Ross Douthat: How Israel Divides The Right
I’ve repeatedly stated my view on Israel.
In the short term, I don’t think there is much that can be done about it because older voters are so strongly pro-Israel, and because Zionists like Miriam Adelson are an important part of Trump’s donor base.
In the long term, it is a different story. Support for Israel is strongly related to age. Younger voters are either hostile or indifferent to Israel. They don’t consume traditional media sources. Elderly Zionists are also dying off. Sheldon Adelson is dead. Bernie Marcus is dead. Sheldon lives on through his wife Miriam Adelson who is 79-years-old.
“For the first year after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the most profound effect in America of Israel’s war in Gaza was to destabilize the Democratic Party’s coalition. The reaction to the conflict widened an existing divide between pro-Israel Democratic Party elites and pro-Palestinian progressive activists and made unity seem impossible, leaving Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign especially stuck straddling a chasm.
In the second year of the war, the intra-liberal divides are still there, but the fractures on the right are also becoming significant. More so than in the Democratic Party, most Republican elites remain staunchly pro-Israel. But on what you might call the alienated right — younger, conspiracy-curious, anti-institutional and very online — there is a vogue for arguments about malign Jewish influences on Western politics, ranging from World War II revisionism to narratives casting Jeffrey Epstein as a cat’s paw for the Mossad. …
But where the larger Republican Party is concerned, I think Beauchamp’s framework underplays a fundamental tension: There’s just no way for mainstream Zionist Republicanism and the anti-Jewish faction on the alienated right to get along. …”
Source: https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/03/21/ross-douthat-how-israel-divides-the-right/
