{"id":301919,"date":"2025-07-29T18:54:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T18:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/301919\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T18:54:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T18:54:10","slug":"the-war-needs-to-end-is-the-us-right-turning-on-israel-israel-gaza-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/301919\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The war needs to end\u2019: is the US right turning on Israel? | Israel-Gaza war"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the Israel-Gaza war<\/a> nears its two-year mark, and as images of starving<\/a> people and utter devastation flood social media, cracks seem to be emerging in the American right\u2019s typically iron-clad support for Israel.<\/p>\n

The US continues to support Israel diplomatically and militarily, and last Thursday pulled out of peace negotiations that it accused Hamas of sabotaging. And in the US Congress, only two Republicans voted<\/a> for a recent amendment that would have pulled funding for missile defense systems for Israel. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, on Monday became the first Republican to call<\/a> Israel\u2019s war a \u201cgenocide\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yet the war\u2019s duration and human cost, as well as recent Israeli strikes on Christian targets, have spurred modest signs of discontent on the US right. Some conservative commentators have walked back their support for Israel\u2019s war; the US\u2019s famously Zionist ambassador to Israel<\/a> rebuked the actions of Jewish settlers in the West Bank; and an unresolved rift over foreign intervention continues to plague the Maga world.<\/p>\n

To some extent this mirrors trends in US sentiment overall. A recent CNN poll found<\/a> a steep decline in US support for Israel since the war started. That drop was most dramatic among respondents who identified as Democrats or independents, but the poll also found that since 2023 the percentage of surveyed Republicans who believe that Israel\u2019s actions are justified fell from 68% to 52%.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s highly likely that depictions of starvation in the territory \u2013 where 147 people have reportedly<\/a> starved to death, including 88 children, and nearly one in three people are going multiple days without eating, according<\/a> to the United Nations \u2013 have played a role. On Monday, Donald Trump partly contradicted the claim of the Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, that there is no starvation in Gaza, telling<\/a> reporters: \u201cThat\u2019s real starvation \u2026 I see it, and you can\u2019t fake that. So, we\u2019re going to be even more involved.\u201d Trump made the statement while visiting Britain, where the Daily Express, considered the country\u2019s most rightwing mainstream tabloid, recently ran<\/a> a headline decrying hunger in Gaza: \u201cFOR PITY\u2019S SAKE STOP THIS NOW.\u201d<\/p>\n

A recent spate of Israeli attacks on Christian targets in Gaza and the West Bank have also angered some American conservatives. Last Thursday, after an Israeli tank fired on the sole Catholic church in Gaza \u2013 killing three people and wounding nine, including a priest \u2013 a reportedly upset Trump called Netanyahu to complain<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A few days after the church shelling, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, visited Taybeh, a Palestinian Christian town in the West Bank that has been repeatedly attacked by Israeli settlers, who earlier this month set a fire near a fifth-century church. In a statement<\/a>, Huckabee described the attack as \u201can absolute travesty\u201d and \u201can act of terror\u201d and called for the perpetrators to be prosecuted. (He did not directly implicate the Israeli government or settlers.)<\/p>\n

Mike Huckabee tours the fifth-century Church of St George in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank on 19 July. Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Although there have long been isolationist and populist elements on the right skeptical of the United States\u2019 close alliance with Israel, their point of view has been eclipsed in recent history by the pro-Israel camp, which enjoys strong support among American evangelical Christians.<\/p>\n

Huckabee is an evangelical Christian who has described<\/a> himself as an \u201cunapologetic, unreformed Zionist\u201d. Like many evangelicals, he believes that Israel has a divine claim to the West Bank, and has memorably declared<\/a> that \u201cthere is no such thing as a Palestinian.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Huckabee issued such a strong statement on Taybeh \u201cwas surprising\u201d, Todd Deatherage said. Deatherage is the co-founder of Telos, a non-profit that works to give US policymakers and religious groups a more nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Huckabee\u2019s gesture, he said, seems to indicate \u201csome complexity in a movement that didn\u2019t have complexity around this before\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative journalist and commentator, described Huckabee\u2019s statement as remarkable \u201cgiven how much of a kind of boomer evangelical Huckabee is\u201d.<\/p>\n

Huckabee also recently called<\/a> for Israel to \u201caggressively investigate\u201d the murder of Sayfollah \u201cSaif\u201d Musallet, a Palestinian American man who was recently beaten to death by settlers in the West Bank, according to his family.<\/p>\n

The events abroad also seem to have made ripples in the US conservative media sphere.<\/p>\n

