Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got the war with Iran he wanted. Now Israel risks losing the American alliance it needs.

For generations, Israel has occupied a central place in American foreign policy, commanding extraordinary political, military and diplomatic support. But among the sweeping changes ushered in by Tuesday’s midterm results is what’s likely to be a major recalibration of the alliance. Democrats swept Congress with even moderate members condemning Israel’s conduct and demanding restrictions on arms sales. Vice President JD Vance pinned Republicans’ crushing defeat squarely on the Iran war, saying voters wanted relief from high prices and to “change our relationship to Israel.”

Politicians are following voters’ lead. Americans' views of Israel have fallen to their lowest level in nearly 50 years of polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In a survey released in October, Israel scored just 44 out of 100 on a favorability scale, down from 58 in 2022. In poll after poll, support for Israel among young people hovers in the teens, heralding a profound generational shift.

Even Donald Trump, who once called himself history’s most pro-Israel president, acknowledged the political cost. On election morning, in a sort of Hail Mary attempt, he said he would end $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel, calling the payments a liability for Republicans. “It’s almost too easy a target,” he said.

Yet Israel’s political class appears unable to grasp the scale of the crisis or its causes. Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid warned that Netanyahu’s continued rule threatened Israel’s security and proposed a listening tour of the US to repair relations. Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief vying to replace him after last week’s inconclusive election, pledged to restore bipartisan ties. Yair Golan, a former general who leads the left-wing Democrats, called Netanyahu toxic to both American parties.

“There is absolutely no in-depth understanding in Israel of the severity of the situation or what’s needed to rectify it,” said Eran Etzion, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council who ran as a Democrat in Israel’s election. “Even opposition leaders are assuming that what’s needed is better communication than drastic policy changes.”Their responses sidestepped the policies driving the backlash: the Iran war, the devastation in Gaza and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

None of the issues were seriously debated in Israel’s own election, because there’s general agreement across the country’s political spectrum about all three. That includes Netanyahu’s main challengers, who criticized his handling of the war but broadly backed it, defend Israel’s conduct in Gaza and oppose statehood for Palestinians.

The consequences could reshape American policy in the Middle East and threaten the foundations of Israel’s regional military dominance and its place on the global stage. With much of the Global South long opposed to Israeli policies, and most of Europe moving in a similar direction, the US under Trump has become even more crucial as Israel’s most important – and sometimes only – major ally.

Washington has for years supplied Israel with billions in military aid, advanced weapons, intelligence, missile defenses, while backing its wars and shielding it from international pressure – including economic sanctions and International Criminal Court arrest warrants. If that support erodes, Israel could find itself even more isolated: fighting Iran and its allies with fewer weapons, less diplomatic protection, under sanction and facing mounting pressure over its treatment of Palestinians.

“What happens when Americans begin to associate Israel with endless military confrontations, regional instability and pressure on Washington to enter wars that many Americans do not want?” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “This is particularly dangerous because the debate is no longer confined to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.”A US-Israel rupture has been building for years, in part because of Netanyahu’s strategy of making his country a partisan issue.

In 2015, the long-time Israeli leader courted Republicans by accepting an invitation to address Congress and attack President Barack Obama's proposed Iran deal, prompting Lapid to warn he was “destroying Israel's relations with the United States.”Once Trump was elected, Netanyahu aligned the country ever closer with the president and his party. After the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, the devastation in Gaza fueled anger among Democrats.

The Iran war exposed an even wider divide: three-quarters of Israelis — having sustained fire from Iran’s proxies for years — backed the American attack, compared with just 38% of Americans, including a growing number of Republicans.

To be sure, Israel retains key support among senior members of both parties, who view it as a key strategic partner in the Middle East, and particularly among Trump’s evangelical Christian base. The relationship also benefits Washington through intelligence sharing, military technology and cooperation against common threats – particularly Iran.

But Tuesday’s results showed how far the backlash had spread: even moderate Democrats are demanding changes in Israeli policy. In Kansas, Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton years before he ran described Palestinians as “second-class citizens,” and has condemned the use of US weapons against civilians in Gaza. “That's just not okay. It's not decent. It's not who we are as Americans,” he said in an October debate. Texas's James Talarico condemned Israel's “collective punishment” and called for an end to offensive arms sales.

Georgia's Senator Jon Ossoff – a Jewish likely 2028 presidential contender – said Israeli forces “violated the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law.”All three support restrictions on military aid for Israel, joining the majority of their party. In July, 103 House Democrats voted to block $3.3 billion in military assistance, while a majority of Senate Democrats now back limits on offensive weapons sales. Just 13% of Democrats viewed Israel positively in a March NBC News poll.

The shift is also weakening the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby. In Michigan, its super PAC spent more than $30 million trying to defeat Abdul El-Sayed, who campaigned in part on a pledge to end US military aid to Israel and has called the Gaza war a genocide. Voters elected him the country's first Muslim senator. Across decided congressional races, AIPAC's super PAC and affiliated committees spent $84 million, including $55 million in contests where their preferred candidates lost, according to Responsible Statecraft.

The more liberal pro-Israel group J Street, which supports Palestinian statehood and restrictions on offensive weapons sales, says its endorsed candidates will make up a majority of congressional Democrats in both chambers. “J Street is now the center of the Democratic Party’s approach to Israel and Palestine,” its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said in a statement Wednesday.

