In Gabriel Colodro’s report for The Media Line, a familiar assumption gets put on trial: that the US–Israel alliance is automatic, durable, and basically immune to the culture wars. Security coordination remains tight—intelligence, weapons systems, shared regional priorities. But the real stress test is no longer in the Situation Room. It’s in American society, where polarization, generational change, and identity politics are reshaping how Israel is argued about, defended, and dismissed.
At an Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) gathering, Israeli officials and US experts traded less reassurance and more diagnosis. In a recorded interview, American Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee pushed back on the “US does everything for Israel” line, arguing that security assistance is small compared with the federal budget and that much of the money cycles back through US defense procurement—while Israel’s battlefield use generates data the US rarely gets elsewhere.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Herzog urged Israel to think past the next news cycle and the current White House, warning that erosion is showing up on both the right and the left, especially among younger Americans. Rotem Oreg-Kalisky argued the debate has shifted from policy details to moral framing and identity, turbocharged by social media. Raphael BenLevi described distrust in institutions spilling into foreign policy, while Dan Shapiro said Oct. 7 unity inside the Democratic Party faded as the Gaza war’s humanitarian toll rose.
The piece ends with a blunt takeaway: alliances don’t fail only when governments clash—they weaken when publics stop caring. Read the full article for Gabriel Colodro’s on-the-ground, speaker-by-speaker map of where the argument is headed.