Who’s to blame for declining American support for Israel?

The shift in U.S. public opinion is real and can’t be denied. Though polls still show a plurality of Americans are still on the side of the Jewish state and that the alliance with Washington has never been stronger, the decline in overall support has been precipitous. Since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attack on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, growing numbers of Americans, especially among the young, have decided that the Israelis are the perpetual bad guys in the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. The joint U.S.-Israeli efforts to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon may have only accelerated this trend and the accompanying surge in antisemitism that has made itself felt in public discourse, as well as on college campuses and in the streets of American cities.

Predictably, this has led to a continual stream of articles from a variety of sources in the secular press and the Jewish world purporting to explain why this has happened. Some come from outlets that are intrinsically hostile to Israel and celebrate the collapse of what was once considered a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. Others speak of this change with regret and claim to be motivated by a desire to make Israel popular again.

Internalizing myths about the Jews

But almost all of them are wrong. The mistake is not in recognizing that a problem exists. Rather, it is in imagining that there is much that the State of Israel or its U.S. supporters can do about it.

As with most discussions of antisemitism, which is what the increase in anti-Zionism truly is, the error is in assuming that the critiques of Israel are rooted in what it does or doesn’t do. Israel’s leaders and government are as flawed as those of any other country. But the shift in public opinion is a product of changes in American society, not the mistakes or even the alleged crimes committed by Israelis.

Accepting this terrible truth is as difficult for Israelis and their Jewish supporters as solving the intractable policy dilemmas that Jerusalem faces. Yet accept it they must if they are to avoid compounding the problem by making further blunders that will only make the situation worse.

Ironically, many Israeli and American Jews have internalized some of the most unfortunate tropes of traditional antisemitism. Jew-haters on the right and the left have treated the objects of their abhorrence as if they had supernatural powers to do harm to them. Marxists have imagined them as the not-so-secret force behind the alleged evils of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. Right-wingers have conceived of them as the masterminds of a global Marxist plot against their national existence or their faith. Many adopt the self-contradictory claims of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery, in which they are somehow part of both conspiracies.

For all of their justified scorn for the calumnies of antisemites, the truth is that many Jews have accepted this mindset, attributing to themselves the power to fix insoluble problems and to persuade people with minds that can’t be changed to see reason.

There is no solution

Just as many, if not most, Israelis and Jews once thought they had the power to win over the Palestinians via goodwill and far-reaching concessions; some are now ready to believe that they have the power to change American public opinion. They think that a change in government, a willingness to stop defending themselves or even by adopting clever public-relations strategies, the downward trend in support can be halted, if not reversed.

Of course, many have also finally come to grips with the fact that the conflict with the Palestinians can’t be ended even by the most generous of peace offers. As such, they ought to understand that the dynamic with respect to the successful mainstreaming of anti-Zionism is similar. Israelis don’t have this power. They never have and never will.

To point this out is not to say that Israel can’t do better at explaining itself to the world—or at least try to do so. Certainly, the current government and its predecessors haven’t consistently put forth much of an effort to do so. Nor is it the case that Israeli governments haven’t made mistakes. They have—and big ones, like any other government, including the world’s other democratic states.

But when you seriously examine the efforts to apportion blame for the current downturn in Israeli popularity, the explanations the critics provide are either inadequate or lead nowhere.

Pointing to Bibi and ‘genocide’

Some blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alienating Americans because of what they consider to be the extremism of his governing coalition or the policies it pursues. They say Israel has become too right-wing, nationalist and religious on his watch. They point to any infraction as corruption. They attribute it to statements of cabinet members like Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich, or the allegedly bad behavior of the Jews living in Judea and Samaria (“settlers” in the “West Bank”) or the rare Israeli soldiers who do something indefensible, like the one who desecrated a cross in Lebanon.

