New polling shows the firewall Israel built on the American right is quietly cracking

On Tuesday I watched Benjamin Netanyahu twice in one day — fielding Dana Bash’s questions on CNN, then Greta Van Susteren’s on Newsmax — and I found I could recite the arguments along with him. The only democracy in the Middle East. Muslim citizens on the Supreme Court and in the Knesset. Iran, totally untrustworthy. He was fluent, polished, in command of every line, because he has been delivering those lines, nearly word for word, since he was explaining Israel to American cameras in the 1980s. Let me say plainly what I believe, because everything that follows depends on it: there is no Israeli leader — and few world leaders — comparable to Netanyahu as a communicator. No one matches his command of a camera, his fluency in the American political language of an earlier era, his sheer endurance at the craft. That is what made it so uncomfortable to watch. Not the arguments themselves — I have made some of them myself — but the serene obliviousness with which they were deployed, as though the audience on the other side of the lens were the same one that existed forty years ago.

Somewhere in the Bash interview I recognized whom he was actually speaking to: me. A viewer who first heard these arguments decades ago and found them persuasive. He was not speaking to my 16-year-old son, whose picture of Israel has been significantly formed by the events of the past few years — the same events that have reshaped how much of his generation, left and right alike, sees this alliance.

That audience no longer exists. And that same day, after a week of American media hits, the evidence landed in the headlines.

The AP-NORC poll released Tuesday produced an irresistible headline: American Jews view Zohran Mamdani more favorably than Benjamin Netanyahu, 44 percent to 32 percent. Within hours it was everywhere — proof, depending on your politics, that American Jewry had lost its mind or found its conscience. Commentators dutifully religated the mayor’s record. The discourse machine did what it does.

But the Mamdani number is not the finding that should keep anyone in Jerusalem awake at night. Buried below the headline is a statistic with far greater strategic weight: Republicans under 45 now tilt unfavorable on Netanyahu, and they are more likely than their elders to say the United States is too supportive of Israel.

A second poll, released the same day in Israel, would later complete the picture. But first, the wager.

The bet

For more than a decade, Israeli political strategy has rested on a single wager, and it was not a secret. Ron Dermer, then Israel’s ambassador to Washington and now one of Netanyahu’s closest advisers, said out loud in 2021 that Israel should prioritize the “passionate and unequivocal” support of evangelical Christians over American Jews, whom he described as disproportionately critical.

The strategy was visible in practice long before it was stated: the cultivation of Christians United for Israel as a mass constituency; the alliance with Republican mega-donors, Sheldon Adelson foremost among them; and the 2015 speech to Congress over President Obama’s head, arranged with Republican leadership. The embrace of Donald Trump was the wager doubled. The premise underneath it all: liberal American Jews were a depreciating asset — critical, conditional, shrinking — while the American right was a growth stock, a firewall that would hold whatever happened on the left.

For a while, the returns looked good. Embassy moved. Abraham Accords signed. Golan recognized.

Tuesday’s poll is the margin call.

What the numbers actually say

Among all American adults, just 20 percent now view Netanyahu favorably, against 38 percent unfavorable. The Democratic numbers are politically damaging but expected: 58 percent of Democrats say the US is too supportive of Israel, up from 45 percent in January 2024. That erosion is old news.

The more consequential news is on the right. The share of Republicans who say America is not supportive enough of Israel has collapsed from 39 percent to 15 percent in two years. Most Republicans still call current support “about right” — the firewall has not fallen. But while older Republicans view Netanyahu more positively than negatively, younger Republicans’ views now tilt unfavorable.

One poll is a warning light, not a verdict, and it would be reckless to declare a generational cliff from a single survey. But this survey does not stand alone. Pew found in 2025 that unfavorable views of Israel among Republicans under 50 had jumped roughly 15 points in three years, reaching about half of that cohort. Gallup, meanwhile, has measured American sympathy for Israel at its lowest point in a quarter century, with the generational gap visible inside both parties. The AP-NORC finding is not an outlier. It is the latest reading on a trend line that has been bending the same direction for several years.

