Yitzhak Rabin’s name matters little to most Americans younger than 40. The Israeli prime minister who staked his career, and ultimately his life, on brokering a peace with the Palestinians was assassinated in 1995 by one of his very own countrymen. His murder cleared the path for the era of Benjamin Netanyahu. Thirty years on, that epoch shows little sign of ending soon. But the economic and political ground beneath it is shifting fast.
The marked shift in American political opinion is already striking. A total of 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavourably, according to polls from Pew Research. Among the young that number is much higher; three-quarters of 19- to 29-year-olds sympathise more with Palestinians than Israelis. The implications of this generational arithmetic are self-evident. As pro-Israeli Boomers die off, the next generation – shaped more by the horrific footage from Gaza on their social media feeds than Cold War era solidarity with Israel – will shape the politics of the world’s most powerful country. Fewer Americans think of Israel as David standing up to the Arab world’s Goliath. More associate it with heavy-handed genocidal militarism.
An economy that is already showing signs of strain, especially for most Americans on Main Street, will compound that trajectory. History has shown that almost without exception, when Americans feel financially squeezed, their appetites for expensive foreign misadventures waver. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are only some of the most obvious examples. The $3.8-billion annual subsidy to Israel, long treated as untouchable, has begun to attract the scrutiny that endless pro-Israel lobbying on Capitol Hill once suppressed.
Iran war is hardening opinions on Israel
The absurd, Catch-22 conflict with Iran that the US has stumbled into – branded Operation Epic Fury, but increasingly looking like an Epic Failure – has made the fiscal arithmetic materially worse. The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. Energy prices have surged. In parts of the US, petrol is over $6 a gallon. Maritime supply chains are in disarray, with food prices already surging. A global recession is no longer a tail risk.
If this happens, Israel will not escape the fallout, and Netanyahu will bear personal responsibility. He was by far the most prominent voice urging Trump to strike Iran, as written at length in the New York Times. The president’s own advisers – Marco Rubio at State, JD Vance at the vice-presidency, and even John Ratcliffe at the CIA – expressed clear scepticism. Netanyahu, who knows precisely how or why, prevailed. The exact reasons are sure to be revealed in the fullness of time. But more immediately, the American public has noticed.
The Democratic Party has already drawn its conclusion. Forty of the 47 Democratic senators voted last month to block US arms sales to Israel. Aipac, the formidable pro-Israel lobby, still insists on its bipartisan ability to influence US politics. Democrats, however, are no longer buying it. They are increasingly wary of accepting what is widely seen as tainted money.
Netanyahu’s longstanding tactic of branding any Jewish American critic of Israel as a “self-hating Jew” has contributed to this unravelling. Similarly, pro-Israel groups have spent years accusing anyone who noted Netanyahu’s influence in Washington as anti-Semitic. But deployed so promiscuously, and blatantly erroneously, such a charge has lost its force.
Outlook for Trump and Netanyahu looks grim
The immediate diplomatic challenge is to find some sort of exit from the current stalemate with Iran, on relatively amenable terms. Any deal Trump can plausibly achieve is unlikely to improve much on the nuclear agreement that Obama concluded in 2015 – and which Netanyahu condemned before a joint session of Congress, saying it was “very bad”. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, now at about 440kg and enough for about 10 nuclear weapons – expanded largely because Trump, at Netanyahu’s urging, withdrew from that deal.
Trump is aiming for an indefinite suspension of enrichment, against Obama’s 15 years. But to the Iranians, this is unthinkable. If Trump settles for anything less, and fails to curb Iran’s ballistic missile programme and to sever Iran’s ties with its regional proxies, for Netanyahu it will be a colossal failure.
Both countries face elections later this year, albeit only midterms in the US. Netanyahu is too canny a political operator to risk a full rupture with Trump before polling day; his strongest trump card, pun notwithstanding, remains his argument that it is only he who can ensure full US commitment to shielding the state of Israel, both politically and militarily. But the longer-term prognosis is grim. Democratic presidential hopefuls are competing to distance themselves most credibly from Israeli policy. Barring a self-coronation and a third Trump term, whoever eventually succeeds Trump in 2028 is likely to be far less sympathetic and indulgent of Israeli bloodlust.
If the economy has soured in the interim, the stock market has fallen, or energy costs have bitten deeper into American living standards – the political space for defending Israel will have narrowed even further. Regardless of all the lobbying they might do, support for Israel as a topic on the campaign trail would have moved from merely awkward and divisive to downright toxic.
There is an obvious irony to all this. The dead-end conflict that Netanyahu engineered to neutralise an unproven Iranian threat may end up accelerating the erosion of American support, which is by far Israel’s most important strategic asset. That this asset is indeed of existential importance to Israel will not be lost on any Israeli voters. Economic pain has a way of clarifying priorities. American voters who once might have supported Israel out of habit or sentiment will find it a harder call should they be asked to pay for it at the petrol pump or grocery till.
The US economy may well muddle through, thanks to its structural advantages of energy independence, deep capital markets, a vast and fully integrated domestic consumer market, and a leading technology sector. These continue to put it at a strength compared with Europe. But resilience is not equivalent to immunity. Netanyahu has spent decades cultivating American subservience to Israel. He may however be about to discover how quickly an economic headwind can destroy it. DM