Reports of starvation from occupied Gaza seem to have shaken the American public’s unconditional support for Israel: 53% hold a negative view of the Jewish state, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 24 countries. The United States used to head the list of countries in Israel’s corner. Today, that list is just three countries long: only in Kenya, Nigeria and India did those with a positive view of Israel outnumber its critics. The United States may be coming into line with European countries, in all of which public opinion on Israel is negative.
In the days after Hamas’s grisly assaults of October 7, 2023, which left almost 1,200 dead, including over 800 civilians, Americans backed Israel’s muscular counterattack by 50% to 45%. But Israel’s ceaseless bombardment of Gaza has left at least 50,000 dead — most of them civilians, including 12,000 children under 12. Precise numbers are hard to come by, and Israel does not permit reporters to enter the war zone. A late-July Gallup poll found that Americans now oppose Israel’s military operation by almost two-to-one.
What is most interesting about this is the partisan skew. Whereas Republican support for the Israeli war effort has remained steady at 71%, Democratic support has collapsed, from 36% to just 8%. This matters: the Democratic Party wins about 70% of the votes of American Jews, and has been their political home since they began arriving as immigrants in the 19th century. It is under pressure to become an anti-Israel party. Under the influence of Donald Trump, the party is moving Left. And opposition to Israel has been a winner for Left parties in the West. La France Insoumise, the continent’s most anti-Israel major party, won the most seats in France’s legislative elections last year. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party’s leader, is France’s most uncompromising critic of Israel. Jeremy Corbyn, who occupies a similar spot on the British political landscape, came within a handful of seats of becoming prime minister in 2017, and now appears to be enjoying a revival.
In July, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders forced a vote to block shipments of offensive weapons to Israel. Though it failed, it did win a solid majority (27-17) of Democrats. The situation may remind veteran Democrats of the crisis they faced after October 2002, when the party’s presidential hopefuls swallowed their misgivings and made the safe-looking vote to follow George W. Bush into the Iraq War. By the 2004 presidential election, that war had gone badly wrong, and Vermont governor Howard Dean briefly appeared likely to win the Democratic nomination on the strength of his anti-war position alone.
In 2008, Democrats reached for a candidate whom obscurity had protected from the need to vote on Iraq — Barack Obama, who at the time had been a state legislator in Illinois. In this light, the stunning emergence in New York City of Zohran Mamdani, now the odds-on favourite to become mayor of the largest Jewish city on the planet, could be a historic development. Like Obama, Mamdani is a state legislator; unlike him, he has backed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which in the United States represents the outermost edge of anti-Israel activism.
In some ways, the grounds for the American shift on Israel resemble those elsewhere in the West. Time has passed. Israelis rightly insist that Zionism dates from the 19th century, and Jewish ties to the Holy Land are ancient. But the world’s willingness to countenance Israel’s extreme measures of self-defence has everything to do with the murder of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. It remains a lesson and a landmark. But it has passed from living memory. The media, for its part, has changed. Today public opinion is built out of on-the-spot clips from Gaza, and when Israel bars foreign correspondents, public opinion smells a rat.
In other ways, the American disillusionment with Israel is different from the rest of the West’s. No article on the Israel-Hamas conflict has done more to influence American opinion in recent months than Brown University historian Omer Bartov’s judgement in the pages of the New York Times that Israel was committing genocide. Bartov’s influence comes from his background as an Israeli war veteran, as the son of a major Israeli writer, and as a man whose distinguished scholarly career has focused on genocide in general and, in particular, on how soldiers and statesmen are led astray in the heat of battle. In a more recent interview, with the journalist Dan Wakin, Bartov tried to describe the sadness he felt in contemplating how Israel had squandered its moral capital. “It took a long time,” he said, “to build up the kind of support — in many ways, love — for Israel that exists in the United States.”
He is right. Americans may not think this is Israel’s finest hour. But they are far from thinking ill of it on a fundamental level. These fond feelings are, quite naturally, reciprocated. The main determinant of Israel’s ability to survive is its relationship with the United States: military, commercial, diplomatic and even legal. Imagine, for instance, the effect on Israel if the US were to reassert the presumption against dual citizenship that is still in its lawbooks, but has been allowed to lapse since the end of the Cold War.
“Whereas Republican support for the Israeli war effort has remained steady at 71%, Democratic support has collapsed”
Trump’s second presidential term has lent a note of paradox to the recent American turn against Israel. He is a straightforward champion of the country, his support for Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu subject to only two qualifications: first, a lingering resentment (reportedly) at Netanyahu’s having recognised Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory with undue haste; second, an unwillingness to be associated with bad TV — hence his pushback against Netanyahu for pooh-poohing allegations of famine in the Gaza Strip. Trump insisted that it was “real starvation stuff”.
