When Both Sides Change: What Happens to the US–Israel Relationship Now?
Ben Sales is right that American support is eroding. We also have to face how Israel’s leadership crisis — and the fraying of American Jewish support — helps drive that shift.
In his recent Times of Israel analysis, “Fewer and fewer Americans support Israel. Will their next president?” Ben Sales shows how sharply the American landscape has shifted. A decade ago, a clear majority of Americans said they sympathized more with Israelis than Palestinians. Today that gap has shrunk dramatically, and for the first time, less than half of Americans express sympathy for Israel.
Roughly half of US voters now say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Most Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, and younger Republicans are souring on Israel as well. Sales’s conclusion is not that the next president will be “anti-Israel,” but that the old, comfortable definition of “pro-Israel” — sacrosanct aid, automatic UN cover, “no daylight” with Jerusalem — is no longer guaranteed from either party.
That is sobering enough. But there’s another reality we need to confront: the Israel Americans are reacting to is not the Israel they fell in love with, and the American Jewish community that once anchored support is itself deeply shaken.
The United States has changed. So has Israel. The relationship cannot remain what it was while both move into more polarized, more illiberal, and more exhausted versions of themselves – led, in Israel’s case, by a prime minister widely seen as fighting first and foremost for his own political survival.
The story that used to bind us
For decades, many American Jews and non-Jews shared a simple story about Israel:
A small, embattled democracy, born from the ashes of the Holocaust, struggling for survival in a hostile region, but fundamentally part of our liberal democratic family.
That narrative bridged partisan divides. It carried Reagan and Tip O’Neill, Bush and Pelosi, evangelicals and liberal rabbis. It allowed both major-party nominees to stand on the AIPAC stage and sound almost identical when they spoke of an “ironclad” alliance.
Sales’s numbers tell us that era is over. But not only because Americans changed. Israel has made that story harder to tell with a straight face.
What Americans see when they look at Israel now
Most Americans don’t read Hebrew or follow Knesset debates. They live on images and a few big impressions.
Today, those impressions often include:
- Judicial overhaul and attacks on liberal checks and balances, making Israel look less like “the only democracy in the Middle East” and more like another country flirting with illiberal majoritarianism.
- A coalition reliant on ultra-nationalist and openly racist figures, whose rhetoric is impossible to explain away to young Americans steeped in the language of human rights and equality.
- Perpetual Haredi draft exemptions and coalition deals that enshrine permanent inequality of civic burden.
- A grinding, highly visible war in Gaza, experienced primarily through graphic images of destruction and suffering, often stripped of October 7 context.
Americans are not inventing this. We may argue with their conclusions, but the raw material is real. The Israel that once showcased “startup nation” and “vibrant liberal democracy” is now frequently represented by police clashing with judicial reform protesters, settler violence, and bills that formalize unequal obligations.
For traditional supporters — especially liberal Jews — this isn’t a public-relations problem. It’s an identity crisis.
Netanyahu as the face of Israel
On top of that stands a more personal problem: to many Americans, Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu. And the story they see is not of a flawed statesman making hard choices, but of a politician clinging to office to stay out of jail.
Netanyahu has been on trial for years on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The drive to weaken Israel’s judiciary has unfolded in parallel with his legal battles, prompting repeated warnings about the conflict of interest when a defendant leads an assault on the very courts and prosecutors judging him.
Many Israelis see the legislative blitz against the courts as inseparable from his desire to blunt their power. Analysts speak openly of a “calculus of survival,” in which judicial changes and even the management of prolonged conflict are weighed not only in national terms, but also in terms of the prime minister’s legal fate. His pursuit of some form of presidential pardon or “arrangement” to end the trial before any conviction or admission of guilt only deepens that impression.
For Americans who have just lived through their own era of leaders trying to discredit courts, law enforcement, and the media, Netanyahu’s rhetoric feels painfully familiar: witch hunt, biased prosecutors, I alone can save you.
Whatever one thinks of his policies, it is hard to sustain the old language of “shared democratic values” when the face of Israel is a man on trial for corruption who appears willing to bend the rule of law to preserve his rule and his liberty.
