Israelis’ view of their actions and perceptions of how Israel is seen are woefully outdated. Until that changes, the deterioration in Israel’s standing in the U.S. will only continue.
When Vice President J.D. Vance addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gathering on Monday, he calmed the assembled pro-Israel crowd that was antsy about his support for the Jewish state by reassuring them that he sees the U.S.-Israel relationship as in America’s best interest. Israelis who were also antsy about the Republican Party’s direction once Trump departs the political scene in two years will undoubtedly be heartened by Vance’s pronouncement, but that is not the part of Vance’s words that they should focus on. What they should instead internalize is his diagnosis for why Republicans have to talk differently about Israel today, since it encapsulates in one sentence what Israelis don’t understand. Vance’s advice was for Republicans to “talk about the concrete alignment of interest and to hook a relationship on that, rather than something that may have made a lot of sense rhetorically 30 or 40 years ago, but just doesn’t have … the same purchase as it did 30 or 40 years ago because the country is different and because young people are looking at this in a different way.” One needs only a glance at recent news from Israel to see just how much the country, its leaders, and its defenders are mired in a world that Vance correctly points out no longer exists.
When Religious Zionist MK and multiple arrestee Tzvi Sukkot went with IDF escort into the Palestinian village of Madama last week and took a sledgehammer to a monument to Palestinians identified as martyrs from the two intifadas, the condemnations from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Sukkot’s party chief Bezalel Smotrich, and members of the opposition came fast and furious. The anger directed at Sukkot was for his recklessness in taking the matter into his own hands rather than letting the IDF destroy the monument, for putting the troops escorting him at risk, and for staining Israel’s reputation in the eyes of the world. Nobody, however, questioned the idea that a monument to terrorists should be destroyed, since Israelis of all stripes will tell you that public glorification of terrorists is evidence of the rot—perhaps terminally existent—in Palestinian society, and the best illustration of the chasm between Palestinian society and Israeli society.
Israelis may be right about the first claim, but they assert the second claim without a hint of recognition of what it looks like to the rest of the world when National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s hometown of Kiryat Arba proudly hosts Meir Kahane park, named for the founder of Israel’s banned Kach party who was convicted in the U.S. and jailed in Israel for terrorism. Israeli leaders justifiably demand that Palestinians stop treating their terrorists as martyrs, yet do nothing about the fact that if you walk to the far end of Meir Kahane park, you arrive at the grave of Baruch Goldstein, Israel’s second most infamous terrorist after Yigal Amir, who gunned down 29 Palestinians in a mosque during Ramadan. Goldstein’s grave is a pilgrimage site, one where I have watched Israelis come to pray and that is always festooned with rocks placed on it in the traditional Jewish sign of respect for the dead, and Goldstein is venerated by no less than Ben Gvir himself, who for years kept a portrait of the terrorist hanging in his living room. Decades ago, glorifying terrorism and violence would have been the province of the extreme Israeli fringe. Today, it gets you put in charge of the police or honored at the state’s official Independence Day celebration.
The problem goes well beyond historical memory and decisions about who to honor. For decades, Israel benefited from a clear and simple narrative, which was that Israelis choose peace while Palestinians choose terror. After October 7, Israelis are even more adamant about this formula, having suffered Hamas’s murders, rapes, and abductions, and they expect everyone to be on their side. But when the most recent pictures to rocket around the world of masked men carrying weapons and riding pickup trucks on their way to brutalizing innocent civilians is not of Hamas terrorists in the Gaza envelope but of Jewish terrorists in the northern West Bank, maintaining the decades-long clear and simple Israeli narrative is not so easy. When Israeli officials in one breath decry the Palestinian Authority for being too cowardly to crack down on their domestic extremists, and in the next breath claim that they can’t find their own domestic extremists because they quickly run away, and make not one arrest despite camera footage of dozens of Israeli marauders, comparisons to Palestinian inaction fall flat. Israelis genuinely do not seem to understand that Americans—both officials and ordinary citizens—view Israeli violence against Palestinians as terrorism, deem the IDF’s inability or unwillingness to do anything about it as extremist complicity, and treat the previous few years of Israeli gaslighting this issue by describing it as either fake news or just a few dozen wayward youth as indicative of Israeli credibility writ large. Fair or not, Israel’s perception of how it is seen on the outside is lagging years behind the reality.
One could easily keep going on less visceral issues, where Israeli leaders and Israel’s friends are still stuck in a world that no longer exists. Talking about Palestinian rejectionism rings hollow as a rhetorical strategy when Netanyahu vows to prevent a Palestinian state at all costs, as do his leading challengers Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and Avigdor Liberman. Decrying potential sanctions arising from Israeli construction tenders for E-1 on the theory that the disposition of the West Bank should be negotiated between the parties rather than imposed from the outside sounds satirical while Israel pursues a settlement policy at breakneck speed that is now pushing into Area B and even Area A. For the average casual observer, the rejectionist and reckless party is Israel, and that will not change no matter how many appeals are made to the terrible events of October 7 or how many times the partition plan and Camp David are mentioned. This Israeli government announced its intention to act decisively and transform Israel’s standing without regard to what anyone else thinks, and indeed it has. In a February 2026 Gallup poll, 53% of Americans aged 18 to 34 said they sympathize more with Palestinians while only 23% sympathized more with Israelis. Those aged 35 to 54 had similar views, with 46% sympathizing more with Palestinians and 28% sympathizing more with Israelis, reflecting a shift that is not limited to youth.
A government and society that turns a blind eye to terrorism, pushes rejectionism as a philosophy, marinates in victimhood, and refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of its actions is how Israelis have, and still do, describe Palestinians. What they are struggling to grasp is that for more and more people, that description fits Israel too. Until Israelis and their leaders understand that this won’t be solved by new language for tired slogans, or whataboutism, or an army of social media influencers, but only by real changes in how Israel acts, they will continue to misunderstand just how much the ground here has shifted and why.