Even leaving aside his willingness to risk war to join Israel’s war against Iran, Trump is as loyal a friend as Israel has. But his programme benefits Israel only in a confused and contradictory way. At the centre of Trumpism is the President’s project to liberate people from civil-rights law in its late, decadent “woke” stage. Twenty-first-century America turned tyrannical when progressive regulators and litigators came to realise that local governments, large corporations and private citizens could be threatened with lawsuits for almost anything they said about minorities or women, and anything that left the impression of a “hostile environment”. Trump has eliminated large parts of this system, especially as regards corporate America. He has ordered experienced civil-rights litigators in the Justice Department to stand down.
And he has paid a lot of attention to Jews. This makes electoral sense. As long as the Democratic Party was built “intersectionally” out of an ever-growing list of underprivileged beneficiaries of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Jews — for all their historic attachment to the party — have been a poor fit within it. That is because they are a rich and successful group, and the main diagnostic tool of civil-rights law is essentially a race-based conspiracy theory: if Group X has more wealth, income or academic honours than Group Y, some hidden plot, somewhere, must be to blame.
But when it comes to universities, Trump has not dismantled the powerful disciplinary apparatus of woke. He has harnessed it to his own ends, and he has done so by focusing on antisemitism — which has not been a problem in American universities since the middle of the last century. What has happened on campus is an increasing number of anti-Israel demonstrations. Trump has forced on universities an irresponsibly vague definition of antisemitism, created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, which assimilates many kinds of statements against Israel to run-of-the-mill antisemitism.
Trump has prompted universities to police certain genuinely disruptive campus protests — for instance, the takeover of Butler Library at Columbia University last May by 70 students who set up a “Basel al-Araj Popular University” while students were studying for finals. In a democracy with total freedom of speech, “activism” can be a way of introducing an element of intimidation into public life. The non-academic public often views American universities as places that mainly undermine the political system and only secondarily offer an education.
On the other hand, the mildness of anti-Israel feeling among the non-academic public may in retrospect have been tied up with the de facto censorship of woke. When people speak of an Israel “lobby”, they most often mean powerful campaign-finance organisations such as AIPAC, to which many congressmen are beholden. But the debate has probably been more shaped by such groups as the Anti-Defamation League, which greet anti-Israel sentiment with organised pressure campaigns — and by a plethora of litigators, advocacy groups and unaffiliated pro-Israel campaigners.
The political scientist John Mearsheimer has credibly alleged that The Atlantic was too frightened to publish an article he co-wrote two decades ago about the Israel lobby. In the end, the story wound up being published in the London Review of Books, and a book followed in its wake. But during the high tide of woke civil-rights law, even a feebly substantiated allegation that a writer or broadcaster was a racist or antisemite placed the outlets that employed them in fear of lawsuits, boycotts and other harassment. In the early days of Trump’s second term, such fears have waned, and with them the power of pro-Israel pressure groups.
Public scepticism about Israel, meanwhile, has waxed. Certain comfortable arguments (“Israel’s fight is the fight of Western civilisation”) and certain familiar solutions (the “two-state solution”) have grown contentious when we weren’t looking. The tendency of Netanyahu’s government and its defenders not to rebut criticism but simply to calumniate critics is bringing diminishing returns. As a young diplomat in the mid-Eighties, Netanyahu himself worked magic on ABC’s Nightline with bravura attacks on Israel’s foes. But he is stuck in that time. Calling starvation in Gaza a “bold-faced lie”, accusing Emmanuel Macron of “siding with Hamas” for urging an end to Israel’s blockade of aid — the tactics that once helped Netanyahu inhibit criticism may now inflame it.
Regarding American public opinion, Israel is in a delicate position. Trump’s return has made speech more free in most respects — but by no means all. For a decade now, Trumpism’s core belief has been that the Washington establishment’s priorities are a giant elite hustle. Israel has been one such priority, and it is due for a cynical reassessment. But Trump’s role as Israel’s most stalwart defender changes its symbolism and its stature — enhancing it in some contexts, detracting in others. Israel is a main target of populists. It is also populism itself.
Israel’s position in the affections of Americans is for the most part unchanged and secure. On the other hand, there is that matter of the anti-Israel activist who is set to become mayor of New York. Should Mamdani govern successfully, he could become a model for a new generation of Democratic politicians. No less important, Democrats always stand a chance in presidential elections. Taken together, that leaves Israel only one or two bad breaks away from a downgraded relationship with its indispensable backer.
