The End of the U.S.-Israel Alliance

A joint war against Iran might be its apex.

June 15, 2026

By Joshua Leifer, a columnist for Haaretz.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/15/israel-united-states-special-relationship-palestine-netanyahu-trump

It would seem that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accomplished what his predecessors could only have dreamed of: U.S. and Israeli fighter jets flying tandem over Tehran, Israeli officers ensconced in U.S. Central Command’s Florida headquarters. Since the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s leaders have sought backing from the world’s preeminent superpower, which they hoped would guarantee their state’s survival into perpetuity. None could have imagined the level of cooperation currently on display. If one were to wake up the Old Man, as Ben-Gurion was known, from his otherworldly slumber in the sands of Sde Boker, he would surely delight in the news.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. In one sense, the U.S.-Israel relationship is at its apogee. Viewed from another angle, it has already entered a period of terminal decline. The political, ideological, and sociological pillars on which the so-called special alliance rested for most of the last half-century have begun to collapse. The Israel-advocacy complex—the network of lobbying groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Jewish communal organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, and Christian Zionist groups such as Christians United for Israel—was once a juggernaut on Capitol Hill. In today’s climate of hyperpolarization, it has started to falter, challenged first by the progressive flank of the Democratic Party and now increasingly by the neoisolationist faction of the MAGA coalition.

Public opinion has shifted dramatically. Less than half of Americans now say U.S. support for Israel is in the national interest; for the first time, Americans also view Palestinians more sympathetically than they do Israelis. Nor is it any longer a given that Americans and Israelis hold a common set of cultural and religious values. As the United States has become less Christian and more diverse, Israeli society has become more traditionalist, its public culture more insular. On both the U.S. right and left, antisemitism has also begun to seep from the margins into the political mainstream, seen by growing numbers of people, especially among the young and disaffected, as a marker of anti-establishment bona fides in populist times.

These shifts were well underway before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. But Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, its blockade and starvation of the devastated territory, and spiraling settler violence in the occupied West Bank—all livestreamed over social media for more than two years—greatly accelerated them, generating an anti-Israel backlash that has become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary U.S. politics. If indeed the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran constitutes the apex of the special alliance, what follows will be the fall.

The special alliance was not always so special. While it was U.S. President Harry Truman who recognized Israel, his successor Dwight D. Eisenhower was notably chilly toward the state, wary of upsetting the U.S. strategic calculus in the early Cold War. John F. Kennedy broke with Ike’s arms embargo and was the first to supply Israel with U.S. arms; Richard Nixon, or rather his advisor Henry Kissinger, rescued Israel in 1973, engineering the crucial airlift of military aid that staved off defeat in the Arab-Israeli war. Still, the relationship had its limits. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush all knew how to say no to Israel’s leaders—sometimes forcefully in terms that today would shock, sometimes with the threat of material consequences—and little feared the Israel-advocacy complex, which was a relative welterweight compared with the heft it would throw around by the mid-1990s.

The end of the Cold War brought the United States and Israel into closer alignment. The relationship was no longer tempered by broader U.S. considerations of global great-power equilibrium. There developed what international relations scholars call a “community of strategic interests.” Israel assumed the role of enforcer of the new U.S.-led international order in the Middle East. With the launch of the global war on terrorism, U.S. and Israeli interests seemed to converge even further. In terms the pliant U.S. media reflexively echoed, U.S. and Israeli leaders framed their countries’ interests as identical and their foes, whether Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda or Yasser Arafat and the PLO, two sides of the same radical, terrorist coin.

That overlap of strategic interests was, in turn, bolstered by a widespread sense of shared values. At the very moment the United States embarked on democracy promotion abroad, Israeli leaders boasted of the country’s uniqueness as the region’s sole democratic state. For those who saw the war on terrorism in civilizationist terms, Israel was the front-line defender in the struggle between the Judeo-Christian West and its Islamist enemies. American liberals, meanwhile, were inclined to see in Israel an exemplary open society amid a black sea of authoritarian Arab regimes, conservative theocracies, and Islamist militants. From Bill Clinton through George W. Bush, U.S. policy in the Middle East was dominated alternately by Atlanticist liberal interventionists and their more sharp-elbowed cousins, the neoconservatives.

For the growing Israel-advocacy complex, this was favorable ground for maneuvering. AIPAC could marshal near-unanimous support for Israel across both parties, while its aligned think tanks maintained a revolving door between Republican and Democratic administrations. Advocates for Palestinian rights, for their part, lacked any comparable apparatus, and few Palestinian writers were being published in mainstream outlets, unlike today. Meanwhile, complaints about the Israel lobby’s power were, for the most part, relegated to the conspiratorial fringes where the boundaries of the far left blurred with the far right. And with Holocaust memorial culture at its peak—the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993—an accusation of antisemitism still carried its career-ending severity.

