Republican schism on Israel is a mainstream media myth

Jonathan S. Tobin

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), speak to members of the press on the steps of the U.S. House of Representatives at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on May 8, 2024. Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images.

It’s the break they’ve been waiting for. Liberal news publications like Axios, Politico, The Economist and Time magazine, among others, all more or less ran articles with the same headline trumpeting “MAGA’s disenchantment with Israel” and a “Republican divide over Gaza.” These pieces heralded what was described as a seminal shift in opinion on the right about Israel because of “starvation” in the Gaza Strip.

The tsunami of opprobrium directed at the Jewish state has gone into overdrive in the last month over the food shortage in Gaza. That’s a genuine calamity that has been orchestrated by the Hamas terrorists, who steal the aid that Israel has flooded into the Strip, hoard it for themselves and then sell it back to their own people at exorbitant prices. It’s also another item in their toolkit to attract the press when headlines turn to other subjects.

But while the largely dishonest media coverage of this problem has stampeded liberals into joining those progressives denouncing Israel, the idea that this is also happening on the right has become an article of faith on the political left.

According to liberal media, Israel can no longer count on support from the GOP for the war it is waging against Hamas in the aftermath of the Palestinian terror assault on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023. That would seem to contradict everything about the contemporary Republican Party, which has been nearly unanimous in its backing for Jerusalem for decades. It does fit in with the general coverage of the conflict throughout the corporate press, which has become Hamas’s stenographers while mainstreaming false narratives about a fictional “genocide” of Arab civilians in Gaza.

If this shift truly has spread from the left to the right—in effect creating a reverse bipartisan consensus against, rather than for, the Jewish state—that would be a catastrophic development for Israel. While there has been some slippage among some of the most extreme, as well as some of the youngest, GOP voters, the notion that there is a genuine split on the right on this issue is nonsense. Indeed, it is as untrue as most of the serious accusations about Israel deliberately causing starvation or targeting civilians that are now treated by legacy media if they were proven facts rather than tendentious smears.

Right-wing Israel-haters

That is not to deny that there aren’t now some vocal foes of the Jewish state on the right. Former Fox News host and current political commentator Tucker Carlson has turned his podcast into a nonstop stream of anti-Israel invective, where Hamas talking points are as likely to be heard as on MSNBC.

Carlson was the tribune of conservatism during the height of the moral panic about race during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, with his program becoming the most popular on cable-TV news. Even now, his podcast, which can be viewed on X, and his website have a considerable following. But in opposing administration policy first on Iran and the Israel-Hamas war, Carlson has broken with President Donald Trump and marginalized himself and those who agree with him.

The same is true of the other MAGA personalities that have joined him in echoing the dishonest criticisms of Israel that are heard on left-wing channels and liberal publications like The New York Times.

One is Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump who has described himself as a “Christian Zionist” and was even honored in 2017 by the Zionist Organization of America. However, like others on the far right who are desperate to stay relevant and need to generate clicks from extremists, he now talks of Trump as being “Israel first” rather than “America first,” and mimics the antisemitic tropes of the anti-Zionist left by claiming that Israel is manipulating American foreign policy.

Another is Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.), who also seems to be operating from the same playbook as Socialists and antisemites like House “Squad” members Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) by denouncing the mythical Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. Indeed, along with extremist libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Taylor Greene joined with four “Squad” members to try to vote down American support for the Iron Dome missile-defense system that has saved countless Israeli lives during terrorist missile and rocket attacks. Throw in former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz and even more extreme open antisemites like political commentator and podcaster Candace Owens, and it’s possible to describe their attacks on the Jewish state as something of a trend.

But to pretend that these individuals—or the extremists who provide them with the clicks to sustain their presence on the Internet—are representative of Trump’s MAGA movement, or most conservatives and Republicans, is not so much an exaggeration as wishful thinking on the part of left-wing reporters who are biased against Israel.

Trump and Johnson speak for the GOP

Far more representative of conservative opinion are people like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who, during a visit to Israel this past week, made clear the GOP’s devotion to the U.S.-Israel alliance. Far from distancing himself from the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he backed it to the hilt, even going so far as to claim that Judea and Samaria are Israel’s “by right.”

The headlines also failed to fully take into account the fact that, despite the hopes of left-wing critics and right-wing antisemites, Trump has maintained his historic support for the Jewish state. His decision to join Jerusalem’s attack on Iran’s nuclear program was a crushing blow to Carlson and other Israel-haters. Since then, he has continued to reject the talk of “genocide,” even if he has also made some statements about being worried about food shortages in Gaza. Still, any concerns about him joining the likes of Carlson and Taylor Greene should have been put to rest when he posted on his Truth Social platform that “the fastest way to end the humanitarian crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!”

Polls do show some diminishment of support for Israel among Trump supporters and Republicans, especially among the young. But that decline is minimal and is nothing compared to the situation on the left. A Gallup poll about U.S. support for Israel’s military action in Gaza showed that only 8% of Democrats back the Jewish state—a shocking number that illustrates just how much mainstream media bias against Israel can influence opinion among liberals. The same poll showed that 71% of Republicans were still firmly backing Israel.

