Israel’s critics are winning the battle for the Democratic Party

The politics of Israel have shifted inside the Democratic Party — and staunch defenders of the Jewish nation are growing scarcer and scarcer.

On Wednesday, 40 out of 47 Democratic senators voted to block a military sale to Israel — far higher opposition than had been previously seen on any similar measure. It was the most dramatic sign yet of the party’s rapid turn toward a more confrontational approach, and one that Democratic supporters and critics of Israel alike believe is nowhere near finished.

The tally left pro-Israel Democrats “shocked and disillusioned,” Marc Rod of the publication Jewish Insider reported. These divides were on display on Thursday, when voters in New Jersey’s 11th District elected Analilia Mejia, who ran as a fierce left-wing critic of Israel in a special House election. While she won handily, historic Jewish towns like Livingston and Milburn swung against her by massive double-digit margins compared to their presidential vote, a rarity in an otherwise strongly Democratic year.

“It’s disturbing for supporters of Israel who’ve long needed and counted on bipartisan support — and had it,” a Democratic operative who has long been involved in Jewish causes told me. “It’s growing, and it’s hard to tell where it’s going to end up, but it’s not good.”

But while the old pro-Israel consensus of bipartisan unconditional aid is clearly dead, reaching a new one will be harder. Operatives in different camps across the Democratic spectrum are unsure how far the current trend will go, and whether Israel faces a mere correction in its relationship or risks fully falling out of the US orbit in a future administration.

The reason for the change, however, is straightforward: Democrats’ voters have shifted.

Back in 2022, a slight majority of Democratic voters — 53 percent — viewed Israel unfavorably. Since then, the devastation Israel brought about in Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks gravely damaged the country’s reputation — as has the new Iran war President Donald Trump launched alongside Israel this year.

Now, a whopping 80 percent of Democrats or adults who lean toward Democrats view Israel unfavorably, per Pew Research polling conducted last month.

As a result, politicians are responding — and not just those in safe blue states or progressive jurisdictions. The 40 senators who voted to block the military sale Wednesday included several who are from swing states and are rumored to have presidential ambitions: Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego from Arizona, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.

The shift has been slower among leaders of the party and its key organizations: the DNC, House and Senate leadership, and party fundraising committees. These officials, such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who voted to approve the arms sales to Israel Wednesday, have condemned the Iran war and criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, while trying to make clear they still support the country as an ally.

But this may not be tenable, given how their party has moved underneath them. The issue will likely play a significant role in the 2028 primaries. The stakes are enormous — and activists critical of Israel feel encouraged by their success so far, and emboldened to push further.

The collapse in Democratic support for Israel played out in three main phases.

Back during Barack Obama’s presidency, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party increasingly soured on Israel, as Netanyahu clashed with the Obama administration over Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank and, most notably, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Indeed, Netanyahu came to Congress to give a speech condemning the Iran deal, seeming to align himself with Republicans and infuriating many Democrats. Still, outside of the activist world and plugged-in elites, Israel was rarely front-of-mind for Democratic voters in Trump’s first term or the first few years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

That changed with the Gaza war, which made Israel a constant topic on news and social media for years. An initial surge of sympathy for Israel after the October 7 attacks gave way to increasing horror over the civilian toll of its reprisals in Gaza — and Biden seemed either unwilling or unable to stop it. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders continued to disparage any talk of an eventual Palestinian state, which had long been the centerpiece of Democratic hopes for a durable peace in the region.

“This was a genocide that played out in real time and that had an impact. Kids were watching it,” James Zogby, a Democratic pollster who has advocated for the Palestinian cause inside the party since the 1970s, argued. Still, there was an age divide, with older Democrats much more likely to view Israel favorably.

Now, the events of Trump’s second term — in which the US has twice attacked Iran alongside Israel — has shaken that up, too.

“Once Trump won, we started to see really massive polling changes among older Democrats who had supported Israel,” Hamid Bendaas of the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a pro-Palestinian advocacy group, told me. “Part of that is the partisan-ization of Israel, seeing Netanyahu as a Trump ally.”

Now, it’s increasingly a consensus inside the Democratic Party that tougher pressure tactics against Israel are called for — but there’s still disagreement over how far to go, with those on the left of the party pushing further.

With increasing opposition inside the party to financing “offensive” weapons for Israel, the left flank is now pushing to go further.

One idea is to cut off US financing for “defensive weaponry,” such as the interceptors used in the Iron Dome missile defense system that defends Israel from rockets fired by Hamas and Hezbollah (and which the US has spent billions to help finance). Some House progressives have recently backed this idea — though some of them stress that Israel should still be allowed to purchase defensive weaponry from the US with its own money.

Another is to end all direct US funding for Israel’s military, which the progressive Jewish group J Street called for this week. Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) recently voiced support for that idea. Many observers believe US policy is headed here, in part because Israel is now a very wealthy nation that doesn’t really need US aid.

“There’s a growing understanding that aid money is fungible and that any amount of aid that the US is giving frees up [Israel’s] own money to spend on things we don’t like,” Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told me. (Duss has reportedly been briefing Ocasio-Cortez, a potential 2028 presidential contender, on foreign policy this year.)

Asked what the next Democratic president should do upon taking office, Duss said he or she should immediately “halt all arms sales — not just to Israel, but generally to governments that have been engaged in human rights abuses.”

Some left activist groups have other priorities, such as urging Democrats to call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. Bendaas said his polling shows increased support for using sanctions on Israel similar to those used against apartheid South Africa.

“I do think that’s probably where the conversation is headed by 2028,” Bendaas said. “But the realms of possibility are moving so fast, it’s kind of hard to pin down sometimes.”

The agreement among progressives that Israel needs to be pressured more masks a deeper disagreement over: to what end?

Several advocates I interviewed pointed to a divide between the progressives hoping to salvage the US-Israel relationship, versus the leftists who are willing or even eager to outright end it.

Often these debates touch on fundamental differences in opinion about the legitimacy of the state — between “liberal Zionist” critics of Israel who also see a democratic Jewish nation as an important refuge for a historically oppressed minority and under dire threat from its neighbors, and “anti-Zionist” critics who are gaining ground in left-wing activism and see Israel as an inherently repressive entity built on ethnic supremacy and colonialism.

On the progressive side, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami told me that while there’s a need to reassess the terms of the US-Israel relationship, he was not seeking to reassess “the friendship” or “the notion that the United States is going to have Israel’s back.”

But on the left, said Bendaas, “There’s a set of folks who are more interested in: how do we actually separate and make the US and Israel less enmeshed in the future.”

The primary in New Jersey’s recent special election was emblematic of this split. The pro-Israel group AIPAC’s campaign arm spent millions to defeat not Mejia, but Tom Malinowski, a more moderate Democrat who was critical of Netanyahu and open to putting conditions on aid. Malinowski described himself as a “pro-Israel” voice seeking to correct a wayward ally; Mejia, the winning candidate, was harsher in her rhetoric and accused Israel of “genocide.”

Progressives hoping to salvage the relationship are optimistic that Israel’s elections this year will depose Netanyahu for good, allowing for a reset with a fresh face. However, the more dovish Israeli left has long been in decline and polls show many of Netanyahu’s policies on Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran retain strong support among the Israeli people — making a sharp change in approach seem unlikely.

So what then? What if the pressure tactics fail to change Israel’s security calculus, as they have so many times before?

If the Democrats retake power in 2028, they’ll have to try and answer that question.