Can new leaders stop Israel’s slide into isolation?

Israeli voters thronged to the polls in record numbers this week, only to produce a frustratingly murky verdict . It may take weeks of haggling among the country’s fragmented political parties to form a new governing coalition — or to decide the country needs a new election.

Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost his parliamentary majority , the variable geometry of Israeli politics means he could retain his post, possibly in a new unity government between opposed parties.

Americans may not much care who holds power in Jerusalem, but they should. After all, it was Netanyahu who persuaded President Trump to join Israel’s war to topple Iran’s Islamist regime. The regime remains, but Americans are paying dearly for weapons , gas and diesel as the war drags on.

Also hanging in the balance is America’s historic role as the ultimate guarantor of Israel’s security. After Hamas’s barbaric slaughter of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, Americans inevitably drew analogies to the 9/11 massacre and rallied around traumatized Israelis. But Netanyahu’s right-wing government squandered U.S. and international sympathy. The razing of Gaza, the unsettled Iran war and the government’s encouragement of settlers’ aggression and land grabs in the West Bank have drastically deepened Israel’s political isolation.

That is especially true in Europe, where British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband recently declared Israel’s occupation of the West Bank illegal and threatened to impose financial sanctions against settlements.

The one ally Israel can’t afford to lose is the U.S. But the Chicago Council on Global Affairs reported last month that favorable attitudes toward Israel have sunk to historic lows . For the first time, most Americans (56 percent) now favor either cutting or ending U.S. military aid to Israel. A YouGov poll found that 41 percent of Americans — including 62 percent of Democrats — now say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Cratering U.S. support for Israel is driven mainly by Democrats, independents and the young. MAGA Republicans and Christian evangelicals continue to view Israel favorably, although overall Republican support has declined modestly.

When Trump announced his “ Complete and Total ” endorsement of Netanyahu, he wasn’t speaking for most Americans. Fifty-nine percent of voters, including 76 percent of Democrats, express little confidence in Israel’s long-serving leader.

Israel has been sucked into the vortex of America’s tribal politics and Trump’s slumping popularity. No doubt Netanyahu’s assiduous courtship of Trump has helped him score tactical battlefield victories, but the strategic cost is high: the shattering of the bipartisan consensus undergirding America’s staunch support for Israel for nearly eight decades.

Repairing that breach won’t be easy, because young voters especially have soured on Israel. YouGov found that many voters under 30 now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israel (34 percent versus 21 percent), whereas Americans over 65 showed roughly the reverse.

In addition to the Netanyahu government’s self-inflicted wounds, hostility towards Israel — often shading into antisemitism — is percolating on America’s political fringes.

On the extreme right, Tucker Carlson treats his nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers to a tawdry parade of antisemites and Holocaust revisionists such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Darryl Cooper. Behind a phony pose of fearless inquiry, Carlson deals in conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the U.S. government and hostility to Christians.

Meanwhile, left-wing activists have whipped up a bonfire of anti-Israel bigotry on U.S. campuses. They have inducted Palestinians into their intersectional pantheon of sanctified victims of racism, nativism, colonialism, capitalism, sexism and other supposedly Western vices. The result is a noxious outbreak of woke antisemitism that brooks no dissent and absolves Palestinians of any responsibility for perpetuating the conflict.

There’s no shortage of oppression and injustice in today’s world. Yet democratic socialists are preternaturally focused on villainizing Israel . Their moral outrage against Sudan’s communal carnage, Russia’s criminal attacks on Ukrainian civilians or China’s ethnic cleansing of millions of Muslim Uighurs seems strangely muted in comparison.

Unfortunately, anti-Israel prejudice is being mainstreamed by some Muslim Democrats as well. In a speech ostensibly commemorating the Oct. 7 massacre, York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s duly deplored Hamas’ “horrific” acts before dwelling a far greater length on Israel’s alleged “genocide” in Gaza.

Whatever the shape of the next Israeli government, it seems foolish to stake Israel’s security and survival on an addled U.S. president who’s nosediving politically and will be gone in two years.

Instead, a new governing coalition should work to rebuild broad American support for Israel. That will require a clean break with the annexationist right and recognition that Palestinian leaders can’t be shut out of decisions about the future of Gaza and the West Bank. New Israeli leaders also should resume diplomatic relations with the Democratic Party, to which most U.S. Jewish voters remain attached .

Netanyahu has shown he’s the wrong candidate for that job.

Will Marshall is founder and president of Progressive Policy Institute .