Tucker Carlson also has a compassionate streak, you’ll be pleased to hear. Yesterday he published an interview with longtime Israel critic John Mearsheimer in which Mearsheimer likewise denounced America’s complicity in the “genocide” playing out in Gaza. Tucker knew whom to blame. “They’re the most vicious people I’ve ever dealt with,” he said of pro-Israel lobbyists, despite having “dealt with” Vladimir Putin face-to-face last year. “It sounds like our entire foreign policy, at least in the Western Hemisphere, is based on this one country.”
You may, and should, draw your own conclusions as to why “America First” nationalists are promoting the most inflammatory term possible to describe the Jewish state’s campaign in Gaza. But conditions there do appear to be desperate, more so than at any earlier stage of the war, and Americans are paying attention. I’ve argued before that the long-term prognosis is grim for continued support for Israel in a postliberal United States, but the humanitarian disaster in Gaza has me wondering if I underestimated how quickly that support might erode.
We’re well on our way to U.S. policy on this subject becoming as polarized along partisan lines as it is on most domestic issues. How much longer can the “special relationship” between our two countries, and with it American aid to Tel Aviv, survive?
Trust no one.
The challenge in assessing what’s happening in Gaza for someone acting in good faith is that every quasi-authoritative source of information has an agenda.
Our own Jonah Goldberg made that point to CNN viewers on Tuesday. “I’ve never been in a situation in a story where I have such complete distrust for almost every actor, including Israel’s people, on this stuff,” he said. “I just don’t trust anything and I don’t want to win the race to be wrong first on any of this stuff, and that’s terrible because there are definitely people suffering.”
Whom should you trust among those that are alleging widespread hunger in Gaza? The local health ministry? That’s tantamount to trusting Hamas.
The United Nations? They’ve been biased against Israel for decades. Last year the U.N.’s relief arm in Gaza fired nine employees on suspicion of participating in the October 7 pogrom.
American media? Their own flagrant pro-Palestinian sympathies have supported a cottage industry of watchdogs and fact checkers that hasn’t yet run out of content in the many years that I’ve been following this topic. Just two days ago the New York Times had to append a note to a photo of a horribly emaciated boy in Gaza, clarifying that he suffers from other health problems that make him unrepresentative of the average child there.
We can’t trust those who claim that Israel is starving Gazans. Does that mean we should trust Benjamin Netanyahu, who claims it isn’t happening?
We should not, as there’s plenty of reason to think that hunger may have reached crisis levels. Shipments of all forms of aid, food most notably, collapsed after Israel imposed a blockade in March and has yet to approach the levels seen before then. The price of flour has reportedly soared at local markets, reflecting the scarcity. Sources at the (ahem) U.N. claim that 500 to 600 aid trucks need to enter Gaza each day to meet demand; according to the Israeli military, an average of just 146 have crossed the border daily since the war began.
There are eyewitness reports from locals about starvation, dehydration, and shortages. Israeli troops have allegedly opened fire repeatedly on Palestinians during aid deliveries as crowds desperate for provisions turned unruly, killing more than 1,000 people—again, according to the U.N. Normally reliable defenders of the Jewish state, like Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, are alarmed enough to have begun warning of a “quagmire” in Gaza. Coverage of mass hunger in the Strip has reportedly broken through in Israel’s own media.
Netanyahu himself stands accused of prolonging the war needlessly to protect his own hold on power. If he quits Gaza without making it safe for new Israeli settlements, the far right might quit his coalition; if that happens, his party will likely lose in the next Knesset elections and he’ll end up back in criminal jeopardy on corruption charges.
Amid all that, to insist that there’s no crisis in Gaza is to risk taking an essentially populist approach to news consumption, using distrust of “enemy” outlets to justify ignoring or dismissing out of hand evidence that’s politically uncomfortable to reckon with.
The alternative is to concede that there is a crisis but to remind the world which side is to blame for it. Hamas started the war; Hamas could end it by returning the hostages and surrendering; and Hamas is indifferent at best and enthusiastic at worst about Palestinian suffering. It may or may not be true that the group is exacerbating the food shortage deliberately in order to raise the diplomatic pressure on Israel to relent, but no one would put it past them.
And yet: If you believe that the war should go on until every hostage is freed and every jihadi neutralized even if it means starving the population of Gaza, then you’re with Randy Fine—and most people aren’t with Randy Fine. It cannot be that one side has carte blanche morally to punish the other in pursuit of its goals because that other side bears ultimate responsibility for the conflict. Especially not now, after Hamas’ leadership has already gotten the full Goodfellas “Layla” treatment from the Israeli military.
The sense most Americans have at this point, I suspect, is that Israel is bouncing the rubble in Gaza, continuing to lay waste to the strip despite the risk of a humanitarian calamity and to no good end after having already accomplished what was reasonably achievable there.
And that comes with a political price.
The end of aid.
On Wednesday night the Senate easily defeated two measures proposed by Bernie Sanders to block further arms sales to Israel. No surprise there. Military aid to the Jewish state always enjoys bipartisan support.
The newsy part was the margin. More than half the Democratic conference voted with Sanders, including some mainstream liberals like Jeanne Shaheen. On top of the human toll of the war, there’s now a political toll: Temporarily or not so temporarily, cutting aid to Israel has become the mainstream position of one of our two major parties in Congress’ upper chamber.
There might be no going back. On Tuesday a new Gallup poll found U.S. support for the campaign in Gaza down to 32 percent, with 60 percent disapproving. Among Democrats, support has dropped to—no typo—8 percent. For the first time in nearly 30 years, Netanyahu is viewed unfavorably by more than half of Americans.
