For much of his political career, Benjamin Netanyahu has sold himself to the Israeli public as the indispensable steward of the country’s international standing, the one statesman fluent enough in Washington, confident enough on the world stage and tough enough at home to keep Israel secure and its alliances intact. The question now is whether the long-term ledger supports that claim, or inverts it.
The short-term picture is difficult to dispute. Israel is more polarizing in American politics than at any point in recent memory. The war has supercharged a deterioration in U.S.-Israel relations that was already underway, and the damage is showing up in the numbers that most concern Jerusalem: the American public and the Congress that translates public opinion into policy.
Polling by Pew finds that favorable views of Israel have collapsed across nearly every slice of the American electorate since 2022. Support has dropped 31 points among older Democrats, 22 points among both younger Democrats and younger Republicans, 23 points among Catholics, 20 points among the religiously unaffiliated and 14 points among Protestants. Even white Evangelicals, long the most reliable pro-Israel constituency in the country, have slipped 15 points from an 80% favorability rating three years ago. The last holdouts with majority favorable views are older Republicans and white Evangelicals. Everywhere else, the floor has given way.
Congress is catching up to the electorate. Last week, 40 Senate Democrats voted for a resolution to block arms sales to Israel, up from 15 on a similar vote a year ago. Every Democratic senator seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender voted yes.
“Netanyahu is destroying the bipartisan nature in terms of support for Israel,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., told Punchbowl News.
Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., a military veteran long considered a reliable pro-Israel Democrat, told Axios: “We need to have a discussion about how to normalize that relationship and what change is necessary. There’s no doubt about that.”
In the House, the shift has moved into territory once considered untouchable. Some Democrats are now turning against even defensive assistance, including funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. “Seen as insanely fringe four years ago,” Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., told Axios of that position. Multiple Democrats who voted to fund Iron Dome in 2021 told Axios they are now finished providing Israel with financial aid.
Netanyahu’s defenders argue that much of this was inevitable, that any Israeli prime minister prosecuting a war of this scope would face the same backlash, and that the prime minister has delivered concrete wins: the Abraham Accords, deeper normalization talks in the Gulf, sustained U.S. military support through the war and the degradation of Iran’s strategic position. They argue that headlines and polls are lagging indicators and that the regional map has shifted in Israel’s favor in ways that will outlast the current anger.
The harder question is whether those gains survive their political foundations. American support for Israel has historically been resilient because it was bipartisan, generational and cultural. What the Pew data shows is a collapse on all three axes at once: Democrats and younger Americans are leaving fastest, but the slide is now reaching into older Democrats, Catholics, Protestants and even white Evangelicals. A pro-Israel consensus that required no defending for half a century is suddenly doing so from a narrower and older base.
Netanyahu’s bet has long been that Israel’s strategic relationship with Washington is durable enough to absorb whatever political friction he generates along the way. That bet may still pay out. But the votes in the Senate this week, the reversals on Iron Dome in the House and the polling across nearly every demographic group raise a question that was, until recently, close to unaskable: whether the prime minister who has cast himself as the guarantor of Israel’s place in the world is also the one most responsible for eroding it.
The answer is not yet in.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
