The Next Generation of Republicans Is Turning Away From the terrorist state of Israel

Netanyahu spent years undermining Israel’s ties with the Democrats. Now he appears to have sparked a seismic shift among Republicans too

Haaretz

On Friday, June 20, at about 3:30 P.M., Donald Trump said ‘Okay.’

The U.S. president informed the Pentagon that they had a green light to attack the nuclear sites in Iran. The day leading up to the decision had been critical. All options were weighed. The president received an intelligence briefing and spoke with his advisers in the White House for an hour. Afterward, he lunched with Steve Bannon, who holds no official position in the administration. He was given two hours to whisper in the president’s ear.

Bannon, who ran Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, is one of the two architects of the burgeoning populist movement, alongside Tucker Carlson. He made the pilgrimage to the White House to urge Trump not to be dragged by those ‘pushing him toward war with Iran’ – chief among them, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Bannon didn’t conceal his disdain for the Israeli leader, whom he depicted as a warmonger who was leading Trump into war by exaggerating the Iranian nuclear threat. ‘You [Netanyahu] started a war, you started a conflict while you don’t have the military capability to end it, and you have to depend upon us,’ Bannon said.

President Trump shouldn’t have to come in and play cleanup for the Israelis, he is quoted as saying.

Since 1948, support for Israel has been a consensus issue for both parties in the United States. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave voice to this approach, telling then-Foreign Minister Golda Meir: ‘The United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East, really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs.’

But Netanyahu has worked systematically for over a decade to erode, and even sever, the relationship with the Democratic Party and its voters. Now, it appears, he’s made a large contribution to fomenting a tectonic change in Republican public opinion.

A seminal moment in Israel’s rupture with the Democratic Party was Netanyahu’s 2015 speech in Congress, when he was invited by members of the Grand Old Party to attack the nuclear agreement President Barack Obama’s administration had negotiated. That conscious choice to burn bridges with the Democratic Party resulted in the backlash that was already apparent during the fighting with Gaza in May 2021 (Operation Guardian of the Walls), when a host of public opinion surveys showed support for Israel among Democrats falling below 50 percent for the first time. The downward spiral has continued unabated since.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March revealed Israel’s gloomy position in the United States among all respondents. Even though Republicans overall still support Israel, the shift becomes apparent in the below-50 age bracket. In 2022, a Pew survey found that 63 percent of under-50 Republicans held a positive view of Israel. In the March survey, only 48 percent said they held a positive view of Israel, with 50 percent saying they didn’t.

When President Joe Biden, a Democrat, allied himself firmly and unequivocally with Israel, citing its right to defend itself, he drew flak from within his party. Biden, like two other longtime Democratic leaders – Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate – expressed the attitude of the baby boomer generation, which views Israel as a small, courageous democracy in need of assistance. ‘A miracle,’ Biden called the country.

Trump is neither an idealist nor a sentimentalist about Israel, but the 79-year-old president is also a baby boomer. He too clings to an image of Israel from other times, and he will likely be the last president from his generation. The Republicans waiting in line espouse a different worldview.

A decade after Trump entered politics, in the summer of 2015, redefining Republican foreign policy, the MAGA movement he leads is in the throes of a fierce debate over Israel. The issue had arisen before, after October 7, but the movement’s leadership generally maintained a posture of ambiguity. Over the past year, as the war in the Middle East expanded, the Trumpist movement started discussing Israel with greater openness.

Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, who is considered a prominent intellectual within the movement, tried to redefine the slogan ‘America First’ in a speech he delivered in May 2024 at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Vance was careful not to rile evangelicals, who also constitute an important part of the Republican base.

Israel was no longer ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ that espouses ‘shared values.’ Instead, Vance lumped Israel together with the ‘Sunni Muslim states’ as important allies. ‘Israel, with the Sunni nations, can actually police their region of the world. That allows us to spend less time and less resources in the Middle East.’ It’s also noteworthy that the Heritage Foundation, which formulated much of Trump’s policy, is calling for a gradual phasing out of aid to Israel.

