Mental Divorce from Israel?

As public opinion shifts, governments turn protest into policy, and Jews abroad become unwilling proxies for Israel, the question is no longer whether Israel faces criticism — but whether it is losing its strategic atmosphere.

Mental Divorce from Israel?

When Israel Loses the Room

Something has changed. It is no longer enough to call it a public relations problem.

Israel is not merely facing criticism. It is losing the room. Not everywhere, not among everyone, and not always for the same reasons. But the pattern is now too broad and too consistent to dismiss as hostile propaganda, campus hysteria, European hypocrisy, or routine diplomatic theater. Public opinion is shifting. Governments are shifting. Street politics is shifting. And in the dangerous space between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and hostility toward Jews, a very old mechanism is becoming visible again.

The first fact is public opinion.

In April 2026, Pew Research Center reported that 60 percent of American adults held an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53 percent in 2025 and 42 percent in 2022. Only 37 percent held a favorable view. Pew also found that 59 percent of Americans had little or no confidence in Benjamin Netanyahu to do the right thing in world affairs. Among adults under fifty, negative views now prevail across both major American parties.

Gallup’s figures are even more symbolically damaging. For the first time since Gallup began its annual measurement in 2001, Americans’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict no longer clearly favor Israelis over Palestinians. Independents now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, 41 percent to 30 percent. Democrats do so by an overwhelming 65 percent to 17 percent. Even among Republicans, sympathy for Israelis has fallen to its lowest level since 2004.

This is the real alarm. Israel can survive criticism from Europe, hostility from the United Nations, and moral theater from regimes with very selective memories. But the erosion of its position in the United States is different. The United States has not been just another ally. It has been Israel’s strategic atmosphere: military, diplomatic, cultural, evangelical, congressional, Jewish, academic, financial, and symbolic. When the American atmosphere changes, Israel does not simply lose approval. It loses depth.

Globally, the picture is even bleaker. Pew’s 2025 survey across 24 countries found that in 20 of them, around half or more of adults held an unfavorable view of Israel. In Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey, unfavorable views reached roughly three quarters or more. Israelis themselves seem to sense the shift: 58 percent of Israelis told Pew that their country was not too respected or not at all respected internationally.

One must be precise here. A decline in sympathy for Israel is not the same thing as antisemitism. Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate. Opposition to settlement expansion is legitimate. Moral outrage over civilian suffering in Gaza is legitimate. No democratic state has a right to demand immunity from judgment. Israel is a country, not a sacred object.

Yet the line between anti-Israel politics and anti-Jewish pressure is increasingly being crossed in practice.

In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in 2025. That was a 33 percent decrease from 2024, but still the third-highest annual total since ADL began tracking in 1979. More disturbing, physical assaults reached a record level: 203 incidents, up 4 percent from 2024. Assaults involving deadly weapons increased by 39 percent. Three people were murdered in antisemitic attacks.

In Britain, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total in its history. CST also recorded more than 200 antisemitic incidents in every single month of the year. After the Heaton Park Synagogue attack in Manchester, CST documented how quickly violence against Jews in one place can become permission for abuse elsewhere. The attack did not silence antisemites. In some cases, it excited them.

That is the mechanism. When Jews are attacked, antisemites do not always recoil. Sometimes they read the attack as a signal. The Jewish body becomes newly available.

Brooklyn offers a local miniature of this global shift. On May 11, 2026, anti-Zionist demonstrators marched through a Jewish area of Brooklyn during a protest against an Israeli real estate event in Midwood. Reports described chants including “Globalize the intifada,” “Israel will fall,” and “Death to the IDF,” as well as the presence of a Hezbollah flag. The demonstration was formally about real estate, including settlement-related marketing. But when such a protest is staged at or near a synagogue, in a Jewish neighborhood, with that vocabulary and that symbolism, the political object changes. Israel is no longer only being criticized. The local Jew is made to carry Israel on his back.

A different Brooklyn scene shows the same pressure in institutional form. In May 2026, the Park Slope Food Coop voted to boycott about a dozen products from Israel and Israeli settlements. About 7,000 of the cooperative’s 17,000 members participated in the virtual meeting, and 67 percent voted in favor. On paper, this was a consumer-political decision. In reality, even the Coop’s leadership acknowledged antisemitic and anti-Arab comments, threatening letters, hostile online activity, suspicious substances sent through the mail, and increased security measures around the campaign.

This does not mean every boycott supporter is an antisemite. That would be lazy and false. But it does mean that Israel has become the switch through which local communities reorganize their own moral aggression. A grocery shelf becomes a battlefield. A synagogue becomes a proxy embassy. A Jewish student becomes a consulate. A man in a kippah becomes a walking foreign ministry.

This is not politics. It is substitution.

The third fact is that governments are now turning protest into policy.

In September 2025, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Portugal recognized a Palestinian state. Reuters described the move as driven by frustration over the Gaza war and by a desire to support a two-state solution. Israel condemned it as a reward for terrorism. But the diplomatic fact remains: major Western states that had traditionally stood close to Israel crossed a symbolic threshold.

Spain went further. In September 2025, the Spanish government strengthened its arms embargo on Israel, banned exports to and imports from Israel of defense material and dual-use technology, prohibited ships and aircraft carrying fuel or material for possible military use in Israel from entering Spanish ports and airspace, and banned imports from illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

The European Union has also begun to move from rhetoric to instruments. In May 2026, EU foreign ministers reached political agreement to sanction extremist Israeli settlers and entities, alongside new sanctions on leading Hamas figures. The formula is important. Europe is trying to avoid the appearance of one-sidedness, but it is nonetheless building a sanctions vocabulary directed at Israeli actors.

