Americans' – and Republicans' – increasingly complicated relationship with Israel
The president who promised to easily and quickly bring about peace has now found himself accounting for yet another major escalation. President Donald Trump had publicly discouraged Israel from striking Iran in recent days, as he pushed to instead secure a deal to curtail Iran's nuclear program.
But it didn't pan out. Israel launched a massive attack overnight that targeted Iran's nuclear facilities and killed high-ranking officials – strikes that Trump told CNN by phone early Friday were 'very successful.'
It all reinforces how the world we live in is much more complex than the one Trump pitched on the campaign trail.
And from a domestic perspective, the situation with Israel is arguably more complex than it has been in many decades.
Multiple indicators suggest Americans' support for Israel has reached historic lows as its war in Gaza has dragged on. And while Republicans are much more likely to back Israel than Democrats, even that is getting more complicated – particularly as influential voices on the right voice skepticism of a hardline approach to Iran.
Much remains to shake out amid the historic escalation in the Middle East. Things will shift. There is a real question about whether Iran is even capable now of the kind of significant retaliation that could lead to a wider war.
But the US decisions that lie ahead aren't as easy as they once might have seemed, politically speaking.
A Quinnipiac University poll released this week – ahead of Israel's strikes – epitomized the shifting landscape.
Polls for decades have asked Americans to choose whether they sympathize more with Israelis or Palestinians, and Israel is almost always the runaway favorite. But this one showed Americans sided with the Israelis by a historically narrow margin: 37% to 32%.
After Hamas' October 2023 terror attack on Israel, that margin had been 61-13% in the Israelis' favor. So a 48-point edge has shrunk to five.
That's not only the lowest advantage for Israel since Quinnipiac began polling this question in 2001, but it appears to be about the lowest since at least 1980 across multiple polls, according to data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.
Those findings, while telling, don't strictly apply to a conflict between Israel and Iran. But it's also clear that overall support for Israel has waned over the past year and a half.
To wit:
A March poll from the Pew Research Center showed 53% of Americans – a majority – had an unfavorable opinion of Israel. That was up from 42% in 2022, before the current war in Gaza. The same poll showed Americans said by more than a 20-point margin that they lacked confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A March poll from Marquette University Law School showed Americans evenly split on Israel: 43% favorable to 43% unfavorable.
And a February Reuters/Ipsos poll showed about 4 in 10 Americans leaned toward the idea that Israel's problems are 'none of our business.'
What was particularly striking about that last one: These views were almost completely nonpartisan. It was about 4 in 10 Democrats, independents and Republicans who said Israel's business was none of ours.
That suggests that Trump's injection of non-interventionism in the conservative movement has caught on, even as it relates to our most significant ally in the Middle East.
But it's more than just non-interventionism; there are also plenty of signs that even Republicans have soured on Israel.
The Quinnipiac poll showed the percentage of Republicans who sympathized more with the Israelis than Palestinians dropping from 86% in October 2023 to 64% today. (Almost all of the shift was to a neutral position, rather than to the Palestinians.)
And the Pew poll showed unfavorable views of Israel among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rising from 27% in 2022 to 37% in March. Most remarkably, right-leaning voters under the age of 50 were about evenly split in their views of Israel.
These modest but significant shifts have come as certain corners of the MAGA movement have adopted a more skeptical view of the American alliance with Israel and cautioned against a hardline approach to Iran.
Those tensions are perhaps best exemplified by an intense and ongoing feud between Fox News host Mark Levin and his former Fox colleague, Tucker Carlson.
Carlson on Friday morning went so far as to say the United States should decouple itself from Israel altogether. He said the Trump administration should 'drop Israel. Let them fight their own wars.'
Carlson said the United States not only shouldn't send troops, but that it shouldn't provide any funding or weapons.
Also this week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard used her personal X account to promote a cryptic video. She urged people to 'reject this path to nuclear war' and said certain 'elite warmongers' were carelessly pushing us toward it, in the knowledge that they personally had nuclear shelters that others didn't.
It's not clear if Gabbard was alluding to the tensions in the Middle East – as opposed to, say, the war between Russia and Ukraine. But she has long advocated a softer approach to Iran. Back in 2020, while she was still a Democrat, she called Trump's killing of a top Iranian commander an unconstitutional 'act of war.'
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana responded this week that Gabbard should 'change her meds.'
In other words, this isn't even simple on the right anymore. Trump leads a country and a movement that are increasingly torn about the path ahead.
He has landed firmly in Israel's corner thus far. But very difficult decisions could lie ahead.
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