The Decline of American Support for Israel—and of Something Far More Important

The collapse of support for Israel is not a foreign policy shift—it’s a mirror held up to a changing America.

We are told that Israel has a public relations problem in the United States. This is comforting. It suggests the issue lies somewhere between a poorly worded press release and an unfortunate military operation. It avoids a far less flattering explanation.

For months now, we’ve been treated to a familiar lament: support for Israel in the United States is collapsing. Cue the solemn panel discussions, the think-tank autopsies, and the endless hand-wringing about Israel’s “image problem.” If only Israel would behave a little better, speak a little softer, fight a little less—perhaps the American public would love her again.

It is a comforting story. It is also the wrong one.

The assumption underlying this entire genre of analysis is that America is a fixed moral reference point, a kind of geopolitical North Star by which others are judged. If support is declining, then clearly Israel must have drifted. But what if the opposite is true? What if the variable in this equation is not Israel, but America itself? Yes, declining support poses risks for Israel. That much is obvious. A cooling American public threatens political backing, complicates military coordination, and emboldens enemies who are always delighted to see cracks in Western alliances. These are not trivial concerns. But they are, in a sense, the least interesting part of the story.

Because they assume that America remains what it once was.

For decades, the United States and Israel have been described as sharing core values: democracy, pluralism, the rule of law, the belief that individual lives carry inherent dignity. These were not abstract talking points; they were the foundation of a strategic and cultural alliance. America did not support Israel merely out of convenience, but out of recognition—a sense that this was a country operating within a broadly familiar moral framework.

But alliances built on shared values have a hidden vulnerability: they depend on those values remaining shared.

Increasingly, that assumption looks fragile. Among younger Americans in particular, there is a visible erosion of attachment to the very principles that once defined the West. Democracy is no longer seen as an achievement but as an accusation. Power is not something to be constrained, but something to be redistributed. And the moral lens through which conflicts are viewed has shifted from one of principles to one of hierarchies—oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, with little patience for nuance and even less for contradiction.

Within this framework, Israel has been recast, not as a democracy under siege, but as a symbol of Western power. And once that transformation is complete, everything else follows with grim predictability. Actions are no longer judged on their merits, but on their assigned role within the narrative. A massacre can be reframed as resistance. A defense can be reframed as aggression. Reality, in other words, becomes negotiable.

This helps explain one of the more peculiar developments of recent years: the growing alignment between segments of the radical left and movements that, on any honest reading, stand in direct opposition to everything the left claims to believe. Feminists marching in defense of regimes that suppress women. LGBTQ activists expressing solidarity with groups that would happily see them erased. It is the sort of ideological contortion that would be amusing if it were not so revealing.

The common denominator is not shared values, but shared enemies. Anti-imperialism—elastic enough to mean almost anything—has become the lingua franca through which these unlikely alliances are formed. In this language, America and Israel occupy the same category: embodiments of Western dominance. And once placed in that category, they become legitimate targets of opposition, regardless of what they actually represent.

The result is a strange symbiosis. Illiberal movements gain moral cover, recast as agents of resistance. Meanwhile, the radical left gains a sense of revolutionary purpose, even if it requires overlooking the rather awkward fact that its allies would not extend the same courtesy in return. It is, in effect, a partnership built on selective blindness.

And this is where the story returns to America.

Because the normalization of these ideas does not remain confined to foreign policy debates. It seeps into the broader culture, shaping how people think about freedom, justice, and the legitimacy of democratic institutions. When the line between liberal democracy and authoritarianism becomes blurred—or worse, irrelevant—the consequences are not theoretical.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, weakening support for Israel makes little sense for the United States. Israel remains one of America’s most reliable allies in a volatile region, a partner in intelligence, defense, and technological innovation. Undermining that relationship does not produce a more stable Middle East; it produces a more uncertain one. But perhaps strategic logic is no longer the primary driver. Perhaps what we are witnessing is something deeper—a gradual reordering of priorities in which ideological narratives outweigh material interests.

If that is the case, then the implications extend far beyond Israel.

It is tempting, of course, to frame all of this as a temporary aberration, a passing phase driven by youthful idealism and social media excess. Perhaps it is. But history offers a less comforting lesson: ideas, once normalized, have a tendency to linger. They shape institutions, influence policy, and eventually redefine what a society considers acceptable.

The real danger, then, is not that Americans are becoming less supportive of Israel. Nations survive shifts in alliances all the time. The real danger is that in the process of turning away from Israel, America may be turning away from the very principles that made such an alliance possible in the first place.

And if those principles go, they will not take Israel down with them.

They will take America.