Israel has lost the West

For 60 years, Israel has enjoyed an almost militant goodwill in America. The reason has not been some all-powerful Israeli lobby, though of course there is a pro-Israel lobby just as there is an oil lobby, a Saudi lobby, a tech lobby, and most murderous of all, a gun lobby. To US administrations, Israel represented an occasionally infuriating ally in a strategic but alien region.

But the support enjoyed from the American public was not primarily based on alliances or overt propaganda – it was centred on identification. There was the closeness of the Israeli foundation myth to the American one – huddled masses yearning to be free, escaping persecution and setting up a quarrelsome and lively democracy in a promised land.

Nearly 20 years ago I had just this argument in public during a “Doha Debate” in Oxford in which the former US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, and I took on a journalist called Andrew Cockburn and Norman Finkelstein – possibly the angriest man I have ever met. What they wanted to portray as a form of conspiracy, we argued was in fact the result of politics.

This exact argument came back to me following the reports that Benjamin Netanyahu had talked Donald Trump into the attack on Iran. Such descriptions merged with a dangerous sentiment on both the left and the right in the US that their country’s interests were now subordinate to those of a foreign nation – one with which they no longer sympathised. Jason Willick in the Washington Post earlier this month put it succinctly:

“Contrary to the notion of an ‘Israel lobby’ dictating American policy toward Israel, the U.S. has often supported Israel because the American people want a pro-Israel foreign policy,” he wrote. “The corollary: If the American people don’t want a pro-Israel policy, the policy will change.”

At the end of March, the Pew Research Centre conducted a poll involving 3,500 respondents. The top line from this poll was that just 37 percent of Americans viewed Israel favourably a few weeks into the Iran war, compared with 60 percent who viewed it unfavourably. That minus-23 net approval compares with a minus-8 approval a year ago and a plus-13 approval the year before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the Israeli response. Those who had a “very unfavourable” view of Israel had nearly tripled since 2022, from 10% to 28%. This negativity is more pronounced among younger Americans – Democrat, independent and Republican.

Much of this is likely to be down to Gaza, where initial support for Israel has been worn away by the scale of Palestinian suffering. Note too to some readers that you can’t really blame the BBC for this one.

But in the US, and in the West generally the behaviour of the Israeli state and government towards others has now become intolerable. To take one small example, earlier this month Itamar Ben Gvir – that celebrator of Baruch Goldstein – persuaded the Knesset to pass a law to provide for expedited executions of convicted Palestinian terrorists – but (in effect) not convicted Jewish ones. As the Atlantic magazine’s Daniel Shapiro put it, “the performance was gross and gloating.” And very public.

And more people now have eyes on the West Bank, where the Netanyahu government has accelerated its policy of de facto annexation and therefore its corollary of effective apartheid. When recently Chancellor Merz repeated Germany’s opposition to annexation, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, responded by telling Merz that there would be no return to “the days when Germans dictated to Jews,” adding, “Our return to the Land of Israel — our biblical and historical homeland — is the answer to anyone who tried or tries to destroy us, and we do not apologise for it for a single moment.”

In Italy L’Espresso magazine carried a cover story on the behaviour of settlers and the Israeli military on the West Bank towards local Palestinians. The picture on the front showed a male settler in military fatigues appearing to taunt a Palestinian woman as she tried to harvest her olives.

The Israeli ambassador to Italy thought it politic to condemn, not the behaviour of the settler, but the magazine itself. Jonathan Peled complained that “the image distorts the complex reality with which Israel must coexist, promoting stereotypes and hatred.” Other Israeli sources claimed the photograph was faked.

But it wasn’t. And the readers and the Italian public knew it wasn’t. Just as the German public almost certainly agree with their conservative chancellor.

So what (in my perception) has opened up is a credibility gulf in which Israel’s leaders and institutions can no longer be believed or trusted by people in the West. The identification with the country is being lost and a generational aversion is being created. Which is manna for the antisemites. One casualty of this are the Jews in diaspora, about whom Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir and the assorted Likudniks, Kahanists and Jewish ultranationalists do not give a fig.