From Haaretz: Netanyahu’s Bet on the GOP Runs Into an Emboldened JD Vance Faction

But wagers premised on the notion that domestic politics are frozen in amber have a way of going bad. The Republican Party of 2026 is no longer the party of Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney and Lindsey Graham. It is, increasingly, the party of JD Vance, the vice president and presumptive heir to Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

The numbers are hard to wave away. Pew Research found this spring that while Republicans overall still view Israel favorably by a comfortable margin, 57 percent of Republicans under 50 hold an unfavorable view of the country, up seven points in a single year. A YouGov survey last November found that a plurality of Republican voters would let the current military aid agreement lapse rather than renew it, and that a majority of those under 45 wanted aid to Israel to end altogether.

These are not campus radicals or members of the Democratic Socialists of America. They are voters who backed Trump, cheered his tariffs and have long ago soured on Ukraine. They look at open-ended commitments in the Middle East through the same skeptical prism. To them, the claim that Israel is America’s indispensable strategic asset sounds like an unconvincing sales pitch.

After the April ceasefire, the vice president became the administration’s most forceful advocate of diplomacy with Tehran, arguing that the goal was to keep Iran from the bomb, not to march into another open-ended war. When Israeli officials attacked the resulting U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, Vance publicly reminded them that they were criticizing “the only powerful ally” Israel still had. On Joe Rogan’s podcast in July, Vance went further, suggesting that elements of the Israeli government were quietly working to derail the negotiations.

None of this makes Vance an enemy of Israel. Earlier this month, speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, he called the Jewish state vital to American security and condemned antisemitism, an obvious effort to reassure donors ahead of 2028. But listen to how he frames the relationship. Alliances, he said, are about interests; sometimes America’s and Israel’s align, and sometimes they do not. That is the vocabulary of Eisenhower, Kissinger and James Baker, not of Christian Zionists.

It’s worth recalling that this approach was once the dominant view within the Republican party. It was Eisenhower who forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai after the 1956 Suez adventure. It was George H.W. Bush who withheld $10 billion in loan guarantees in 1991 over settlement construction. The unconditional embrace of Trump’s first term was the historical anomaly, not the rule.

The clearest sign of the shift is not rhetorical but financial. The current ten-year memorandum between Israel and the U.S., which provides Israel with $3.8 billion a year in military aid, expires in 2028. Formal talks on what would replace it began in June, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, announced that the next agreement would rest on trade more than aid. There is a certain irony here. The most pro-Israel administration in memory is presiding over the beginning of the end of American aid to Israel.

It would be premature to write an obituary for the bond between Israel and the Republicans, however. Trump himself remains instinctively supportive of the Jewish state, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Senator Ted Cruz represent a still-powerful hawkish wing. Evangelical voters remain a core constituency that will influence GOP politics in the years to come.

What is more likely is that the relationship will mature into something cooler and more calculating: a marriage of convenience, sustained where interests overlap and contested where they do not.

Netanyahu’s real strategic blunder wasn’t misreading the Republicans but abandoning the bipartisan consensus that was Israel’s most valuable asset in Washington. He now finds himself losing support on both sides of the aisle. A country that bets everything on one faction of one party in a foreign capital should not be surprised when that faction changes its mind.

Leon Hadar is a senior analyst at a geostrategic consulting company.