Other surveys are in line with that. A CNN poll published earlier this month saw a scant 23 percent of Americans and 7 percent of Democrats say that Israel’s actions in Gaza have been “fully justified.” In both surveys, opinion among independents is much closer to the left than it is to the right. A mere 25 percent of indies now approve of the Gaza campaign while just 14 percent agree that Israel’s actions there are “fully justified” per Gallup and CNN, respectively.
All of that follows other polling published this year tracking declining left-wing support for the Jewish state writ large. In March Gallup revealed that 59 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israelis, the first time a majority of the party has tilted towards the former group. A month later the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found Democrats’ “feelings” about Israel dipping to a score of 41, the first time in nearly half a century of polling that it’s fallen below 50.
Skepticism of Israel is increasingly the safe position for Democratic officials, and last night’s Senate vote proved that they know it.
“It won’t last,” you might say. “Democrats won’t risk alienating Jews, one of their most dependable constituencies, by distancing the party from Israel permanently.” Maybe, but it’s worth noting what Data for Progress, a left-wing outfit, found when it polled New York City Democrats—a cohort with a few Jewish voters, as I recall—earlier this month. Some 78 percent agreed that “genocide” is happening in Gaza while 79 percent said the U.S. should restrict weapons sales to Israel until, among other things, Israel stops attacking civilians there.
If you think Jews are single-issue voters, you’re making the same dubious assumption that Donald Trump did when he accused those who vote Democratic of being “disloyal to Israel” and, er, hating their religion. It simply doesn’t follow that a Jewish Democrat who supports Israel should necessarily prefer U.S. leadership that’s reluctant to put pressure on Tel Aviv over one that’s more willing to do so—although it doesn’t surprise me that Trump might struggle to understand that.
That’s what I meant earlier about populists extolling ruthlessness. To Trump, it’s unfathomable that a voter who cares about Israel might favor a party that won’t let Israel behave as ruthlessly as he will. How could a Jew possibly vote for the side that wants to treat starvation in Gaza as a red line?
In the end, this is a numbers game. Democrats should worry about shedding Jewish voters unless support for Israel falls so far among the American middle that the party ends up netting votes on balance by being harder on Tel Aviv. If you believe polls like Gallup’s and CNN’s, we may have already reached the point where attempts in Congress to withhold aid are no longer a political liability for Democrats.
And it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where they become an asset.
The horseshoe.
I’ve written before about how Trump has become an unlikely champion for hawks, especially those of us who support Israel.
In a way, it’s another facet of his politics of nostalgia. The president is a baby boomer and many of his tastes reflect that—including his solidarity with the Jewish state, as there’s a yawning age gap among Americans over Israel that keeps showing up in polling. The Gallup survey I mentioned earlier found 49 percent support for the campaign in Gaza among Americans 55 and older, but just 9 percent support among those 18 to 34. Among that same younger cohort, 33 percent told CNN that the campaign was at least partly justified; compare that to the 67 percent who said so among those 65 and up.
Donald Trump is an old man, and he’s acting like one by supporting Israel. But he won’t be around forever.
The “genocide” rhetoric from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson is another obvious attempt by the nucleus of “fundamentalist MAGA” to nudge the right in the direction it wants populism to take post-Trump. Perhaps they’re kidding themselves in believing that Republicans will ever be meaningfully anti-Israel: Between the GOP’s hawkish DNA, the religious support for the nation among dispensationalist Christians, and the tribal antipathy the right is likely to go on feeling toward Palestinian Muslims, they have their work cut out for them.
In fact, GOP support for the Gaza campaign in Gallup’s poll stands at 71 percent and Netanyahu’s favorability within the party is the highest it’s ever been. Better luck next time, Tucker.
Still, I would not underestimate the degree to which the cult of personality around the president might be buoying up right-wing support for Israel amid strong postliberal downward pressure. The mere mention of his name in polling questions about sending weapons to Ukraine, for example, can send Republican support for the idea skyrocketing by 30+ net points. For members of his party, his imprimatur on policy is talismanic. There will be no GOP turn against Israel so long as he’s in Tel Aviv’s corner.
But after he’s gone? Who knows?
If fundamentalist MAGA gains influence and fills the power vacuum left by Trump, it’s possible we’ll see a left-right populist horseshoe alliance in Congress in which Greene’s faction and Bernie’s faction come together to cut aid to Israel. It’s never made sense as a matter of logic that “America First-ers” like J.D. Vance would make a special exception for Tel Aviv from their normal hostility to foreign aid. It makes sense only as a matter of raw politics, because they’re afraid how their base will react if they insist on consistency.
Apres Trump, with more dogmatic populists potentially ascendant on the right, perhaps that taboo will weaken. The president’s own record might be exploited as a reason for weakening it, in fact. If he builds on the Abraham Accords by brokering a peace deal between Israel and other regional powers, MAGA fundies may argue, the need for a “special relationship” between Washington and Tel Aviv will be over. Having broken Iran and its proxies with U.S. help, and with Sunni nations finally accepting the nation’s legitimacy, what more could the Israeli people possibly want from us?
We might plausibly see a coalition form in the House and Senate between a majority of Democrats and a sizable minority of Republicans in favor of cutting off aid in all forms to the Jewish state. Electoral interests would encourage it too. If it’s true that young voters, especially nonwhite ones, are America’s new “swing” contingent, then both parties have a strong incentive to recoil from an ally that those voters disdain.
Maybe it won’t be so bad. Given the military might on display over the past two years, it could be many years before some rival power is foolish enough to thrust Israel into another conflict that will force America to take sides.
But when it does happen, don’t assume that we’ll choose the right side next. Especially if Netanyahu and his government don’t figure out a way to end the Gaza crisis soon.
