--- title: Why Young Americans are Turning on Israel description: "Fronts video analysis of Why Young Americans are Turning on Israel, with context on conflict, defense, and security." url: https://fronts.co/videos/why-young-americans-are-turning-on-israel.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/why-young-americans-are-turning-on-israel/ datePublished: 2026-08-19T21:00:46.000Z dateModified: 2026-08-19T21:00:46.000Z author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://fronts.co/authors/simon-whistler/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/why-young-americans-are-turning-on-israel-420e594c.png" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 6903 --- Last Tuesday, a former county health director who calls Israel's ongoing campaign in Gaza a genocide and who campaigned on ending American weapons transfers to Jerusalem entirely won the Democrats' nomination for U.S. Senate in the state of Michigan. That man, Abdul El-Sayed, beat his pro-Israel rival Haley Stevens by one point. U.S. House, with its 435 districts, may have occasionally elected some unorthodox members. Shout out Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the Senate is a different animal, which made this a real WTF moment. while having an anti-Israel candidate win a Senate primary feels like a watershed, the truth is that this is just the biggest manifestation yet of a vast political realignment, one that is seeing younger Americans overwhelmingly break with their elders' consensus on U.S. support for Israel. And while El-Sayed is of the left, this isn't purely a democratic phenomenon. A majority of young Republicans now hold a negative view of Israel as well. And that raises a major question. How did support for Israel go from being a bipartisan issue that united the generations to one that's essentially radioactive among young people? best of friends. be well remembered now, but the U.S. and Israel were not always close. Israel was officially neutral in the Cold War, and if anything, initially gravitated towards the Soviet Union. Any potential friendship with America was also derailed by the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Israel, France, and the U.K. joined forces to try and take chunks of Egyptian territory, only for America, under Eisenhower, to bitch-slab all three of them back into place. But as Moscow deepened its ties with Arab states, particularly Egypt and Syria, Israel's Cold War neutrality basically collapsed, leaving the Israelis scrambling for a partner. And as it just so happened, the U.S. was also looking for new partners in the Middle East. It was President Kennedy who approved the first serious American weapons sale to the Israelis in 1962, and after Israel took on its neighbors multiple times in the coming years, it came to be felt that they'd proven themselves a worthwhile partner. the time that Ronald Reagan swept into the White House in 1981, the relationship was effectively as deep as it could get. Reagan spent most of his campaign calling Israel a strategic asset that the U.S. needed to double down on, and enlisted foreign policy staffers heavily steeped in neoconservatism. The enthusiasm might have been felt stronger on the right, but it was never a partisan issue. For Democrats, support for the Jewish state, likewise, ran across their coalition. Israel seemingly had something to offer everyone. They were the first Middle Eastern country, and one of the first countries on Earth, to elect a female prime minister, all the way back in the late 1960s. More broadly, they had robust protections for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, universal health care, military service that treated men and women equally. get the idea. If you were progressive, there was a lot on that checklist to like. lot of that was downstream of who founded the country. Overwhelmingly secular Ashkenazi Jews who had emigrated from Europe, almost all of whom were some variety of left-wing. The country was a semi-socialist state for its first few decades, dominated by the Mapai Labour Party, with its Hebrew equivalent of the internationalism, National Socialist logo to boot. Thanks to this ability to cut across the partisan divide, two groups of Americans, the Baby Boomers and Gen X, came of age with a version of Israel that increasingly seems to no longer exist. oldest boomers technically predate the state's founding in 1948 by two years, but excluding some miraculous childhood memories, the more controversial aspects of its founding, namely the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians in what's known as the Nachbar, or history to them, rather than something they actually lived through. Israel that they grew up knowing, instead, was one that was already there and fighting for its survival on a daily basis. underdog, the one that didn't give up, that really resonated with Americans of all stripes. Israel in those early years was decidedly not the regional military powerhouse that you know of today, and the possibility of them actually being wiped off the map sounded less like crazed Iranian propaganda and more like something that could actually happen. After the 1948 war in response to its creation, Israel found itself right back in the thick of things in 1967, and after winning the day that time, they were caught completely off guard just a few years later in the Yom Kippur War, when two of its neighbors were able to break through its defenses. time that American generation was holding political power, though, the question was already starting to become less whether Israel would survive than whether the conflict itself could finally be