Most Democrats Don’t Like Israel Any Longer. Period.

By James Kirchick

Sunday, May 24, 2026

 

‘No more U.S. military…financial assistance by the taxpayers for Israel.” So insisted Rahm Emanuel on a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. The former congressman, White House chief of staff, and Chicago mayor elaborated that the Jewish state is “a country like all other allies of ours, Japan, South Korea, the Brits, the Germans,” in that it’s a “very wealthy nation” that can defend itself on its own. Hoodwinking the United States into launching an attack on Iran amounted to a “violation of a rule it had for 78 years” that “the United States should never spill any blood for the State of Israel’s security.”

 

Coming as they did from the most pro-Israel of potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates, these comments represented yet another ominous sign of the party’s distancing itself from the Jewish state. They were also fundamentally dishonest. Unlike the treaty allies Emanuel mentioned, whom the U.S. is bound to defend by law, Israel does not have thousands of American troops stationed on its territory at a cost that can be weighed in not only treasure but potentially blood. If Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, or Germany were attacked, American soldiers would have to put their lives on the line. Israel defends itself by itself.

 

As a former ambassador to Tokyo, Emanuel is aware of this distinction. That he obliterated it to score a cheap political point illustrates the degree to which anti-Israel sentiment is becoming mainstream within the Democratic Party. Last year, 15 Democratic senators voted for a Bernie Sanders–sponsored resolution that would have blocked arms sales to Israel during wartime, a significantly more drastic measure than ending military assistance. When Sanders reintroduced the resolution this past April, that number jumped to 40.

 

Democrats keen to maintain at least a veneer of their pro-Israel bona fides insist that they bear no hostility toward Israel per se, just its right-wing leadership. “Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has sacrificed Israel’s interests in the United States,” Amos Hochstein, an Israeli-born former adviser on energy issues to Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. Netanyahu has “destroyed” Israel’s bipartisan support, Hochstein averred, “because he has decided to become not just part of the Republican Party, but he’s decided to become just an appendage of Donald Trump.” Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, another potential Democratic presidential contender, uses similar language, saying that Netanyahu is “destroying the bipartisan nature in terms of support for Israel.” Rarely does a Democrat mention Israel these days without a perfunctory jab at the country’s leader.

 

As critical of Israel as elected Democrats have become, they are not nearly as hostile as their party’s base. According to an April Pew poll, 8 out of 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have a negative view of the Jewish state, a historic low. “I’ve never seen public opinion change as fast on any issue, including gay marriage,” Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, yet another presidential hopeful, recently said. As the House’s most desperate attention-seeker, he knows of what he speaks.

 

There has always been a portion of the far left that’s implacably hostile to Israel. What’s more concerning is the collapse in support among average Democratic voters. Until recently, American support for Israel was a bipartisan affair, with Democrats and liberals often outshining Republicans and conservatives in their affinity for the Jewish state. Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson were stalwart supporters of Israel; so too was Bill Clinton. Apportioning culpability for the rupture between Democrats and Israel is therefore a bit like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg.

 

One man looms larger over this question than any other. Besides David Ben-Gurion, no Israeli leader has been as consequential as Benjamin Netanyahu. The country’s longest-serving prime minister and one of the longest-serving democratically elected rulers in history, he’s a figure for whom the word “polarizing” does not even begin to do justice. To insist, therefore, that he shoulders no blame whatsoever for the deteriorating relationship between Israel and the American left, as many of his supporters in both countries do, is fatuous.

 

No matter how correct Netanyahu’s message may have been, his 2015 speech advocating against the Iran nuclear deal before the U.S. Congress, undertaken at the behest of the chamber’s Republican leadership against the express wishes of the Obama White House, was needlessly provocative. His exhortation about “Arabs voting in droves” during the Knesset election that year not only alienated Israel’s Democratic friends; it was demagoguery unworthy of the leader of a great democracy. Though Netanyahu apologized, the apology was clearly insincere, as demonstrated by a recent AI-generated campaign ad for his reelection in which opposition figures Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett peel off their faces to reveal themselves as Arab party leaders in disguise. His inability or unwillingness to crack down on settler violence against West Bank Palestinians—a problem exacerbated by his inclusion of two far-right ministers in his coalition—is shameful. His 2023 attempt to push controversial judicial reforms through the Knesset, which generated the largest protests in the country’s history, was opposed by Israelis across the political spectrum.

