Transcription
There's a strange thing happening right now that almost nobody in Washington wants to say out loud. And it's this. The country that has been treated as untouchable in American politics for three generations is losing its grip. Not because of some external enemy, but because the people who used to defend it without question are quietly stepping back. And once you start pulling on that thread, you realize the whole architecture built around greater Israel. The idea that one state should permanently control the land from the river to the sea is starting to come apart at the seams.
Let's start with what's actually visible, the part you can measure. Go back just a couple of weeks to the primary elections in Manhattan. This is about as safe a political environment as exists for unconditional support of Israel. Wealthy, connected, deeply tied into the old donor networks. And what happened? Every candidate who ran on a platform critical of unconditional US backing for Israel won. Not narrowly, decisively. There was even a race where two Jewish candidates ran against each other. And the one who said American support for Israel had gone too far is the one who came out on top. 10 years ago, that result would have been unthinkable. Today, it barely makes the front page because it's part of a pattern, not an outlier.
And the pattern goes well beyond JewishAmerican voters where support for the current Israeli government's conduct has been dropping for years now, especially among younger generations. The bigger shock, frankly, is what's happening with Christian evangelicals, the group that has functioned as Israel's most reliable, highest turnout political base in this country for decades. That coalition isn't disappearing overnight, but it's fracturing. Younger evangelicals are watching the same footage everyone else is watching. The bombing campaigns, the displacement, the home demolitions in the West Bank. And a good number of them are starting to ask whether what they're seeing has anything to do with the faith they were raised in. When the theological foundation of a political alliance starts to wobble, the alliance doesn't survive forever on habit alone.
Then zoom out to the rest of the world because this is where it gets even starker. Pew and other major international polling outfits have been tracking favorability toward Israel across dozens of countries, and the trend line is about as onedirectional as you'll ever see in public opinion data. steadily down region after region, including in countries that have historically been neutral or even friendly. People have watched in real time on every phone screen on the planet a level of destruction and civilian death in Gaza that's almost impossible to rationalize and then watched the same approach extend into the West Bank and into southern Lebanon. You can only ask the rest of the world to look away for so long before global opinion simply refuses to cooperate anymore.
So here's the uncomfortable bottom line. Outside of the United States government and arguably Germany, for reasons rooted entirely in its own 20th century history rather than anything happening today, there is no major institutional backer left standing. And even the American relationship, the loadbearing pillar of the entire structure is showing real cracks for the first time in living memory.
Now, to understand why this matters so much, you have to go back and look honestly at what this project actually was. Because it didn't start last year, and it didn't start with this war. It goes back decades and it has a name, even if that name rarely gets said on American television. It's called Greater Israel. The idea that the territory captured in the 1967 war, the West Bank, parts of southern Lebanon, parts of the Golan should not just be occupied temporarily as a security measure, but absorbed permanently, settled permanently, ruled permanently. This isn't speculation or interpretation. It's written down. The founding charter of the political party that has dominated Israeli politics for most of the last 30 years states plainly that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there will be only one sovereignty. And it explicitly rules out handing any of that territory to a foreign administration. That's not rhetoric from a fringe figure. That's the founding document of the governing party dating back to the late 1970s. So when people hear the chant from the river to the sea and assume it must be some kind of extremist Palestinian slogan, it's worth knowing that the exact same geographic claim word for word in spirit has been the official platform of Israel's ruling party since before most of today's policymakers were even born.
And this is precisely why a two-state solution has never actually been allowed to happen, despite every American administration since the 1990s claiming publicly that it supports one. Go back to the original UN partition plan after the British mandate ended. The Arab states rejected it at the time, but even that plan, controversial as it was, set aside a substantial share of the land for a Palestinian state. After the 1948 war, the territory under Israeli control expanded well beyond that. After 1967, it expanded again. And at every single stage since then, the documented political program of the dominant Israeli political movement has been the same. No Palestinian state. Full stop. Not a smaller one, not a demilitarized one, not one with limited sovereignty, none at all.
