‘The war needs to end': Is the US right turning on Israel?

The Guardian

3 days ago

As the Israel-Gaza war nears its two-year mark, and as images of starving people and utter devastation flood social media, cracks seem to be emerging in the American right's typically iron-clad support for Israel.
The US continues to support Israel diplomatically and militarily, and last Thursday pulled out of peace negotiations that it accused Hamas of sabotaging. And in the US Congress, only two Republicans voted for a recent amendment that would have pulled funding for missile defense systems for Israel.
Yet the war's duration and human cost, as well as recent Israeli strikes on Christian targets, have spurred modest signs of discontent on the US right. Some conservative commentators have walked back their support for Israel's war; the US's famously Zionist ambassador to Israel rebuked the actions of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and an unresolved rift over foreign intervention continues to plague the Maga world.
To some extent this mirrors trends in US sentiment overall. A recent CNN poll found a steep decline in US support for Israel since the war started. That drop was most dramatic among respondents who identified as Democrats or independents, but the poll also found that since 2023 the percentage of surveyed Republicans who believe that Israel's actions are justified fell from 68% to 52%.
It's highly likely that depictions of starvation in the territory – where 147 people have reportedly starved to death, including 88 children, and nearly one in three people are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations – have played a role. On Monday, Donald Trump partly contradicted Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that there is no starvation in Gaza, telling reporters: 'That's real starvation … I see it, and you can't fake that. So, we're going to be even more involved.' Trump made the statement while visiting Britain, where the Daily Express, considered the country's most rightwing mainstream tabloid, recently ran a headline decrying hunger in Gaza: 'FOR PITY'S SAKE STOP THIS NOW.'
A recent spate of Israeli attacks on Christian targets in Gaza and the West Bank have also angered some American conservatives. Last Thursday, after an Israeli tank fired on the sole Catholic church in Gaza – killing three people and wounding nine, including a priest – a reportedly upset Trump called Netanyahu to complain.
A few days after the church shelling, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, visited Taybeh, a Palestinian Christian town in the West Bank that has been repeatedly attacked by Israeli settlers, who earlier this month set a fire near a fifth-century church. In a statement, Huckabee described the attack as 'an absolute travesty' and 'an act of terror' and called for the perpetrators to be prosecuted. (He did not directly implicate the Israeli government or settlers.)
Although there have long been isolationist and populist elements on the right skeptical of the United States' close alliance with Israel, their point of view has been eclipsed in recent history by the pro-Israel camp, which enjoys strong support among American evangelical Christians.
Huckabee is an evangelical Christian who has described himself as an 'unapologetic, unreformed Zionist'. Like many evangelicals, he believes that Israel has a divine claim to the West Bank, and has famously declared that 'there is no such thing as a Palestinian.'
That Huckabee issued such a strong statement on Taybeh 'was surprising,' Todd Deatherage said. Deatherage is the co-founder of Telos, a non-profit that works to give US policymakers and religious groups a more nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Huckabee's gesture, he said, seems to indicate 'some complexity in a movement that didn't have complexity around this before'.
Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative journalist and commentator, described Huckabee's statement as remarkable 'given how much of a kind of Boomer evangelical Huckabee is'.
Huckabee also recently called for Israel to 'aggressively investigate' the murder of Sayfollah 'Saif' Musallet, a Palestinian American man who was recently beaten to death by settlers in the West Bank, according to his family.
The events abroad also seem to have made ripples in the US conservative media sphere.
The Israeli government said that the church strike was a battlefield mistake, but in a recent episode of his talk show, Michael Knowles, a rightwing American pundit, expressed skepticism. 'I've been broadly supportive of the state of Israel,' Knowles, who is Catholic, said in the segment. 'And you're losing me.' The Israeli government 'is really screwing up, is really not playing its cards right', he argued. 'The war needs to come to an end. How long is the war gonna go on?'
He added: 'America is the only friend that Israel has on planet Earth. I do not get what the Israeli government is doing here, but I suspect there will be political consequences – as there should be.' Some critics in the comments section of Knowles' video accused him of only noticing deaths in Gaza once the victims were conspicuously Christian.
The Free Press, the online publication founded by Bari Weiss to challenge what she describes as an establishment liberal media, recently published an article arguing that although past claims about hunger in Gaza were 'lies', the territory is now rapidly entering a 'real hunger crisis'. The Free Press has generally taken a fervently pro-Israel stance.
Similarly, Joe Rogan, the everyman podcaster who threw his support to Trump in the last election, has refused to host Netanyahu on his podcast, the premier's son, Yair Netanyahu, claimed on Friday. And Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, published an op-ed on Saturday arguing that Israel's military operation has crossed into being 'unjust'.
Although the US right is perceived today as staunchly pro-Israel, recent history is more complicated, Deatherage noted; George HW Bush's Republican administration undertook a political fight with Israel about Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The right's pro-Israel stance really hardened after 9/11, he said, when Christian conservatives and defense hawks embraced the view that the US and Israel were allies against Islamic terror.
The modern iteration of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) was founded in 2006 to facilitate US evangelical support for Israel. The organization's membership is significantly larger than Aipac, the pro-Israel organization founded by Jewish Americans. Trump's alliance with the religious right during his first term intensified the political power of Christian Zionism.
'That part of the evangelical movement really gained unprecedented access to being heard,' Deatherage said.
Some Christian Zionists, particularly evangelicals, believe there are Biblical justifications for the US supporting Israel. A small subset believe that a showdown between Israel and enemy states could presage the End of Days, Daniel Hummel, a historian of Christian Zionism, said. The recent strike on Iran sparked apocalyptic speculation in some Christian circles, he noted.
Yet polling data suggests a generational divide. Younger evangelicals, like younger Americans broadly, are more skeptical of Zionism, and the gap seems to be growing.
A 2021 survey by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke found that only 33.6% of American evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Israel, down from 69% surveyed in a similar poll in 2018. Research by the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll has found similar shifts among younger evangelicals.
'Younger evangelicals in particular are kind of renegotiating what it means to be a Christian in the public square,' Deatherage said. 'And they're not thrilled by the bargain that the older generation maybe made with politics.'
The topic of Christian Zionism came up during a heated episode of Tucker Carlson's talk show, this June, featuring Senator Ted Cruz. Carlson is one of the major faces of an America First camp in the Maga movement that views the American alliance with Israel with increasing suspicion. During the conversation, Cruz cited a Bible verse as one of the reasons that he supports Israel. Carlson responded by testily mocking the notion that foreign policy objectives should be determined by biblical exegesis.
On the fringes, criticisms of Israel have sometimes been intertwined with outright antisemitism. The far-right pundit Candace Owens, for example, has often disparaged Israel in conspiratorial terms.
Yet skepticism of Israel has also gained some credible intellectual traction on the more mainstream Maga right, particularly among a group of mostly younger conservative activists, political staffers and policy wonks sometimes known in Washington DC as the 'restrainers'. These are generally pro-Trump conservatives who, while not necessarily outright isolationists, believe that the US should protect its own national interests even if this means scaling back – or 'restraining' – allies such as Israel.
The term is subjective and contentious, but the Pentagon's policy chief, Elbridge Colby; the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, Mike DiMino; and JD Vance himself are sometimes considered examples.
Pro-Israel Republicans and hawks still mostly hold the whip hand, but Deatherage believes a political window for rethinking the US's relationship for Israel may be opening on the right. 'There's a lot of pressure on [Trump] to support whatever the Israeli government is doing. But there's now some really dissenting voices on the other side of that.'