When Vice President JD Vance went to the University of Mississippi last October to speak at an event for Turning Point USA, he had reason to believe he was among friends. Mr. Vance had been a close ally of Charlie Kirk, the conservative group’s founder, who had been assassinated a month earlier. Mr. Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, later endorsed Mr. Vance as a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
Then came the questions from the audience. One student asked whether it was “a conflict of interest” for a wealthy supporter of Israel to give millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s campaign, and then for the president to have “pro-Israeli policies.”
A young man in a baseball cap had an even more pointed inquiry. “I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally,” he said. He complained about billions in U.S. foreign aid to Israel being used for “ethnic cleansing in Gaza.” Israel’s religion is also openly hostile to “ours,” he concluded, to a burst of applause from the crowd.
Why We Wrote This
On the surface, Republican leaders remain staunchly pro-Israel. But a clear, generational shift is emerging, as younger conservatives have grown skeptical of U.S. aid to Israel and of Jewish political influence in the U.S.
Mr. Vance let the applause fade. “Let me say a few things about this,” he said. Alliances are about pursuing interests; sometimes Israel and the U.S. have similar interests, and sometimes they don’t. But “when people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States – they’re not controlling this president.”
Are there “significant theological disagreements” between Jews and Christians? “Yeah, absolutely,” Mr. Vance continued. “My attitude is, let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them. But if there are shared areas of interest, we ought to be willing to do that, too.”
For decades, Republican leaders have been staunch supporters of Israel. Democrats in recent years have been roiled by internecine battles over U.S.-Israeli relations. (Read Part 1 of this two-part series here.) By contrast, the GOP-controlled Congress has continued to have Israel’s back. Lawmakers who have bucked the party line on the issue have either quit (such as former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) or been ousted by Trump-endorsed primary opponents (as happened this week to Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie). Republican candidates running as critics of Israel and the war in Iran remain confined to the fringes.
Beneath the veneer of unity, however, clear cracks are emerging. Younger conservatives have grown skeptical of U.S. aid to Israel and, in some cases, suspicious of the political influence of Jews. The Gen Z students who came to see Mr. Vance in Mississippi are part of a generation that will shape the Republican Party after Mr. Trump leaves the public stage. And many see reflexive solidarity with Israel as a shibboleth that belongs in the past, to be replaced by a more isolationalist foreign policy.
In 2022, only 35% of Republicans under age 50 viewed Israel negatively, according to the Pew Research Center. By March 2025, with Israel at war in Gaza, that share had risen to 48%. In March 2026, 57% of Republicans under age 50 held a negative view of Israel, compared with 24% of over-50 Republicans. Likewise, a New York Times-Siena poll this week found that 55% of potential Republican voters between the ages of 18 and 44 disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and 63% of that same cohort oppose providing additional military and economic aid to Israel. While Democrats as a whole hold far more negative views about Israel than Republicans, the gap between the parties is roughly equivalent to the generational gap within the GOP.
“On the Republican side, more so than the Democratic side, this is a generational divide,” says Andrew Day, a senior editor at The American Conservative. “Older Republicans are pretty much the last remaining cohort that still support Israel unconditionally.”
Rising voices of dissent
Lately, some of the harshest criticisms of Israel on the right have come from podcasters and media personalities with ties to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has interviewed far-right influencers who have shared conspiracy theories about Jews that echo within the broader right-wing digital ecosystem. An uproar erupted last year within the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, when its president expressed support for Mr. Carlson after he was attacked for hosting Nick Fuentes, an online streamer who espouses racist and antisemitic ideas, on his podcast.
Mr. Carlson, who claims that his shows average more than 50 million views across multiple platforms, was once a Trump ally but has become sharply critical of the president on a number of fronts, particularly foreign policy. In May, he told The New York Times that Mr. Trump had been “more of a hostage than a sovereign decision-maker” in going to war with Iran. “Israel pushed the United States president, who caved. And I’m not giving him a pass, but that’s just a fact,” he said.
Republicans say Mr. Carlson and other anti-Israel commentators don’t represent the views of the party. “That is a lot of noise – loud voices who don’t actually affect policy or the direction of the party,” says Sam Markstein, a spokesman for the Republican Jewish Coalition. He says many social media users “have been served a poisonous cocktail of anti-Israel propaganda,” and that it’s Republican officials who are actually pushing back against it, while Democrats are “caving” to the extremists in their coalition.
Both parties accuse the other of spreading bigoted content, says Dov Waxman, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has a forthcoming book on antisemitism. And each side is “quicker to call it out or even to recognize it when it arises on the other side of the political spectrum” than when it’s within their own ranks, he adds. Even some Republicans who support Israel, for example, have repeated antisemitic tropes.
Extreme and, at times, bigoted views about Israel and Jews have become increasingly common among Gen Z voters of all political stripes. A survey last year by the Manhattan Institute found that young voters who might have voted for Democrats in the past but now identify as Trump Republicans were more likely to express anti-Israel and antisemitic views. In a Yale Youth Poll conducted in March, more than half of all voters aged 18 to 29 agreed with a statement paraphrased from Mr. Fuentes: “America should end the slavish surrender to Israel, its wars, and its demands for foreign aid.” A similar share of respondents agreed with a statement paraphrased from Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who is Palestinian American: “Israel is an apartheid state, engaged in racist oppression against Palestinians.”
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
Ongoing economic fallout from an unpopular war with Iran has heightened scrutiny of Israel among conservatives. Many commentators allege that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu arm-twisted Mr. Trump to launch U.S. attacks, a claim that appeared to be bolstered by media accounts of the decision-making process in the runup to war, though it has been strongly denied by both governments. The criticisms haven’t altered the position of Mr. Trump, who calls himself a “best friend to Israel,” or broken the lock of pro-Israel views among Republican leadership in Washington. But some predict that lock can be picked. “There’s always a lag between shifts in public opinion and votes in Congress,” says Professor Waxman.
