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07-05-2025
WASHINGTON: I ran from the White House briefing room, past the portico entrance of the West Wing to our camera position on the lawn and flung on an ear piece connecting me to the studio.
A moment later the presenter asked me about the comments we had just heard live from US President Donald Trump.
I said we were seeing a fundamental shift in a United States’ policy position after decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It was February this year and Trump had just held talks with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the first foreign leader since Trump’s inauguration to be invited to the White House. The US President vowed that his country would take control of the Gaza Strip, having earlier pledged the territory would also be “cleaned out” and emptied of its Palestinian population.
Trump was grabbing the world’s attention with a proposal that hardened his administration’s support for Israel and also upended international norms, flying in the face of international law. It marked an apex of the current Republican Party’s relationship with Israel sometimes described as support “at all costs”.
The alliance between the two countries had been thrust into the international spotlight after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s offensive in Gaza that followed.
During that war, the administration of President Joe Biden sent some $18bn (£13.5bn) worth of weapons to Israel, maintaining unprecedented levels of US backing. The period was marked by intensifying protests in the US, with many of those protesting being traditional Democrat leaning voters. The fallout became the focus of a bitter culture war centring on American attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinians. I covered demonstrations in which protesters repeatedly labelled Biden “Genocide Joe”, an accusation he always rejected.
At the time Donald Trump branded the protesters “radical-left lunatics” and the Trump administration is now targeting for deportation hundreds of foreign students who it accuses of antisemitism or support for Hamas, a move being vigorously challenged in the courts but as a Democrat who could otherwise have expected the vote of many of those upset over his support for Israel that support was politically costly for Biden in a way not experienced by previous presidents or, indeed, Trump.
One of Biden’s key decision makers over relations with Israel still wrestles with the decisions they took.
“My first reaction is just, I understand that this has evoked incredibly passionate feelings for Arab Americans, for non-Arab Americans, Jewish Americans,” says Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former national security adviser.
“There were two competing considerations: one was wanting to curb Israel’s excesses, both with respect to civilian casualties and the flow of humanitarian assistance. The other was (…) wanting to make sure that we were not cutting Israel off from the capabilities it needed to confront its enemies on multiple different fronts.”
He added; “the United States stood behind Israel materially, morally, and in every other way in those days following October 7th” but opinion polls suggest support for Israel among the American public is dwindling.
A Gallup survey taken in March this year found only 46% of Americans expressed support for Israel (the lowest level in 25 years of Gallup’s annual tracking) while 33% now said they sympathized with the Palestinians, the highest ever reading of that measure. Other polls have found similar results.
Surveys with all their limitations suggest the swing is largely among Democrats and the young, although not exclusively. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
