on the left something real to point to.

These forces don’t absolve Israel or its government. But any serious attempt at repair has to reckon with all of them, not just swap out the government in Jerusalem.

What the World Watched

Hundreds of millions of people have seen the images coming out of Gaza over the past two and a half years. Whatever one believes about Israel’s right to defend itself after October 7 — a right I believe in fully — the visual record has been devastating. The eyes of the world were on Israel at its darkest hour, and the people speaking for it were the last people who should have been.

What It Actually Means

Polls are not policy. But over time polls become policy.

What started with AOC and the Squad has grown. From the election of Zohran Mamdani to the elevation and mainstreaming of voices like Hasan Piker — recently celebrated on Pod Save America, the institutional home of Obama-world Democrats — anti-Zionism has become normalized in much of the Democratic Party. I wrote about this recently in response to Ezra Klein’s attempt to legitimize exactly this kind of politics.

The hostility is coming from both sides, but it is not the same hostility. On the right, it is older and uglier — antisemitism, white supremacy, the ancient suspicion of Jewish power in new clothes. Candace Owens built a following partly on it. Tucker Carlson used to just platform it — now he is it. Politically, this version has not yet defined a major party — but it is no longer as marginal as it once was. The same Enten data shows Thomas Massie — openly anti-Israel, not Trump-endorsed — with a 71% chance of winning his Republican primary. That is not a fringe outcome anymore.

On the left, anti-Zionism has become a values-driven identity, a moral framework built around justice and solidarity. However flawed, it is a framework — and frameworks can be challenged. That version travels under the banner of human rights, which gives it respectability and mainstream platforms that the right’s version doesn’t get. That is where the argument can still be won.

AIPAC’s leverage in Republican primaries has eroded alongside Israel’s favorability numbers. The political cost of supporting Israel is rising across the center. The last firewall — non-liberal Democrats — is cracking.

The practical consequences are already visible. Military aid debates that were once settled in hours now take months. This week, 80% of Senate Democrats voted to block arms sales to Israel — resolutions that failed, but with more than double the Democratic support from two years ago. J Street — the institutional home of pro-Israel progressive politics — just called for phasing out U.S. military financing to Israel, including subsidies for Iron Dome, the missile defense system that protects Israeli civilians. When the organizations that exist to defend the relationship question the relationship, and when four out of five Democratic senators vote to restrict arms, the assumption that American support for Israel is unconditional — an assumption that shaped Israeli strategy for decades — no longer holds.

The Wrong Response

The Israeli government’s response to all of this has been to point outward. Qatari money. Campus radicals. Antisemitism. These are not invented problems; they exist, and they matter. But they are being used as a shield against accountability rather than a diagnosis for repair. The government that is losing America is the same government telling Israelis there is nothing to fix.

Many Americans who have turned against Israel are not antisemites. Many people who watched the news from Gaza over the past two and a half years and reached a harsh conclusion are still reachable — people who formed a view based on what they saw, without the context or the history that might complicate it. That audience is worth fighting for. It is also the one the current Israeli government has written off entirely.

Some will argue that Israel had no choice — that any military response after October 7 would have produced the same result, that the accusations of genocide began immediately and there was nothing Israel could have done. That’s partly true. There would have been a dip in support regardless of who was governing Israel. But between the first accusation and half of Americans telling pollsters Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza were a whole lot of bad political choices, reckless statements from ministers, and a government that seemed more interested in managing the catastrophe politically than ending it. The slide was coming, and this government made it worse.

Is It Beyond Repair?

No. And this year may matter more than most. Israel is heading toward elections — polls suggest Netanyahu’s coalition is vulnerable, and the possibility of a different government is more real than it has been in years. The window for repair is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.

American public sympathy for Israel was significantly higher when Israel was the party making the effort — showing up at the table, offering proposals, taking risks for peace. Americans are not reflexively anti-Israel. When they saw Israel trying, they gave it credit. When Palestinian leadership walked away, Americans saw that too. A centrist Israeli government could change the dynamic without putting security at risk or signing anything — committing to a two-state outcome as the eventual goal, freezing remote settlements, pushing Arab normalization. None of this depends on a Palestinian partner. These are choices Israel can make on its own.

And something no Israeli leader has done in years: addressing the American people directly. Not performing for Israeli audiences in Washington — Netanyahu has always done that, showing off his English while the real audience was back home. Actually speaking to Americans. Saying we took this relationship for granted, we chose sides, and we are choosing differently now. And saying something that would genuinely surprise them: that Israel’s goal is to reach a point where it no longer needs the extraordinary military support America has provided. Not out of ingratitude but out of a vision of what a secure, peaceful Israel actually looks like.

Most young Americans know Israel the way they know Russia — through its leader. Netanyahu is Israel to them, the same way Putin is Russia. They have no personal relationships with Israelis, no lived sense of the country beyond its government’s conduct. That is not permanent. People’s understanding of a country can change, especially when the country itself changes.

Israelis didn’t wake up one day and choose this. A society that has lived through what Israel has lived through — wars, intifadas, rockets, October 7 — moves rightward. That is not unique to Israel. It is what trauma does to politics everywhere. Netanyahu, more than any other figure, understood how to harness that fear, how to make hopelessness feel like realism and maximalism feel like strength. The Israeli public didn’t just drift right. They were led there.

Repair doesn’t require solving the conflict. It requires a government that is seen trying to end it. That alone would shift the perception that Israel has made a permanent choice to occupy and expand rather than resolve.

The current Israeli government is not that government. Governments change.