A friend of mine who is Jewish and a bit older than I am explained it to me this way: In the 1960s and 1970s, Israel was a small country surrounded on all sides by enemies.

Now? It has a massive military and is an occupying force in the West Bank and turned Gaza into an open-air prison.

April 10, 2026 - 00:43 UTC

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I am Jewish adjacent and definitely on the older side and we all understood that it was a weak threatened state. I’m not saying we were right. In retrospect I think 1982 was the tipping point oddly enough an invasion of Lebanon.
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My guess is that those 57% of the younger Republicans are devotees of Fucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens. The Toilet Paper USA crowd remains pro-Israel, I assume (this will be a liability for Vance in 2028).
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It’s better to support a democracy than islamic terrorists. Israel tried peace for 80 years and Palestinians still insisted “winner take all.” Don’t insist on winner take all if you can’t win.
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Ethnonationalism is inherently unegalitarian
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i feel like it's hard to overstate the level of foreign policy debacle this has been for israel.

they turned decades of bipartisan american support into....this.

that's bad for their long term national security.
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Israel is as evil as the nazis, so are trump and the republicans… stupid people will attack Jews… lots of people are stupid
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Also, American Jews were not obsessed with Zionism in the fifties, sixties, early seventies.
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Good point!
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Democratic voters also view their party as the defender of "out-groups." Truman recognizing the state of Israel was not about geopolitical strategy; he saw it as justice. Democrats saw support for Israel as penance for FDR keeping Jewish people out of the U.S. during the Holocaust.
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And for the Holocaust in general. Everyone believed in Never Again as our duty.

Probably not Trump's father, I don't think he believed in justice as a goal.
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Now? Democrats see Palestinians as the oppressed party here. Particularly its younger voters. And it's not just woke white college students with noserings at $60K a year liberal arts schools sympathize with the Palestinians. Black and Latino voters are far more sympathetic to Palestinians.
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My dad was in his 80s- his contemporaries saw Israel as a place they could go if it ever happened again- they would be welcomed no matter what because they are Jews. If you grew up thinking this about Israel- it’s safety to you- it’s not genocide. His generation can’t see that. They see their safety
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People who are under 40-45 have never thought of Israel as the underdog.
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"The Holocaust in American Life" (Novick 1999) fairly convincingly challenged that argument IIRC.
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It was meant to be the ethnonationalist exception to a world moving away from ethnonationalism as a basis of political organization, as penance for the failure to provide Jewish people a meaningful right of self-determination. But ethnonationalism is a hell of a drug, anywhere it flourishes.
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Israel can fuck right off. Get rid of Bibi.
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It was also far more Democratic.
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This is true. But three things:

1) Carter, Clinton and Obama all held summits for peace, and all 3 had as a central ask "please stop building settlements in the west bank." Israel's response was no, no and no.

2) End of USSR meant ~1m jews from former USSR > to Israel who were much more anti-left.
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3) When Rabin was close to peace in the 1990s, Netanyahu led rallies basically calling for his death. Rabin was then assassinated by a right winger and Netanyahu was elected the next year and went out of his way to sabotage the effort. He's led the country away from peace and 2-state solution.
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It’s going to be super scary to see what it means exactly for young Republicans to be anti-Israel
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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have a sneaking suspicion that those 57% of Republicans under 50 might have a VERY different reason for their dislike of Israel than Democrats in the same category?
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Israel isn't gonna like President Fuentes in 2037, but they definitely enabled it.
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Oh, a big reason is dislike of the JOOOOOOS!
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I would say that the *perception* of Israel was that it was a small country surrounded by enemies. That was certainly the line they tried to sell me in Sunday school.

But in fact it was always the aggressor: 1956 and 1967 were attacks by it on its neighbors, but they weren't presented as such.
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It’s much more simple. Like America, Israel used to have leaders who acted in good faith. Now, it has Netanyahu.
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Palestinians who were displaced in 1967 would disagree.
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It took a friend to explain this to you? I guess that’s easier than reading a newspaper for the past 30 years.
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