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How Israel’s strongest partisans destroyed global support for Israel
No one has done more damage to Israel than the people who claim to love it the most.
As this week’s shocking election news demonstrates, the extremism of Benjamin Netanyahu, his far-right coalition partners, and his fundamentalist Amen corner in the United States has destroyed the bipartisan support for Israel that has been in place since the Kennedy administration. Israel’s most ardent defenders have become some of its worst enemies.
The change is not just taking place on the Socialist Left or Nationalist Right. And it is not a result of antisemitism, propaganda or misinformation, although all of those play a role. It is the result of years of Israeli actions that have alienated nearly half of the Democratic party, a quarter of the Republican party, and liberal Zionists in both camps.
There are now millions, perhaps tens of millions, of liberals and centrists who may still support the existence of a Jewish state, but who are morally repulsed by the destruction of Gaza and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and millions of progressives who, wrongly but not without reason, now lump Zionism in with racism and sexism as ideologies that offend their core values.
Israel has even alienated conservatives and America-Firsters who can’t understand why aid to Israel is treated differently from all other foreign aid or foreign policy programs. Yes, many of them believe in, and spread, antisemitic conspiracy theories. But many others have legitimate questions about Israel’s and AIPAC’s influence on American foreign policy, most recently the Iran war, which America and Israel have lost. These Americans include, most recently, the Vice President of the United States, who publicly rebuked Israel as no American leader has done since the 1950s, noting that Israel has lost the support of almost every other country in the world, and was now in danger of losing American support as well.
And for what? For what bowl of porridge did Israel sell its birthright as a member of the civilized world? For nationalist pipe-dreams of Gaza wiped off the map? For keeping Bibi’s coalition alive so he doesn’t go to jail for bribery? For messianic dreams of Greater Israel? For the most hawkish possible interpretation of Israel’s legitimate security needs? For revenge?
To be sure, Bibi, his ultra-nationalist coalition, and AIPAC are not responsible for all of this. But they are responsible for most of it. Had Israel conducted the war in Gaza differently and not killed over 70,000 people; had Bibi not persuaded Trump to join a fruitless and costly war with Iran; and had AIPAC not insisted on absolute, unquestioned support for Israel no matter what, we would not be where we are today. Of course, the hard left and some parts of the hard right would still be opposed to Israel’s existence, often for illegitimate reasons. But they wouldn’t have attracted so much support from others, including the voters which handed the progressive Left three election wins in New York this week.
Maybe some of those voters are bamboozled or bigoted, but surely not all or even most of them.
Israel’s standing has deteriorated so much that it’s even possible to imagine a presidential race (probably 2032 rather than 2028) between two candidates who reject the current America-Israel relationship: an AOC-type progressive on the Left and a Tucker-Carlson-type nationalist on the Right. It’s hard to think of a worse failure of political strategy.
You can’t blame this all on double standards, antisemitism, effective online propagandizing, or groupthink on the left. Of course, all of these exist, as I myself have written about many times. But at some point, we have to face the facts that the hard-right Israeli government’s policies are the primary cause of these rapid and radical changes.
Nor are they part of some timeless, causeless Jew-hatred that will never go away. Sure, some percentage of Americans (on both sides of the aisle) are, in Hillary Clinton’s words, deplorable. But they are a small minority. There are many more of us who may not use terms like Anti-Zionist, genocide, or colonialism, but who see that the Israel we may once have loved has devolved into a cruel, hyper-nationalist state whose actions are antithetical to liberal moral values.
We are horrified by what we saw in Gaza, even as we were also horrified by Hamas’ murderous attacks of October 7. We are dismayed by the failed misadventure in Iran, even as we despise the theocratic regime that has funded terrorism for decades. We are too left-wing for AIPAC, not left-wing-enough for the Bernie Left segment of the Democratic Party. Among non-Orthodox American Jews, I would venture to say that we are the conflicted majority.
Which is why, uncharacteristically for me, I want to end on a note of tempered, tentative optimism, for three reasons.
