How Israel Lost Americans

 

Opinion

Michelle Goldberg

How Israel Lost Americans

 

Feb. 27, 2026

Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/opinion/israel-american-public-opinion.html

 

It’s been obvious for some time that Americans are souring on Israel, but a Gallup poll 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 in the West Bank and the systematic ethnic cleansing 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 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 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 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 worse if America bombs Iran, as Netanyahu hopes it will. 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.