resolved, and if so, how? Peace between Israel and the Palestinians had been an American goal for decades, and by the time the 1990s rolled around, it stopped being a dream and started looking like something that might actually happen. Secret Talks in Norway produced a deal in which the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist, Israel recognized the PLO as the Palestinians' legitimate representative. hard questions got kicked down the road, but for the first time ever, there was a can that could actually be kicked. the next few decades, Israel existed as one of those issues where the two parties rarely disagreed. was a certain logic that held it together. country that felt it was one misstep away from being wiped off the map was never going to make the concessions necessary for a two-state solution, so security had to be an upfront, rock-solid commitment provided by the US and international community to Jerusalem. there flowed aid packages, the perpetual veto cover from hostile resolutions at the UN Security Council, and neither the Democrats nor Republicans fought against it. Gallup has tracked where Americans stand on the Israel-Palestine issue for decades, and by the turn of the millennium, there was hardly any daylight between the two parties. GOP leaned heavily more pro-Israel than the Democrats did, but even the Dems had a clear majority of their voters on the Israel bandwagon. forward to today, the party is currently embroiled in a civil war over the issue. Perhaps even wilder, there are increasingly numbers of Republicans who are also grumbling about America's commitment to Israel. All of which just begs the question: what changed and who blew it? Consensus Cracked geopolitics, there are rarely simple questions with simple answers, and we're afraid that this time is no exception, but that doesn't mean we can't also point to number of turning points that helped things along their way. The cracks started to form on the American left, and started to become visible during Obama's presidency. At the time, and especially in the earlier years, it looked to be more of a personal dispute between the US President and his Israeli counterpart. The two were about as polar opposite as they come: Obama was a perennial optimist, believing that there wasn't a problem in the world that couldn't be talked through over negotiating tables and resolved through peace agreements. Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is the archetypal hard-headed "security above all else" sought. He was of the mindset that there was almost no issue that could be settled through negotiations, and viewed Obama as naive for thinking otherwise. This clash led to some telling hot-mic moments. At the G20 summit in 2011, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was caught in conversation with Obama talking about Netanyahu saying, "I can't stand him. He's a liar," to which Obama responded, "You're tired of him? What about me? I have to deal with him every day." Clearly, not a lot of love between the two leaders. Still, the alliance between their countries was strong, and so they both decided that they had to suck it up and tough it out when it came to dealing with the other. That is, until 2015. The Obama administration had been negotiating, initially in secret, later with its European colleagues and China, toward a deal that would limit Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Israel despised the deal, and Netanyahu made it his life's mission to sabotage the thing. But Obama's commitment to the deal forced his Israeli counterpart to take some unconventional approaches. Netanyahu would use an address to a joint session of Congress to blast the sitting US President's plan, and worked directly with Republican Speaker John Boehner, who extended the invitation without even telling the White House. He didn't badmouth Obama in the speech directly, but made the deal out to be absolutely awful, telling Congress it paved Iran's path to a bomb rather than blocking it. 58 Democrats sat the speech out entirely, including then-Vice President Joe Biden. This gave the Democrats a pretty intense wake-up call, though they were split on what the actual issue was and the dividing line almost always came down to age. Older Democrats largely skewed in the direction of thinking that the current Israeli PM was a dick, but that he'd be out of power eventually. How'd that work out? And as they could pick up the pieces with whomever came next. Young Democrats drew a completely different conclusion, in part because the Israel they had grown up watching looked nothing like the vulnerable stage their parents knew it as. Instead, as the IDF strength grew, they couldn't really pull off the little guy argument, the Palestinians, as a result, inherited the status of the underdog who was getting pushed around. The Democratic primary was kicking off that year, and while there were a slew of candidates who threw their hat into the ring, it was always going to come down to one of two candidates: Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. This is where the generational divide really started to become apparent for the left, on all issues, but especially on Israel. Bernie caught far in a way few establishment Democrats, oh, would have thought possible, especially with younger Americans. Democrats under 30 years old, he was polling in the 70s, a margin that began to wane as you skewed older. time you reached Democrats 65 and older, Hillary was the one polling that high. Bernie's campaign broke a lot of taboos on what could and could not be said in US politics, particularly around the phrase democratic