Others say Israel blundered by adopting a transactional approach to the United States. According to this argument, embracing Republicans, especially President Donald Trump, while taking umbrage at the Democrats’ positions was mistaken. The pro-Israel community’s willingness to be too critical of former President Barack Obama over his 2015 Iran nuclear deal and of President Joe Biden for his half-hearted backing of the war against Hamas—and slow-walking and even denial of the supply of weapons during the conflict—was, we are told, a misjudgment.

By applauding and working with Trump, the Israelis are alleged to have made a deal with the devil that will come back to haunt them when the Democrats inevitably come back into power. Belief in this thesis has only grown since Trump’s decision to join with Israel in attacking Iran, which the war’s critics blame on Netanyahu dragging him into a conflict that they assert isn’t popular or in America’s interests.

Most of all, they assert that the war Israel waged on the Hamas perpetrators of the Oct. 7 atrocities was too brutal and killed too many civilians in Gaza, where terrorists rule over some 2 million people. They make the same claims about efforts to prevent Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon from making northern Israel uninhabitable or to forestall Iran’s desire to eradicate the Jewish state. It is, they believe, all about the “genocide” Israel is supposedly committing against Palestinians. Stop killing innocent people, they say, and Israel will be better liked—or at least, less unpopular.

While these arguments make sense to Israel’s critics, they have it all wrong.

The rise of the right in the Jewish state wasn’t the product of a reactionary impulse within Israeli society. If Netanyahu, the Likud and its coalition partners have won most of the elections during the course of the last quarter-century, it’s because the peace process championed by the Labor Party and the left wing was exposed as a dangerous delusion. The Palestinians refused multiple offers of statehood in much, if not almost all, of the territory they claim. That destroyed the center-left’s hold on much of the Israeli electorate. That and Palestinian support for terrorism during the years of violence associated with the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and the atrocities of Oct. 7 ended belief in the possibility of a two-state solution among the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public.

To focus on alleged settler violence or other outlier actions is also to ignore the reality in which Israelis live. Even if a tiny minority of Israelis does things they shouldn’t, the entire discussion of such crimes is premised on a willingness to ignore the daily toll of Palestinian terrorism that exists in the territories. Nor is the problem the things said by Ben-Gvir or Smotrich.

Israelis would choose peace, even at the cost of territory, if they could. But you have to be disconnected from the reality of the Middle East to deny that the century-old war against the Jewish presence in the country is inextricably linked to the national identity of the Palestinians. There is no Palestinian partner for peace—and won’t be one until their political culture undergoes a sea change in which they will reject violence and accept that the Jews aren’t going to be wiped out or go away. Those Americans who cling to ideas like two states or imagine that there is anything any conceivable Israeli government can do to persuade the Palestinians to end that war simply haven’t been paying attention to the events of the last 25 years or choose not to do so for reasons of their own.

Israelis remain divided on whether they want Netanyahu to continue leading them after a total of 18 years in power. But they are not divided on the necessity of the wars their country has fought against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. The same critiques used against Netanyahu will be employed against his political opponents should they prevail in the elections that will be held in Israel later this year.

Nor should anyone upbraid Israelis for embracing Trump.

The Democrats changed, not Israel

It was not Netanyahu and Israel that turned on the Democrats. It was the Democrats who had increasingly abandoned the Jewish state. In the last generation, the Democratic Party, joined by the education system, the media and the arts, has been largely taken over by woke ideologues. The long march of the progressives through these institutions has helped indoctrinate a generation in the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that all falsely label Israelis and Jews as “white” oppressors.

As such, everything they do is considered wrong. And everything their opponents, who are accorded the status of oppressed “people of color” and perpetual victims, do is deemed defensible, no matter how wrongheaded or evil. That belief has filtered down throughout the political system in ways that no amount of Israeli concessions or outreach can alter.

Israelis can do more to explain the realities of the Middle East to an American public that knows little of their own history, let alone that of the Jewish state and the Palestinians. But clever messaging, better use of social media or attempts to change the subject to a discussion of the great things Israeli genius has provided to the world are incapable of convincing those who have been taught to believe Zionism is racism to think otherwise.