The debate in the MAGA movement over the war in Iran has thrust the Israel question to center stage. The attack infuriated two key voices in the movement, Bannon and Carlson, but there is actually no corner of the Trumpist media universe where, at the very least, one question isn’t being asked: Why are Americans putting themselves at risk for Israel’s benefit? Or, as Carlson phrased it, ‘Why is every single Republican that I’m aware of in this weird Israel worship mode all the time? And many Democrats, like Pelosi. Why is that? I’m not the only one who thinks that, and that doesn’t make me an antisemite.’

Generational gap

Research carried out at Northwestern University found that the generational gap has been a major factor in shaping attitudes toward Israel since Hamas’ attack in October 2023. The study compared people aged 18 to 24 with the those aged 65 and older. It found that only 43 percent of young people who identify as Republicans support Israel, compared to 72 percent among the 65-and-over group. Among those who identify as Democrats, 36 percent of the younger generation support Israel, compared to 56 percent among the older group.

Bannon, who is 71, may be an exception in his generation – but not in the movement he is helping to shape via his influential podcast.

A breakdown of the votes cast in the presidential election shows that Trump fomented a turnabout in America’s younger generation, winning 43 percent of the under-30 vote. That’s a spurt of 7 percent compared to his 2020 performance, and a notable spike compared to past Republican performance.

Since the 1960s, younger voters have tended to favor the Democrats. The isolationist promise not to become involved in ‘unnecessary wars,’ like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, was also a key factor in Trump’s appeal to GenX and Millennials, groups that came of age in the early 2000s.

A study conducted last year pointed to the way in which seminal historical experiences shape each American generation and its attitude toward Israel. The baby boomers, shaped by the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973), tend to view Israel as a country that needs protection. Gen X and older Millennials remember Israel as a country committed to peace during the Oslo Accords period of the early 1990s. In contrast, younger Millennials and Gen Z tend to see Israel as a militant power ruling a disenfranchised minority.

The generational gap is also apparent in media consumption. Young people get their news exclusively from the web, and in some cases, so do their parents. Their grandparents, in contrast, remain devoted viewers of Fox News and major television networks. The debate that broke out in the Trumpist movement over the war was generational, and therefore, also about the media.

‘Why do Americans have to be shown Israel – nuclear-armed Israel – 24 hours a day being bombed?’ Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wondered in an interview on Tucker Carlson’s web program. ‘Why do we have to be fed that, when we’re not being shown wars anywhere else?’

Taylor Greene is Trump’s protégé. Carlson was fired from Fox News. She’s 51, he’s 54 and both are considered leaders of the GOP’s next generation.

‘It’s because we’re being manipulated, that’s why,’ Carlson replied.

‘Mark Levin is attacking you and attacking me and calling me names, and Fox News is tolerating that, by the way, which is atrocious and pathetic,’ Greene added, referring to a Jewish broadcaster on Fox News who urged Trump to attack Iran. ‘Any other company would never allow their employees to go on their own social media and verbally berate and attack and call names to people. That’s a fireable offense… Fox News just loves war, it keeps all the baby boomers glued to the television, it helps their ratings.’

Process of reckoning

The 12-Day War between Israel and Iran – the name Trump is vigorously working to brand – will be remembered as a milestone in the annals of the Trumpist movement, which is recovering from a truly rare internal confrontation. Bannon was right when he pointed to the source of that conflict: opposition to the hated trinity of the left, immigrants and unnecessary wars. In his view, that’s the solid base of the movement. Hence the acrimonious debate.

Still, Trump was keenly aware that he makes the calls, not Bannon. ‘Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,’ he told The Atlantic magazine in an interview.

Surveys conducted among right-wing Americans during the war against Iran showed that Trump indeed possesses singular power to shape the perception of aid to Israel. He didn’t persuade his supporters that it’s worthwhile or worthy to help Israel in the war, rather he persuaded his followers that an attack on Iran was a one-time event that wouldn’t drag the United States into an unnecessary war.

The populist elite – waiting for the battle of succession to the soon-to-be octogenarian, who is barred by law from running again – are drawing conclusions independently. There is general agreement that even if Trump is a supreme and omnipotent leader, the Israeli government is working underhandedly to drag the United States back into the Middle East.

This group isn’t blind to Netanyahu’s manipulation of Trump, and they’re unlikely to forget it anytime soon. Some like to drag out from the recesses of oblivion old testimony by Netanyahu, delivered on the eve of the Iraq war, encouraging the Americans to topple Saddam Hussein and declaring that ‘only good’ would come of it.

