Support for Israel among Democrats declined significantly during the 12 years of the combined Obama and Biden terms

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or decades, we’ve heard that support for Israel should be a consensus issue in America and must not turn into a divisive topic between Democrats and Republicans, like most other issues have.

Support for Israel among Democrats declined significantly during the 12 years of the combined Obama and Biden terms. Now, signs of erosion among Republicans are surfacing.

It was startling last week to hear Matt Brooks, the perpetually composed CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, telling the Jewish News Syndicate’s International Policy Summit in Jerusalem that the “cancer that has taken over the Democratic Party with the woke, progressive left” is starting to take hold in the Republican Party.

Saying that “we can’t allow that to happen,” Brooks urged Republicans to resist the rise of neo-isolationism, which turns Israel into a liability for the US instead of an asset. He reminded party members that if they genuinely support President Trump’s MAGA agenda, they must recognize that Trump is “the most pro-Israel president in history.”

A few days later, Brooks tweeted on X, asking his followers to read Seth Mandel’s latest article in Commentary, “The Anti-Semites in the Conservative Manosphere: The world’s oldest hatred takes over the world’s newest medium.” Brooks called this a “MUST READ wake-up call. It’s chilling and unsettling.”

Mandel’s article calls out some of the leading conservative podcasters, including Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, for hosting individuals he categorizes as white nationalist influencers, Holocaust deniers, and conspiracy theorists. It might be good for ratings, but it’s bad for the Jews.

“The podcast maestros with massive audiences and an endless appetite for questioning everything are crowdsourcing their war on the Jews,” Mandel wrote.

While Matt Brooks maintains that faithful MAGA supporters must get behind President Trump’s pro-Israel agenda, Tucker Carlson pulls no punches with his opposing viewpoint, which is eye-popping and shattering to the eardrums.

Carlson, who received a thunderous ovation at last year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, recently interviewed Dan Caldwell, who claims the Defense Department dismissed him for opposing an Israeli military strike on Iran. Reuters reported the Pentagon placed Caldwell on administrative leave for “an unauthorized disclosure.”

Caldwell praised the Trump administration for pivoting to diplomacy with Iran, even invoking a spiritual tone: “Thank G-d we have Steve Witkoff in the administration. He is truly doing the L-rd’s work and trying to stop this war through diplomacy.”

Carlson supported this sentiment, adding that the quickest way to derail the whole MAGA project is a war with Iran. “God bless Steve Witkoff… as a man, and as an instrument of peace and a figure now out of history,” Carlson said.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The sentiment expressed on America’s most popular conservative podcasts is influencing public opinion, including how Republicans perceive Israel.

For the past 25 years, the Gallup Poll has asked respondents a straightforward question: In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians? Gallup conducted its latest survey in February, which was published in March under the headline “Less Than Half in US Now Sympathetic Toward Israelis.”

Megan Brenan, a senior editor at Gallup, noted that the 46% of US adults who support Israel over the Palestinians marks a record low in the poll’s history. Meanwhile, the 33% of American adults who said they sympathize with the Palestinians, 6% higher than last year, represents a record high.

Republican sympathy for Israel dropped to 75% from a peak of 87% in 2018. Democrats favor the Palestinians over Israel by 59% to 21%.

When asked: “Do you favor or oppose the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip?” 41% of Republicans responded yes, up from 24% in just one year. In comparison, Democratic support reached a record high of 76%.

Theodore Sasson, a scholar at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, who focuses on the American Jewish community, contends that two main factors are to blame.

He cited the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2023–2024 and released in February 2025. The survey found that just 62% of US adults identify as Christians, down 9 points from 2014 and 16 points from 2007. Evangelical Christians have been among Israel’s staunchest supporters, so if fewer Americans self-identify as Christians, the percentage of Israel supporters will drop correspondingly.

The second factor is a much larger drop in religious affiliation among young adults. Pew found that 43% of youths ages 18–24 say they have no religious affiliations.

Tell the Truth

None of this should be shocking, considering how the media portrays Israel as the bad guy and constantly laments the humanitarian plight of Gaza Arabs, while downplaying the pure evil of Hamas. Students on college campuses are exposed to a constant drumbeat of pro-Palestinian propaganda, numbing the brains of the 18–24 crowd with a biased and false history of the Middle East conflict.

Last week, Harvard University released its long-awaited report on campus anti-Semitism, taking 311 pages to detail “the Jew-hatred festering on its campus,” in the words of David Volpe, who witnessed it himself as a visiting scholar on campus. Volpe detailed his experiences expansively in an essay published over the weekend in the Free Press titled “Harvard Is Spraying Perfume on a Sewer.”

President Trump has established a policy to drain campus swamps by penalizing universities with reduced funding and tax breaks if they do not take responsibility for protecting their Jewish students.

Israel allocated the shekel equivalent of $150 million in its recently passed budget for hasbarah abroad. This amount is 20 times what Israel typically spends, but even if it utilizes every dollar wisely, it is decades behind and tens of billions of dollars short in competing with Qatar, which has invested vast sums of its oil wealth to peddle fictional narratives about the Middle East conflict in the media, on campuses, and other spheres of influence.

A wishy-washy Israeli government, which has misled voters by promoting itself as wall-to-wall right-wing, as well as the left-wing elites who wield veto power over every government decision that encroaches on their power base, both need to take long, hard looks in the mirror if they want to turn the tide.

This will pose a significant challenge in a divided society. The post-Oslo generation of Israeli public-school students, and even university students, have been educated in a system that has gone “woke.” They have been taught to give peace a chance, even when pursued by vicious enemies, and to extol the virtues of offering land for an imaginary peace that never was and never will be. The system has taught them very little about our glorious past and almost nothing about the virtues of patiently awaiting the fulfillment of the prophecies regarding our even more magnificent destiny.

It’s never too late. The future doesn’t have to be as grim as it seems. A little light dispels a lot of darkness. Supporters of Israel will need a sky full of lightning bolts and more warnings from people even more influential than Matt Brooks and Seth Mandel to scare us into action.

The first step to reversing the trajectory of declining support for Israel is to candidly admit that we have significant ground to cover in a short time frame, with limited financial resources and less external support than we previously assumed. It will require a concerted team effort to articulate the simple truth that Israel is the G-d-given land of the Jewish People and that every other narrative that paints Israel as an occupier or a colonizer is a gross distortion of history.

Our enemies have gained the upper hand by repeating a lie long enough for people to start believing it. If we speak the truth consistently and with conviction and passion, it will take hold and resonate. —

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1060)