Peloni: Must read article!
Victor Satya | TOI | May 1, 2026
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.
Zionism rode to success in part on the coat tails of the age of Western tech superiority and spare population both of which have diffused.
However remember the anecdote of the visiting Indian CoS who for his presentation displayed a wall map with India and Israel highlighted then opened his speech with, “This is us and everything between is hostile.”
History is full of niche powers that did well and some are still with us and still prospering even if no longer the top tree: The Dutch, the Swiss, the Swedes, Venice, Japan Singapore, Britain, Portugal…. We have been tip toeing between the tulips for centuries and as long as we do not let the swollen heads make the silly error of riling major powers gratuitously – as Germany did – we shall continue to shine.
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The World War on Jews
Jew-Hatred is a Mental Illness and at Heart Resentment of Jewish Achievement and Success
https://open.substack.com/pub/lel817/p/the-world-war-on-jews?r=1q2uiq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
It is in fact a sign of a civilization in decline. I fear what will become a post-Trump America.
The sad thing is that we Jews are very much responsible for the hatred.
Now most people simply don’t understand the meaning of “responsibility”. They think that responsibility means “guilt”. No, we are not guilty, but we are certainly response-able.
It is important that we understand the Christian Jew-hatred.
We need to listen to the haters and learn from them.
The most prominent engine of Jew-hatred for the last 2 millennia is our claim of being chosen.
Of course being chosen is nothing special. Dinka think that they are chosen by their god Boomba, Japanese think that they are chosen by their Kami, Hawaiians are chosen by their Mali etc. Our problem is that unlike these other chosen nations, our Yehova got hijacked by Christians, who also stole our holy book.
Now the Christians have a problem, they think the Bible is holy and divine, but since we wrote it, it says that we, not them are chosen. So their hatred is very natural. All other Jew-hatred in the Western civilization both leftists and conservative’s is derived from that.
The most logical thing for us is to renounce our “chosen” status. Not just in the relligous – mythological plane, but in general conversation. We should never argue that we deserve the place under the Sun because we are better than others.
Not because we have invented drip irrigation, Hollywood and the Theory of Relativity. And not because our army is the most moral in the world.
Not at all, we are exactly as moral as Brits who killed 42k people in Hamburg in just 2 days of bombing, and additional up to 700k in Germany, France, Italy, and other countries.
We are just as moral as Americans who killed 80k – 100k people in just 3 hours of bombing Tokyo the night of March 9–10, 1945. Like all other nations we also commit war crimes. And like all other nations, we expand our territory when we win the wars.
We should also declare ourselves as a nation, not as a “religion”.
Religions don’t have a right to national states, nations do. Now national states may or may not have a state religion, that’s a different matter. Japan has Shinto, Denmark has the Danish People’s Church, etc. But we Jews are a nation. A nation in exile, a nation that has not yet fully returned home. But a nation, not a religion.
And preferably we should start referring to ourselves as “Israelites” not as “Jews”.
Then the very name of our nation logically connects us with our state. Just as it does with all other nations Japanese, Russians, Chinese, French, etc, etc.
So when we stop trying to be chosen and better than others, the others will no longer have the special hatred for us.
Of course they will still hate us, just like all nations hate other nations at times.
@Vivarto
Do NOT forget that the Moslem World has its own anti- Jewish tradition in the Koran Hadith etc. The Roman Church has at least tried to make amends . It is fifty years since Nostra Aetate. The Moslems still have to clean up on medievalism.
Moslems do not have to edit the Koran but they do not have to wallow in the verses that – no place, no names, no time , no context nor reasons – accuse Jews of “killing prophets.” Suras: 2.61; 2.91; 3.21; 3.110-112;3.181;4.115;5.70;
accuse Jews of lying: 3.75;3.181; 5.41; 5.64; accuse Jews of “being as pigs & monkeys” : 2.63; 5.59-60; 7.166 and Sura 9.30 accuse Jews of worshippiing Ezra as “son of God.”
Ah, right, Candace Owens.
Going forward it should be spelled Cuntice Owens.
it is important to note that Jew-hatred is not limited to leftists. It is spreading to the conservatives, too. E.g. Tucker Carlson, and the Black girl, I forgot her name.
The article speaks of moral fixed points. Our common morality comes from God and the Bible.
What should be noted is that the US is moving away from God and Israel is moving back towards God.
Yes, and the UK and Europe, once Israel’s allies, are now moving further and faster away from God than the USA. That is why their response to Trump’s requests for help was so pathetic. They have almost lost all sense of Biblical morality. Weakened by generations of Marxists and now by huge numbers of Third World migrants of the religion-of-peace.
Get off the Marxist kick. Nobody to day would run a government without keeping childen out of workplaces and in school. Nobody could run a modern government with out progressive income tax; and almost all modern successful states spend public funds subsidising R &D and big economic sectors – ironically enough, led by agriculture when farmers are the foremost right wing sector of the electorate complainiing of taxes ad welfare etc….
AI Overview
@Frrankadam@aol.com Those policies are actually more Bismarck than Marx though Eduard Bernstein would advocate those policies in the name of Marxism giving birth to the labor parties of the 2nd International in Europe and Israel. Marx was about overthrowing capitalism not ameliorating it, though he was willing to accept concessions along the way. Keynes, along with Bismarck also advocated the welfare state as a means of saving capitalism. Bernstein just put “Socialism” into the far future.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html
@Frrankadam@aol.com Those policies are actually more Bismarck than Marx though Eduard Bernstein would advocate those policies in the name of Marxism giving birth to the labor parties of the 2nd International in Europe and Israel. Marx was about overthrowing capitalism not ameliorating it, though he was willing to accept concessions along the way.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/ottob.html
Keynes, Ferdinand Lasalle, and Veblen also played a role. Lasalle, a socialist rival of Marx, worked with Bismarck.
It’s not that Israel support i declining, it’s just that the left has better marketing. Pollywood.