View from Washington: The day Israel lost America

Political support from Washington has been ‘the gift that keeps on giving’ for Benjamin Netanyahu
Pic.: The Week

Years from now, February 28, 2026, might be remembered as the day Israel finally lost the American public, insist By Ross Barkan, a political columnist for Intelligencer (New York magazine).

The Iran war, launched by the U.S. on that date and executed in direct coordination with Israel, is predictably a catastrophe, unleashing deadly chaos throughout the Middle East. American bombs are slaughtering Iranian civilians. Iranian rockets are terrorizing the Gulf States. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant portion of the world’s oil flows, is functionally closed, and energy prices are spiraling.

Why are we there? What are we doing? A majority of Americans are horrified or, at minimum, bewildered. It was Marco Rubio, the powerful secretary of State, who spoke the truth to reporters on Monday. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio said. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces … And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

The comments made a dark reality plain: It was Israel, not just the U.S., that wanted Khamenei dead and were agitating for the sort of all-out war that past presidents, Republican and Democratic alike, understood carried too many risks to be worthwhile… Barack Obama’s diplomacy — yielding the Iran nuclear accords — had found real success, but Trump tore them up because the Israeli government and its backers in the U.S. hate the idea of negotiating with Iran.

The fiercest supporters of Israel in the United States do not quite understand that there is no going back. Gavin Newsom, California’s governor and a 2028 presidential front-runner, now calls Israel an “apartheid” state. A few years ago, this would have been unfathomable — a mainstream Democrat who spoke like this would have been ridiculed and censured, driven to the margins of the party.

We are in a new era, and it’s going to be a permanent one: Poll after poll shows that Americans under 40 take a startlingly dim view of Israel.

The Iran war could be what decisively breaks the United States from Israel. Not yet — certainly not now, with Trump in the White House. But there will be presidents after Trump. A future Democrat will have no incentive to cater to the whims of a warmongering Israel. A Republican not explicitly bound to pro-Israel, right-wing Evangelicals might not care a great deal about Israel, either. Why should he? The American people do not want this war with Iran. They don’t want their brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters to die. They see this for what it is: a cataclysm.

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