socialism. another taboo was offering any sort of support to the Palestinian cause, which was seen as beyond the pale in most political circles at the time. wasn't even that critical of Israel, especially not by today's standards. called Jerusalem's operations in Gaza disproportionate and criticized Hillary for not mentioning the Palestinians in her speech to AIPAC. Mild-mannered, as this may seem, it created an absolute firestorm in the press. A similar divide was running through American Jewish circles as well, though this received far less attention at the time. Brand Israel Group, a pro-Israel coalition of advertising professionals, trying to find the best way to market the alliance to Americans, was shocked to find that Jewish college student support for the Israeli side of the conflict had fallen from 84% in 2010 to 57% in 2016, while Jewish support for the Palestinian cause went from 2% to 13% across the same time frame. It's a trend that Israel had long been paying attention to and one they had baked into their PR strategy. Ron Dermer, the former Israeli ambassador to Washington, advocated formally shifting strategies away from relying on the Jewish vote entirely. noted that American Jews are disproportionately among our critics, and pointed out that their 2% of the overall population made them essentially irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Instead, they pivoted this time towards leaning heavily on the evangelical vote in the US, and unlike Jews, evangelicals made up somewhere around a quarter of the electorate. Long story short, this ended up being a really smart play in the short term, though even that coalition is today showing signs of strain. realistically, they didn't have many other options other than bailing on the American left, because the bottom was about to fall out, and they could feel it coming. October Now, it's difficult to have a conversation about support and opposition to Israel without mentioning Gaza, which has become a rallying cry for large swaths of the anti-Israel left worldwide. Jerusalem's policies, when it comes to the enclave, have been controversial in Europe and Latin America for decades now. But for a long time, it seemed that the US was immune to this. that changed when Hamas carried out their slaughter on October 7th. We're not going to get into detail about all that, as it's been covered extensively in many other episodes that we've done, and isn't particularly relevant to today's conversation. is relevant, though, is the reaction to Israel's war in the enclave in the years that followed. Now, to be clear, Israel did understand that it was going to receive some seriously negative press during the campaign, and partially built its strategy around that. The working assumption was that the clock started the moment the first airstrike landed, and that sympathy would be gone within one hour. weeks regardless of how the campaign was fought and that the only real question was how much could get done before it ran out nobody's ever managed to fight urban warfare in a place that dense and come away with footage that they would want to defend or even present to their own citizens and there's a pretty good reason for that this was always going to be an ugly fight that said though this wasn't israel's first time going into gaza they had experience in their numerous air campaigns along with the larger scale operations cast lead in 2008 and protective edge in 2014. the major difference this time was where people were getting their news from in 2014 footage from gaza came almost entirely from camera crews who either set up along the border or embedded with the idf and it reached americans through television at least the clips that were allowed to be shown on air tick tock didn't yet exist youtube was filled less with political analysis and more with top 10 lists and snapchat was brand new so even the occasional clip filmed on a phone from inside the strip had nowhere much to go fast forward a decade and the situation has completely reversed the footage americans saw was filmed by the and by 2023 tick tock and snapchat were where the majority of young americans news none of what they saw was pretty mataz aziza a photographer in daya al-bala who went into the war with just a few thousand followers and came out of it with somewhere north of 16 million was posting almost daily images that people had never seen before on cnn bodies pulled apartment blocks children being carried into hospitals that had run out of anaesthetic the aftermath he had walked to himself half an hour earlier that sort of thing in an effort to preempt exactly the sort of footage israel had barred the international media from reporting on the ground in gaza but that ended up backfiring the lack of journalist presence on the ground meant that the exclusive way to get images and news from gaza was from palestinians on the ground none of whom were going to waste time with things like right of reply and journalistic neutrality at the outset of the war and admittedly riding a post october 7th high quinnipiac found that the american voters sided with israel by a 61 to 13 margin and voters aged 18 to 34 were still leaning towards jerusalem 41 to 26. within the first few months of the war the same polling firm found that americans under 35 had completely switched sides sympathizing more with the palestinians by a 52 to 29 margin self-identified democrats in that cohort would later go on to swing furthest of all with nearly three quarters back in the palestinians as the conflict dragged on past the first year things started to shift away from the mass bombing campaigns though there was