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For decades, Israeli politicians have routinely bemoaned what they see as Israel’s poor public advocacy (hasbara) in promoting its case to a global audience. They present the problem as one of bad marketing; rather than a case of damaged goods. In days past, Israel’s supporters might have found this a credible explanation for the country’s poor standing. But no longer. The Gaza genocide has ripped off the mask and exposed its ugly face. The damage to Israel is permanent and irreparable. The decline in Israel’s prospects has been extraordinary.
Simply put, you cannot sell a Zionist pig [sic] in a poke. Israel is a faulty product. Nothing can fix it. Liberal Zionists have for years held out hope that some Israeli knight in shining armor would arise to return Israel to the liberal social democratic country they were taught to admire in Hebrew school. But that has always been a cruel illusion. One unfortunately, that many still cling to. The Israeli far right, which has ruled the country for the past 50 years, can no longer count on American Jewish support. Even non-Jews are abandoning ship. Israel has no one to blame but itself. It has become a Judeo-Nazi state (no, that is not an exaggeration). For Americans, this is a bridge too far.
The politicians from both parties haven’t gotten the message. Our campaign financing system allows the Israel Lobby to corrupt our ejections. You can’t win without cash. And the Lobby has plenty of it–for a price: blind loyalty to the pro Israel agenda. For example, in this weeks Illinois Democratic House and Senate primaries, the Lobby dumped $35-million of the $50-Million spent overall, in order to deprive progressive candidates of a spot on the general election ballot (the state is thoroughly red and primary winners will win their seats in November).
The United Democracy Project, an Aipac-adjacent PAC intended to infiltrate primaries and sabotage Democratic progressive candidates, has a $100-million war chest. Almost all of it will consist of attack ads against the left candidates. The ads won’t mention Israel or the Middle East. Instead they will focus on local issues manipulated to damage them. But as the average American responds with revulsion the Lobby and it’s cash is becoming a dirty word. Now instead of dumping money directly into campaigns, it creates astroturf PACs that conceal the origins. It’s a vain attempt to slip under the radar.
One would expect that views of American Jews would be generally supportive of Israel. However, a Washington Post poll shows they have markedly changed since 10/7. Between 2013 and 2025, the percentage saying that the US gives too much support to Israel has increased by 20 points (11% vs 32%). 40% responded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. A plurality (48%) disapprove of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. This decline is even more pronounced among the Democratic grassroots. Some candidates are also getting the message. Governor J.B. Pritzker, who eyes a presidential run, is one of them:
Pritzker…was a donor to the Aipac before he walked away more than a decade ago. He [said] that AIPAC…lost its way as a bipartisan group focused on Middle East peace.
“It became an organization that was supporting Donald Trump and people who follow Donald Trump,” Pritzker said. “AIPAC really is not an organization that I think today I would want any part of.”
One of the winning candidates, a liberal Zionist who was attacked by Aipac as insufficiently pro-Israel, said this:
At his victory party…Biss slammed the group for spending heavily “to buy this seat to support the idea that we can’t accept nuance” on the U.S.-Israel relationship.
“AIPAC found out the hard way — the 9th District is not for sale,” Biss told supporters. However, the Party leadership is reading from an old hymnal. It listens to the Israel Lobby donors and ignores all the rest. We’re static in their ears.
But candidates who happily banked millions from Aipac in the past are renouncing its funding now. Unfortunately, some of them are doing so by half measures. They may not take funds directly from Aipac, but they do take them from stealth PACs set up by Aipac to hide its role. This is a phenomenon necessitated by the group’s increasingly negative profile among Democratic voters. That in turn is due to Israel’s increasing unpopularity. This Aipac subterfuge can only succeed for so long, before the victims of the con figure things out.
A recent NBC poll confirms these findings. A plurality of American respondents (40%) had more sympathy for Palestinians than Israelis. A similar poll 13 years ago found 45% favored Israel and only 13% favored Palestinians: this was a jump of 27 points for the Palestinians. Among Democrats, the results were far starker: 67% favored Palestinians, while 17% favored Israel. A rise of almost 50 points for Palestinians compared to the 2003 survey. 60% of Democrats view Israel negatively.
A Quinnipiac poll found that 44% of Americans said the US is too supportive of Israel, the highest such finding in the history of its polling. While a separate Gallup poll found that sympathy for Israel (compared to the Palestinians) declined by 30% since 2018. Among the youth cohort, sympathy for Israel declined nearly 40 points since 2006.
It’s hard to understand why Israel’s leaders don’t recognize that the ground is collapsing underneath them. These polls are a harbinger of the future. The results are going in one direction–down. Israel appears to believe that it can continue these longstanding policies of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide indefinitely, without fear of losing America’s support. But there will come a reckoning. A time when the Party, Congressional Democrats, even a Democratic president will develop a spine and cut off the spigot of funding, weapons and UN votes. The worse Israel’s behavior, the sooner it will come.
Progressive, and even some mainstream media outlets are exposing these stratagems. Hopefully, voters in the districts the Lobby has targeted will get the message that they’re being manipulated by an anti-democratic lobby allied with a foreign power, using stealth to conceal its agenda: one which is fundamentally hostile to American interests.
Shockingly and surprisingly, while AIPAC, ADL, AJC etc., have a large hand in public support for Israel, the worst offender is Congress (which is why the pro-Israel agencies pay out so much to get their own representatives in Congress).
Congress has created many “secret” backdoors methods of funding Israel’s militaries, not just toe eyewash of the $3.3 Billion a year that is the official number.
There are many “transfers” of weapons, stockpiles of weapons in Israel for use by the US and grants to purchase weapons (“Israel bought $x billion worth of weapons”) … from the US of course! This means that not only does Israel get to pay out billions of American moneys so it can indirectly lobby Congress, but the military industry ALSO lobbies on Israel’s behalf so it can continue to get its sales. Of course, Congress gets a lot of all this money so THEY can continue in office.
It’s a very complex, convoluted self-feeding system primed with American dollars playing all of us against ourselves and out of the “normal” American field of vision.