Israel’s genocide in Gaza has galvanized massive opposition on the antiwar left and set in motion a sea change in American politics concerning Israel.

Last month, a Quinnipiac poll showed marked declines in almost every metric concerning attitudes toward Israel in the wake of Gaza. Support for Palestinians for the first time exceeds support for Israel (37 to 36 percent). Exactly 50 percent consider Gaza a genocide. Sixty percent oppose further arms shipments to Israel. A similar number oppose Israel’s war on Gaza. A majority (53 percent) opposes Trump’s handling of the Gaza conflict. Forty percent consider US policy “too supportive” of Israel.

These are shocking numbers, which have never been recorded in many years’ worth of previous polls that have consistently reflected strong support for Israel and far less for Palestinians. The call for a suspension of military aid, for example, has been taboo in mainstream discourse for decades. Attitudes hitherto considered unthinkable have now become mainstream.

It is, of course, tragic that it takes genocide to move American public opinion. Decades of activism on the antiwar left barely moved the needle. It took a looming Holocaust to break the barrier. Still, the barrier has broken.

The party has been riven by a schism between a senior leadership aligned with the Israel lobby and the billionaire donor elite; and the left, grassroots youth wing represented by the Squad in Congress. It played out at a recent Democratic National Committee (DNC) meeting at which antiwar Democrats proposed a resolution calling for an end to the war and ban of weapons sales to Israel. DNC senior leaders countered with their own resolution supported by the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and its party proxy, the Democratic Majority for Israel, which called only for release of the Israeli hostages. The polling data suggests that these party grandees are wildly out of touch with where their voters are.

Congressional Democrats, who read the same polls you and I do, have begun to get the message. The majority of Senate Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders’s resolution to suspend military aid. A new Block the Bombs bill is circulating in the House. It has even drawn support from members who’ve received substantial past financial support from AIPAC. They include some of its most powerful members, Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Rep. Adam Smith, who said, “I believe it is time for the United States government to stop the sale of some offensive weapons systems to Israel.”

Though Smith’s support was somewhat tempered, it signaled an awareness that the times are changing on Israel. His Seattle district includes one of the country’s main weapons developers, Boeing. He’s also received $800,000 from AIPAC in the past two election cycles.

After AIPAC-funded party primary challenges devastated the ranks of progressive candidates in 2022, some members have begun to pledge that they will no longer accept such donations from such pro-Israel PACs — though these pledges do not cover primary candidates recruited by the Israel lobby to challenge progressives. Until the party itself bans such PAC manipulation, this will continue.

In 2022, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and others on the party’s left flank complained about the absurdity of Republicans intervening to defeat Democratic candidates. Ocasio-Cortez warned that their money was “toxic” and a “slush fund for Republican billionaires who should not have influence in the Democratic Party, let alone our primaries.” The congressional leadership yawned and did nothing. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

The worse Israel’s genocide, the more disgust it arouses in the American public. This, in turn, trickles up to the party’s elected officials who read the tea leaves: being in lockstep with the lobby is no longer the sure ticket it once was.

The DNC and congressional leadership are still late to the game. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, Senate and House leaders, have kept their distance from their party’s New York City mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani because, among other things, he supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and opposes the Gaza genocide. They are incapable of leading into the future, where the party must be if it is to win national elections and counter MAGA.

There are two upcoming tests of this phenomenon: the 2026 midterm elections and, more important, the 2028 presidential election. So far, prospects are not promising for the Democrats next year. The party’s popularity is in the toilet. It has the lowest approval rating in three decades (33 percent). Even the Republican Party eclipses that, with 40 percent. It seems unlikely that the Democrats can right the ship and develop a coherent message that will resonate with the voters in time to take back the White House. In these circumstances, a disappointing result for the minority party in an off-year election would be disastrous.

The 2028 presidential primary race will determine whether the party can generate a younger, more progressive candidate, who will more closely reflect rank-and-file views on Gaza and the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When, if ever, can the Democrats produce a candidate who speaks to and for the grassroots, while defying the Israel lobby: a candidate not beholden to the lobby and its billionaire class who, besides political interests, has values as well?

Of the current crop — Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttegieg, Gretchen Whitmer, and J. B. Pritzker — only the latter has supported blocking arms sales, which Pritzker says “sends the right message” to Israel. Though he remains a politician whose views on Gaza aren’t fully aligned with those of the progressive left, he’s miles ahead of his competitors.

Israeli genocide has also created a massive fissure with American Jewry, which loathes Benjamin Netanyahu. Its view of the war in Gaza is only slightly less negative. A 2024 poll found that one-third of Jews believed Gaza constituted a genocide. A 2025 survey found 45 percent of respondents felt Israel was “too aggressive” in Gaza. Interestingly both polls were taken by pro-Israel organizations.

Yet the stance of the major Jewish organizations and their wealthy gerontocracy remains fossilized. Except for anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, the community has remained largely mute. Nor do communal groups have any of the worries politicians do: most Jews are unaffiliated, thus there is no mechanism for them to influence mainstream institutions. Groups like the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and AIPAC will walk off a cliff for Israel. Most American Jews refuse to join them.

Trump’s statements about Gaza haven’t helped. He has sided with Israel unconditionally, even endorsing ethnic cleansing and recasting the enclave as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” He’s called on Israel not just to topple Hamas but to exterminate it.

A US-funded “humanitarian aid” operation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), has prepared a plan to create what the Israeli defense minister calls a “humanitarian city” imprisoning 600,000 Gazans. Similarly, the Boston Consulting Group devised a $5 billion plan calling for “voluntary relocation” of the entire population. Gaza would become a “US trusteeship” and be “transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub.”

Trusteeships must be recognized by the United Nations, which would never agree to this.  There hasn’t been one since Palau gained independence in 1994. And not only will the world react with outrage to such a plan if implemented, it would further sour Americans on Trump’s Gaza policy. Polls indicate a majority oppose it. The last thing Americans want is a long-term entanglement in the Middle East, where we’ve fought three wars in the past three decades.

Nearly two thousand Palestinians have been murdered at GHF sites as they swarmed for food, many of them by American mercenaries hired by a US security company. Such sights may not trouble Israelis inured to such suffering, but most Americans are appalled. Every starved child, every mother killed as she stretches out her hands for food, hammers another nail in the coffin of American support for Israel.