Support for Israel among U.S. conservatives is starting to crack. Here’s why

Red-state America has been a big fan of Israel, according to Jackson Lahmeyer, an evangelical pastor in Oklahoma and founder of Pastors for Trump.

“Evangelical Christians in America for the most part, not always but generally speaking, have usually been very strong supporters of the nation of Israel and the Jewish people,” Lahmeyer said in an interview with NPR.

That support is deeply rooted in their evangelical faith, he said. But recently, Lahmeyer has noticed the conversation around Israel is changing quite a bit — particularly online.

“Some very influential leaders, all of whom I like — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have taken a very controversial stance in regards to the nation of Israel,” he said.

Last week, Carlson hosted a prominent white nationalist named Nick Fuentes on his show. Although Carlson disagreed with Fuentes on his most antisemitic statements, such as American Jews are more faithful to Israel than they are to the United States, he did broadly align with Fuentes on his views about the country itself.

“I’ve always thought it’s great to criticize and question our relationship with Israel because it’s insane and it hurts us. We get nothing out of it, I completely agree with you there,” Carlson said.

Opposition to Israel on the right isn’t new, but younger conservatives appear to be rapidly moving away from supporting the close U.S. relationship with the country. Among several polls, one from the Pew Research Center out earlier this year showed that conservatives under 50 were increasingly skeptical of Israel. Over the past three years, the group’s negative views of the country jumped from 35% to 50%.

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The stakes for Israel are enormous. If skepticism starts spreading from conservative influencers to elected officials, it could threaten billions in military and foreign aid that Israel receives each year from the U.S.

For more than a decade, the majority of its political support in America has come from Christian conservatives, said Daniel Hummel, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who’s studied Christian support for Israel. Today, with many on the left angry over the war in Gaza, their backing is more important than ever.

“They’re the last bastion of organized, large-scale national support for Israel,” he said.

Biblical roots

Christian support for Israel is rooted in the Bible itself. Many evangelical Christians believe that the promises God made to the Jewish people in the Old Testament still hold, Lahmeyer said.

“God’s made a covenant with the Jewish people and he’s not going to break that covenant,” he said.

Evangelicals see support of the modern state of Israel as a way of honoring that divine will. “If God says, ‘This land belongs to you eternally,’ then it belongs to you eternally — because God’s the creator, he’s the owner,” Lahmeyer said.

Many also believe the return of the Jewish people to Israel is a prerequisite for the second coming of Christ, he added.

From a modern standpoint, Hummel says, Christian support for the state of Israel has been growing in fits and starts since the nation was founded in 1948. The famous evangelical pastor Billy Graham visited Israel in the 1960s. By the 1980s and 1990s many large Christian groups, like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, were supporting Israel.

Evangelical support for Israel grew vastly in the years following the 9/11 terror attacks, Hummel said. Particularly in 2006, support for the country took off with the formation of a group known as Christians United For Israel (CUFI). The group became a single-issue lobby that claimed support from millions of American evangelicals, Hummel said. CUFI has been a staunch advocate for Israel and some of its most expansionist policies — such as settlements in the West Bank. (CUFI did not respond to NPR’s request for an interview for this story.)

Because of their biblical beliefs about Israel, Hummel said, evangelical backers, known as Christian Zionists, have become central to American support. The backing of Christian Zionists kept growing, even as traditional supporters on the American left grew increasingly skeptical of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Today Christian Zionists “are really valuable to Israel,” he said. “They tend to say, ‘We think Israel knows its interests best… and we just want to support what they decide.'”

Cracks over Gaza

But Israel’s war in Gaza has challenged that view. “Over the last two years, there has been this kind of gnawing away of support of Israel among evangelical Christians,” Lahmeyer said.

The polls support that observation, said Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, who tracks public opinion about Israel. He says that since the war in Gaza, support has plummeted among young conservatives.

Telhami’s own work shows that today, only 32% of evangelicals aged 18-34 sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians — that’s more than 30 points lower than the older generation. Support more broadly from Republicans in the same age range is only 24%.

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Telhami believes that shift in sentiment has emboldened longtime opponents to Israel on the right.

In addition to Tucker Carlson, prominent Republican influencers like Candace Owens and Stephen Bannon have publicly criticized Israel recently.

Many of these personalities never supported Israel, and they sense that now is the moment to speak up, said Curt Mills, editor of the American Conservative Magazine, which opposes Israeli policies and was founded by Pat Buchanan – a Christian conservative, former presidential hopeful and political commentator.

“Tucker and Bannon are political operators and in a lot of ways true believers, but they are also very effective businessmen and they would not be doing these programs if nobody gave a hoot,” he said. “There’s an audience for this, people are frustrated, people are angry and they have reason to be.”

In addition to anger over the way Israel has conducted its war in Gaza, Mills says many conservatives want America to avoid becoming entangled in new wars, particularly in the Middle East. And they worry Trump is allowing Israel to drive military decisions. That anxiety grew after America bombed Iranian nuclear sites earlier this year.

“They are using Donald Trump’s presidency like a rented car. The Israelis, the Israeli lobby, the Netanyahu Government, the neoconservatives in his ranks,” he said.

Resurgent antisemitism

A desire for American isolationism and outrage over how Israel has conducted the war have driven some to speak up. But other influencers are using the war as an opportunity to peddle antisemitic conspiracies.

One example came last month, when podcaster Candace Owens discussed a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a group of U.S. social media influencers:

“Two years ago, the mere idea that you might share a perspective that Jews are controlling the media, that would be considered antisemitic. You would be called a Jew hater. Fast forward to 2025, and Bibi Netanyahu is now hosting an on-camera meeting,” she said.

The idea that “Jews control the media” is a long-held antisemitic trope. Owens has made other antisemitic remarks in the past, though she has repeatedly said that she does not hate Jewish people.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes used his appearance on Carlson’s show to promote numerous antisemitic ideas: including that he believed Jews naturally dislike Europeans and that Jewish people prevent America from unifying around a common vision for itself.

“The main challenge to that, a big challenge to [unifying the country] is organized Jewry in America,” he told Carlson.

Hummel points out that much of this antisemitism is entangled in a theological divide over Israel. Many conservative opponents to Israel are Catholic or non-evangelical Protestants, he said. Those sects do not share the view that the Jewish people share a sacred covenant with God. And some, like Fuentes, are resurfacing centuries-old Christian conspiracy theories about the Jewish people.

Telhami says that it remains to be seen what all this actually means for the relationship between America and Israel. The Trump administration continues to be broadly supportive, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee — a devout evangelical Christian.

“The question of course is whether the shift in public opinion in-and-of-itself would lead to a shift in policy. And that’s not a straightforward line,” Telhami said.

But he added, it is clear that on the American right, support for Israel is no longer the given it once was.