Where the Fight for Israel Can Still Be Won

Recently, I was helping a pro-Israel client decide where to spend its conference budget – which rooms their people would actually be welcome in. Evangelical conferences, obviously. Jewish federations, of course.

“And the RNC,” I concluded before rushing to carpool.

Israel getting an increasingly hostile reception from the Democratic Party

I never once thought to send them to the DNC. Some filing clerk in my brain had quietly stamped the Democratic convention “Rooms Where You’ll Get Booed Off the Stage” and moved on without telling me.

That reflex didn’t come from nowhere. Last week, the most powerful Democrats in Congress were asked whether the party platform should keep affirming Israel’s right to exist. Two years ago, that commitment was written into the 2024 platform. Now the answers came back as evasions; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pivoted to the cost of living and health care. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called affirming Israel’s right to exist “a vague statement.” It isn’t.

You can see the same tolerance up in Maine. Democrats made Graham Platner their Senate nominee against Susan Collins even after he accused Israel of genocide, labeled a rival as “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu,” and spent nearly two decades with a Nazi death’s-head tattoo he says he never recognized as one. Most of the party stood by him through all of it. What finally shook that support was an allegation of sexual assault, which he denies. Sexual assault should end a candidacy. So should a Nazi tattoo. His party only moved on one of them.

I’m old enough to remember when supporting Israel wasn’t partisan at all. Left and right fought about everything else, but this was the one handshake that survived every election, and it made sense.

How important is Israel to the world, as well as to Jews?

Israel is the only real democracy in a hostile neighborhood, America’s closest regional ally, and the front line against the same extremism the rest of us watch from a safe distance. After centuries of persecution, it’s the one country where Jews aren’t someone else’s vulnerable minority.

That consensus is now collapsing, and not just for one awkward week in Congress. Around 80% of Democrats now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani supports boycotting Israel and rolled back antisemitism initiatives on his first day in office, and every anti-Israel candidate he endorsed in June won.

There are still brave exceptions, like John Fetterman and Ritchie Torres. But exceptions are what they’ve become, not the center of gravity.

Trouble spots on the Republican side, but not nearly so many

Before anyone leaves an angry comment: No, the Republican Party isn’t spotless. Not even close. Tucker Carlson gave Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes a friendly interview. Candace Owens resurrects antisemitic conspiracies for a living. A leaked group chat of young Republican staffers read like something you’d hope was fake, and senior Republicans waved it off as “pearl-clutching.” A year ago, half of Republicans under 50 viewed Israel unfavorably; today it’s 57%. None of that should be minimized.

But the two parties are not having the same argument. On the left, the anti-Israel faction is winning: shaping the conversation, taking primaries, becoming the party’s future while its leaders flinch. On the right, those same voices are still losing. When Kentucky’s Thomas Massie made hostility to Israel his brand, pro-Israel groups spent millions to defeat him, and they did. As one Republican strategist put it, being anti-Israel in today’s GOP is “not a path to success.”

I’ve seen the other side of this up close. In 2024, I helped elect Dave McCormick to the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. It was the first major election after October 7, when Jewish voters were quietly taking attendance. McCormick went to Israel, met hostage families, and spoke with conviction instead of calculation. Lifelong Democrats crossed party lines because they believed he meant it. In a race decided by less than a point, authenticity mattered.

The fight for Israel is winnable on the right, not the left

This brings me back to that conference list. On the right, the fight for Israel is still winnable, and that is exactly where the pro-Israel world should be spending its money, its time, and its energy. It needs to stop pretending it’s still 2014 and start investing where the outcome is still up for grabs.

Reach young conservatives before the algorithm hands them to Tucker Carlson, and fund the influencers, campus groups, and content making the case for Israel where anti-Israel voices now go unanswered. Recruit the next generation of Republican candidates who back Israel out of conviction, not calculation.

Spend in primaries the way pro-Israel groups spent to beat Massie, so hostility to Israel keeps ending careers instead of launching them. Draw unmistakable lines around the Fuenteses and the Owenses. Not polite disagreement. Real consequences. The kind that make antisemitism disqualifying rather than edgy.

And make leaders pay a price for waving it away as “pearl-clutching,” the way the left never made its own radicals pay. Because ideas that go unchallenged don’t stay on the fringes. They become the mainstream.

Finite resources

In an ideal world, America would have two pro-Israel parties. But resources are finite, and not every battle is equally winnable. A dollar goes further where support is still the norm than where you’re rebuilding from rubble. That’s not celebration. It’s triage.

There’s one room that’s almost stopped listening, and I hope it starts again. But there’s another that’s still arguing, still persuadable, still deciding what it wants to be. You don’t pour your heart into the room that’s stopped listening. You fight, harder than we are now, for the room where the conversation isn’t over yet.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.