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What is cracking in the United States is not some sudden outbreak of irrationality, nor a mysterious collapse of old alliances. It is the overdue failure of a political protection racket that has demanded, for far too long, that Americans confuse loyalty to a foreign state with moral seriousness.
The numbers now tell the story that polite official Washington has been trying to muffle: Pew says six in ten Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, with negativity rising sharply, especially among younger Americans; Israelis no longer clearly lead Palestinians in Americans’ sympathies. That is not a fringe revolt. It is a public beginning, belatedly and imperfectly, to notice what has been done in its name and with its money.
And why would that support not fracture? Gaza has become the moral ulcer of our time. Palestinian health officials, report that more than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, “mostly civilians.” The genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel remains active before the International Court of Justice, while Amnesty International is no longer mincing words and describes Israel’s actions as an ongoing genocide and apartheid.
One need not await the leisurely choreography of legal finality to know that something monstrous has been unfolding before the eyes of the world. When mass death, starvation, displacement, and the reduction of an entire civilian population to a laboratory of siege are treated as regrettable but tolerable, the issue is no longer merely Israeli conduct. It is the organized degradation of human conscience.
This is the central fracture in American opinion: not that people have suddenly become anti-Jewish, which would be both false and contemptible, but that they are increasingly unwilling to pretend that a state armed to the teeth, shielded by Washington, and governed by expansionists and zealots is somehow forever entitled to immunity from moral judgment. Many Jewish Americans themselves have been revolted by what has been done under the banner of Jewish safety. The real divide is not Jew versus gentile, but human decency versus the doctrine that some states may pulverize, starve, expel, and colonize indefinitely so long as they can furnish a security pretext and hire enough spokesmen.
Lebanon has only sharpened the disgust. Israeli forces remain in a 5-to-10 kilometer strip of southern Lebanese territory, have published maps showing dozens of villages under their control, and have now issued evacuation warnings even north of the Litani River. The Israeli strikes in Lebanon amount to war crimes, including strikes on residential buildings, displaced people, tents, and healthcare facilities. This is the old colonial reflex in its current uniform: seize land, rename the seizure “security,” and then expect the rest of the world to admire the euphemism. A buffer zone is still an occupation when it is carved out by force and held against the will of the people living there.
Then came the perfectly revealing little obscenity in Debel: an Israeli soldier smashing a crucifix with an axe while another documented the act. Reuters verified the image and reported that the soldiers were punished, but also noted that rights groups say such accountability is rare. Exactly. The scandal is not simply that one lout with a weapon desecrated a Christian symbol. Armies everywhere contain louts. The scandal is that this ugly little performance felt natural enough to be staged, photographed, and circulated from within an occupying force already operating in a culture of near-total indulgence. Once a military comes to believe itself as morally untouchable as it is materially armed, desecration, humiliation, and cruelty cease to be aberrations and become the ambient language of impunity.
And while Gaza burns and Lebanon is carved up, the settlement project grinds on with all the shameless persistence of a burglary conducted in broad daylight. Israel approved 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, and that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has described this construction drive as a way to bury the idea of Palestinian statehood. Settler violence has surged and displaced entire communities. One cannot in good faith watch a government expand settlements on occupied land, tolerate or encourage settler terror, and then continue to speak as though the problem were some elusive diplomatic misunderstanding.
Washington’s role in all this is not that of an honest broker, nor even of a confused bystander. It is that of an enabler that has spent years issuing ritual murmurs about restraint while underwriting the machinery that makes restraint unnecessary. The public is increasingly aware of this grotesque contradiction. The same political class that lectures Americans about democracy and human rights behaves, on Israel, like a chorus line of frightened toadies. You may call that donor capture, ideological servility, moral cowardice, or the corruption of imperial habit. Whatever name one chooses, the result is the same: a Congress and an executive branch that appear far more responsive to organized pressure and strategic mythology than to the mounting disgust of their own electorate. “Rules for thee, not for me” is part of what is now tearing the old consensus apart.
Then there is Trump, the orange barometer of national vulgarity, who promised “America First” and “no new wars” and has instead produced the foreign policy equivalent of a bar fight in a munitions dump. 61% of Americans disapprove of his handling of the Iran conflict and that 59% say the U.S. made the wrong decision in using force there. Trump continues to push to grab Greenland, and boasting he could do “anything I want” with Cuba and musing that he would have the “honor” of “taking” it. This is not realism. It is imperial senility in a red tie: threats thrown at the globe like beer bottles, followed by demands that the public mistake chaos for virility.
Iran, meanwhile, is ruled by a vicious theocracy that deserves no romanticism whatsoever. But it is precisely the idiocy of men like Trump that allows such regimes to survive their own moral bankruptcy by posing as besieged guardians of national dignity. That has always been the curse of stupid wars: they rescue the very tyrants they claim to punish. So here we are again - American power flung into the region without thought, Israeli militarism ranging across borders with its usual confidence that force will cure what force has worsened, and a clerical regime in Tehran handed the oldest gift in politics: an enemy stupid enough to make it look resilient.
The American people are not hallucinating when they feel betrayed. They were sold “no new wars” and handed another infernal Middle Eastern entanglement. They were told the United States was acting for order and civilization while watching civilian corpses accumulate, settlements expand, southern Lebanon militarized, and war talk treated as a test of seriousness. They were told the alliance was about shared values while being invited to swallow ever more plainly visible contempt for law, proportion, mercy, and truth. And at some point even a propagandized public begins to notice that the sermon and the spectacle no longer match.
So the old deference is dying. Good. It deserves to die. Not because Jews are collectively to blame for the crimes of the Israeli state, they are not, and to say otherwise would be filth. But because no state has a perpetual lien on the moral imagination of another people. Israel’s current governing project has made itself harder and harder to distinguish from permanent war, permanent settlement, permanent siege, and permanent exemption. The American governing class, caught between public revulsion and institutional cowardice, is finally discovering that the slogans no longer anesthetize as they once did.
That is the real fracture: the slow refusal of millions of Americans to go on subsidizing euphemism. They are no longer willing to hear “self-defense” and ignore occupation, hear “security” and ignore annexation, hear “civilization” and ignore mass death, hear “America First” and ignore another quagmire. What is collapsing is not a friendship between peoples, but a racket of sanctimony. And it cannot collapse too soon.