Many posts have discussed relations between the US and Israel
American voters’ feelings on Israel and the Palestinian territories have shifted dramatically in recent years, in a sea change that is transforming the Democratic Party and shaping its primaries.
A new NBC News poll underscores the depths of the shift. More registered voters view Israel negatively than positively, a change from a few years ago. The change has been especially pronounced among independents and Democrats, fueling divided congressional primaries in 2026 and potentially shaping the party’s 2028 presidential contest.
Some conflict was inevitable between a US Democratic Party (and an American Jewish community) grounded in the left and an Israeli electorate that has mostly moved right since the 1990s. But Netanyahu has systematically widened that divide by consistently and almost exclusively cultivating the American right. “Netanyahu decided 20 years ago that evangelical Christians, conservative Jews and the Republicans were his natural constituency, and he’s given up. He doesn’t care about the rest,” says Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former top State Department adviser on the Middle East.
To win his first election as prime minister in 1996, Netanyahu recruited Arthur Finkelstein, a legendary strategist among the Republican far right. Once in office, Netanyahu commissioned a study by a group of US neoconservatives that urged both “a clean break” from the Palestinian peace process and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Netanyahu clashed so vehemently with Democratic President Bill Clinton over his push for a two-state peace agreement that Clinton famously left his first meeting with the Israeli leader angrily declaring “who’s the f---ing superpower here?”
