Israel Is Not the Story. America Is

For nearly half a century, the United States led the free world in confronting Soviet communism. Americans understood that ideas mattered. Totalitarian ideologies rarely arrived wearing military uniforms; they entered societies through institutions, culture, and politics long before they threatened governments.

Today, more than a generation after the Cold War ended, America appears increasingly willing to tolerate—if not embrace—ideas that once stood in direct opposition to the principles it spent decades defending. Nowhere is that transformation more visible than in the country’s changing attitude toward Israel.

The headlines have been unmistakable.

For the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 2001, Americans now sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israelis. Among Democrats, the shift has been especially pronounced. A Washington Post poll found that nearly six in ten Democrats now believe the United States supports Israel too much. In Congress, nearly half of House Democrats recently voted in favor of reducing military assistance to Israel—almost three times the proportion that took that position just two years ago.

Many observers see these developments as evidence that Israel is losing America’s support.

They are asking the wrong question.

The real question is not what these trends mean for Israel.

It is what they reveal about America.

A New Ideological Lens

During the Cold War, support for Israel was never merely a geopolitical calculation. Israel was seen as a fellow democracy standing on the front lines of a larger struggle between free societies and authoritarian movements. Americans instinctively understood that defending democratic allies strengthened the very principles upon which their own Republic rested: individual liberty, religious freedom, the rule of law, and the belief that free societies have both the right and the obligation to defend themselves against those who seek their destruction.

The Soviet Union disappeared, but ideological conflict did not. It simply changed its vocabulary.

Many commentators attribute today’s shift in American sentiment to generational differences, suggesting that younger Americans simply see the conflict differently than their parents and grandparents. There is truth in that observation. But it is not the whole story.

America itself is changing. Its demographic composition is evolving. Immigration has transformed many communities. New ideological movements have gained influence in universities, media, and politics. Increasingly, public discourse is no longer framed around liberty versus tyranny or democracy versus totalitarianism. Instead, it is viewed through rigid categories of power, identity, and oppression. Nations are judged less by whether they are free than by whether they are perceived as powerful. Democracies are often scrutinized more harshly than the terrorist organizations or authoritarian regimes that seek to destroy them.

Israel has become the clearest example of that reversal. Within this new framework, it is no longer viewed as a small democracy defending itself in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods. It is instead cast as a symbol of colonialism, power, and privilege. Hamas, despite openly embracing terrorism and rejecting Israel’s right to exist, is too often seen primarily through the lens of victimhood.

Once that moral inversion takes hold, Israel’s actions become indefensible almost by definition.

The Irony America Should Notice

The consequences reach far beyond the Middle East.

The election of New York City’s mayor offers one illustration of these changing political currents. His willingness to portray Israel’s democratically elected prime minister as a criminal while minimizing the existential threats Israel faces would have been politically unimaginable in much of America only a generation ago. Whether one agrees with every policy of the Israeli government is beside the point. Democracies thrive on debate. But the ease with which leaders of democratic allies are morally equated with terrorist organizations reflects a profound shift in political culture.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

America spent decades resisting communist ideology overseas because it understood that ideas shape nations. Presidents from Truman to Reagan argued that freedom could not survive if totalitarian doctrines gradually displaced democratic values at home. Yet today, many Americans appear less concerned about ideological movements that question the legitimacy of national sovereignty, capitalism, Western institutions, or even liberal democracy itself. Whether one calls these ideas Marxist, neo-Marxist, or simply radical anti-Western ideologies, they increasingly influence universities, cultural institutions, and parts of our political discourse.

One need not believe that America is becoming communist to recognize that intellectual currents once confined to the political fringe have entered the mainstream. The debate over Israel reveals just how profoundly those currents have reshaped our understanding of justice, morality, and democracy.

Israel happens to be the first test case.

Tomorrow it may be another ally.

Eventually, it may be America itself.