still plenty of that and towards the impact that limitations on importing food was having on the strip this is also when the accusation of genocide really started to catch on south africa had filed the case back in december of 2023 but the images of starving children really began to flood the world in 2024. that year 2024 had a few other things going on as well namely the u.s presidential election On the Democrat side, there was no serious candidate running for the nomination against Joe Biden, a man clearly vibrant and young enough to keep flying the party's banner for another four years. But the lack of a candidate didn't mean voters were not hungry for an alternative. In the state of Michigan, over 101,000 voters went in to cast their ballot for uncommitted, which worked out to be 13% of the vote, but still a clear warning sign and something that had never before happened in presidential primaries against a sitting president. In the city of Dearborn, which is both majority Arab and majority Muslim, that number was 56% who voted for literally nobody. A few months later in November, Michigan, along with the rest of the swing states, all went for Donald Trump. He won Dearborn outright, largely as a protest vote against the man that residents were calling Genocide Joe. Jill Stein, the perennial Green Party candidate, was able to take 18% of the vote. This was decidedly not limited to Arab Americans, nor was it confined to Michigan. 2024 was the height of pro-Palestinian protests across the US. They began to set up shop in universities, eventually growing into full encampments at many of the top schools in the country. Within a few weeks of the encampment going up at Columbia University, there were encampments at more than three dozen schools. We should note that these encampments were themselves quite controversial with young Americans. ended up shutting down classes across many of the universities they took place in. There were many instances of Jewish students being harassed by some of the agitators for being Jewish. And the soft-handed response by many of the universities gave the whole thing a sense of lawlessness. But it forced the issue onto the center stage of American politics and was driven almost exclusively by college-aged young adults. Either way, the encampments came down at the end of the academic year, and they never really made a comeback when the fall semester started. But the impact of everything firing at once had made its mark, and the generational divide between young Americans and their elder peers was wider than ever. Despite originating on the left, though, it wasn't confined to it. The right had been experiencing its own mini-realignment on Israel during this period as well, but for completely different reasons. America First The right's version of this started from somewhere else entirely. And ironically, it started with the man who was resolutely the most pro-Israel president in US history. Trump's foreign policy has always been eclectic and difficult to ascribe to being either purely isolationist or interventionalist. But for his base, the idea of America First, where the country simply needed to pull back from these international alliances, obligations, and military presence across the globe, really caught on. Most of the coverage of this had been on institutions like NATO, in no small part because Trump has beat up on the alliance for a decade now, including rather infamously handing German Chancellor Angela Merkel an invoice for $300 billion. But while no one could accuse Israel of underspending on defense, there were still many on the right who didn't see why Israel should be treated any differently than Europe. Nobody has played a bigger role in right-wing opposition to Israel than Representative Thomas Macy, who we should note is a libertarian and not really a part of MAGA. puts it, he's never voted for foreign aid of any kind to Egypt, Syria, Ukraine, just about anywhere else. Israel, which continues to receive considerable financial support from Washington, should be treated no differently. Realistically, though, Macy is the least interesting version of this phenomenon. It's well known where he stands. What may have moved the needle more came from people with far bigger audiences, who have been far less ideologically committed to a philosophy like libertarianism and isolationism. Here, Tucker Carlson really has carved himself a niche. channel on YouTube has racked up hundreds of millions views for the interviews he's done with people across the political spectrum, many of which focus on Israel. while Carlson can be controversial for some of his guest selections, including avowed Holocaust denar Nick Fuentes, he has reached a portion of the right who, quite frankly, never heard a conservative talk like that before. Remember, it wasn't just that the anti-Israel push started from the Democrats. It started from the Democrats' left flank. People who, along with opposition to Israel, hold a number of views that are bound to be anathema to those even on the center-right. Criticism of Israel might be easy to ignore for someone on the right when it comes from someone who's also advocating to abolish ICE and defund the police. fundamentally lands differently when you're hearing it from someone who will look at those same other far-left positions and shake their head along with you. 2022, Pew Research recorded Republicans under 50 at 35% unfavorable to Israel, which had grown among that cohort to be a majority by 2025. meanwhile, had barely budged the entire time, still overwhelmingly backing Jerusalem. What very well may end up being the turning point on the right is