“The Whole World Is Against Us”: Israel’s Strategic Blindness About America

“The whole world is against us / No matter, we’ll overcome / They don’t care about us at all / No matter, we’ll manage.”

These are the opening lines of a popular Israeli song written by Yoram Taharlev in 1969 and performed by the Dizengoff Band. The song reached No. 1 on Israel’s Kol Yisrael popular-music chart that October. At the time, its defiant message reflected a widespread Israeli sense of isolation: if the world was against us, Israelis would simply have to manage on their own. In recent years, however, that attitude has become something closer to a worldview in Israel’s relationship with the United States.

In the Israeli media, political system, and among segments of the public, a convenient but dangerous assumption is taking hold: growing criticism of Israel in America is viewed almost exclusively through the lens of antisemitism. This leaves little room for the possibility that something deeper is happening, that America’s relationship with Israel itself is changing. It allows Israel to avoid the harder question: Why are growing segments of the American public changing their views of Israel, and what does that mean for the relationship between the two countries?

The erosion of support for Israel is not primarily the result of hatred of Jews. It reflects deeper changes in American society: a generational shift, growing skepticism about U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and the revolution in social media.

None of this means that antisemitism does not exist or does not affect attitudes toward Israel. It does, and at times it is an important factor. But it is not the only explanation for the shift. Insisting that antisemitism is the principal explanation obscures deeper processes taking place in American society.

To understand the growing anger surrounding AIPAC, consider the Senate primary in Michigan. AIPAC and affiliated organizations spent nearly $30 million supporting Representative Haley Stevens and trying to block the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive candidate and outspoken critic of Israeli policy. El-Sayed ultimately won. The case was not isolated. In 2022, AIPAC waged an aggressive campaign against Andy Levin, a progressive Jewish congressman who supported a two-state solution and criticized Israel’s settlement policy.

For AIPAC’s critics, these cases illustrate a broader phenomenon: the organization is not merely promoting support for Israel; it has become a powerful political actor whose use of money to influence elections has generated public opposition and raised broader questions about the role of money in American politics. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election likewise demonstrated the depth of the change—precisely in the city that is home to the largest Jewish community in the United States.

But the war in Gaza, and now the war with Iran, have opened a much larger Pandora’s box. The American debate is no longer limited to whether Israel is an important ally. Americans are beginning to examine the relationship as a whole: What does the United States get from the alliance? What does it give in return? And what is the American cost of the relationship?

The war with Iran has made these questions concrete rather than abstract. Many Americans are asking whether Israel pushed Washington into a war that is not America’s, and whether the United States should bear the economic and strategic costs of another Middle Eastern conflict. There is a historical precedent as well. In 1973, U.S. military support for Israel preceded the Arab oil embargo, which contributed to an energy crisis and severe economic turmoil in the United States.

Within the United States, support for Israel is also increasingly colliding with basic American conceptions of free speech. Anti-BDS laws enacted in 38 states have drawn opposition from civil-rights organizations and constitutional lawyers, who argue that they infringe on the First Amendment right to engage in political boycotts. For many Americans, the very possibility that a citizen could be required to give up a political position concerning a foreign government in order to contract with a public authority is seen as inconsistent with fundamental principles of American democracy.

Criticism of Israel did not begin on October 7 or with the war in Gaza. It also draws on an historical memory of episodes in which Israel was perceived as acting against American interests or entangling the United States in Middle Eastern conflicts, from the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, through the Jonathan Pollard affair, to the controversy over Israeli involvement and the role of American officials in promoting the 2003 Iraq War. One need not accept every interpretation of these events to recognize that they form part of the American political memory.

That memory is now compounded by a deep generational divide and the erosion of the consensus around Israel among younger Americans. Campus protests and social media have made Palestine a central moral issue for an entire generation. Even large numbers of young American Jews no longer see Israel as the weaker party in a struggle for survival. Social media bypasses traditional intermediaries and brings direct images from Gaza onto their phone screens. Faced with the devastation there, it is difficult to expect such images not to change the way young Americans view Israel.

Against this backdrop, efforts by Jewish communal organizations to blur the distinction between criticism of Israeli government policy and antisemitism are generating a backlash. When American Jews who criticize the war or government policy are themselves portrayed as “self-hating Jews” or “antisemites,” the public debate becomes a struggle over the very right to criticize Israel. When every criticism is labeled antisemitic, the fight against antisemitism itself may be weakened, because the term loses its precision—and with it, its moral force.

And the shift is not confined to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. One hundred and three House Democrats voted to halt military aid to Israel, including senior members of the party. At the same time, opposition to American involvement in Middle Eastern wars is growing on the Republican right as well. The America First movement reflects a growing aversion to the idea that American soldiers should fight or die for allies. Support for Israel, which for decades was one of the few issues to enjoy broad bipartisan backing, is therefore eroding from both ends of the political spectrum.

Israelis rightly demand that Netanyahu take responsibility for the October 7 failure. He refuses to do so. But where is the comparable demand that Israel itself take responsibility for the consequences of its actions and policies? Too often, the instinct is the opposite. For instance, a farmer in Iowa who sees images of Israeli atrocities on television and concludes that the IDF is committing war crimes can be dismissed as an antisemite, while Israel itself refuses to investigate its own conduct. The answer is once again the familiar refrain: “The whole world is against us.” The world is antisemitic. The media is hostile. AIPAC is losing its ability to defend Israel. All of these explanations may contain elements of truth. But together they can become a convenient way of avoiding the more difficult question: What has Israel itself done to erode its support?

The U.S.-Israel alliance is not inevitable. It rests on interests, shared values, and above all on public support. If Israel wants to preserve it, it cannot demand that America understand Israel while refusing to examine its own conduct. “The whole world is against us” may have been a defiant popular song in 1969. But when that refrain becomes a strategy for avoiding responsibility, it becomes strategic blindness and gives credence to the charge that Israel expects immunity for whatever it does.