In 2022, a slight majority of Democratic voters — 53 percent — viewed Israel unfavorably. That figure has since increased by more than half.
It’s a striking collapse in Democratic support for one of America’s staunchest allies, and it played out in three main phases.
The first began in the early 2010s, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clashed with the Obama administration over Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
The second took place roughly a decade later and centered around the war in Gaza. An initial surge of sympathy for Israel after the October 7 attacks by Hamas gave way to increasing horror over the civilian toll of its reprisals. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders continued to disparage any talk of an eventual Palestinian state, which had long been the centerpiece of Democratic hopes for a durable peace in the region.
The third phase has played out in Trump’s second term: His close alliance with Netanyahu, and the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran, have deepened Democratic opposition to Israel, especially among older voters.
“Once Trump won, we started to see really massive polling changes among older Democrats who had supported Israel,” Hamid Bendaas of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, told me. “Part of that is the partisan-ization of Israel, seeing Netanyahu as a Trump ally.”
The consequences playing out in Congress
Now, it’s increasingly a consensus inside the Democratic Party that tougher pressure tactics against Israel are called for — but there’s still disagreement over how far to go.
One idea is to cut off US financing for “defensive weaponry,” such as the interceptors used in the Iron Dome missile defense system that defends Israel from rockets fired by Hamas and Hezbollah (and which the US has spent billions to help finance).
Another is to end all direct US funding for Israel’s military, which the progressive Jewish group J Street called for this week. Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) recently voiced support for that idea. Many observers believe US policy is headed here, in part because Israel is now a very wealthy nation that doesn’t really need US aid.
“There’s a growing understanding that aid money is fungible and that any amount of aid that the US is giving frees up [Israel’s] own money to spend on things we don’t like,” Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told me.
Some left activist groups have other priorities, such as urging Democrats to call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. Bendaas said his polling shows increased support for using sanctions on Israel similar to those used against apartheid South Africa.
“I do think that’s probably where the conversation is headed by 2028,” Bendaas said. “But the realms of possibility are moving so fast, it’s kind of hard to pin down sometimes.”
The deeper disagreement
Several advocates I interviewed pointed to a deeper divide between the progressives hoping to salvage the US-Israel relationship and the leftists who are willing or even eager to end it.
Often these debates touch on fundamental differences in opinion about the legitimacy of the state, pitting “liberal Zionist” critics of Israel (who see a democratic Jewish nation as an important refuge for a historically oppressed minority) against “anti-Zionist” critics (who see Israel as an inherently repressive entity built on ethnic supremacy and colonialism).
Progressives in that first camp are optimistic that Israel’s elections later this year will depose Netanyahu for good, allowing for a reset. However, the more dovish Israeli left has long been in decline and polls show many of Netanyahu’s policies on Gaza and Iran retain strong support among the Israeli people — making a sharp change in approach seem unlikely.
So what then? What if the pressure tactics fail to change Israel’s security calculus, as they have so many times before?
If the Democrats retake power in 2028, they’ll have to try to answer that question.
Read Andrew's full story here.
