On Sept. 22, JNS Hebrew-language site editor Ariel Kahana posted a video clip on X of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a Jew by origin, at New York’s Riverside Church. Sanders claimed that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza and that America must “end all military aid to the Netanyahu government.”
As Kahana noted, the most disturbing part was the applause at the end, along with the alarming knowledge that most of the Democratic Party now shares that position.
“Israel has a serious problem in American public opinion,” Kahana wrote, “and it is worth acknowledging.”
He is right to sound the alarm. American opinion is moving against Israel, including among some Republicans. Younger voters on both sides of the aisle are the most hostile.
The problem is the conclusion many Israelis draw next: that Israel itself is the cause of this slide, and American opinion will recover if only Israel fights differently, fields better spokespeople or behaves more in line with Western expectations.
Those conclusions are fundamentally wrong.
Many Israelis watch America the way they watch a television panel. There is a campus riot, a poll, Sanders in a church and then comes the verdict: “America has turned.” As if 330 million Americans spend their time thinking about what Israel has done in Gaza.
Most Americans rarely think about Israel at all. They think about how to pay rising rent, about schools, education, crime, gas prices, immigration issues and whether their parents’ America still exists. Israel is not at the center of their lives. It is the subject of a headline dropped into a culture war already underway, a war over the future of America itself.
If you miss that, everything else is misread. A protest at Columbia University becomes “the American people.” A Republican influencer chasing clicks becomes “the base.” Democratic talking points become a verdict on Israel’s soul. Israeli journalists, thought leaders and politicians then press for changes to how Israel fights, what it does and who leads it, as if any of that would change votes in Michigan, Ohio or Pennsylvania.
That is how Israel loses twice: First, by misunderstanding what is actually driving American opinion; then by endangering Israeli lives based on that misunderstanding.
Israeli actions, Israeli politicians and Israeli hasbara are not what is driving the shift. The story is larger and far more sinister.
For decades, a red-green alliance of progressive radicals and Islamist networks has been buying the American mind through campuses, media, NGOs, Capitol Hill, school boards, mosque networks and national Muslim organizations.
After Oct. 7, the project went into overdrive. A war against genocidal jihadists was flipped to foster hatred of Israel and then rage at America itself. How else to explain that after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, so many Americans came to see Israel as the aggressor?
Israel cannot outbid that machine. It has neither the money nor the tools.
The money is not a metaphor. Iran funds terror, propaganda and proxies. Qatar has poured billions of dollars into American universities and bought media access while hosting Hamas leaders. China buys influence, research and narrative machinery aimed at weakening the United States. Saudi money has built mosques, endowed academic chairs and funded lobbies. Russia wages an information war to split the West.
This is state and quasi-state power on a scale no Israeli embassy or spokesperson could ever match. It is aimed at hollowing out America from within.
Israel cannot outbid that machine. It has neither the money nor the tools.
None of this is new. In 1984, KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov laid out the Soviet playbook of “ideological subversion” for American audiences: demoralize a society, destabilize it, drive it into crisis. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West, later described how the KGB helped manufacture the modern “Palestinian” cause as part of that same strategy.
Similarly, “globalizing the intifada” under the banner of “Palestine” was never the point. It was a delivery system for Western self-destruction through progressive anarchy fused with jihadist ideology. It is a match made in KGB heaven.
The strategy is on record in an American federal courtroom. In the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial, prosecutors entered into evidence a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum describing the group’s work in North America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers.”
That strategy has been implemented across America for decades: capture institutions, sanctify the capture in progressive language, then turn on Israel and the Jews with a war that supplies images and easy sound bites. Thus, the progressive left has been the accelerant for the growth of jihadism in America, all in the name of a cause the Soviets helped invent.
Oct. 7 was harnessed to this end from day one. Rallies celebrating Hamas’s attack broke out in Western cities within hours, three weeks before the Israel Defense Forces launched its offensive in Gaza. The ground had been prepared long before.
Professors had already taught that Israel and the West are the world’s original sins. Networks backed or inspired by Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood built the street presence and the legal machinery. Progressives held the campuses and the school boards. Then Hamas filmed a pogrom, and the ideology finally had its visuals: the Jew as settler, America as accomplice, jihadist “resistance” as virtue.
That is why every Israeli concession fails as persuasion and no spokesperson, however polished, can turn the tide. Warn civilians before every strike, and Israel is still a monster. Prove that the rocket that hit the Al-Ahli Hospital compound was an Islamic Jihad misfire, and Israel is still a baby-killer. Win a battle, and Israelis are war criminals. Israelis are murdered, and the sympathy goes to the “resistance fighters.” The script was written before Israel ever responded.
So, what would actually help?
First, Israel must internalize that its future is not an American focus group. The Jewish state must be run to fulfill its purpose, not as one more Western country struggling to survive, and not as a performance for the West’s perceived approval.
Second, Israel must understand what Americans really want. Many are frightened by what is happening to their country. They need a model for how to take their country back, not another Gaza explainer on why the IDF did “x” or why some Israeli politician said “y.” Israel can be that model. For example, Israel should deport jihadists, so Americans see that they can deport jihadists too.
Third, stop Israel’s own government and educational institutions—from universities to K-12 classrooms—from implementing the progressive ideology that seeks to neuter the Jewish state. This will show Americans how to break that capture at home.
Kahana is correct that support for Israel is falling. But the answer is not what many Israelis assume: endlessly adjusting Israel’s conduct and its spokespeople to perceived American concerns until the numbers recover.
Israel is not why America is sick. But Israel can show Americans how to fight back and save their country. That is how Israel wins back their support.