The Israeli government said that the church strike was a battlefield mistake, but in a recent episode of his talkshow, Michael Knowles, a rightwing American pundit, expressed<\/a> skepticism. \u201cI\u2019ve been broadly supportive of the state of Israel,\u201d Knowles, who is Catholic, said in the segment. \u201cAnd you\u2019re losing me.\u201d The Israeli government \u201cis really screwing up, is really not playing its cards right\u201d, he argued. \u201cThe war needs to come to an end. How long is the war gonna go on?\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cAmerica is the only friend that Israel has on planet Earth. I do not get what the Israeli government is doing here, but I suspect there will be political consequences \u2013 as there should be.\u201d Some critics in the comments section of Knowles\u2019s video accused him of only noticing deaths in Gaza once the victims were conspicuously Christian.<\/p>\n

The Free Press, the online publication founded by Bari Weiss to challenge what she describes as an establishment liberal media, recently published<\/a> an article arguing that although past claims about hunger in Gaza were \u201clies\u201d, the territory was now rapidly entering a \u201creal hunger crisis\u201d. The Free Press has generally taken a fervently pro-Israel stance.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Joe Rogan, the everyman podcaster who threw his support to Trump in the last election, has refused to host Netanyahu on his podcast, the premier\u2019s son, Yair Netanyahu, claimed<\/a> on Friday. And Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, published an op-ed on Saturday arguing<\/a> that Israel\u2019s military operation has crossed into being \u201cunjust\u201d.<\/p>\n

Although the US right is perceived today as staunchly pro-Israel, recent history is more complicated, Deatherage noted; George HW Bush\u2019s Republican administration undertook<\/a> a political fight with Israel about Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The right\u2019s pro-Israel stance really hardened after 9\/11, he said, when Christian conservatives and defense hawks embraced the view that the US and Israel were allies against Islamic terror.<\/p>\n

A man tidies the graves of Palestinian-American Sayfollah Musallet, left, and Mohammed al-Shalabi, both of whom were killed by Israeli settlers, on 21 July. Photograph: Maya Alleruzzo\/AP<\/p>\n

The modern iteration of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) was founded in 2006 to facilitate US evangelical support for Israel. The organization\u2019s membership is significantly larger than Aipac, the pro-Israel organization founded by Jewish Americans. Trump\u2019s alliance with the religious right during his first term intensified the political power of Christian Zionism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat part of the evangelical movement really gained unprecedented access to being heard,\u201d Deatherage said.<\/p>\n

Some Christian Zionists, particularly evangelicals, believe there are biblical justifications for the US supporting Israel. A small subset believe that a showdown between Israel and enemy states could presage the End of Days, Daniel Hummel, a historian of Christian Zionism, said. The recent strike on Iran sparked apocalyptic speculation<\/a> in some Christian circles, he noted.<\/p>\n

Yet polling data suggests a generational divide. Younger evangelicals, like younger Americans broadly, are more skeptical of Zionism, and the gap seems to be growing.<\/p>\n

A 2021 survey by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke found<\/a> that only 33.6% of American evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Israel, down from 69% surveyed in a similar poll in 2018. Research by the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll has found<\/a> similar shifts among younger evangelicals.<\/p>\n

\u201cYounger evangelicals in particular are kind of renegotiating what it means to be a Christian in the public square,\u201d Deatherage said. \u201cAnd they\u2019re not thrilled by the bargain that the older generation maybe made with politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

The topic of Christian Zionism came up<\/a> during a heated episode of Tucker Carlson\u2019s talkshow, this June, featuring Senator Ted Cruz. Carlson is one of the major faces<\/a> of an America First camp in the Maga movement that views the American alliance with Israel with increasing suspicion. During the conversation, Cruz cited a Bible verse as one of the reasons that he supports Israel. Carlson responded by testily mocking the notion that foreign policy objectives should be determined by biblical exegesis.<\/p>\n

On the fringes, criticisms of Israel have sometimes been intertwined with outright antisemitism. The far-right pundit Candace Owens, for example, has often disparaged<\/a> Israel in conspiratorial terms.<\/p>\n

Yet skepticism of Israel has also gained some credible intellectual traction on the more mainstream Maga right, particularly among a group of mostly younger conservative activists, political staffers and policy wonks sometimes known in Washington DC as the \u201crestrainers\u201d. These are generally pro-Trump conservatives who, while not necessarily outright isolationists, believe<\/a> that the US should protect its own national interests even if this means scaling back \u2013 or \u201crestraining\u201d \u2013 allies such as Israel.<\/p>\n

The term is subjective and contentious<\/a>, but the Pentagon\u2019s policy chief, Elbridge Colby; the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, Mike DiMino; and JD Vance himself are sometimes considered<\/a> examples.<\/p>\n

Pro-Israel Republicans and hawks still mostly hold the whip hand, but Deatherage believes a political window for rethinking the US\u2019s relationship for Israel may be opening on the right. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of pressure on [Trump] to support whatever the Israeli government is doing. But there\u2019s now some really dissenting voices on the other side of that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the Israel-Gaza war nears its two-year mark, and as images of starving people and utter devastation flood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-301919","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-united-states","9":"tag-us","10":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114938043836953247","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}