the Iran War, which is about the closest thing the US has ever had to its own Suez Crisis. Washington is no stranger to misadventures in the Middle East, but this one really is different. in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US accomplished its initial objectives and only failed to create a stable trajectory afterwards, this latest war has been a catastrophe from almost the get-go. Washington has severely depleted its stockpile of a considerable number of munitions, including the ultra-expensive Patriot interceptor system that goes for $4 million a pop, and has completely exhausted its advanced surface-to-surface munitions, called attackants. the Republican base has been relatively supportive of the war with Iran since Trump launched it, nearly half of Republicans see Israel as the primary beneficiary of it. And given that the US used up to 25% of its entire high-altitude THAAD supply during last summer's 12-day war with Iran, it's not hard to connect the dots here. This sort of thing has ushered in a new wave of people on the right, saying what was previously unthinkable. Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance sat down with podcast host Joe Rogan and outright accused Israel of attempting to manipulate US public opinion in an effort to extend the Iran vance is not carson and he's certainly not macy five years ago that sentence would have likely ended a republican vp's career if these sorts of things are now acceptable on the right from the vice president who has aspirations of running in 2028 things really are changing but and here's the moment where we interject a great big shot of nuance into all of this it is unlikely that they're changing as fast as those opposed to israel would like while washington and jerusalem are no longer perfectly aligned the odds of them moving from fighting to a full-blown divorce are still extremely long an uphill battle all right so it should be pretty clear that the us and israel are headed for some kind of collision the shift we've seen over the last decade or so has been unprecedented at this stage it's difficult to see either party reversing course and becoming more pro-israel given that both the republicans and democrats are moving away from jerusalem there's just no long-term rationale that plays to either party's electorate where more support for israel works out for them all that said there's still quite an uphill battle for those advocating for a divorce perhaps the single biggest of them is going to be congress which has long been reliably even more pro-israel than the white house one of the biggest obstacles is that israel becomes something of an all-or-nothing issue where you're either incredibly motivated to vote one way or another on it or are relatively standoffish when it comes to the matter knowing that saying the wrong thing will get you yelled at by both sides we saw that play out in michigan where abdul el saeed narrowly defeated hayley stevens after making gaza and opposition to israel a major part of his campaign stevens had apac backing her big time they alone spent nearly 32 million dollars on advertising variously supporting her and opposing el saeed but what's so interesting here is that the ads that money bought had almost nothing to do with israel or even foreign policy they were talking about domestic issues and that right there might be the largest concession of them all to this new generational divide support for israel is increasingly seen as a lost cause at least in democratic primaries the battle is just one of many playing out in the primaries this year with more coming as the midterms approach though it hasn't been the democrats who have seen this become an issue republican representative tom macy just recently lost his primary race to a candidate ed galreen who had been on the receiving end of a considerable amount apac funds more than 15 million dollars from the group and allied donors in what became the single most expensive house primary race in u.s history this time when appealing to the right wing instead of the left they did include discussions of macy's opposition to israel while also slamming him more generally for being disloyal to trump and it worked macy had opposed the president's agenda on a whole host of other proposals and given how narrow the republicans majority in the house is he had become a genuine pain in the ass for most of them regardless though the message was delivered loud and clear the money is still very much going to be there it's just up to you which side want to be on but while he's drawing down the remainder of his term macy decided to go out with a bit of a bang on july 15th he put forward an amendment on the state department funding bill that would have cut off every dollar going to israel including the 3.3 billion dollars in annual security assistance it failed 314 to 104 which might sound like a lopsided defeat and to be clear for any ordinary amendment it would be but that was not any ordinary amendment that wasn't in the same ballpark as an ordinary amendment or even a controversial one this was the complete upending of decades of u.s foreign policy towards what long been described as its closest ally in the region and 103 democrats and one republican ended up voting for it ultimately if the folks pushing for a breakup with israel want to have their way there's still a long way to go but the tide appears to be powerfully on their side and with every year that passes younger americans who lean against jerusalem will take up a larger and larger share of the electorate and it seems the old guard has no plan for winning them back thank you for watching