Some conservative donors who support Israel and regard the Democratic Party as implacably hostile have also begun to worry about antisemitism on the right. The problem “is nascent,” says Eytan Laor, a Florida-based fundraiser for Mr. Trump and other Republicans. “But it’s problematic and disturbing.” Mr. Laor, who is Jewish, points to social media misinformation about Israel and its military conduct. “We have a lot of work to do,” he says.
The evangelical effect
Republican support for Israel was not always a given. The Zionist movement in the U.S. didn’t find a home on the right until the Reagan realignment, says Doug Rossinow, a historian at Metro State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, who is writing a book about American Zionism. Before then, support for Israel had been mostly a liberal cause. That changed due to the rising influence of evangelicals within the GOP.
“The demographic or social basis for Zionist politics in the Republican Party [is] evangelical Protestants,” says Professor Rossinow.
While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has become a bête noire on the left for its super PAC spending, the largest pro-Israel political organization is actually Christians United for Israel. The evangelical-led group celebrated the appointment of Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor, as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Israel. Mr. Huckabee, who ran for president in both 2008 and 2016, has used biblical language to laud Israel as an ally and defend its territorial rights.
Yet even among evangelical voters, a generational divide has opened. An April analysis of Pew Research Center data by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that half of white evangelicals under the age of 50 held an unfavorable view of Israel, compared with 20% of white evangelicals over 50, a 30-point gap. “There is currently no young cohort within the general U.S. population that can be said to view Israel positively,” the analysis concluded.
In February, Mr. Carlson interviewed Mr. Huckabee on his podcast and repeatedly challenged his assertions of shared values and interests between the U.S. and Israel. The ambassador defended Israel’s bombings in Gaza, where more than 70,000 people died according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, in comments that Mr. Carlson later characterized as advocating the killing of children and civilians. (Mr. Huckabee called the description outrageous and said Mr. Carlson had become “a very angry and bitter man.”)
Many evangelicals believe a Jewish homeland in Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy and is a necessary step toward the Second Coming of Christ on Earth. “I believe [Israel] is a special place because God made it special,” Mr. Huckabee said during a 2024 interview on The Charlie Kirk show. He cited Genesis 12: “‘Those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed,’” saying, “I want to be on the blessing side, not the curse side.”
Mr. Carlson calls this belief a “brain virus” among Christian Zionists, including Mr. Huckabee, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and other pro-Israel Republicans. “I dislike them more than anybody,” he told Mr. Fuentes on his show.
Money and politics
Other MAGA critics of Israel focus on its perceived financial and political influence on U.S. policy.
Ms. Greene stepped down from her House seat in January after becoming the first Republican in Congress to call Israel’s decimation of Gaza a genocide. She also called for AIPAC to register as a foreign lobbying group and voted to end military aid to Israel.
In March, Mr. Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, a military veteran and former congressional candidate, resigned in protest over the Iran war, which he said was the result of “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” He claimed Israel had lied to draw the U.S. into both the Iran war and the Iraq war, and said that his first wife, a Navy officer killed by a suicide bomber in Syria, had died “in a war manufactured by Israel.”
Mr. Kent’s comments were seized upon by Mr. Carlson – who interviewed him on his show immediately after his resignation – and by other far-right commentators, including Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly. Ms. Owens has amplified multiple antisemitic conspiracies, including unfounded claims that Israel was behind the assassination last year of Mr. Kirk.
It’s unclear how much of an effect these media figures are having when it comes to shaping public opinion on the right. In one poll commissioned by the Free Beacon last September, a majority of conservatives aged 18 to 34 who said they listened to Mr. Carlson and Ms. Owens actually expressed a favorable view of Israel. The poll found that Mr. Carlson’s own favorability rating was similar to that of Ben Shapiro, the conservative co-founder of The Daily Wire, who is an ardent supporter of Israel and a foreign-policy hawk.
In recent weeks, though, The Daily Wire has laid off staff amid declining traffic. Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, has sharply criticized Mr. Carlson and others who attack Israel and Jews, and some have suggested that his outlet’s struggles could be a sign that he’s losing the argument among Gen Z audiences.
On his podcast last week, Mr. Shapiro pushed back on those reports. While his company has had to implement layoffs, he said, polling data shows “the positions that we take here on the show are reflective of the broad majority of Republicans.”
“There is something else going on here,” he continued. Commentators such as Mr. Carlson and Ms. Owens see “an opportunity to supplant traditional conservatism with a conspiratorial, grievance-addled, nutty version of populism,” he charged. “It’s a lucrative grift. It’s a dangerous grift for America.”
A successful conclusion to the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and its proxies could yet defuse some of these intra-conservative battles and make the role of Israel less salient in U.S. politics, says The American Conservative’s Mr. Day.
Other analysts note Israel’s expressed openness to ending U.S. military aid as a politically savvy move. Mr. Netanyahu told CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that he wanted to wean his country off U.S. support. And Mr. Netanyahu faces a parliamentary election in October that could reset Israeli politics.
A bigger factor, however, will be who emerges to lead the GOP after Mr. Trump exits the stage. Some pro-Israel advocates on the right are already weighing the words and actions of Mr. Vance, who built a reputation as a skeptic of foreign wars and must now defend Mr. Trump’s decision to attack Iran as he looks ahead to 2028.
“He’s trying to be a man for all people on the right,” says Mr. Day.
That might prove an impossible task, he adds, particularly as the U.S. gets further embroiled in an unpopular war in the Middle East. The American right, Mr. Day concludes, “now includes the most intense anti-Israel voices and the most intense pro-Israel voices.”