Amid the deluge of news about Donald Trump’s erratic reign, multiple wars and climate change, a development of monumental importance has gone largely unnoticed: US public opinion has turned against Israel.
Disgust at Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and the perception that prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu dragged Trump into the disastrous war on Iran precipitated this dramatic shift. The UN reported on May 18th that 72,769 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023. During the same period, 1,096 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in the West Bank.
Unconditional US support for Israel could be a thing of the past. As Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland wrote in The New York Times this week, “The American people … do not want to be complicit in ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, or what human rights organisations and scholars have determined to be genocide in Gaza.”
A Pew Research Center poll released on April 7th found six in 10 Americans hold an unfavourable opinion of Israel. That rises to 80 per cent in the Democratic Party, long the political home of Jewish-American voters. Rejection of Israel’s actions is particularly strong among young people, with 84 per cent of Democrats under age 50, and 57 per cent of young Republicans, expressing negative views of the Jewish state.
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Old lies have been debunked. Israel cannot be “the only democracy in the Middle East” while 7.2 million Jews impose an apartheid regime on the slightly greater number of Palestinians living in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank.
The scale of the slaughter in Gaza has shredded Israel’s claim to have “the most moral army in the world”. The New York Times might not have published Nicholas Kristof’s article entitled The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians before the Gaza war. Kristof described “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children – by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards”. Netanyahu threatened a lawsuit and accused Kristof of “blood libel”.
In the winter of 2023/24, US campuses revolted against the destruction of Gaza. Using blacklists compiled by the far-right Zionist vigilantes of the Betar group, the Trump administration targeted immigrant student protesters, including Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University, for deportation. Three Ivy League university professors accused of complacency towards anti-Semitism were hounded out of office by the Trump administration.
Yet despite – or perhaps because of – the suppression of free speech on college campuses, the tables have turned. “Attempts to conflate criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism do not combat that hate,” Van Hollen writes. “They only undermine the fight against anti-Semitism by equating the Israeli government with all Jews.”
“Thirty or forty years ago, you couldn’t say the word ‘Palestine’ in the halls of Columbia,” Rashid Khalidi, emeritus professor of history at Columbia University, told Le Monde. “It was toxic. Now, it’s the words ‘Aipac’ and ‘Israel’ that are toxic.”
As documented in the 2007 landmark book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Aipac (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has used money to meddle in US politics for decades. In 2024, the group boasted that “98 per cent of Aipac-backed candidates won their general election so far!”
With Israel increasingly viewed as a pariah state, Aipac’s support has become a liability. At least four Democratic presidential hopefuls have distanced themselves from Aipac. They include governor JB Pritzker of Illinois, whose Jewish family own the Hyatt Hotel chain and were major donors to Aipac, and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose father Benjamin was born in Jerusalem and fought in the ranks of the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun.
On April 15th, 40 of 47 Democratic and independent senators voted for a Bill sponsored by senator Bernie Sanders that would have stopped the transfer of military bulldozers, like those used to flatten towns in Gaza and Lebanon, to Israel. Israel is by far the largest recipient of US aid, having received more than $300 billion since its foundation in 1948.
In a new book entitled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times reporters recount Netanyahu’s hard sales pitch for war against Iran to a White House cabinet meeting on February 11th. CIA director John Ratcliffe called Netanyahu’s argument “farcical”. Secretary of state Marco Rubio dismissed it as “bulls**t”. Trump bought it.
A question hangs over Israel’s ability to survive the eventual loss of US military aid, US diplomatic protection in the UN and International Criminal Court, and US deterrence of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East. A Ruderman Family Foundation poll last winter found the vast majority of Israelis, nearly 80 per cent, are concerned about the decline of US support.
It is a self-inflicted wound, Douglas Bloomfield, a former Aipac official, wrote in the Jerusalem Post on May 14th: “The greatest threat to Israel’s survival is not Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Hamas fantasies, or Hizbullah’s dreams. The real damage to Israel’s stature and support has been an inside job.”