First, there is an Israeli election coming up. And while the Bennett/Lapid coalition is still to the Right of many American Jews, it is also sane, competent, and not beholden to actual genociders like Bezalel Smotrich, who sullied the recent Israel March by treading his blood-stained feet in it. Bibi’s complete failure to achieve even a decent deal with Iran has greatly weakened him. Normal, non-left-wing Israelis are exhausted by the endless wars which do not bring security. And many normal, non-left-wing Israelis are horrified by what they see in the West Bank, where, unlike Gaza, there is not an implacable terrorist enemy holding Israelis hostage, but where there are frequent, state-tolerated pogroms against innocent Palestinian people, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert has compellingly written about. There is, at last, some hope for Israeli democracy.
Second, as reflected in the February 2026 JFNA survey of American Jews’ attitudes toward Zionism, progressives’ antipathy to Zionism is, in large part, a misunderstanding — what Mimi Kravetz aptly called “the ‘Zionism’ gap.” In that poll, only 37% of respondents identified as Zionist, but 88% said that they believed Israel has a right to exist as a democratic, Jewish state — which is, itself, the classic definition of Zionism. Meanwhile, 80% of Jews who identified as anti-Zionist said that Zionism means “supporting whatever actions Israel takes,” which is definitely not what Zionism means, as evidenced by the polls about the upcoming election.
I have suggested that much of this gap is due to the difference between Zionism in theory and Zionism in recent practice. But whatever the cause, the point is that “anti-Zionism” is not nearly as strong as anti-Zionists, or many worried Zionists, say that it is. A large majority of supposed anti-Zionists and non-Zionists are really just anti-Bibi, anti-genocide (as they understand the term), and anti-oppression of Palestinians. As I am as well.
This means that, if there is a new government and new policies in Israel, there is hope for change, which is my third reason for qualified optimism.
Ironically, for that to happen, the best hopes for improving Israel’s standing in the world are some of the very constituencies and populations that AIPAC and the Israeli Right have seen as their enemies: Standing Together and their new political party Makom Le-Kulanu, the New Israel Fund, T’ruah, J Street, Rabbis for Human Rights, Smol Emuni, Peace Now, denominational bodies like Arza and Merkaz, New Jewish Narrative, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and many others.
The path of the Right has led to a dead end. Bibi and his American allies have tarnished the Israeli ‘brand’ to the point where even taking money from AIPAC is a deal-breaker in numerous Democratic Party elections. The real debate among the liberal half of the country is now between liberal Zionists (and quasi-Zionists) like those I’ve listed above, and non-antisemitic anti-Zionists and post-Zionists who argue that Israel’s hyper-nationalism, Jewish supremacy, and war crimes are not an aberration from Zionism but an inevitable expression of it; that there can be no Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel without the oppression and displacement of Palestinians; and that the only way forward is a non-Jewish state for all its citizens. (I am omitting from this discussion Palestinian genociders like Hamas, and its supporters overseas.)
I think the latter view is both incorrect and unrealistic, not least because there are at least five million Israeli Jews who will not surrender a Jewish state. I think that coexistence is the only way, whether that takes the form of two states, or a confederation of two states, or some other political arrangement. But I also admit that the Netanyahu government’s actions over the last five years provide ample evidence for the anti-Zionist view. Who knows, maybe it is too late for a democratic Israel, or maybe the term is a contradiction in terms.
But I do know this: The moral corruption of Israel has destroyed the alliances that kept it safe for decades. No amount of tough talk from Bibi and Smotrich, no guns or bombs will enable a small pariah state to endure forever. The old logic has ended. But there is hope for a better one.
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Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.
Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.
Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”
“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”
“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.
He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”
Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.
“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”
“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”
Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.
After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.
What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.
Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.
“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.
“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”
“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”
Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.
But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”
That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”
That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”
As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.
Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.
To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”
At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.
“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.
“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”
Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”
Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”
During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.
“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
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