It was the pro-Israel right, not the pro-Palestinian left, that shattered the bipartisan consensus in Washington. The pivotal year was 2015. Then, as now, the issue was Iran. As the Obama administration pushed for a nuclear deal, the Israel-advocacy complex went to war against the widely popular Democratic president. AIPAC dumped roughly $40 million into lobbying against the nuclear deal. Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress without first notifying the president, a move widely seen as a politicized breach of procedure and basic decorum. Behind the lectern, Netanyahu lambasted the Obama administration’s deal-in-the-making that would “only change the Middle East for the worse.”

The Israel-advocacy complex’s blitz failed to stop the nuclear deal. Instead, it demolished its own vestigial facade of bipartisanship. Pro-Israel groups soon began to function openly as a wing of the Republican Party, especially as Jewish communal organizations shed the pretense of representing the views of most American Jews in favor of the priorities of right-wing megadonors. Trump’s first term deepened this process of partisan polarization on Israel even further. He embraced a hawkish pro-Israel line far to the right of any previous administration: shuttering the PLO’s office in Washington, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Trump has arguably done more to push rank-and-file Democrats away from Israel than any pro-Palestinian activist.

2015 also marked a turning point in Israel’s trajectory. Over the course of a bruising election campaign, Netanyahu appeared to radicalize. He eschewed the image of the Israeli right’s responsible adult and embraced the style of authoritarian populism ascendant around the globe. Whereas Netanyahu had previously given lip service to a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, he pivoted toward open territorial maximalism. After his 2019 indictment on corruption charges, Netanyahu grew ever more desperate in his attempts to remain in power. He forged electoral alliances with the most extreme forces in Israeli political life, not only normalizing the followers of the quasi-fascist rabbi Meir Kahane and hard-line messianic settlers but empowering them as ministers in his government.

Against the backdrop of democratic backsliding within Israel proper and the deepening occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza, vanishingly few American liberals could claim to share values with their Israeli counterparts. Meanwhile, a new generation of progressives came of age having known only the Israel of Netanyahu. That generational cohort was more diverse than any before it, comprising, to a significant degree, the children of immigrants from South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Many of them rejected the U.S. tradition of pro-Israel politics, were inclined to view Israel with antipathy, and felt no fealty to the Holocaust meta-narrative that had become an anchor of U.S. political culture. An increasing number of young American Jews also began to challenge support for Israel as a pillar of American Jewish identity; some would become prominent leaders of a resurgent anti-Zionist movement.

During these same years, between the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and George Floyd in Minneapolis, U.S. progressives underwent a “racial reckoning” that dramatically reshaped their understanding of identity and power—a shift that would have significant ramifications for the debate about Israel within the left wing of the Democratic Party. In 2016, long before Oct. 7, the Movement for Black Lives published its policy platform in which it labeled Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians a genocide.

More recently, a segment of the MAGA right has joined the progressive left in its rejection of the U.S.-Israel relationship. The terms of critique are different. Beyond the swamp of antisemitic conspiracism that has engulfed parts of the young and online right, those who identify with the “restraint”-oriented faction of the MAGA coalition have begun to call for a reevaluation of U.S. support for Israel. They charge that there is not, or no longer is, a community of interest between the two allies and that Israel and its advocates exert an outsized and undue influence on U.S. foreign-policy making. They advocate for slashing U.S. aid to erstwhile allies as part of what they hope will be Washington’s withdrawal from imperial management and see no reason why the relationship with Israel should remain an exception.

If the old bipartisan pro-Israel consensus has collapsed, a new anti-Israel consensus is taking shape on the edges of both the Democratic and Republican parties. For Democrats, the primaries ahead of the 2028 election will almost certainly be a referendum on Israel. Already, activists have made significant strides in pressuring candidates to distance themselves from AIPAC and other groups associated with the Israel-advocacy complex. Universal healthcare was the watchword of the 2020 primaries; conditioning, or ending, U.S. military aid to Israel will likely fill the same role in 2028. On the left, hostility to Israel—the more strident, the better—is fast becoming a litmus test as an indicator of reliability on other matters of progressive concern.

Among Republicans, much will depend on the aftermath of the Iran war. If the economic and diplomatic pain suffered by Americans sticks, Israel and its advocates will take the blame. That scenario will likely empower the neoisolationists and restrainers, whose champion, at least for the moment, is Vice President J.D. Vance. But if he is sullied by the Iran debacle, there are other figures waiting in the wings, including conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, whose presidential ambitions are only whispered for now. On the right, too, military aid to Israel will be on the chopping block regardless as a baseline position much of MAGA can embrace.

Where, then, does this all leave Netanyahu? The Israeli prime minister has already begun to spin the eventual reduction in U.S. military aid as his own proposal, rather than face a political fight over a new aid package that Israel is not in a position to win. Netanyahu has pledged to wean Israel off U.S. assistance entirely over the next decade. The Heritage Foundation has drafted a proposal that outlines how that might work, substituting the current model of providing discounts to Israel for buying U.S. materiel with joint weapons technology efforts—hardly a return to the U.S. arms embargo on Israel of the early Cold War years.

Yet Netanyahu may be too sanguine about a future for Israel after the end of the special alliance. Having taken it for granted, he is perhaps more responsible than anyone else for its precipitous decline. When he departs the scene, he will leave Israel worse off for it.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 print issue of Foreign Policy.