Lie Down with Palantir, Wake Up Alone

Zach Bryan is a country singer. Born on a military base into a Navy family, an eight-year Navy veteran himself who came of age in rural Oklahoma, he has exploded in recent years into a genre-defying musical phenom well beyond Nashville. With a Grammy to his name and billions of streams on Spotify, his music resonates through raw, unvarnished anthems about small-town life, loss, and self-reckoning. Last week, he took the stage wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a provocative slogan: “Free Palestine.”

In Israel, the political class and commentariat prefer to look away. Broadcast networks and late-night satire programs cling to a comfortable, manufactured illusion: that the erosion of American sympathy is merely the passing whim of fringe progressives—the private obsession of Columbia gender studies majors and blue-haired baristas. It is a dangerous fantasy. On the ground, alienation from Israel cuts across party lines and is fast approaching consensus, particularly among adults aged 18 to 34. According to Pew Research Center surveys, 53% of young Americans sympathize with the Palestinians, compared to just 23% with Israel, while approval of the Israeli government has plummeted to a historic low of 16%. Even within American Jewry, nearly 70% support conditioning or halting military aid altogether.

Alongside this denial, local politicians and loyalist pundits peddle an equally specious talking point: the entire world is inherently against us, it is timeless and immutable antisemitism, and there is nothing to be done. Recent history belies this fatalism. Throughout the decade following 9/11, American public support for Israel hovered steadily between 58% and 71%, with most of the remainder staying neutral. As recently as 2013, roughly 40% of Americans believed diplomatic pressure for a settlement should be directed exclusively at the Palestinians (with a similar share remaining neutral). Israel long enjoyed virtually boundless public credit.

So what fractured?

The strategic inflection point came in 2015, marked by the formation of a narrow right-wing coalition in Jerusalem, an accelerated drive in settlement expansion, and a deliberate, high-decibel showdown with the Obama administration over the Iran nuclear accord. That gamble escalated when Israel tethered its fortunes wholesale to Donald Trump—a figure with enduring, deeply underwater approval ratings among the broader American electorate. This dynamic reached its apex under the Biden administration: despite the unprecedented diplomatic shield and arms pipeline Washington extended following October 7, Netanyahu’s calculated, public clashes signaled to swing voters, mainstream Democrats, and even moderate Republicans that Israel had ceased behaving as a strategic asset and had devolved into a rogue, volatile player.

Yet political skirmishing between the two nations captures only half the story. To understand why a patriotic country singer from small-town America turned his back on Israel, one must discard the provincial Israeli lens and view the rupture through American eyes.

The adage that Americans vote their pocketbooks may be a cliché, but it remains true. Today, the everyday American is battered across two socio-economic fronts: a suffocating cost-of-living crisis driven by out-of-reach housing and predatory healthcare costs, alongside deep-seated disillusionment with the erosion of democratic sovereignty by an unprecedented consolidation of corporate power—from Silicon Valley titans to Wall Street.

This is precisely where a potent mechanism was set in motion: material and class discursive coupling.

Economically, it is an exercise in narrative framing that draws a straight line between the everyday American’s empty wallet and the billions sent across the Atlantic. In an era where families are forced to weigh the cost of insulin against heating their homes in the dead of winter, an expansive campaign hammers home a brutally simple equation: every dollar underwriting the IDF is a dollar looted from their children’s futures. This rhetorical frame has captured mainstream politics. Across recent primary cycles, progressive insurgent campaigns turned opposition to unconditional foreign military aid into the cornerstone of their economic platforms: foreign wars enrich defense contractors while medical debt forces working families into bankruptcy and municipal budgets starve for affordable housing.

In doing so, they have forcefully shifted the Overton window. What was once the untouchable dogma of a special relationship with Jerusalem has transformed into a legitimate grievance: Israel is no longer viewed as an indispensable ally, but as an expensive, liability-laden drain on the American taxpayer.

In terms of class politics, to a generation ground down by sustained financial precarity, bipartisan establishment backing for Israel was repackaged as an organic component of the very “rigged system” squeezing the working class. Here, the Israel issue merged directly with one of the most toxic fault lines in contemporary American politics: the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which unleashed an unchecked flood of dark money through Super PACs and effectively auctioned governance to mega-donors.

Within this landscape, mainstream pro-Israel lobbies—foremost among them AIPAC, through its dedicated electoral arm, the United Democracy Project—stepped into the arena as aggressive primary power brokers. By pouring tens of millions of dollars in corporate capital into races to crush insurgent candidates and protect institutional incumbents, they cemented their profile among younger demographics as an entrenched corporate PAC suppressing the popular will. In their eyes, the very power brokers, Beltway elites, and defense conglomerates profiting off a national security budget knocking on the door of one trillion dollars were visibly identical to those bankrolling campaigns and insulating the Israeli government from critique.

And so the historic mythology evaporated. Israel ceased to be the biblical David standing against Goliath; in the minds of tens of millions of Americans, it became a central cog in a detached, predatory, and elitist war machine—one willing to sacrifice the working families of rural America and the industrial heartland to feed the military-industrial complex. That is why Zach Bryan wore the shirt: out of simmering fury at an American establishment that abandoned its own people.

A prime case in point of this dynamic is the toxic embrace extended to Israel by Palantir in the wake of October 7—the very moment Israel stands in desperate need of moral authority and international legitimacy. Palantir, the surveillance and big-data behemoth, repeatedly takes out prominent full-page ads in marquee outlets like The New York Times, trumpeting an unyielding alliance with the Jewish state. Inside Jerusalem’s public diplomacy apparatus, strategists likely celebrate a PR coup bankrolled by Silicon Valley royalty; through the eyes of the American public, it is damning proof that Israel is hopelessly entangled with the very military-surveillance apparatus they have come to despise.

Palantir is the poster child for the modern Orwellian nightmare. Seeded by the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel, the company built its empire supplying predictive surveillance engines to ICE and battlefield AI targeting platforms to the Pentagon. This footprint collides squarely with a profound crisis in American civil life: Gallup measures institutional trust in Big Tech hovering at a historic low of roughly 20%, while Pew finds that over 70% of the public harbors deep dread over how corporate and government bodies harvest private data and amass unchecked power.

This borders on genuine existential dread. While mainstream computer scientists and leading AI safety labs—most notably Anthropic—sound urgent alarms that unconstrained frontier models risk civilizational catastrophe, documenting instances of deceptive alignment and self-preservation drives in advanced neural networks, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has taken the opposite tack: gleefully weaponizing those raw algorithms and strapping them directly to the kill chain.

In chillingly brazen public remarks, Karp boasts that his company’s systems are built to “kill the adversaries of the United States,” likens his enterprise’s deployable AI to a modern “Oppenheimer moment,” and dismisses calls for algorithmic safety and regulatory restraint as expressions of “Western weakness.” To millions of Americans, Karp is not a patriot securing the homeland, but an eccentric, unfettered technocrat gambling with human survival and personifying the darkest corners of dystopian fiction.

When a behemoth like Palantir steps forward as the proud patron of Israeli militarism, it does not rehabilitate Israel’s brand. It almost irreversibly cements it within the exact matrix of alienated, predatory power that most of America has come to despise.