While this was going on, the vast majority of Republicans remained pro-Israel and hostile to its Islamist enemies. Trump chose to be the most pro-Israel president to sit in the White House since the founding of the modern-day Jewish state. He has done so because he correctly views the alliance with Jerusalem to be in his nation’s interests and believes that stopping Iran is similarly essential to American security. The notion that Israelis and pro-Israel American Jews should have nevertheless rejected him is nonsensical. Only a nation of fools would embrace its foes and give the back of its hand to its friends.

Nor can Israel win back friends or lessen hostility by committing less “genocide” or being kinder to its enemies.

What’s the alternative?

That’s because Israel has not embraced a harsh form of militarism or committed “genocide” in Gaza or anywhere else.

To the contrary, it is its Iranian-backed foes—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis—and their foreign cheerleaders and enablers that seek the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet and the consequent genocide of half of all of the global Jewish population. The Israel Defense Forces employ rules of engagement and policies that do more to avoid civilian casualties than any other army. The casualties in Gaza are the result of Hamas leaders’ own efforts to sacrifice the population in their midst. The fact is that up to half of those killed are Hamas operatives, meaning that the ratio of civilians to combatants killed is lower than that of any urban combat in modern history.

The only alternative to the policies Israel has pursued in Gaza, Lebanon or Iran is to simply sit back and allow the genocidal terrorists who committed the Oct. 7 atrocities the impunity to do so again at a time of their choosing. That is something no rational government would do. Israel tried during the 17 years that Hamas has ruled Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name to live with this murderous regime. The country learned on Oct. 7 that this was a mistake that would be paid for in the blood spilled during the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

What those liberal journalists, foreign-policy establishment pundits, and Democratic activists and politicians who criticize Israel’s war policies apparently want is for the Jewish state to repeat that same blunder, regardless of the cost in Jewish lives.

It’s time to recognize that the problem isn’t with Israel but with its critics. More to the point, the issue is the woke war on the West. That has influenced a generation of young people to see Israel, Zionism and Jewish rights as somehow illegitimate. Nor is this limited to the political left. The same people who hate Israel tend to also take a dim view of America’s role in world affairs. As is the case with every other antisemitic conspiracy theory embraced by the left or the right, the issue isn’t what the Jews have or haven’t done. The problem is the lies and distortions that antisemites believe.

Israelis and Jews want to feel they have the power to alter the situation with gestures, policies or even just expressions of goodwill. That apparently can’t happen. Still, it’s wrong to blame them for the delegitimization and demonization of their nation and its rights.

What they can do

What can Israelis and the pro-Israel community do about this?

They have the power to stand with their friends and make themselves as strong as possible. They can make alliances wherever possible with those who want to be their friends and be more skillful in putting their best foot forward to the world, while explaining the facts about the conflict in which they are stuck whenever possible. They can support those seeking to defend the values of the West and the Judeo-Christian heritage that is the foundation of American democracy, as well as Zionism.

Equally important would be for friends of Israel to stop the breast-beating about their supposed sins and start playing offense by pointing out the lies being told about them. In particular, those who care about Israel and the facts should support independent media outlets that tell the truth about the conflict like JNS, rather than those that mainstream antisemitic pro-Hamas propaganda.

The information war that is being waged against Israel and the Jews is exacting a price in isolation that is far from insignificant. But the price of losing the actual war on the ground against genocidal terror regimes would be far higher. And those who counsel Israel to adopt policies that would lead to such a defeat are neither well-meaning nor wise.

It’s time for supporters of Israel to stop internalizing the false arguments that their opponents seek to impose upon them. Israel isn’t perfect and doesn’t have to be. But blaming it for the lies and acceptance of beliefs antithetical to Jewish life and the survival of Western civilization itself is neither logical nor productive. It means blaming the victims for the crimes of their persecutors. That’s a strategy that never worked throughout millennia of Jewish history, and it won’t do so now.

© JNS.