How the woke right joined the left’s war on Israel

In the evolving political landscape of the United States, a bizarre race has emerged, one in which both extremes of the ideological spectrum are locked in fierce competition over who can demonize Israel with greater intensity. It’s a full-blown legitimacy war, one that has fused progressive dogma with nationalist disillusionment, forging an unlikely alliance between the radical left and the “woke right.”

For decades, the radical left’s animus toward Israel has been overt and well-documented. Israel is cast as the villain in their global morality play, the last standing settler-colonial state, the aggressor in every conflict, the oppressor in every encounter. This narrative was seeded during the Cold War by Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda and matured in the hands of Western academics, NGOs, and campus activists.

By 2025, it has metastasized into an all-consuming doctrine. Universities became staging grounds for ritualized public hatred. Anti-Israel protests organized by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine are now commonplace, with most devolving into blatant antisemitism. Intersectional ideology conveniently casts Israel as the white “oppressor,” allowing progressive coalitions to ignore the Jewish people’s Middle Eastern origins, their history of persecution, or the theocratic fascism of their enemies.

But while the radical left’s hostility toward Israel is expected, the mutation taking place on the right is more disturbing, and less understood. What was once a stronghold of constitutional conservatism, Christian Zionism, and pro-Western foreign policy has been infiltrated by a faction that began by envying the left’s power. Watching the radical left rise through narratives of oppression, this new “woke right” adopted the same playbook. They crafted their own victimhood identity, centered on claims of “anti-white racism” and “Christian persecution,” in an effort to compete with the left in moral authority.

But that competition didn’t end with grievance narratives, it escalated. In the same way the left used Israel as a symbolic oppressor to elevate their cause, the woke right began doing the same: portraying Israel not as an ally, but as a rival in the moral hierarchy. Competing in the oppression Olympics, they escalated from mimicking the left’s victimhood to outflanking them in anti-Zionist rhetoric, casting Israel as a manipulative force, questioning Jewish influence in America, and increasingly parroting Islamic talking points to prove their ideological purity.

While the left vilifies Israel in the name of anti-imperialism and social justice, the woke right attacks Israel through the language of nationalism and religious betrayal. They see in Israel a foreign parasite, an ethnostate hijacking US resources, dragging America into endless wars, and manipulating domestic institutions. They accuse the “Zionist lobby” of corrupting Christian values, spreading cultural degeneracy, and controlling the media. And while the language differs, the ideological structure is identical to that of the radical left: Israel is the root cause of all dysfunction.

This convergence crystallized after Hamas’s October 7, 2023. On the left, there was no moral reckoning. No pause. No horror. Just deflections and justifications. Israel, they argued, had brought it on itself. Meanwhile, on the right, rather than standing in defense of a nation under siege, major voices like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens used the moment to accelerate their pivot. They questioned America’s alliance with Israel. They suggested the IDF was using Christian blood. They platformed guests who echoed Iranian talking points and denied basic facts of Jewish history. The narrative became identical on both sides: Israel is the problem.

This wasn’t a coincidence. It was the product of years of erosion, years in which Islamic regimes like Iran, Qatar, and Turkey invested heavily in Western discourse. They didn’t need to build a fifth column from scratch. They just had to manipulate the cultural traumas that already existed. On the left, it meant embedding Islamic causes within intersectional struggles. On the right, it meant exploiting nationalist backlash to redirect anger toward Jews. The genius of this strategy is that it hides behind American faces. When Dave Smith or Joe Rogan or Darryl Cooper push antisemitic tropes under the guise of “truth-telling,” it’s not perceived as Islamic propaganda, but that’s exactly what it is.

The woke right, in this sense, is not merely a conservative movement with bad ideas. It’s an ideological doppelgänger of the radical left, born out of resentment, animated by grievance, and recruited into a larger project they barely understand. Their hostility to Israel is not based on scripture, geopolitics, or history, it is the product of mimicry. They saw the power the left gained by weaponizing identity, and they wanted in. But rather than building a morally coherent counter-narrative, they simply adopted the same mechanisms: suspicion of institutions, demonization of elites, and an ever-expanding enemy list that somehow always leads back to the Jews.

And that’s where the convergence becomes deadly. Because once both ends of the spectrum agree on the target, all that remains is the method. Whether it’s cancel culture on the left or digital demagoguery on the right, the end result is the same: the erosion of Western solidarity with Israel, and the legitimization of Islamic narratives that seek the annihilation of the Jewish state. This is not theoretical. It is strategic. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and their sponsors in Tehran and Doha know that a strong Israel requires strong Western backing. If they can fracture American support, especially among Evangelicals and conservatives, they win without firing a bullet.

And it’s already working. Polls show declining support for Israel among younger Americans. Conservative influencers are now openly questioning Holocaust history, promoting antisemitic documentaries, and cozying up to figures who once would’ve been persona non grata in Republican circles. Meanwhile, Islamic organizations fund campaigns that reframe the conflict, not as jihad against infidels, but as resistance against “Zionist aggression.” The terms are changed, but the objectives remain: delegitimize Israel, isolate it, and eventually destroy it.

The West is now facing a moment of reckoning. The traditional alliance between Christian conservatives and the Jewish state, once the bedrock of American Middle East policy, is under assault from within. The woke right is not an ally of conservatism. It is a hijacking of it. And in its desperate bid to imitate the radical left’s success, it has become indistinguishable from it in the one area that matters most: its hatred of the only democracy in the Middle East.

If Western civilization falls, it won’t be because Islam defeated it in war. It will be because the West committed suicide through ideological betrayal, by embracing the very propaganda its enemies designed to destroy it.