The October 7, 2023, attack was the worst security catastrophe in Israeli history as Hamas terrorists murdered more than a thousand people in their homes and took hundreds of hostages. The aftermath and the ensuing war in Gaza have coincided with a rapidly changing political climate among its closest allies, and one that threatens to alter the Jewish state’s international relations significantly.
In the United States, long Israel’s most reliable and stalwart ally, support for Israel has turned partisan. At the same time, in the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Party, the issue has become further fuel for a generational divide that has already laid waste to much of the party’s previously established orthodoxies.
According to recent polling from Pew Research, since 2022, negative views about Israel have increased dramatically across the political spectrum. But the change is most pronounced among Democrats and young people. According to the poll, the portion of Democrats with an unfavorable view of Israel increased from 53% in 2022 to 69% in 2025. Among Republicans, it increased from 27% to 37%. Among Republicans under the age of 50, unfavorable views of Israel increased from 35% to 50%, while Democrats in the same group increased from 62% to 71%.
The generational divide among conservatives was on full display last week at the National Conservatism Conference, which hosted a debate on U.S. military support for Israel, and, in particular, the June bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. The panel featured Northeastern University professor Max Abrahms arguing in favor of the Iran strike, and Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, arguing against it, while criticizing the U.S. relationship with Israel. Daniel McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Modern Age, moderated the discussion.
The audience for this one breakout session was standing room only, and it included several high-profile figures in the conservative political movement, including the conference’s organizer, Yoram Hazony; Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation; and The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre, to name a few.
While Mills repeatedly attacked the U.S.’s relationship with Israel, Abrahms made a point to say that the two men agreed on one thing: What is in Israel’s interests is not necessarily in the U.S.’s interest. And this became the central point of the panel segment that featured audience questions, where the generational divide was laid bare for all to see. Practically every question that a younger person asked showed sympathy with Mills, repeating the common theme of “what is good for Israel is not necessarily good for the United States.”
There is little question that many critics of the Jewish state are doing so not out of a genuine concern for the direction of U.S. foreign policy, but because they harbor animosity against Jews. But among Gen Z conservatives, including many of those who are engaged in politics, the growing unfavorability toward Israel is a far more complicated issue that cannot be reduced to anti-Jewish prejudice. This issue, like many others within the establishment conservative movement, has emerged as a flashpoint between the older generation of political elites and the younger generations of elites who aspire not only to replace them but also to challenge and discard the political orthodoxies they espouse.
While the vast majority of the pro-Palestinian (and arguably pro-Hamas) activists on the political Left have repeatedly questioned the legitimacy and even the existence of the state of Israel, skepticism of Israel among young conservatives who are entering the political fray rarely, if ever, questions the existence of Israel as a state.
While my anecdotal experience is hardly representative, the vast majority of young conservatives I’ve spoken to who have questioned the degree to which the United States supports Israel believe that the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, were a horrific crime against humanity that required a significant and forceful response.
While the Left focuses on the war in Gaza, discussions about Israel on the right veer into much larger questions about the role of the United States in the world and its relationships with all governments, not just the government of Israel. For these Gen Z conservatives, the source of this growing unfavorability toward Israel is largely contained in the question of what the relationship between the United States and Israel should be, not whether Israel should exist. And how that question is answered cannot be separated from the emergence of a hardline anti-elite consensus among the younger voices in the conservative movement.
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Further compounding the issue is the fact that the Evangelical Protestant teaching of “dispensationalism” wherein support for Israel is grounded in beliefs about events necessary for End Times and the Second Coming of Christ to occur, has far less salience among a younger generation that is in one sense far less religious overall, but also much more aligned with the Catholic Church, which has no dispensationalist tradition.
In a recent interview, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a remarkably candid admission when he said, “I think that we’ve not been winning [the propaganda war], to put it mildly.” And while he may be right when it comes to the perception of Israel among the world at large and within the Democratic Party, Netanyahu has shown himself to have a rather significant blind spot when it comes to slipping support among conservatives.
While older generations of conservatives have generally supported U.S. interventions in the Middle East, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere in the region, perceptions of the area among the Gen Z right are in many ways colored by the disaster of Iraq and the failures in Afghanistan. It is impossible to understand why Israel is losing support among young conservatives without grappling with the reality that American involvement in the entire Middle East region for the last 25 years has yielded few positive results.
For Netanyahu in particular, this is a difficult reality to navigate. In 2002, while out of power, he was invited to testify before Congress and argued that the U.S. should invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. To date, he has never acknowledged that the war was a mistake, putting him at odds with what has emerged as a universal consensus among Americans of all political stripes.
By not acknowledging the Iraq War as the disaster that it was, Netanyahu is associating himself with the losing side of an ongoing war on political elites. For many on the Gen Z right, the entire political project they espouse is grounded in a rejection of the elites who are vanguards of a political order that failed them. It is precisely why President Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his support for Israel, was able to expand his support among these very Israel-skeptic young voters in the 2024 election. He promised to be a hammer against a corrupt system and destroy the order that the existing political elites had created.
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While it is certainly possible that, with the benefit of hindsight, Netanyahu would not have advised the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003, his failure to recognize the anti-establishment sentiments percolating in the body politic of his most important ally is hardly doing his country any favors. The fact that unquestioned support for Israel was once a bipartisan proposition among the political elite is now a serious liability precisely because it associates the issue with the out-of-touch political elite that young voters seek to destroy.
The consequences of the Gen Z Right’s anti-Israel turn will inevitably change US-Israel relations. In many ways, this is a warning for Israel of the perils of relying so heavily on foreign support. If it doesn’t find a way to speak to young conservatives soon, Israel’s support may wither quickly in the U.S.
