Slump in voters’ support for Israel shakes US consensus over military aid (4/17/26)

Bipartisan backing for special relationship is fraying as Middle East conflicts turn public opinion

Via the Guardian

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 particularly 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 Democratssupporting 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.”

Read the entire article here.

What Went Wrong in Israel? A Genocide Scholar Examines ‘What Zionism Became’

Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.

Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was perhaps less a change of heart than one of strategy, as his senior adviser later admitted, the lyric became a byword of Israeli politics, an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.

 Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.

Read the full article here. Thanks to Portside for posting it.