History shows that civilizations rarely undergo dramatic transformation overnight. More often, they change gradually, through altered assumptions about identity, justice, patriotism, national borders, economic systems, and the legitimacy of the institutions that sustain a free society. Just as ideological drift during the Cold War was often invisible until a crisis forced Americans to confront it, foreign policy today serves as the earliest mirror of those deeper changes.

That is why the debate over Israel deserves America’s attention.

Not because Israel’s future depends on American opinion.

Israel has spent 78 years confronting existential threats. It has built one of the world’s most dynamic economies while defending itself against repeated attempts to destroy it. It remains a vibrant democracy whose young men and women continue to risk—and often sacrifice—their lives so that future generations may live in security and freedom. Israel will continue to defend itself because history has taught Israelis that no one else can be relied upon to do so.

America, however, cannot assume that its own institutions and values are immune to erosion.

The debate over Israel is revealing a deeper question: Does America still believe that liberal democracies have the moral right to defend themselves? Does it still distinguish between democratic governments that seek to protect civilians and terrorist organizations that deliberately target them? Does it still possess the confidence to defend the principles upon which it was built—the same confidence that once allowed it to face down a totalitarian superpower without apologizing for its own convictions?

These are not questions about Israel.

They are questions about America.

Israel is not the canary in the coal mine because it is weak.

It is the canary because it is first.

The way Americans now speak about Israel may well foreshadow how they will one day speak about their own country—its history, its institutions, its borders, and even its right to defend itself.

Should America Adopt “Militant Democracy”?

The question of how a free society should treat movements that reject its founding premises is not new. It has a name: militant democracy, or streitbare Demokratie—a doctrine born in postwar Germany, where the memory of the Nazi party’s rise through the ballot box led the framers of the Basic Law to build in a safeguard. Article 21 of Germany’s constitution allows the state to petition its constitutional court to ban political parties found to be working to abolish the free democratic order itself. Germany has used this power sparingly but not never—outlawing a neo-Nazi party and a Stalinist communist party in the 1950s, and more recently pursuing (unsuccessfully) a case against the far-right NPD.

Proponents of a similar approach for the United States argue that free speech was never meant to be a suicide pact. A democracy, they contend, has the right to protect the conditions of its own survival, just as a person has the right to self-defense. If a political party or movement is organized around dismantling constitutional government—whether by importing an authoritarian ideology or by accepting foreign funding designed to erode domestic institutions—tolerating it under the banner of free speech is naïve at best and self-destructive at worst. Some point to America’s own history of treating certain organizing as beyond the pale of ordinary politics, such as the postwar prosecutions of Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act, as evidence that the U.S. has never treated free speech as truly absolute.

Opponents counter that this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw from history. The United States has deliberately chosen a different constitutional path than Germany, and for good reason. American courts have held for decades—most clearly in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969)—that even advocacy of violence or the overthrow of government is protected unless it is directed at inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce it. Mere advocacy of communism, socialism, or any other ideology, however unpopular, is not enough. Critics of militant democracy argue that handing the government the power to ban parties based on their ideology creates a weapon that inevitably gets turned on whoever is out of favor with the party in power—today’s “anti-constitutional” party is tomorrow’s normal opposition, depending on who controls the definition. They also note that the Smith Act era is remembered today less as a triumph of democratic self-defense than as a civil-liberties low point, one the Supreme Court itself later narrowed.

There is also a practical objection: banning a party does not eliminate the grievances or ideas that produced it—it can drive them underground, insulate them from rebuttal, and hand them the credibility of martyrdom. The American tradition has instead bet that the best answer to a bad idea is a better argument, made in the open, where it can be tested, mocked, defeated, and discredited in daylight.

Where one comes down on this question says a great deal about how much confidence one has left in the persuasive power of American ideals themselves—which returns us to the deeper question this essay has been asking all along.

The Bigotry That Follows

The erosion of a shared moral framework has not remained an abstract debate confined to op-ed pages and faculty lounges. It has produced real casualties.

