Lebanon under fire
© Marwan Naamani/dpa/ZUMA Press/APA ImagesSmoke billows from Beirut’s southern Dahiya suburb following Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon • April 8, 2026
We've been covering the shift in American politics on Israel for years. Donald Trump's disastrously failed war on Iran has accelerated it.

For years, conventional wisdom held that support for Israel was a third rail in U.S. politics. Phil Weiss has written a library of analysis and coverage on that here at Mondoweiss over the past 20 years. Uncritical support for Israel was toxic for politicians to touch, impossible to oppose, and self-reinforcing across both parties through the combined pressure of donor money, media consensus, and institutional loyalty. That consensus is broken forever. It didn't break because of a sudden moral awakening in Washington. That will never happen, on virtually any issue. If you need any more proof of that, just look at the way the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein are being treated, or refer to the fact that even massacres of schoolchildren haven't moved Congress to do something about guns in the country. The consensus across the political elite on Israel broke because Israel's conduct in Gaza, Lebanon, and now in its open effort to torpedo an end to the war with Iran, has become a liability that American politicians can no longer ignore.

Michael Arria, our U.S. correspondent, documented this week how military aid to Israel has finally become a true litmus test in Democratic Party primaries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced she will vote against all military aid to Israel, including weapons classified as "defensive," a position she had previously hedged. Even J Street, the organization meant to offer a counter to AIPAC's extremism but locked in perpetual confusion about its identity, is even now opposing U.S. support for the Iron Dome missile defense system. AIPAC, once considered the most powerful of all the many lobby groups, is now a liability in Democratic races, losing key primaries and watching candidates run against it by name. A recent NBC News poll shows just 13 percent of Democrats view Israel positively. These numbers are not marginal; they represent a fundamental and permanent realignment of the Democratic base. Politicians, candidates, and political institutions are paying attention.

This fracturing is thankfully not limited to the left. The Iran war has cracked open the MAGA coalition in ways that the genocide in Gaza could not. Powerful conservative commentators commanding huge audiences and figures closely aligned with the MAGA movement have been openly and harshly critical of Trump over the war. The widespread, and correct, view is that Netanyahu manipulated Trump into a conflict that serves Israeli interests, not American ones. The critique of the tail wagging the dog is now being advanced loudly by people who would never have entertained it two years ago. The political ground is moving, dramatically, in the months before an all-important mid-term election. Republican figures with aspirations for more power, such as J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, are beginning to distance themselves from the Iran debacle.

Mitchell Plitnick says the Iran war will only end when the U.S. decides to restrain Israel. The ceasefire is fragile, Trump's own contradictory statements have directly undermined it, but the central obstacle to any durable resolution is Israel. Netanyahu declared the ceasefire did not include Lebanon and immediately launched what Lebanese officials described as a massacre, killing hundreds of people in something close to carpet bombing Beirut, just hours after the agreement was announced. Jonathan Ofir reports that the Israeli political spectrum has united not against the war but against the ceasefire, with Netanyahu's domestic critics attacking him for agreeing to stop. Israel wants this war to continue. The question Plitnick poses, whether the U.S. will finally impose real limits on Israel, is the question we're all waiting to have answered.

For those of us not terminally online, Walter Lucken looks at the controversy within the Democratic Party surrounding livestreamer and political commentator Hasan Piker. The debate about whether progressive politicians should associate with Piker is, as Lucken argues, a proxy war over Palestine's place in American politics. The liberal establishment's effort to push Piker out of the tent is a tacit concession that they have already lost the argument. Palestine is now central to left-populist politics in the United States, and the candidates who have embraced that fact, from Zohran Mamdani in New York City to Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, are either winning or coming damn close, building new coalitions of voters who have no confusion that Israel is a rogue state carrying out genocide and apartheid. The Israel lobby is not done fighting, but it is fighting from a position of retreat, which can also make it more dangerous.

None of this means the genocide in Gaza is ending, or that Palestinian lives are suddenly valued by American policymakers. The bombs, the starvation, the systematic destruction of Palestinian civil society all continue, with U.S. support. But the political conditions that have sustained that support for decades are visibly crumbling. The movement for Palestinian rights has been insisting for years that this shift was possible. It's finally here.