AI Overview
The U.S. political consensus on support for Israel is eroding, raising concerns in Israel about future relations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s focus on ties with President Donald Trump may have strained bipartisan support. Divides over Israel are growing among U.S. voters, with many advocating reduced military aid. Israeli officials suggest diversifying foreign policy to reduce reliance on the U.S.
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Discontent with U.S. support for Israel has loomed over some of the year’s key Democratic primaries, including in New York, Colorado and Michigan, where El-Sayed, a vocal critic of military aid to Israel, faced Haley Stevens, who was backed by more than $30 million in spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliated groups.
Divides over Israel, though less stark, are also growing among Republican voters. The majority of Americans want U.S. military support for Israel reduced or ended, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted last month, including nearly three-quarters of Democrats.
Netanyahu, a political survivor, faces an election of his own in October, and his opponents are looking for a reset with the United States.
For well over a decade, as he openly embraced the friendship of Donald Trump, Netanyahu appeared to operate under the hope that if the Democrats eventually drifted away from support for Israel, the Republican Party would remain a permanent insurance policy. Today, those calculations are crumbling, as Israel increasingly becomes a wedge issue within the GOP as well.
While Netanyahu, who met with Trump last month, continues to project confidence, reassuring the Israeli public that his personal ties with the U.S. president are “very good,” Israeli officials and analysts are deeply concerned.
“Israel’s foreign relations have never been at such a low point,” opposition leader and former prime minister Yair Lapid said last month at the Herzliya Conference, an Israeli security summit. Lapid argued that the growing isolation could still be repaired, because “there is an understanding around the world that Israel’s problem is not the country, but the government.”
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.
“Hostility and anger toward Israel is today one of the few issues unifying right and left in American politics,” said Yael Sternhell, an associate professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University. “Both sides today view Israel as the neighborhood bully, a troublemaker that destabilizes the region and does not benefit the United States.”
Some Israelis worry opposition to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran could further that view.
“Bipartisanship was a key element of the U.S.-Israel special relationship,” Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations at Reichman University, said at the Herzliya Conference. It eroded “due to upheavals within the Democratic Party, but also because since 2012 Netanyahu has sided with the Republicans,” he said.
The war in the Gaza Strip and the perception that Netanyahu pushed Trump into a war with Iran have only widened the rift between the two countries, as an increasing number of Americans suggest the U.S. is too supportive of Israel.
“This is the first time in the history of our relations with the United States that we have no recourse,” said Michael Oren, a former ambassador to the U.S. “In the past, whenever Israel had a problem with a Republican administration, it would go to the Democrats,” he said, and vice versa.
Sternhell said domestic news coverage in Israel has blinded much the public to the extent to which the country’s international standing has collapsed.
“The gap between how the war in Gaza was covered in Israel, through the IDF’s perspective, and in the rest of the world, through the perspective of the Palestinian humanitarian disaster, is very difficult to bridge,” she said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “Israelis live in an information bubble, and, therefore, they find themselves shocked by the way Trump and the Republican Party are now growing weary of them.”
Gayil Talshir, a political analyst at Hebrew University, said Trump is systematically distancing his rhetoric from the Israeli prime minister. “Initially, when Trump said that Netanyahu is a wartime prime minister, it sounded like a compliment,” Talshir said. “But now, when he says it, what he is actually saying is that with Netanyahu, it is impossible to close fronts and wars, and impossible to lead to peace.”
More so than the U.S. primaries, a niche concern in Israel, Israelis are focused on their own upcoming elections. Israeli critics argue that Netanyahu’s foreign policy is driven by domestic political survival.
Although the U.S. and Israeli militaries have rarely been so much in lockstep as during the Iran war, Trump’s ceasefire deal with Iran in June was unpopular among some Israelis. While Netanyahu has downplayed frictions over the matter, his allies in politics and the media have blamed the White House for the perceived shortcomings related to the war. The truce has since collapsed.
“Netanyahu is playing a very dangerous game,” Talshir said, “endangering the relationship with the U.S., the Republicans, the Trump administration, and certainly the next president, whether Democratic or Republican.”
As Americans’ views on Israel shift, some Israeli officials are advocating for systemic changes in Israel’s reliance on Washington. “Israel also has to diversify its foreign policy portfolio,” Oren said. “There’s no substitute for America; we’re not going to have an alliance with Russia or China. But still, we should not be as utterly dependent on the U.S. as we’ve been.”
While Netanyahu has publicly called for independent munitions production, others emphasize Israel’s deep structural reliance on the U.S. “In the near future, Israel will have to fight for its life in the U.S., because this war has proven that Israel is completely dependent on it,” Gilboa said.
“The big question is the younger generation of Republicans,” Sternhell said, pointing to Vice President JD Vance, who recently criticized Israeli officials who opposed the Iran deal. “For him, Israel is perceived as a liability, as a country that creates headaches for the U.S., and I have no doubt that if he becomes president, policy toward Israel will be different.”
This shift matches the growing skepticism among younger Americans toward Israel. The primary election results in Michigan “show the wider trend where … people of the younger generation are decidedly anti-Israel,” said Jesse Weinberg, a researcher focused on U.S.-Middle East relations at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank, stressing that the war in Gaza “is one of these defining political moments for many young voters.”
“I don’t think,” Sternhell said, “one can exaggerate the depth of hostility among the younger Democratic generation in the U.S. toward Israel. It is perceived today as the evil empire. And I don’t see them softening toward the Israeli position as they mature.”
In both countries, many view a potential new Israeli government as an opportunity to repair relations with Washington. Talshir said the candidates seeking to replace Netanyahu, whether it is Naftali Bennett or Gadi Eisenkot, must establish ties to both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as work to change broader U.S. public opinion, “to reset the bilateral relationship independent of Netanyahu’s politics.”
“If there’s a different government in Israel, how much of a grace period will we get?” Oren asked. “The most generous estimate is about three weeks.”