Which raises the obvious question, if there's no Palestinian state and 8 million Palestinian Arabs living under that same territory, what exactly is supposed to happen to them? Logically, there are only a few possible answers, and they're not pleasant ones. Either they get full and equal citizenship in a single democratic state, which Israeli leadership has consistently rejected, or they live permanently under a system of separate and unequal legal status administered by a foreign army without a vote in the government that controls their lives. or the option you've watched play out with increasing intensity over the past 2 years. They get pushed out through bombing campaigns, through home demolitions, through settler expansion into the West Bank backed by military force, through what looks to almost every outside observer at this point like a slow motion campaign of displacement.
And once you frame it that way, the strategic logic of the last three decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East starts to make a grim kind of sense. Even if it's a logic nobody in power wanted to state plainly at the time. If there's never going to be a Palestinian state, then there's always going to be resistance to that arrangement, armed and otherwise. And if you're committed to suppressing that resistance permanently rather than resolving its underlying cause, you eventually have to go after every government in the region that gives that resistance political cover, financial support, or safe harbor. That's Iraq. That's Syria. That's Libya. And the largest prize of all, the one that's been the obsession of an entire generation of American foreign policy hawks, is Iran. None of those wars happened in a vacuum. The case for invading Iraq in 2003 was sold to the American public as a response to weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. But underneath that public justification was a much older strategic agenda, one openly discussed in policy circles years before the war about reshaping the political map of the Middle East to eliminate governments that supported the Palestinian cause and stood close to Iran. Syria's government was toppled into 14 years of catastrophic civil war for largely the same underlying reason. And now you have a direct ongoing military confrontation with Iran dressed up in the language of nuclear non-prololiferation but tracing back to that same decades old refusal to allow a negotiated Palestinian state to exist.
So when you ask why American foreign policy has been locked into this cycle of intervention after intervention for 30 years at a staggering [snorts] cost in lives and money and credibility, the honest answer isn't really about any single threat. It's about a foundational decision made decades ago to back permanent Israeli control over land that international law, the United Nations, and most of the world's governments say belongs at least partly to someone else. Once you commit to defending an arrangement that has no political resolution, you commit yourself to an endless list of enemies. Because resistance to an unresolved injustice doesn't go away. It just changes shape generation after generation.
And this is the part worth sitting with because it's not really a partisan point or even fundamentally a moral one. Although the moral dimension is impossible to ignore once you've seen the scale of civilian death in Gaza over the past 2 years, it's a practical observation about how political projects sustain themselves. A one-state arrangement where one population rules permanently over another population with no political voice doesn't have a stable equilibrium. It either evolves toward genuine equal citizenship for everyone living in that territory or it requires permanent escalating force to maintain others. Checkpoints, walls, demolitions, expulsions, recurring wars. There's no third option where you simply get to freeze the situation in place forever because the people on the losing end of that arrangement don't agree to stay quiet indefinitely. And the rest of the world doesn't agree to keep funding it indefinitely either.
That second part is exactly what's breaking down right now in real time. For decades, the entire project survived precisely because it had one government willing to underwrite it politically, diplomatically, and militarily, regardless of the human cost, and willing to treat any criticism of that arrangement as something close to unthinkable in mainstream political life. That's eroding, not because of a single event, but because of an accumulation. two years of aroundthe-clock footage out of Gaza, expanding settlement activity and violence in the West Bank, military operations into southern Lebanon, polling that shows the policy increasingly isolated from global public opinion, and now finally, cracks inside the domestic coalitions that used to make the politics of unconditional support so safe and so automatic.
Which brings you back to the actual choice on the table, the one that's been on the table the entire time, dressed up in different language by different administrations for 30 years. Either there's a genuine negotiated Palestinian state with real sovereignty, real borders, real political agency sitting alongside a secure Israel. or there's one state with one government extending equal citizenship and equal voting rights to everyone living inside it, Jewish and Palestinian alike. Those are really the only two arrangements that have any chance of being stable over the long run, because they're the only two that don't require permanent intensifying coercion to hold together. everything else, every version of permanent occupation, permanent settlement expansion, permanent military administration over a population with no path to citizenship or self-determination is not actually a long-term policy. It's a holding pattern that depends entirely on outside backing strong enough to absorb the moral and political cost indefinitely. And what you're watching right now across New York primaries and evangelical pews and international polling data alike is that backing finally running out. Not because the underlying conflict has changed, because the world watching it