For the past two years, the political class in the United States has been under immense pressure to distance itself from Israel. Yet, despite relentless protests, media campaigns, and international condemnation, Israel has managed to conclude the war without losing American support. The question now is, will that support endure?
Keep Congress pro-Israel and the rest would hold. That is the formula Israel and it’s allies followed, they assumed that elites shape public opinion, but in the digital age, the causality has reversed, public opinion shapes elites. Political leaders follow polls, not alliances. Their moral vocabulary is supplied by universities, media, and the online attention economy. Israel’s outreach to congressional committees preserved the mechanics of support but ignored the cultural soil that sustains it.
Policy is not self-sustaining; it is a political product that must be renewed by consent. Every contract must be reauthorized by legislators who answer to voters. Every military partnership depends on governments that survive elections. Every veto in the United Nations depends on domestic legitimacy. When a generation grows up morally alienated from Israel, policy will follow culture. Israel’s leaders behaved as if diplomacy were insulated from democracy. It is not. Culture writes law with a delay.