That Israel has maintained such high levels of support on the right, despite the cacophony of blood libels spewed out by Hamas and dutifully regurgitated in the liberal press in recent weeks, points to why the headlines about MAGA repudiating the Jewish state are so wrong.

Why conservatives love Israel

Why are Republicans and conservatives not budging on Israel, while Democrats and even independents are trending against it?

There are four main reasons.

One is that conservatives love Israel. That affection is rooted in part in faith, with evangelical Christians demonstrating overwhelming support for the Jewish state and believing devoutly in the biblical teaching that he who blesses Israel will be blessed. That verse became a point of contention between Carlson and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in an online debate. While Carlson’s claim that this didn’t mean Americans should be faithful allies to the Jewish state sounded right to left-wingers and those not particularly religious, it’s a point that resonates deeply with most evangelicals and conservatives. And it represents the foundation of American philosemitism that goes back to the Founding Fathers.

That is reflected in the statements and actions of Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. The views of the former Arkansas governor and one-time presidential candidate are much like those of the tens of millions of conservative Christians who have become the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States in recent decades. His stance is far more representative of opinion on the right than Carlson, Bannon or Taylor Greene.

The second is that a record percentage of Republicans back Trump and trust his judgment. While Carlson and other Israel-haters claim they are more in touch with the GOP grassroots than Israel’s supporters, Trump is still the only one who gets to define what “America First” means. And according to the president, that means embracing the Jewish state.

The right distrusts liberal media

The third is that while the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum have always joined forces when it comes to antisemitism, most Republicans instinctively oppose what the left embraces.

Conservatives understand that the pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses chanting for the destruction of Israel and in favor of terrorism against Jews are radical leftists seeking to tear down Western civilization and the country they love. They fully support Trump’s efforts to overturn the progressive takeover of education by those who think that America is an irredeemably racist society and Israelis and Jews are “white” oppressors. They are no more likely to join forces with “The Squad” on Israel than they are on any other issue, and rightly see GOP outliers who do so as having betrayed Trump and his movement.

Related to this and perhaps most important in this discussion is the fourth reason why Republicans still back Israel: They don’t believe anything published or broadcast by legacy media outlets that promote anti-Israel blood libels about Gaza.

It is axiomatic that Americans are living in a bifurcated society in which the left and right no longer read, listen or watch the same media, and therefore operate with a completely separate set of facts and beliefs about the issues of the day.

Liberals are still in a state of shock over the right’s embrace of Trump and his ability to win re-election in 2024, despite the mainstream media echoing Democratic talking points about him being an authoritarian and a threat to democracy. That’s because so many of them live in an ideological bubble and don’t understand that those on the other side of the aisle reject assumptions about Trump that are taken for granted in the liberal media. The same rule also generally applies to coverage of Israel and the war in Gaza.

That’s not to say that there has been no movement in American politics concerning the Middle East. To the contrary, in the almost two years since the Oct. 7 attacks, the anti-Israel faction within the Democratic Party on the issue has gained an enormous amount of ground.

The shift on the left

In the last few decades, Democrats could be said to have split on Israel, with the left-wing base and younger voters increasingly falling under the influence of toxic intersectional myths about Israel being a “white” oppressor and “apartheid” state. But when Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) entered Congress in January 2019 with the rest of the first members of the progressive antisemitic “Squad,” mainstream Democrats weren’t wrong to dismiss them as outliers in a party whose officeholder class was still solidly pro-Israel. Yet rather than censor and ostracize them, the elderly congressional leadership of the party was hesitant to shut down what they believed to be the future of the party. Events like the decisive win of Socialist Israel-hater Zohran Mamdani, 33, in the recent New York City Democratic mayoral primary seem to indicate that this assumption is being proven true.

Democrats are now increasingly the anti-Israel party, with even supposedly pro-Israel moderates joining the radical left to vote against military aid to the Jewish state during wartime. They also engage in over-the-top and vicious criticisms of the Netanyahu government to keep their left-wing critics at bay.

As long as Donald Trump is unquestioned leader of the Republican Party, the idea that the same thing is going to happen on the right bears no resemblance to reality. And Christian conservatives and most Republicans are still faithful friends of the Jewish state, and no more likely to believe liberal mimicking of Hamas smears of Israel than they would the same outlets’ attacks on Trump.

The shift on the left demonstrates that the old bipartisan pro-Israel consensus is dead. Backing for Zionism—something that has always been baked deep into the political DNA of this country—is now a matter of partisan contention. And much as Jerusalem would prefer not to be totally dependent on support from either party, that is something that can no longer be avoided. With Democrats drifting further away and becoming an anti-Israel party, the fact that the overwhelming majority of Republicans remain its stalwart supporters is something that should be celebrated by friends of Israel.

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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

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