A new Pew Research report showing plummeting public support for Israel in the United States confirms a trend since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks on Israel. The paradox of Hamas’s rampage is that it triggered an Israeli counteroffensive, from Gaza to Lebanon to Iran, that left Israel’s rivals dramatically weakened but also extracted a real political cost for Israel in American and world opinion.
The top line from Pew is that just 37 percent of Americans viewed Israel favorably a few weeks into the Iran war, compared with 60 percent who viewed it unfavorably. That minus-23 net approval compares with a minus-8 approval a year ago and a plus-13 approval the year before the Oct. 7 attacks.
The drop is bipartisan and most pronounced among young people. American and Israeli hawks argue that it’s more important for the Jewish state to be secure within its borders than politically popular in the U.S.. But an Israel poorly regarded by the electorate of its superpower backer will have a harder time remaining secure within its borders. The Iran war and its potential aftermath illustrate this point.
The justifications for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran have shifted, but the most internally consistent case is that it was now or never. Iran regards Israel and the U.S. as mortal enemies, and, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, its rapid accumulation of ballistic missiles and drones would have afforded it “immunity” from attack in “about a year or a year and a half.”
If the trend lines on ballistic missiles help explain why President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to strike now, the trend lines in American public opinion are just as relevant. Iran would also have acquired a degree of immunity from attack if the U.S. elected a president more inclined to restrain Israel than Trump. Virtually all Democratic contenders, and many Republican contenders, likely fit that bill.
The “now or never” rationale for this war, in other words, was probably political as well as military. Trump and Netanyahu saw an opening to do something that might be foreclosed in the future both by Iran’s missile development and the political trajectory in the U.S. They took it. But one consequence might be the further erosion of Israel’s standing in the U.S. electorate.
This is the logic of a bank run, and it’s where Israel’s calculation starts to look more dubious. The regime that rules Iran will remain hostile to Israel after this war, and perhaps become more so after the assassination of its leadership. Iran’s offensive capabilities have been badly eroded, but Russia and China can help rebuild them. As Elliot Kaufman put it in the Wall Street Journal recently: “The only lasting way to end the danger from Iran’s missiles, drones and boats is to topple the regime that turns them into an unacceptable threat.”
Now the Trump administration has disclaimed toppling the regime as a war aim, and Trump has also tried out the line that the killing of Iran’s prior leadership already amounts to regime change. Regardless, the existence of an anti-Israel and anti-American government in Iran means the threat will persist indefinitely.
Israel will continue to rely on U.S. military power to counter that threat. For how long will Washington be reliably willing to play that role? Foreign policy decisions don’t correspond perfectly with polling, but in a democracy like the U.S., popular preferences are inevitably reflected in policy over the long term.
Contrary to the notion of an “Israel lobby” dictating American policy toward Israel, the U.S. has often supported Israel because the American people want a pro-Israel foreign policy. The corollary: If the American people don’t want a pro-Israel policy, the policy will change. The U.S. and Israel were never co-belligerents in any war in Israel’s 78-year history until last year; Trump and Netanyahu’s assault on Iran has attached Israel to an unpopular U.S. war in the Middle East directly and for the first time.
Israel had to take actions after Oct. 7 that would harm its public standing in parts of the West, and some people criticize any Israeli act of self-defense. But the decision to try to change Iran’s regime in an offensive war was a historic gamble with American opinion that so far isn’t paying off. While Israel has historically looked for ways to live with and deter threats in a dangerous region, this campaign represents the post-Oct. 7 mindset that the Iranian threat had to be eliminated altogether, once and for all.
That was a heady, even intoxicating, goal. Netanyahu saw a moment of opportunity under a strongly pro-Israel president of an increasingly Israel-skeptical U.S. The result so far looks like a war that will leave Tehran’s threatening regime in place while draining the political reservoir of American goodwill toward Israel. The results will be felt in a future round of fighting — perhaps in the next administration, or perhaps even sooner.
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