Slump in voters’ support for Israel shakes US consensus over military aid

Israel’s conflicts in the Middle East have driven a sea change in US public opinion, threatening a bipartisan consensus of support for military aid for Israel that has been the status quo for decades.

In public opinion polling of Americans, among likely candidates for president, and even in pro-Israel lobbying circles, the special relationship enjoyed by Israel with the US is now under fire as human rights concerns from the left and a new “America First” foreign policy groundswell on the right could impact coming elections – including the 2028 presidential elections.

The shift has been particular marked on the left. When Bernie Sanders, a US senator, first tabled a joint resolution of disapproval (JRD) to oppose arms sales to Israel last year, it received votes from just 15 Democratic members of the Senate. A similar vote last July won 27 supporters.

On Thursday, a vote against supplying Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to Israel – which Sanders said could be used to destroy homes in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon – was defeated again but with a record 40 Senate Democrats supporting it. (Another measure restricting the sale of 1,000lb bombs to Israel was rejected by a 36-63 vote.)

Most importantly, said observers, a number of Democratic senators who flipped to support the resolutions are considering presidential runs in 2028.

“None of the senators who are publicly considering running for president on the left voted against it,” said Jon Hoffman, a foreign-policy analyst at the Cato Institute who has called the relationship with Israel a “strategic liability” for the US.

“I have this conversation with my Democratic colleagues a lot: I think it’s going to be very difficult for a 2028, Democratic primary candidate to win, if they do not openly disavow US aid to Israel – possibly even the US-Israel special relationship. I think we will have reached that point by 2028.”

The change among moderate Democrats has been driven by shifting public opinion due to the Israeli military’s conduct during the war in Gaza and also by anger over Donald Trump’s support for the Iran war.

“We can all look at what is happening in the region right now and understand that this is not business as usual – and it is not making us safer,” said Mark Kelly, the senior US senator from Arizona who voted for the JRD on Wednesday. “The United States and Israel are fighting a war against Iran without a clear strategy or goal. I’ve been clear I oppose this war in Iran and the reckless decisions being made by Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump.”

Ruben Gallego, a senator who has become a vocal opponent of sales of offensive weapons to Israel despite previously supporting them, told Punchbowl News that the vote “means Netanyahu really screwed up the politics of the Middle East, and he is destroying the bipartisan nature in terms of support for Israel”.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in recent opinion polling. The Pew Research Center last week released a poll showing a record 60% of US adults now have an unfavourable view of Israel, a 7% jump in just the last year. The poll, which was fielded nearly a month into the joint US-Israeli intervention into Iran, also showed a marked age gap: in both political parties, a majority of adults under the age of 50 now view Israel and Netanyahu negatively.

The number of Americans who say they have a strongly or somewhat unfavourable view of Israel has risen 20 percentage points since 2022, when Hamas launched a raid from Gaza that killed more than 1,200 and left hundreds more as captives in appalling circumstances. Israel began its war in Gaza on 8 October, which to date has killed more than an estimated 72,000 Palestinians and has marked an inflection point for a US-Israel relationship going back decades.

While the shifting public opinion won’t immediately affect policy made in the White House, observers said, the 2028 presidential cycle will be strongly impacted, with Democratic candidates pressured to disavow US support for Israel in the Iran war, and the Republican field shaped by Trump’s continuing stature in conservative politics.

“The conversation on Democratic side is often hinged to questions of human rights and the international rules-based order,” said Josh Paul, a former director of congressional and public affairs at the US Bureau of Political-Military Affairs who resigned over the lack of oversight on arms sales to Israel. “On the Republican side, it’s much more often framed either around taxpayer funding for Israel, or around is this America first or Israel first? And the war with Iran has only brought that into sharper focus.”

In a significant shift this week, the liberal thinktank J Street which positions itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace” announced that it would change its stance for the first time to oppose direct US funding for arms sales to Israel even of defensive weapons, including Iron Dome missiles, in what its leadership said was a “a “fundamental reassessment of the U.S.-Israel security relationship”. Instead, the US should treat Israel “as it does other wealthy US allies” to purchase US arms without subsidies.

“It’s really important for Israel to stop this financial subsidy and take this out of the equation,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder of J Street, in an interview. “It is really causing a whole additional level of anger that the things that this government of Israel is doing are being financed by American taxpayer dollars.”

Aggravating factors for the relationship included the “war in Gaza, rising extremist Jewish terror in the West Bank and the US-Israel war with Iran”, he said.

“We’ve actually been kicking this around now for many months,” he said by telephone. “And you know, there’s never a good moment for it. But you know, the more that things go on on the West Bank, the more the Gaza continues to suffer, the war in Iran… you add up all these things, and you’ve got to say it out loud, that it’s time for this to stop, and it’s time for us to stop paying for it.”