Lie Down with Palantir, Wake Up Alone

Zachry Brown is a country singer. The son of a serviceman, born on a military base and raised in a devout Christian family of twelve, he grew up in the rural South, nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Georgia. In the early 2000s, he broke out with the smash hit “Chicken Fried” and became a fixture of the Nashville scene. Since then, he has racked up three Grammy Awards writing anthems about pickup trucks, cold beer, homemade pecan pie, and blue jeans. Today, his marquee tracks boast well over a billion streams on Spotify. Last week, he stepped onto the stage wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with two simple words: “Free Palestine.”

In Israel, the political class and commentariat prefer to look away. Broadcast news desks and late-night satire shows cling to a soothing, manufactured illusion: that the erosion of American sympathy is merely the pet project 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 now cuts across party lines and is fast approaching consensus, particularly among adults aged 18 to 34. Pew Research Center surveys paint a sobering picture: 53% of young Americans sympathize with the Palestinians, compared to just 23% with Israel, while favorability toward the Israeli government has plummeted to a historic nadir of 16%. Even within American Jewry, roughly 70% favor conditioning or ending military aid altogether.

Alongside this, domestic politicians and loyalist pundits peddle an equally specious talking point: that the entire world is inherently set against us, that it is timeless, immutable antisemitism, and that nothing can be done. Recent history belies this fatalism. For the decade following 9/11, 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 pressure for a negotiated settlement should be applied exclusively to the Palestinians. Israel long enjoyed virtually boundless public credit.

The strategic inflection point came in 2015, marked by the formation of a narrow, right-wing coalition in Jerusalem, an aggressive push in settlement expansion, and a deliberate, high-decibel showdown with the Obama administration over the Iran nuclear agreement. That gamble metastasized when Jerusalem tethered its fortunes wholesale to Donald Trump—a figure with enduring, historically 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, Jerusalem’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 client.

Yet partisan skirmishing inside the Beltway captures only half the story. To understand why a patriotic, small-town country singer from Georgia 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 American domestic landscape is battered across two socio-economic fronts: a suffocating cost-of-living crisis driven by out-of-reach housing and predatory healthcare expenses, alongside deep-seated disillusionment with the erosion of democratic sovereignty by an unprecedented consolidation of corporate power—from Silicon Valley titans to Wall Street.

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 organized 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 bedrock 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 untouchable dogma—the sanctity of the special relationship with Jerusalem—has transformed into a permissible, even mainstream grievance: Israel is no longer viewed as an indispensable democratic ally, but as an expensive, liability-laden drain on the American taxpayer.

Culturally and economically, to a generation ground down by sustained financial precarity, bipartisan establishment backing for Israel was repackaged as an organic organ of the very “rigged system” squeezing the working class. Here, the Israel issue merged directly with one of the most toxic fissures 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 apparatus, the United Democracy Project—stepped into the arena as aggressive primary power brokers. By pouring tens of millions of dollars in corporate and billionaire capital into races to crush grassroots, working-class insurgencies and shield institutional incumbents, they cemented their profile among younger demographics: no longer an ideological foreign-policy lobby, but an entrenched corporate PAC suppressing the popular will. The very power brokers, Beltway elites, and defense conglomerates profiting off an annual 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.

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

Then, on the anniversary of October 7—the solemn date to which Israeli diplomacy turns for moral authority and international legitimacy—Jerusalem received the ultimate poisoned chalice: Palantir, the surveillance and big-data behemoth, took out an unabashed full-page advertisement in The New York Times declaring its unyielding support for Israel. In Jerusalem, communications strategists likely cheered another “hasbara coup” backed by Silicon Valley royalty. To the American public, it was damning proof that Israel is wholly embedded in the exact surveillance-industrial machine they distrust.

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 anxiety transcends surveillance and borders on 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 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 irreversibly cements it within the exact matrix of alienated, predatory power that most of America has come to despise.