The coalition breaks
For years, Israel assumed that erosion on the American left could be offset by a durable anchor on the right. That premise has now broken down in both parties. The decline on the left is no longer debatable. On the Democratic side, what was once contested is increasingly treated as settled fact: Israel is blamed first, and defended second, if at all. That shift is visible not only on the activist fringe but among figures long regarded as relatively pro-Israel, but that now throw Israel under the bus, saying it should no longer receive special U.S. military subsidies, or arguing that aid should function as leverage over Israel’s use of American-made weapons.
The right was supposed to be the safe zone, and recent polling suggests that assumption is weakening. Pew Research Center reported in July that only 51% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents viewed the Israeli government favorably. Separately, Gallup found in February 2025 that the partisan gap in favorable views of Israel had reached a record 50 points — 83% among Republicans, versus 33% among Democrats — up from the previous 30-point record a year earlier. And in a University of Maryland poll fielded in 2025, only 22% of Republicans aged 18–34 said Israel’s military actions in Gaza were justified under the right to self-defense. These findings point to a significant generational fracture on the American right. Israel is becoming a wedge issue through which the American right is fighting over identity, authority, religion and national purpose.
The Republican identity crisis
Many scholars agree that the Republican Party is now divided into three broad streams, even if they do not always agree on the exact labels. The European Council on Foreign Relations describes the three foreign-policy “tribes” as restrainers, prioritizers and primacists, while other analysts describe the same basic fracture in different terms. For the purposes of this argument, it is more useful to embrace Yoram Hazony’s division of the party into “liberal Republicans;” a national wing who currently can be seen as mainstream Republicans led by President Trump; and the alt-right. “Liberal Republicans” are the heirs of the old internationalist and institutional party; the nationalist mainstream wing remains broadly conservative but pragmatic and coalition-minded; and the alt-right camp, much of it shaped by adjacent “woke right” or isolationist currents, is more hostile to elite institutions, more suspicious of foreign commitments and more open to defining Israel as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
That third stream is no longer content to shout from the sidelines. Nick Fuentes, whose America First livestream now draws around a million views an episode, boasts that his followers have embedded themselves across the conservative ecosystem — in the administration, in youth organizations, in right-wing media — and speaks openly of leveraging his movement against the 2028 nomination. Whatever discount one applies to his bravado, the direction of travel is clear: what was an online subculture is becoming an entryist political force.
Israel as litmus test
This is why Israel has become so charged. The argument is not really about what Israel is doing, at least not in any narrow policy sense. Israel has become a litmus test for the Republican Party itself. To defend Israel is increasingly coded by one part of the right as submission to neoconservatives, donors, globalists, liberal empire or corrupted theology; to attack Israel is presented as proof of independence, authenticity, anti-elitism and civilizational clarity. What looks like a foreign-policy debate is actually an internal argument over who rules the right.
The Iran war accelerated this dynamic. In the populist right, the emotionally powerful narrative became that Israel dragged the United States into war, even though that claim was contested by reporting and by statements from administration figures indicating U.S. agency and prior awareness. That gap between narrative and reality is the key point. What matters politically is not merely what happened, but that a growing segment of the right now finds the accusation intuitive: of course Israel manipulated America, of course the war served someone else’s interests, of course the old alliance is a trap.
Since the spring, the conflict has moved from online argument into a high-profile statewide Republican contest. In Florida’s Aug. 18 gubernatorial primary, insurgent candidate James Fishback has attracted an energized cohort of younger and far-right supporters, though he remains well behind Trump-endorsed front-runner Byron Donalds in statewide polling. Fishback has said that “white genocide is real,” pledged not to enforce Florida’s antisemitism law, mocked the Western Wall as a “stupid wall” and praised Nick Fuentes as “very patriotic.” Fishback denies being antisemitic and says he condemns hatred of Jews. His campaign is not merely criticizing Israeli policy: it openly contests whether support for Israel and institutional enforcement against antisemitism should remain core expectations in Republican politics. Whatever the result, the Florida primary is an unusually visible statewide test of how much electoral space that challenge has on the American right.
The rupture reaches the very top. Tucker Carlson, once among Trump’s most prominent media backers, has repudiated the president as a “slave to Israel,” apologized to his audience for having “misled” them into voting for him, and declared that Trump has finally understood that Israel is the “biggest threat” to his administration. He now says he will not vote Republican in the midterms, while Fuentes urges his followers to stay home or vote Democrat. Israel has thus become something new in Republican politics: not merely a wedge inside the coalition, but a demobilization weapon aimed at its turnout.
Challenging the evangelical support
That theological dimension matters more than many in the Jewish world appreciate. One of the strongest pillars of American support for Israel was evangelical Christianity, but the generational trend line is unmistakably bad. Brookings reported that support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped dramatically between 2018 and 2021, and warned that the sustainability of strong religiously driven evangelical backing for Israel was in question. This July, Christianity Today reported that evangelical views of Israel have slipped to a new low. Brookings has argued that evangelical attitudes account for most of the Republican Party’s support for Israel, and that without evangelicals, Republican attitudes on Israel do not substantially deviate from the rest of America. In other words, the erosion of the evangelical foundation is not a side story, it is the essence.