Why? Honesty requires humility here: the poll does not tell us. Some of it may reflect the isolationist turn in parts of the MAGA coalition and the foreign-policy skepticism of its loudest media voices. Some of it may be generational memory — a 35-year-old Republican has no recollection of Entebbe, only of two decades in which Israel appeared on their screens at war. What can be said with confidence is narrower but damning enough: the assumption that Republican support was self-renewing, requiring no persuasion and no case made in terms a new generation finds credible, is now visibly false.

Which brings me back to Tuesday’s interviews. There, in a single day, was the whole strategy in miniature: one appearance for the mainstream, one for the MAGA base, both flanks covered — with a script written for their parents and grandparents. The American right has spent the past year litigating Israel openly — across podcasts, youth conferences, and think-tank debates — in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. A prime minister who noticed would be making a new argument to that audience, in its own idiom, about why this alliance serves them — and Netanyahu may be better equipped than anyone to make it. That is the tragedy of Tuesday. What I watched instead was a man making the old argument, expertly, to the already convinced. The next audience is already old enough to be listening.

Does this cohort matter yet? They are not writing the party’s platform today; their elders still are. But they are the party’s future primary electorate, they are disproportionately influential in the online media ecosystem where conservative opinion increasingly forms, and elected Republicans have already begun adjusting to that pressure — note how contested votes on Israel aid have become on the right’s flank. Constituencies shape parties with a lag. That is precisely why a warning light matters more than a verdict: verdicts arrive too late to act on.

The tell in the Jewish numbers

Skeptics will say American Jews were always going to prefer a Democratic mayor to a Likud prime minister, and they are right — 59 percent of the Jewish sample identifies as Democratic. But the same poll contains a control group: Josh Shapiro, at 41 percent favorable and just 21 percent unfavorable, outpolls both men. The comparison is instructive because Shapiro shares Mamdani’s party but not his politics on Israel. He is demonstrably, publicly pro-Israel, and has also criticized Netanyahu’s leadership. If American Jews were simply rewarding Democrats or punishing Zionism, Shapiro’s numbers could not look like that. They have not abandoned pro-Israel politicians. They have abandoned this one — which suggests the problem the data describes is not Zionism’s brand but Netanyahu’s.

That should reframe the Mamdani panic. A mayor whom most New York Jewish voters opposed at the ballot box — he won roughly a quarter of the city’s Jewish vote — posting a modest net-positive rating nationally is not evidence of a community seduced. It is evidence of a community exhausted, measuring every figure against a leadership in Jerusalem it no longer trusts.

The mirror

Now, the second poll. On the same day the AP-NORC survey landed, an Israeli survey of 603 Jewish and 151 Arab respondents, conducted June 28 to July 1 and reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, found that the share of Jewish Israelis who believe the country can fully rely on Donald Trump has plummeted 38 points since March — a collapse of confidence in the American leader on whom Netanyahu had placed so much weight.

Hold the two findings side by side. In America, the young right is losing faith in Israel’s leader. In Israel, the public is losing faith in America’s. The special relationship, as currently constructed, is a bridge being renegotiated from both ends at once — and both governments are still walking across it as though the cables will hold because they always have.

Somewhere on Tuesday, between the CNN hit and the Newsmax one, there was a moment when the prime minister might have glanced at the day’s polling and wondered whether the old lines still landed. Nothing in either interview suggested he did. Firewalls, it turns out, are not natural formations. They are built, and they are maintained, and when a generation of builders decides the wall will stand on its own, it begins — quietly, on both sides — to crack.

The AP-NORC poll surveyed 3,040 US adults, including 1,022 Jewish adults, June 11–17, with margins of error of ±2.8 and ±5.0 points respectively. The Israeli survey carried a margin of error of ±3.57 points.