Time's no longer on Israel's side in America

Dave Hodges

  by Leon Hadar

For eight decades, the Israeli political and security establishment has operated on a premise so deeply embedded that it is rarely stated as a premise at all: that American support is not a policy but a condition of nature, as fixed as the Mediterranean coastline.

Administrations would come and go, presidents would hector and cajole, but the underlying architecture, congressional majorities, public sympathy, the annual aid package renewed on autopilot, would hold.

This was never quite true even in 1973, when Washington resupplied a faltering Israel Defense Force only after extracting, in the following months, a set of diplomatic concessions Jerusalem did not want to make.

But it was true enough, for long enough, that Israeli planners could treat American backing as a structural fact rather than a political variable.

That premise is now the thing actually at risk. Not a battlefield reversal, not an Iranian breakout, not even the next round with Hezbollah. The worst case Israel is facing is demographic, and it is already visible in the numbers.

Start with Gallup, which has tracked American sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2001. Every year of that survey, Israelis led — often by margins above 40 points. In 2026, for the first time, they did not: 41% of Americans now sympathize more with Palestinians, 36% with Israelis, a gap inside the margin of error.

Pew's numbers tell the same story from a different angle: 60% of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 42% in 2022, nearly a doubling in four years, and 59% lack confidence in Netanyahu on world affairs. Among Democrats, unfavorable views of Israel have reached 80%.

The good news, if there is any, is that this is not yet a bipartisan collapse. Republicans still favor Israelis over Palestinians 70 to 13. The bad news for Israel is where the erosion is concentrated: among the young, in both parties.

Gallup's 18-to-34 cohort now sympathizes with Palestinians by a majority, 53%, a record. Pew finds Republicans under 30 offer only 52% confidence in Trump's handling of US-Israel relations, against 93% among Republicans over 65.

A Yale youth survey last year measured the generational gap directly and found it larger than any other divide in American political life: Baby Boomers score +34 on a composite pro-Israel index; Gen Z scores -22.