On December 27, 1962, President John F. Kennedy welcomed Golda Meir, then Israel's foreign minister, to his family's summer compound in Palm Beach, Florida.
During the meeting, Kennedy described what would become one of the defining pillars of American foreign policy: that America had a “special relationship with Israel”, one he said was “really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs.” According to the official readout, the Democratic president went further than any of his predecessors, privately pledging that the United States would come to Israel's aid "in case of an [Arab] invasion."
This was hardly Kennedy breaking with Democratic tradition.
Fourteen years earlier, in 1948, Harry Truman had become the first world leader to recognise the newly established modern State of Israel, doing so just eleven minutes after David Ben-Gurion declared independence.
In the late 1960s, Lyndon Johnson entrenched the strategic and military partnership between the two countries to the point that Haaretz noted in 2018 that “Israel had no better friend” than the Texan president.
Jimmy Carter may have become a harsh critique of Israeli settlements after leaving office, but during his presidency he brokered the Camp David Accords of 1978, involving Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, securing the first peace agreement between Israel and an Arab state. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Bill Clinton invested enormous political capital in pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and remains to this day a great friend of Israel.
Even Barack Obama, despite his well-documented scraps with Benjamin Netanyahu, approved a record-breaking ten-year, $38 billion military assistance package to Israel.
If one political party can fairly claim ownership of America's modern relationship with Israel, it is the Democratic Party. Long before support for Israel became a defining feature of Republican politics, Democratic presidents repeatedly institutionalised the alliance.
For years, that bipartisan consensus survived wars, intifadas, peace negotiations and government changes in both Washington and Jerusalem. This was also a relationship underpinned by something greater than geopolitics.
In Israel's early decades, many Democrats saw the nascent Jewish state as a fellow liberal democracy shaped by socialist ideals. Its kibbutzim, moshavim, labour institutions and pioneering spirit resonated with an American left that viewed Israel as a progressive experiment in nation-building as much as a strategic ally.
Today, that political consensus is rapidly unravelling. When the so-called “Squad” – Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – arrived in Congress in 2019, their hostility toward Israel was widely viewed as a fringe position within the Democratic Party. Seven years later, many of the ideas once confined to the party's progressive wing have moved steadily toward its centre.
The numbers tell a disconcerting story. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, eight in ten Democrats now hold unfavourable views of Israel, up from 69 per cent just one year ago and 53 per cent in 2022.
The shift is increasingly evident among Democratic elected officials. Last week, nearly half of House Democrats voted in favour of legislation that would have cut off military aid to Israel, an outcome that would have been almost unimaginable only a decade ago.
The party's rising stars increasingly reflect this changing political landscape. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani recently declared that his administration would seek to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit the city during September's United Nations General Assembly, arguing that the Israeli leader belongs before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Representative Ro Khanna generated headlines after visiting sensitive areas of the West Bank without coordinating with the Israel Defense Forces before using the trip and the media frenzy that followed to intensify his criticism of Israeli policy.
None of this suggests that Democrats should refrain from criticising Israel. Healthy alliances are built on honesty, and successive Democratic presidents have often disagreed with Israeli governments. However, opposition to Israel is increasingly becoming a defining feature and prerequisite of Democratic progressive politics rather than a disagreement over the policies of a particular Israeli government.
As Democrats have grown more sceptical of Israel, Republicans have become its more reliable political home, even as parts of the conservative movement now also begin to show signs of strain. Support for Israel, once among Washington’s strongest bipartisan commitments, is becoming another casualty of America's widening political polarisation.
Perhaps no Democrat has articulated the stakes more clearly than Senator John Fetterman – one of Israel's strongest supporters in his party. "My long-term concern has been with the Democratic Party," he said. "If our party ever becomes... the anti-Israel party, that's when I would leave because that's been a moral clarity for me."
His warning deserves to be taken seriously.
Americans can and should debate Israeli governments, military strategy, and the future prospects of regional peace. Democracies thrive on vigorous disagreement. But something far more consequential is unfolding before our eyes. For decades, support for Israel formed part of the shared foreign-policy DNA of both major American parties. That foundation may be beginning to crack.
The implications extend well beyond Israel itself. America's allies have long relied on the assumption that the country's core security commitments transcend changes in political leadership. If support for America's closest Middle Eastern ally becomes simply another partisan dividing line, every US ally will inevitably begin asking the same question: what happens after the next election?
The Democratic Party helped build the US-Israel alliance. Watching it steadily distance itself from that legacy should concern not only supporters of Israel, but anyone who believes American foreign policy is strongest when its closest alliances enjoy support across the political spectrum.
When John F. Kennedy sat down with Golda Meir in Palm Beach in 1962, he helped define a principle that Democrats and Republicans would come to share: that America’s mutually beneficial partnership with Israel should transcend party politics.
Whether the Democratic Party of today – the very party responsible for cultivating this alliance – ultimately becomes the party that abandons that legacy may prove to be one of the defining foreign-policy questions of our time.
Jonathan Harounoff is Israel’s former international spokesperson at the UN and the award-winning author of Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt
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