After El-Sayed’s comfortable win, the pro-Palestinian Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project put it bluntly: “Democrats who want to win the presidential primary and general election in states like Michigan are on notice — we are in a new era for Palestinian rights.”More troubling for Israel, opposition has spread through Trump's political base. After the midterm rout, Donald Trump Jr. endorsed Vance's criticism of the Iran war and America's relationship with Israel. Among Republicans under 35, just 28% viewed Israel's government favorably, compared with 68% of those over 50, according to a Pew survey in May.

“People have got to wake up to the fact that the state of the US-Israel relations is not just a Democrat problem. It's an American problem,” said Thomas Nides, former US ambassador to Israel. Nides said Israel remains a crucial partner for the US in the Middle East, but “if you're 30 years old or younger, the only two things you know about Israel right now are the Gaza war or Bibi Netanyahu.”A social media exchange between Lapid and a newly-elected progressive Democrat illustrated the disconnect.

The Israeli opposition politician argued that most Democrats objected to Netanyahu’s far-right government, rather than Israel itself, and proposed a US tour. “America is not lost. It is waiting for somebody to talk to it again,” he wrote on X Wednesday.

Congressman-elect Brad Lander, who will represent one of the most Jewish districts in the country, dismissed the proposal. “We aren’t starving for a barnstorming tour. We’re hungry to see respect for international law and human rights,” he wrote in response. Lapid, in a later post, rejected the logic of people like Lander, who is Jewish, who “will hate us no matter what.”Yet changing the prime minister would leave much of Israel's security doctrine intact – because it is widely supported by Israeli voters.

Lapid backed the Iran war and said Israel should have bombed the country's oil fields. Eisenkot backed attacks on Iran, although he opposes another full-scale war aimed at regime change. Like Netanyahu, he insists on continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and parts of Lebanon and Syria, although he has said he would curb settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank and would seek diplomatic solutions with Israel’s neighbors in exchange for troop withdrawal.

For many Israelis, the country’s policies reflect decades of feeling under existential threat, from wars with Arab neighbors to terrorist attacks and threats from Iran. The October 7 massacre and three years of fighting on multiple fronts have turbo-charged those fears. A September Israel Democracy Institute poll found that 68% of Jewish Israelis considered the Hamas assault a central factor in deciding how to vote.

“Popular Israeli opinion has turned two ticks to the right,” said Kobby Barda, a US-Israel researcher from the Jewish People Policy Institute. “Israelis are still in the trauma of Oct. 7, and after three bloody years of war, absorbing fire also from Lebanon and Iran and Yemen and all of Israel's other fronts.”Arab-led parties won a record 19 seats in the Oct. 27 election and on Thursday endorsed Eisenkot for prime minister, giving him the backing of 67 lawmakers.

But he and other opposition leaders have vowed to exclude them from any government, a decision that risks deepening US Democrats' concerns about Israel’s treatment of its 2 million Arab citizens.

Citrinowicz, the former Israeli intelligence official, questioned why Americans would change their views of Israel if a new government’s policies are largely the same. “The problem is not that Americans do not understand what Israel is doing,” he said. “Increasingly, the problem is that they understand it very well and disagree with it.”By Friday, the Israeli government sought to portray the end of military aid as a mutually agreed decision. “The move by PM Netanyahu and President Trump from aid to partnership shows the strength and sophistication of our relationship,” the Prime Minister’s office said in a statement on X Friday.

But Trump's announcement blindsided Israeli officials, including President Isaac Herzog, who said it hit him “like a bolt from the blue.”Democrats taking control of Congress in January is likely to only intensify scrutiny of any military assistance. A future president could go further, curbing weapons sales and withdrawing Washington's diplomatic protection at the United Nations.

“I think this particular announcement is just the beginning of a new relationship between the US and Israel,” said Nomi Bar-Yaacov, associate fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. “And I don’t think we will see vetoes in the Security Council by the US in the same way that we have seen in the past.”Netanyahu himself warned before Israel's election that Americans would no longer provide billions in military aid.

“Get used to the fact that we won't, because America has changed,” he told an Israeli television network on October 23. “It's over. It's only a matter of time.”Netanyahu also warned that Israel could be cut off from international banking networks and forced to find ways around sanctions, including through cryptocurrency. Lapid said the proposal “belongs to countries like Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.”Israel's central bank urged the government to prevent sanctions in the first place.

Netanyahu has sought to strengthen other partnerships, deepening military and intelligence cooperation with the UAE, expanding defense cooperation with Morocco and backing Ethiopia's push for Red Sea access. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland in December 2025 could eventually give Israeli forces a foothold across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen's Houthis. But none can come close to replacing Washington.

“Israel is facing a more selective US, which will adopt a more conditions-based arms policy toward Israel,” said Etzion, the former Israel national security council official. “If Israel loses the US, Israel will feel that absence in every part of our lives. Israel has no alternative.”Replacing Netanyahu would only be the beginning, said Daniel Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel.

Restoring American support would “require significant policy changes on matters relating to the West Bank and Gaza, up to and including openness to an eventual two-state arrangement.”Even then, he warned, “the climb back to renewed broad support will be long and steep.”