 

One does not have to be a left-winger to find any of these actions noxious. But Netanyahu does not exist in a vacuum.

 

To pinpoint the moment when the divorce between Israel and the American left became inevitable, one can go as far back as the Six-Day War. Literally overnight, the Jewish state went from being a plucky underdog beloved by socialists all over the world to a colonialist occupier of downtrodden subalterns. But the modern form of Israel-hatred that has overtaken wide swaths of the left did not kick into high gear until after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which Israel was simultaneously accused of orchestrating and inspiring others to orchestrate due to its brutal policies toward the Palestinians. A conspiratorial way of thinking prevalent in the Muslim world started to permeate Western political discourse, with fervent talk about the purported machinations of a maleficent clique of Jewish American government officials and intellectuals acting on behalf of the Israeli Likud party becoming de rigueur in left-wing publications and intellectual salons.

 

The conversation about Israel became increasingly absurd. Achievements that liberals lauded just a few years earlier were portrayed as cynical diversions from monstrous crimes. New concepts were invented out of whole cloth to delegitimize the state. Israel’s status as an oasis of tolerance for gay people in a region where homosexuals are tortured and murdered? “Pinkwashing” aimed at disguising its crimes against Palestinians. Its promotion of environmentally conscious technologies? “Greenwashing” to serve the same malignant purpose.

 

The election of Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008 signaled a significant shift in Democratic Party thinking. In the Middle East, Obama’s policies were premised on ideas that any Israeli government would have opposed. Reorienting America’s strategic posture away from its traditional allies in a way that emboldened the revolutionary regime in Iran, respecting rather than resisting Tehran’s “equities” in Syria and Lebanon, warming to the Muslim Brotherhood in places like Egypt and Qatar—these moves deeply unsettled not only Israel but the Sunni Muslim states as well.

 

Broader trends have also played a significant role in deepening the divide between Democrats and Israel. Since the end of the Cold War, American politics have become increasingly polarized ideologically. (See the dwindling existence of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.) The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exacerbated that polarization, with Israel increasingly coded as a “right-wing” cause. Along with Russia and Hungary under Viktor Orbán, Israel became a red state. Every Israel-friendly initiative Trump undertook encountered knee-jerk opposition from Democrats, from his moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem (a policy supported by every American president since 1995) to the assassination of Iranian terror-master Qassem Soleimani.

 

Then there’s the unavoidable fact that while Israel has become more conservative over the past quarter century, the Democratic Party has lurched left. In 1992, Labor and Meretz won a combined 44 percent of the Israeli vote. The Oslo Accords followed, a sovereign state was offered to the Palestinians, and they responded with the second intifada. Today, neither Labor nor Meretz exists, and the number of left-wing members of the Knesset can be counted on two hands. Across the Atlantic, the party of Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton now endorses the “Squad,” Zohran Mamdani, and the Totenkopf-branded Graham Platner. Courageous Democrats like Senator John Fetterman and Congressman Ritchie Torres find themselves alienated for defending the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. Despite saying that Netanyahu is “one of the worst leaders of all time,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was asked by Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential-campaign vetting team whether he was an agent of the Mossad.

 

To test the Democratic claim that Netanyahu is to blame for Israel’s unpopularity, one must try to imagine how a leader more palatable to Democrats might have acted over the past 25 years. Israeli conduct during the war in Gaza is correctly cited as the driving factor behind its fall in global support. But an overwhelming majority of the Israeli public backed the war, and a more centrist government would not have conducted it in a manner all that different from the way the current coalition did. None of the leading candidates for prime minister supports the immediate creation of a Palestinian state, a policy embraced by most of the world, which, in the meantime, recognizes an imaginary one. In large numbers, Democrats blame Israel for having duped the U.S. into war with Iran and for committing a “genocide” in Gaza, the affirmation of which is bound to be imposed as a litmus test on the party’s presidential candidates.

 

With any relationship, there often comes a time when one or both parties decide that it should end. Unfortunately, we seem not far from the point when most Democrats admit that their problem isn’t with Benjamin Netanyahu but Israel itself.