Michelle Goldberg: How Israel Lost Americans

Saturday, February 28, 2026

[I]t's not just Israel's policies toward the Palestinians that have eroded Americans' good will toward Israel. Perhaps as important has been Israel's role in American politics ... . Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters. As Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, told me, "When you end up using antisemitism as a pretext for kicking kids out of universities and out of the country, and you use it as a pretext for ending cancer research and use it as a pretext for undercutting the First Amendment, you're going to get some blowback against the people doing that."

Posted by Doc_Sarvis at 05:03 AM | 16 COMMENTS | permalink

The blowback will almost certainly get worse if America bombs Iran, as Netanyahu hopes it will. Americans don't want a war, and Trump hasn't bothered to explain why he might wage one. In this murk, conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because there will be a grain of truth to them. Friday's Gallup poll marks a low point in American sentiments toward Israel, but they could still have much further to fall.

Comments

"As long as the possibility of a Palestinian state remained alive, liberals who feel warmly toward Israel could tell themselves that this system of de facto apartheid was only temporary," Goldberg notes. "But Netanyahu's government has done everything in its power to make a two-state solution impossible, including, before the attacks of Oct. 7, propping up Hamas. In theory, a state that's both Jewish and democratic may be possible. Today, on the ground, it looks like a pipe dream."

#1 | Posted by Doc_Sarvis at 2026-02-28 05:05 AM

From the article cited here: drudge.com
US sympathies in Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted

... The shift began even before the Israel-Hamas war turned the issue into a flash point within the Democratic Party. Palestinian militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the initial attack and took another 251 hostage, but the Israeli response has been widely seen as disproportionate, with Gaza health officials reporting more than 72,000 Palestinians killed, nearly half of them women and children, and wide swaths of the territory reduced to rubble. Many progressive politicians and activists now describe Israel's actions in the war as genocide " a charge Israel vehemently denies.

Democrats have expressed greater sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis since 2023 " in a Gallup poll that was conducted before the Oct. 7 attacks " but Gallup's surveys show their support in the conflict has been tilting toward the Palestinians and away from the Israelis since around 2017. ...

Chart showing Gallup sympathy for Israel polling numbe5rrs since 2001: interactives.ap.org