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HOW ISRAEL LOST AMERICANS  
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Michelle Goldberg
July 6, 2026
The New York Times
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_ It's not just Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians that have
eroded Americans’ good will toward Israel. Perhaps as important has
been Israel’s role in American politics. _

, David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

 

It’s been obvious for some time that Americans are souring on
Israel, but a Gallup poll
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that came out on Friday marks a turning point. For the first time in
the poll’s 25-year history, it found, more Americans sympathize with
the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The shift wasn’t just among
Democrats, whose opinion of Israel has been in free fall in recent
years. According to Gallup, only 30 percent of independents now
sympathize with Israel; 41 percent sympathize with the Palestinians.
Among adults under 35, support for Israel has fallen to a record low
of 23 percent. With numbers like this, bipartisan backing for Israel,
long a constant in American politics, will in time become
unsustainable.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel famously prides himself on
his ability to shape American policy. As he said in a secretly
recorded 2001 conversation, “I know what America is. America is a
thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Yet
he has presided over an ongoing collapse in American Zionism and could
eventually go down in history as the prime minister who lost
Israel’s most important ally.

Israel’s imploding reputation is largely a consequence of its
oppression of the Palestinians, in particular the mass killings in
Gaza, which millions of Americans watched up close on social media. At
the same time, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — which is
increasingly turning into outright annexation — is making Zionism
and liberalism seem incompatible. Today, between the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean Sea, about 7.2 million Jews preside over a slightly
larger number of Arabs, if you combine Israel’s Palestinian
citizenry with the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. The majority
of those Palestinians are stateless and have almost no guaranteed
rights, as we see in the growing number of settler pogroms
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in the West Bank and the systematic ethnic cleansing
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of villages.

As long as the possibility of a Palestinian state remained alive,
liberals who feel warmly toward Israel could tell themselves that this
system of de facto apartheid was only temporary. But Netanyahu’s
government has done everything in its power to make a two-state
solution impossible, including, before the attacks of Oct. 7, propping
up
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Hamas. In theory, a state that’s both Jewish and democratic may be
possible. Today, on the ground, it looks like a pipe dream.

But it’s not just Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians that
have eroded Americans’ good will toward Israel. Perhaps as important
has been Israel’s role in American politics.

For decades, pro-Israel organizations in the United States have
struggled mightily to control the parameters of acceptable debate
about the Jewish state. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee
has spent countless millions intervening in primary elections,
including against
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Jewish critics of Israel like the former Michigan congressman Andy
Levin, a self-described Zionist who infuriated AIPAC by fighting for a
Palestinian state. Israel’s allies have pushed speech codes defining
anti-Zionism as antisemitism. They’ve passed anti-boycott laws used
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to punish American enterprises that refuse to do business not just
with Israel proper but also with Israelis in the occupied territories.

Efforts to make harsh criticism of Israel verboten redoubled after
Oct. 7, as many of Israel’s backers watched in horror as campuses
exploded with pro-Palestinian demonstrations, some of which shaded
into genuine antisemitism. Major pro-Israel groups like the
Anti-Defamation League cheered on Donald Trump as he cracked down on
universities in the name of fighting anti-Jewish discrimination, which
the administration treated as synonymous with hatred of Israel. The
right-wing pro-Israel group Betar U.S. gave the American government
lists of pro-Palestinian immigrant students to target for deportation,
including Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by ICE last
March.

By aligning Zionism with American authoritarianism, Israel’s
champions earned the country the enmity of many Democratic partisans.
The influential resistance podcaster Jennifer Welch is indicative. A
wealthy interior designer from Oklahoma, she was once a Hillary
Clinton-supporting Democrat who backed Israel without thinking much
about it. But more recently, she told Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, she’s
come to link the pro-Israel lobby with the forces destroying American
democracy. “My husband always said, ‘I don’t know what’s going
on in Israel and Palestine, but I just know every politician I hate
supports Israel,” she said, using an obscenity. The more she read
about the conflict, the more she saw Israel as a genocidal state.

Republicans remain broadly pro-Israel; according to the Gallup poll,
69 percent of them view the country favorably. Still, some of the
conservatives who’ve spent the past decade denouncing wokeness have
been infuriated by restrictions on anti-Israel speech. They see —
with good reason — the government attempting to silence political
arguments in the name of safety and sensitivity. “You can say
whatever you want about America, whatever you want, and people do, and
I’m glad you can,” Tucker Carlson said in a conversation with Cenk
Uygur, a host of “The Young Turks,” an enormously popular
left-wing streaming show. “But the second you’re critical of
Benjamin Netanyahu, you get punished by the U.S. government?”

Netanyahu and his government deserve this growing bipartisan
opprobrium. Unfortunately, ordinary Jews are experiencing it as well.
I’ve long argued that anti-Zionism and antisemitism aren’t the
same thing. Yet as antisemitism rises in the United States, contempt
for Israel sometimes gives way to anti-Jewish paranoia and hostility.
Carlson doesn’t just disparage Israel; he also hosts white
nationalists and Holocaust deniers. And just this week, Uygur’s
“Young Turks" colleague Ana Kasparian indulged in an antisemitic
outburst on X, writing, “The goyim are waking up. Deal with it.”
(She used an obscenity I’m not allowed to repeat here.) Kasparian
refused to apologize, insisting that she was merely deploring Israel,
even though “goyim” is a Yiddish word for non-Jews, not
non-Zionists.

No one is to blame for Kasparian’s bigotry but herself. But Israel,
by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of
its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters.
As Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of the liberal Zionist
group J Street, told me, “When you end up using antisemitism as a
pretext for kicking kids out of universities and out of the country,
and you use it as a pretext for ending cancer research and use it as a
pretext for undercutting the First Amendment, you’re going to get
some blowback against the people doing that.”

The blowback will almost certainly get much worse now that Trump,
working in concert with Israel, has bombed Iran
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just as Netanyahu long hoped. Americans don’t want a war, and Trump
hasn’t bothered to explain why he might wage one. In this murk,
conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another
Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because
there will be a grain of truth to them. Friday’s Gallup poll marks a
low point in American sentiments toward Israel, but they could still
have much further to fall.

_Michelle Goldberg has been an opinion columnist at The New York Times
since 2017._

* Israel
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* public opinion
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* United States
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