And that evangelical support is not merely fading on its own. It is being actively demolished. In July, days after telling Nick Fuentes that he “hates Christian Zionists more than anybody” and that their beliefs are “anti-Christian,” Carlson devoted an entire episode to a disgraced ex-pastor under the title “Origins of Christian Zionism, How It Corrupted American Christianity and Why It’s Finally Collapsing.” The message to his millions of followers is explicit: Christian Zionism is not a conviction to be debated but a corruption to be purged.
Indeed, a growing current on the right is working to weaken the Protestant foundations of evangelical support for Israel by challenging biblical literalism and covenantal readings of scripture, while normalizing replacement theology or supersessionist claims that the Church has displaced Israel in God’s promises; academic research shows that evangelical support for Israel is closely tied to beliefs about prophecy, biblical authority and the continuing significance of the State of Israel. As younger evangelicals grow less attached to those commitments and influential right-wing voices increasingly mock or pathologize Christian Zionism, the fight over Israel becomes, in part, a fight over who gets to define orthodox Christian political theology on the American right.
What some call the “woke right” is not just anti-left populism. It often borrows the left’s moral grammar: purity tests, friend-enemy sorting, institutional capture, grievance identity and the search for hidden systems of oppression. The target is different, but the style is familiar. In that framework, Israel becomes irresistible because it sits at the intersection of war, religion, media, nationalism and Jewish visibility.
Safe spaces, schools and communal life
Two “wokes” begin to converge. Woke on the left undermines the Jewish lived experience by recoding Jewish particularism as suspect power. Woke on the right undermines the U.S.-Israel relationship by recoding support for Israel as betrayal of nation, faith and sovereignty. They speak in different vocabularies, but they are moving toward the same outcome: Israel as stigma, Jews as symbol, and Jewish communal life as something that must justify itself before increasingly hostile moral tribunals.
As a result, safe spaces, primarily universities and K-12 schools, become the first arenas in which Israel is transformed from a foreign-policy question into a moral sorting mechanism. The latest ADL audit makes the downward migration measurable: while antisemitic incidents on college campuses fell sharply last year, incidents in K-12 schools barely moved. The politicization of “safe spaces” is now moving downward into earlier civic formation, shaping how children first learn to think about Jews, Israel, and the legitimacy of Jewish communal life.
So what should be done?
First, the response has to begin with realism. There are two engageable audiences on the right, and they are not identical: evangelicals and mainstream nationalists. Sometimes they overlap, but they do not hear the same arguments from the same people. The mainstream Jewish community is not especially well positioned for this fight because it is more comfortable with liberal institutions, legacy media, establishment donors and bipartisan scripts than with the religious, populist and digital ecosystems where the new right increasingly lives. It is surely not in an ideal position to intervene in the domestic Christian theological battle.
Second, many of Israel’s natural Christian allies are not mobilized because they do not yet see the connection between isolationism, theological realignment, anti-elite nationalism and anti-Israel narratives. Too many allies still treat these as separate phenomena rather than parts of one emerging coalition. Making that connection visible should be a central task for advocacy organizations.
Third, engagement must be different for each audience, and left-wing tactics will fail in both arenas. With evangelicals, the case is theological, relational and civilizational. With mainstream nationalists, the case must be translated into the language of national interest, alliance credibility, anti-jihadist realism, minority self-defense and resistance to actual elite manipulation rather than conspiratorial fantasy.
The first counter-infrastructure is now being built. In July, allies of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — who has described right-wing antisemitism as an “existential crisis” within the GOP — launched The Front Line, a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit that reportedly raised several million dollars. Its stated mission is to make antisemitism disqualifying in Republican politics by mapping primaries at every level, running electoral messaging, and building digital monitoring and response capacity. The organization’s first announced intervention is a $400,000 ad buy against James Fishback in Florida’s Aug. 18 gubernatorial primary.
That is a welcome start, but it relies initially on a familiar mechanism: paid political advertising. The harder task is to develop credible messengers within nationalist-right ecosystems, durable coalitions and arguments that address the strategic, theological and political claims driving anti-Israel sentiment there. The issue is not only Israel policy; it is also a struggle over the Republican Party’s moral and ideological boundaries.
The U.S.-Israel relationship is not doomed, but the old logic is no longer enough. Israel cannot rely only on historical goodwill, partisan habit, or privileged access to Washington; it must prove itself again as a strategic asset that advances hard American interests across administrations and across party lines. That requires deeper integration into the emerging regional order, stronger partnerships with pragmatic regional actors and a public case for Israel that speaks not only to old allies but to the new political coalitions now shaping America. Israel is already acting on this logic: in June, Washington and Jerusalem formally opened negotiations to replace the military-aid memorandum that expires in 2028, with Israel itself proposing a gradual wind-down of direct U.S. cash assistance in favor of joint research, development and defense-industrial partnership. Israel and Jewish community organizations do not need to move to the right; they need to get this right.
Eran Shayshon, founder of Astarta (atchalta.com), a think and create tank, working to strengthen resilience and cohesion in Israel and the Jewish world. Astarta created and launched Parent-Dome, an AI platform that supports Jewish parents whose kids face antisemitism in schools; and will be launching soon Campus-Dome, a similar platform that support Jewish students on American universities.