America has changed too
At the same time, the American side of the equation has shifted.
On the Democratic left, a clear majority now sympathizes more with Palestinians than Israelis, and many are convinced Israel is committing genocide. Anti-occupation and even anti-Zionist positions have moved from the fringes into the progressive mainstream.
On the Republican right, “America First” has turned foreign aid in general into a suspect project. Israel is increasingly lumped with Ukraine and others: expensive, complicated, politically risky. Younger conservative voices are more isolationist, and some flirt with classic antisemitic tropes about “globalist” or “Zionist” elites.
The old bipartisan reflex — “of course we stand with Israel” — has given way to hesitation, conditions, or outright hostility from different directions.
The keystone of American Jewry is cracking
We also need to name a third change: American Jewry itself is no longer the united, reliable keystone of US support for Israel.
For decades, American Jews:
- Built and funded the institutions that lobbied, educated, and advocated for Israel.
- Functioned as a moral and cultural bridge, translating Israel’s story into American idioms of civil rights, democracy, and shared values.
- Turned diffuse public sympathy into concrete policy through philanthropy, political engagement, and elite leadership.
When that community is broadly united in attachment to Israel, it stabilizes bipartisan consensus and keeps the alliance anchored.
But that unity is fraying:
- Many young American Jews feel distant from Israel, or exhausted at being asked to defend policies and leaders they find indefensible.
- Liberal Jews see supporting Netanyahu’s coalition as a betrayal of their core commitments to equality, democracy, and minority rights — the very values that once underpinned their Zionism.
- Even in establishment circles, support has become more conditional and more openly conflicted.
That internal crack radiates outward. Politicians hear a cacophony instead of a single, confident Jewish voice. Non-Jewish allies, seeing Jewish opinion fragment, feel freer to reassess their own stance. The institutional infrastructure that once turned “support for Israel” into a default position grows weaker and more defensive.
As American Jewish support becomes ambivalent, overall American support inevitably softens and fragments too.
The dangerous feedback loop
Unless something changes, we are drifting into a destructive cycle:
- Israel doubles down on siege politics — judicial weakening, permanent Haredi exemptions, creeping annexation, and a prime minister whose survival depends on keeping an extreme coalition intact.
- American support erodes further, especially among the young, who experience Israel mainly as an occupying power led by a man on trial for corruption and a Trump ally.
- Facing hostility abroad, Israel retreats deeper into “the whole world is against us”, relying on ever narrower circles of support and ever more extreme partners.
- American Jewry frays, leaving fewer committed, credible advocates; as the keystone loosens, the broader American arch of support continues to sag.
At some point, “lousy like usual” leadership is not just disappointing. It becomes a strategic threat — to Israel, to its bond with the United States, and to the Diaspora community that has long been its greatest diplomatic asset.
What kind of Israel — and what kind of support?
Sales ends with a cautious hope: politics is unpredictable, and a more traditionally pro-Israel president could still emerge. Perhaps.
But focusing on the “right” American leader misses the deeper questions:
What kind of Israel will they be asked to support?
What kind of America will be doing the supporting?
And what kind of American Jewish community will still be standing between them?
Those answers are being shaped now — in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, in Knesset committees debating the courts, in coalition agreements dividing burdens and privileges, and in the synagogues, Hillels, and living rooms where young American Jews are quietly deciding whether the story of Israel still feels like theirs.
If Israel wants a deep, resilient relationship with the United States, it cannot simply demand more public advocacy and more lobbying. It must face the fact that its own political choices and the character of its leadership are reshaping American public opinion and eroding the very American Jewish base that once anchored it.
Likewise, American Jews who care about Israel’s future cannot treat its internal trajectory as “none of our business.” The Israel we get is the Israel our children will be judged for — and judged by.
Support for Israel is not collapsing in a vacuum. It is reacting to the Israel, the America, and the American Jewry that actually exist today. If we want a different kind of support tomorrow, we will need a different kind of politics on both sides of the ocean — and a different kind of leadership in Jerusalem than one whose first priority is to stay in power and out of court.