By the Anti-Defamation League’s own count, 2025 was the third-highest year for antisemitic incidents in the United States since it began tracking them in 1979, trailing only 2023 and 2024, and physical assaults—including attacks with deadly weapons—reached record levels even as overall incidents declined. American Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks on U.S. soil for the first time since 2019: two Israeli embassy staffers shot outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum, and a demonstrator who died from injuries sustained in a firebombing at a Boulder walk for Israeli hostages. A global task force representing the seven largest Jewish diaspora communities called 2025 the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks outside Israel in more than three decades.

What makes this moment distinct is not that antisemitism has a single ideological address. It doesn’t. The same task force, surveying the confluence of forces driving the surge, pointed to far-right ethno-nationalism, left-wing anti-Zionism, and Islamist extremism operating simultaneously—three currents that agree on almost nothing except a shared hostility to Jews and, often, to the Jewish state. That is precisely what should trouble anyone tempted to treat this as someone else’s problem. When ideologies that despise each other on every other question converge on the same target, the target is rarely the actual explanation. The explanation is closer to what this essay has already described: a broader erosion of the liberal-democratic consensus that once made room for pluralism and made bigotry, from whatever direction it came, unacceptable on principle rather than tolerable depending on who was doing the hating.

That is the deeper danger of losing the moral clarity this essay has been describing. A society that can no longer agree on why hatred is wrong will eventually find itself unable to agree on much else.

A Party That No Longer Controls Itself

The party’s titular leadership—Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Hakeem Jeffries in the House, Ken Martin at the DNC—are not socialists themselves. But leadership on paper is not the same thing as control in practice, and the evidence suggests the establishment is losing its grip on the party it nominally runs.

Consider the money and the mutiny happening inside the party’s own house. David Hogg, elected by Democrats themselves to serve as a DNC vice chair, used that position to bankroll a $20 million campaign explicitly designed to primary sitting Democratic incumbents—not in swing districts where the party needs unity to survive, but in safe blue seats, where the only purpose of a challenge is to replace the current generation of leadership with a more combative, further-left one. That this effort was launched from inside the DNC’s own leadership, and that the party’s establishment could not stop it, is itself evidence of where the real power is shifting. Meanwhile, the DNC under Martin has hemorrhaged money and donor confidence—reportedly left with a fraction of the funds held by its Republican counterpart—even as insurgent, ideologically further-left candidates and their allied outside groups have had no trouble raising millions.

The Israel vote is downstream of the same dynamic. Nearly half of House Democrats voting to cut military assistance to Israel—almost three times the share who did so just two years earlier—did not happen because Chuck Schumer wanted it to. It happened because the incentives inside the party have shifted: primary challenges now come from the left, energy and small-dollar money increasingly flow to the most combative progressive voices, and Democratic officials who hold the more traditional, pro-Israel positions that once defined the party increasingly find themselves playing defense within their own coalition rather than setting its direction.

The party’s leaders may not wear the label. But a leadership that can be primaried from its own ranks, outspent by its own insurgents, and pulled toward positions it did not choose is a leadership that has lost control of the wheel, even if it still holds the title.

Conclusion

Israel has become the first democratic ally through which Americans are debating their own identity.

That is why the latest polls matter. That is why the congressional votes matter. That is why the rhetoric coming from some of America’s largest cities matters.

They are not isolated events. They are signals.

History teaches that great nations rarely lose their way all at once. They drift, gradually, as ideas once considered self-evident are replaced by new assumptions about freedom, justice, nationhood, and moral responsibility.

The United States once understood that defending democracy abroad required confidence in democracy at home.

The debate over Israel suggests that confidence is no longer assured.

Israel will endure because it has learned, often at terrible cost, that its survival ultimately depends upon the resolve of its own people.

The more pressing question is whether America still possesses that same confidence in itself.

Israel is not the story.

America is.