Bipartisan Support for Israel Is Eroding, and Netanyahu Owns a Piece of It

For most of the last 50 years, backing Israel was one of the few things Republicans and Democrats agreed on in Washington. That's changing fast, and it's changing on both sides of the aisle at once.

According to The Atlantic, 19 senators in the Democratic caucus voted in 2023 to block arms sales to Israel. By this April, that number jumped to 40 out of 47. That's most of the caucus now, including multiple senators eyeing a 2028 presidential run.

This didn't happen in a vacuum. It followed the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre of Israeli civilians and the Israeli military's subsequent invasion of Gaza, which killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and drew sustained international criticism. The shift among Democratic voters was already underway before October 7, according to The Atlantic, but the war accelerated it dramatically.

The political fallout is visible in individual races and offices, not just Senate votes. New York City's mayor is now an avowed anti-Zionist who campaigned on a promise to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he set foot in the city, per The Atlantic. A Columbia University activist who attended an October 8, 2023 rally celebrating the Hamas attack is on track to win a seat in the next Congress. Senators Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, both mainstream Democrats, now make criticism of Israel a central part of their public message.

The Republican side isn't clean either

Support for Israel used to be closer to unanimous on the right than on the left. That's cracking too. Vice President JD Vance, widely viewed as a frontrunner for the 2028 GOP nomination, told podcaster Joe Rogan this month that Jeffrey Epstein "clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence." The Atlantic states plainly that no evidence supports this claim. Vance has also accused Israel of undermining his own diplomatic efforts with Iran.

A decade ago, a Republican pushing an unsubstantiated Israeli-intelligence conspiracy theory tied to Epstein would have faced serious blowback from his own party. Today that person is a heartbeat from the presidency and a likely nominee. The shift in what the GOP base and its leadership will tolerate deserves scrutiny regardless of which administration or party benefits.

Where Netanyahu fits in

Netanyahu has spent four decades cultivating a reputation as Israel's chief interpreter to America, going back to 1982 when Israel's ambassador in Washington recruited him from a furniture-marketing job because of his fluent, media-ready English. He became a fixture on Nightline and Larry King Live. Every job he's held since has included, in his own view, defending Israel's image in the U.S.

By that measure, on his own terms, he's failed. The bipartisan reflex he spent his career protecting has fractured on both flanks during his tenure as Israel's longest-serving prime minister. The war, Hamas's October 7 attack, and the scale of Gaza's civilian casualties all factored in, but it happened on his watch and, critics argue, his own conduct in Washington accelerated it rather than contained it.

The legitimate concern on the other side

It's fair to note that plenty of Israel's defenders would argue this framing understates the provocation. Hamas started the war with a massacre of over 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, and Israel has a sovereign right to respond to a terrorist attack on its civilians. Critics of the current political drift would say that conflating opposition to Netanyahu's government with opposition to Israel's existence, or excusing rhetoric that celebrates the October 7 attack, crosses a line that mainstream Democratic and Republican leaders should be more willing to call out clearly.

But the numbers here are what they are. Forty of 47 Senate Democrats voting to block arms sales in April is a measurable, sourced fact, not a partisan characterization. So is a sitting vice president floating an unsupported Epstein-Israel intelligence theory on a podcast with tens of millions of listeners.

What happens next

Whether this bipartisan erosion is temporary, tied to the current war and Netanyahu specifically, or a permanent realignment in how both parties treat Israel, is an open question. The 2026 midterms and the eventual 2028 presidential primaries on both sides will be the next real test of whether this shift sticks or reverses once Netanyahu leaves office.