The legal front has also become part of Israel’s international environment. The International Court of Justice continues to hear South Africa v. Israel under the Genocide Convention concerning Gaza, while the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant after rejecting Israel’s jurisdictional challenges. A legal case is not a verdict. An arrest warrant is not a historical judgment. But both have changed the diplomatic weather around Israel.

Poland offers a particularly disturbing case, precisely because it does not fit the easy map of anti-Israel politics.

In May 2026, Polish conservative commentator Piotr Skwieciński argued that Poland should undergo what he called a “mental divorce” not only from Israel, but more broadly from the Jewish community, and begin to look at them as “foreign.” The formulation is startling not because it comes from the usual anti-Israel activist milieu. It does not. Skwieciński explicitly rejects simple analogies between Israel and Russia and does not turn the Gaza flotilla into a sacred cause. His argument is colder, more strategic, and therefore more revealing.

He writes from within a Polish conservative-intellectual world that once wanted to feel a special closeness to Israel: Israel as a hard, Western, anti-left, anti-Russian, strategically serious state. That image is now cracking.

The immediate context was the Global Sumud Flotilla affair. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski summoned Israel’s chargé d’affaires after the detention of Gaza flotilla activists, including Polish nationals, and demanded their release and an apology. Poland also moved to ban Itamar Ben-Gvir from entering the country. Reuters reported that the outrage followed scenes in which Israeli police forced detained activists to kneel in rows with their hands tied behind their backs while Ben-Gvir looked on.

One does not need to romanticize the flotilla, endorse its organizers, or ignore its political ambiguity to see the damage. The damage was not only interception. The damage was spectacle.

This is the Polish lesson. Israel is not losing only the hostile left, the radical campus, the predictable UN bloc, or governments that were never friendly. It is losing people who once wanted to admire it. It is losing observers who, especially in Poland, saw Israel through the memory of Jewish presence, anti-totalitarian struggle, strategic toughness, and a certain shared intuition of historical danger.

But Skwieciński’s conclusion also contains a danger of its own. A state can and sometimes must conduct cold policy toward another state. Poland has every right to judge Israel by Polish interests, by international law, and by the treatment of Polish citizens. No state is owed sentimental loyalty. Yet to move from political distance toward a “mental divorce” from the Jewish community is another matter.

Israel, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Israeli citizens, Jewish diaspora communities, and the centuries-long Jewish presence in Poland are not one object. To package them together is precisely the point at which diplomatic realism risks becoming a clean administrative form of estrangement.

This is why Poland belongs in the larger story. The issue is not that Poland has “betrayed” Israel. That would be crude and historically unserious. The issue is that Israel’s current conduct is helping dissolve reservoirs of sympathy that were difficult to build and easy to waste. A public humiliation staged by an Israeli minister can travel further than a military operation. It can cross borders, enter national memories, activate old wounds, and turn former goodwill into icy neutrality.

And icy neutrality may be more dangerous than shouting. Shouting still acknowledges a bond, even through anger. Neutrality says: you are no longer part of our moral imagination. We will deal with you transactionally, like with any other foreign object. In Poland, given the history of Jewish life and death on Polish soil, that sentence is not merely diplomatic. It is civilizationally radioactive.

None of this can be separated from the context of Israel’s predicament.

Israel is fighting a war that began with the barbaric Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. It does so under continuing threat from Hezbollah, from Iran, from armed movements that openly call for Israel’s destruction, and from regional actors who understand very well how to exploit Western moral exhaustion. Part of the international pressure on Israel is driven by genuine Israeli errors, controversial decisions, extremist ministers, settlement policy, and the unbearable images of civilian suffering in Gaza. But part of it is also driven by one-sided propaganda, selective moral outrage, and digital systems that reward the most extreme and emotionally useful narratives.

This does not excuse Israeli failures. But it does mean that Israel is operating under exceptional conditions: existential threat combined with growing international isolation.

Still, exceptional conditions do not abolish political responsibility. They intensify it.

Israel’s defenders often respond by saying that the world is hypocritical. Often it is. The same governments that speak passionately about Gaza frequently speak with admirable softness about Syria, Iran, Sudan, China, Russia, or their own colonial afterlives. The United Nations has turned selective outrage into an administrative art form. Some activists appear to discover international law only when Jews are involved, as if human rights arrived on earth carrying a placard and a convenient camera crew.

But hypocrisy is not a strategy. Israel cannot survive by proving that its critics are worse. That may be true and still insufficient. The question is not whether the world is fair. It is not. The question is whether Israel understands the scale of its own positional collapse.

There is a terrible irony here. Israel was built, in part, so that Jews would no longer depend on the goodwill of others. Yet today the conduct of the Israeli state is increasingly making Jews abroad more exposed, not less. The state that was supposed to reduce Jewish vulnerability is, through a mixture of necessary self-defense, political extremism, settlement intoxication, strategic drift, and moral exhaustion, helping make Jews globally more available to hostility.

This is not an argument against Israel’s existence. It is not an argument against Israeli self-defense. It is an argument against strategic and moral blindness. Security cannot be reduced to force, borders, intelligence, and tactical dominance. A state can win battles and lose legitimacy. It can destroy enemies and manufacture isolation. It can survive militarily while shrinking diplomatically, morally, and symbolically.

Israel is not only losing enemies. It is losing former reservoirs of goodwill.

And perhaps this is the most painful question now facing Israel and the Jewish world:

If Israel is losing sympathy globally, losing diplomatic cover in Europe, losing moral patience among liberal democracies, losing the young, losing the center, losing former conservative goodwill in places like Poland, and now losing even the old automatic advantage in the United States, are we watching a temporary diplomatic crisis — or the beginning of a structural collapse of Israel’s international position in the one country without which its current strategic architecture cannot endure?

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig