Losing the thread: The unravelling of US support for Israel - analysis

This isn’t just about politics. It’s about perception – and the story Israel is no longer telling effectively.

According to Pew’s late-September survey, nearly four in 10 Americans now say Israel is going too far in Gaza – up sharply from a year ago.

A majority, 59%, hold an unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government, and even Israel’s people, once viewed as plucky survivors, are seen less warmly than before: only 56% of Americans express a favorable view, down 11 points since 2022.

Those numbers alone would be troubling. But they become alarming when broken down by age and party.

Israel is not becoming a partisan issue, as some have warned for years. Israel now is a partisan issue – right up there with abortion, gun control, and gay rights. For decades, support for Israel was bipartisan – a rare constant in a fractured political landscape.

But the Times/Sienna findings indicate how thoroughly that consensus has unraveled.

Three-quarters of Republicans now approve of US President Donald Trump’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; only 8% of Democrats do. Fully 73% of Democrats oppose further military or economic aid to Israel, compared to just 20% of Republicans.

That matters politically. That oft-used AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) slogan – Support for Israel is good policy and good politics – rested on the assumption that American lawmakers reflected the instincts of their constituents. Members of Congress, for the most part, didn’t back Israel out of any personal soft spot in their hearts; they did so because they believed this was what their voters wanted.

That calculation is now changing.

When 27 US senators – more than half of all Democratic senators – voted against an arms sale to Israel in July, or when 47 Democratic representatives signed a letter urging recognition of a Palestinian state, those were not isolated gestures. They are signs of a shifting political equation, one in which supporting Israel is no longer the safe political choice it once was.

As public opinion erodes, politicians are concluding that standing with Israel may no longer be good politics but in fact may – in certain districts – even be a liability. If the general public’s shift is dramatic, the findings among American Jews are staggering. The Washington Post poll of 815 Jewish Americans found that 39% believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Stop and think about that for a minute: 39% of American Jews are buying into the canard that Israel is acting with intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Thirty-nine percent of American Jews are arming Israel’s enemies with the ultimate weapons with which to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state.

That such views have taken root among Jews – the community once defined by a reflexive solidarity with Israel – marks a profound transformation. It reflects not just political liberalism but cultural absorption: American Jews are internalizing the vocabulary and media frames of their environment.

The very word “genocide” has become untethered from its historical meaning and reattached, emotionally and politically, to images from Gaza.

For many young Jews, those images – amplified endlessly on social media – have overridden historical memory and any sense of mutual responsibility for their people. Israel’s right to self-defense, once axiomatic, is now conditional, even suspect.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in the introduction to his Yom Kippur Mahzor, wrote words nearly 20 years ago that resonate deeply today:

“To be a Jew is not to go with the flow, to be like everyone else, to follow the path of least resistance, or to worship the conventional wisdom of the age. To the contrary, to be a Jew is to have the courage to live in a way that is not the way of everyone,” he wrote.

“Judaism always has been, perhaps always will be, counter-cultural,” he continued. “To be a Jew is to swim against the current, challenging the idols of the age, whatever the idol, whatever the age.”

The idol of our age – especially in the progressive circles where many American Jews live and think – is the belief that Israel is committing genocide. It is repeated so often, with such moral certainty, that it has become a kind of progressive creed. But to be Jewish, Sacks said, is precisely to resist that kind of intellectual conformity, to stand against the tide when the tide is wrong.

Israel today is doing just that – standing largely alone against the world’s eagerness to sanitize terrorism and romanticize victimhood. To call Hamas’s war “resistance” is to exhibit moral blindness; to label Israel’s defense “genocide” is to invert good and evil.

The country that once commanded American sympathy – small, embattled, and democratic – is now filtered through the lens of power and privilege. Gaza’s devastation, broadcast continuously, has become the dominant image; October 7’s atrocities have faded from memory.

In this sense, Israel is losing the narrative not because its case is weak, but because the moral language of the West has shifted. In universities, on social media, and in much of the press, the frameworks that once shaped sympathy for Israel – survival, fighting terror, and democracy – have been replaced by binaries of oppressor and oppressed, with Israel cast in the role of oppressor. Within that frame, Israel cannot win.

Generationally, the divide is stark. Young Americans – the future voters, journalists, and policymakers – are detached from Israel in a way their parents never were. To many of them, Israel’s story no longer resonates as one of a people’s rebirth and resilience but of domination. The Pew data showing 61% of young adults sympathizing more with Palestinians is not a passing fluctuation; it signals a possible long-term realignment.

That reality will have profound implications for Israel’s standing in the decades ahead: the center of gravity in American society toward Israel is shifting.

Three years now into the war that began on October 7, Israel can claim extraordinary military achievements. Hamas’s power has been shattered, Hezbollah’s leadership decimated, and Iran’s nuclear infrastructure set back. Yet, the same period has seen a collapse of sympathy abroad.

Israelis are showing they can bear a long war, but the cost of this endurance is being paid in political capital abroad. Part of this, of course, is inevitable: a long war produces terrible images. But part of it is also a product of Israeli complacency about how those images are interpreted. For years, Israel assumed that its story – of survival, of morality under fire – was self-evident. It isn’t.

A generation ago, there was broad agreement that terrorism was evil, that democracies had the right to defend themselves, and that civilian casualties, though tragic, were inevitable in war and did not automatically invalidate self-defense. Those moral certainties have eroded. Today, power is treated as guilt, might makes wrong, and the instinctive sympathy once extended to Israel is being redirected toward its enemies.

The irony is that as Israel’s physical survival looks more secure than it has in generations, its public standing, especially among the young and among Jews abroad, is more fragile than at any time since 1948. Rabbi Sacks wrote that to be a Jew is to swim against the current. The question is whether enough Jews – and enough Americans – still have the courage to do so.