The process of reckoning has only just begun. Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser at the Pentagon and a confidant of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, wrote recently in The Washington Post that the administration should shut down all American bases in the Middle East. ‘The Iran strike shows we don’t need bases in the Middle East,’ he argued, warning that Israel’s tendency to go to war with its neighbors is endangering American bases – as a result of which Israel could drag the United States into a war.

‘The war’s end provides an opportunity for the United States to do what it has tried and failed to do for the better part of a decade: rationalize and downscale its presence in the Middle East. We should not miss this opportunity to act,’ Caldwell wrote.

‘I felt like it was supposed to be America First, we’re focusing on: ‘What are we doing to get things back into America,’ right? Now, it feels like we are just working for Israel,’ said the popular podcaster Theo Von, who hosted Trump during his campaign last year and is credited with reintroducing him to the younger generation.

Von’s views, echoed by others, are triggering a growing online discussion about the ties between Jerusalem and Washington. Much like progressives in the Democratic Party, voices in the MAGA movement are now also questioning the legitimacy of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

When Von hosted libertarian Congressman Thomas Massie, he used the language of vested interests that characterizes the Trumpist movement. ‘What do we get from Israel?’ Von asked, and Massie replied curtly, ‘We get a lot of countries that hate us.’

Less than half of Republican voters held a positive view of Israel, even before the Iran strike. ‘I felt like it was supposed to be America First… Now, it feels like we are just working for Israel,’ said the popular podcaster Theo Von.

Rep. Taylor Greene continued the discussion with a post on X: ‘Now what has been done is done, and Americans now fear Iranian terrorist attacks on our own soil and being dragged into another war by Netanyahu, when we weren’t even thinking about any of this a week ago.’

Podcaster Tim Dillon, who interviewed Vance during the campaign, broadened the critique to include freedom of speech, which he holds dear. He questioned why freedom of speech was being curtailed on campuses in the name of protecting Israel.

‘Is this being done for America, or for Israel?’ he asked, referring to the arrest of a PhD candidate at Tufts University. ‘I mean, this is a fair question. Is the United States government now just taking edicts and orders from Israel? Is this what people voted for when they elected Trump? To have a country taking orders from Israel? I don’t think so.’

Similar questions about AIPAC came up in Carlson’s interview with Taylor Greene, only they took on a more salient religious tone. ‘Think about it this way,’ she said. ‘We all live in this house, the United States of America. If we’re giving our full allegiance to another foreign country, who doesn’t pay our taxes, will not pay off our debt, did not defend our southern border when it was invaded for four years straight, whose prime minister, Netanyahu, was the first to congratulate Joe Biden – he was the first foreign leader! – we’re opening the doors to foreigners.’

Here Carlson interjected: ‘A country that has long-standing military ties to China, which runs the port of Haifa.’

‘There is a feeling among a lot of Protestant Christians – I guess ‘evangelicals’ is the term they use – that we have a moral obligation to support the secular government of Israel,’ Carlson said. ‘God tells us we have to fight these wars for the secular government of Israel. Not that ancient nation of Israel, or the Jewish people, but for this secular government.’

Greene interjected: ‘That supports abortion, LGBTQ and supports trans. The secular government of Israel shouldn’t be telling Americans what they should or shouldn’t do with their tax dollars.’

The Washington Post recently ran a piece about young Republicans who were drawn to Trump’s isolationist message and are now going through a phase of disillusionment about Israel. ‘To be ‘America First,’ the Stars and Stripes must come before the Star of David,’ said Josiah Newman, a Christian student and member of the Republican leadership at the private Catholic Xavier University in Cincinnati.

He said he had visited Israel as a boy and had been persuaded that it was ‘the land of God’s chosen people.’

However, since October 7 the images from Gaza that he saw on social media have shocked him – especially when he realized that the bombs being used there are American-made.

He noted that he had started showing his parents images and videos of the conditions in Gaza and accused Fox News of ‘dehumanizing the Palestinians.’

‘Even my parents are a little bit more open to seeing the headlines from Gaza,’ Newman said. ‘The starvation, the cutting of humanitarian aid in the area, the bombings – until it’s basically just rubble in what were civilian areas. Their heart goes out to those people as well.’