2025 saw the most significant political shift toward Palestinian rights in U.S. history

2025 started with a Gaza ceasefire that was never meant to be sustained and is ending with one that was never actually instituted. The year also saw a steady intensification of the occupation on the West Bank, and an unprecedentedly broad wave of Israeli warfare all across the Middle East.

In the United States, the transition from the passionate and self-defeating support for Israel of Joe Biden to the transactional but nonetheless still solid support for Israel of Donald Trump had negligible effect on the superpower policy that is one of the greatest obstacles to the realization of inalienable Palestinian rights. 

But there is real hope we might take this year from a significant movement in the American discourse on Palestine and Israel and that this shift is finally starting to be reflected in American politics, albeit in ways far too small to match the needs of the moment.

Most notably, 2025 saw American public opinion continue its shift away from Israel. 

In July, an article in The Economist, hardly a progressive publication, noted that,

 “Israel’s rightward political shift in recent years, and especially the protracted war in Gaza, has alienated many ordinary Americans. The disquiet about Israel that has been building for some time within the Democratic Party is now growing among Republicans, too. Younger members of both parties have shifted especially dramatically. A fundamental reshaping of one of America’s deepest friendships seems all but inevitable, with huge ramifications for the Middle East and the world.”

Even the most stalwart of Israel supporters found that the political winds had shifted enough that they were forced to criticize Israel’s behavior at least implicitly. Rep. Ritchie Torres, who has made his career as an extreme opponent of Palestinian rights could not withstand the outcry from his New York City constituents at witnessing Israel’s deliberate starvation of the people in Gaza over the summer of 2025. He wrote on X, “The free world has a moral responsibility to Palestinians in distress. Flood Gaza with food.”

Torres’ implication that Israel was not allowing enough food into Gaza (at that point, they were barely allowing any, and Gaza was in a state of famine) was shocking for him. But more importantly it reflected the growing distaste for Israel among Democrats. 

Nothing convinces Democrats more than polls, and many polls were showing that their constituents were growing increasingly fed up with Israel. 

When Israel began its genocide in Gaza after the attack of October 7, 2023, Americans were split on Israel’s response. A Gallup Poll showed 50% of Americans approved of Israel’s actions, with 45% opposed. That number quickly changed to disapproval, but in 2025, it veered sharply, and by mid-July, 60% of Americans disapproved of Israel’s actions and only 32% approved. 

The numbers were even starker for Democrats. While 36% approved of Israel’s initial response, only 8% did by July 2025.  

But the shift isn’t only apparent among Democrats. While Republicans are still much more supportive of Israel than Democrats, that support is beginning to ebb, especially among younger Republicans. 

Pollster Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, conducted a poll in August 2025 and found that 21% of Republicans said that U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies were “too pro-Israel.”

“The change taking place among young Republicans is breathtaking,” Telhami said. “While 52% of older republicans (35+) sympathize more with Israel, only 24% of younger Republicans (18-34) say the same — fewer than half.”

Public opinion is finally impacting politicians

In November of 2024, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a Joint Resolution of Disapproval (JRAD) to stop a large sale of arms to Israel. The measure failed, but 18 senators voted to support Sanders’ resolution. 

Such a vote might not have even reached the Senate floor in the past, and a bill like this one would have been lucky to get any support at all. As Jewish Voice for Peace Action’s Political Director Beth Miller put it at the time, “This is too little too late; this genocide has been going on for 13 months, but that does not change the fact that this is a critically important step.” 

That vote was also significant because some of the Democrats who supported Sanders were not those one might suspect. For instance, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, Tim Kaine of Virginia, was among those who supported the Sanders bill. 

Despite the failure, Sanders tried again in July 2025. This time, his JRAD got 24 votes in support, a 33% increase. Like the 2024 vote, this still doesn’t speak well of the Senate, Congress, or even the Democrats as a whole. This vote centered on a 22-month-long genocide at that point. But, as Miller had said before, the increase mattered, and it mattered that more moderate Democrats, such as Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, joined in.

These votes, though defeats, are a huge political turning point, even though they failed to save any Palestinian lives. Israel was perceived to be involved in “war,” as unsuitable as that term might be to those of us observing what was happening at the time. And this was not a question of aid to Israel, but weapons sales. The idea of voting against arms to Israel under any circumstances, let alone a sale during perceived wartime, was an absurdity in the past. It was political suicide for all but a few politicians, and it could never have gotten more than a vote or two in support.

Even a few years ago, just whispering about conditioning aid to Israel was considered a dangerous and controversial step. In 2025, more than half of the 47 Democratic caucus members in the Senate voted to block an arms sale to Israel. Political trends can take time to shift, especially when they are supported by powerful political forces and have been entrenched for decades. This is what change looks like.

It was a remarkable turnaround, and as efforts to change American policy on Palestine continue and intensify, there is every reason to believe it is a trend that will persist.

The base of both parties are splitting over Israel 

2025 saw significant momentum build in both parties for substantive change in American policy toward Palestine. 

As time passed after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election and gave the world a new, more unbalanced, and more authoritarian Donald Trump in the White House, it became clearer and clearer that Joe Biden’s and Harris’ policy toward Palestine was a key factor in alienating potential Democratic voters and thus costing her the election. 

Just before Trump was sworn in, a poll from the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) and YouGov found that the top issue that caused former Biden voters to change or withhold their votes in 2024 was Gaza. 

It turned out, in fact, that this was particularly true in battleground states, demonstrating that the famously poll- and focus-group-driven Democrats had either completely misread or disregarded the ideological map in the states they most needed to win.

In December, the Democrats decided to bury a post-mortem report they had commissioned on the 2024 election. They didn’t offer much of an explanation, just some word salad about needing to look forward, not back, which anyone could easily see was a naked evasion. 

No doubt, there were many reasons the Democrats found for their loss that were embarrassing and reflected their own political short-sightedness and tunnel vision. But virtually every serious analysis of the loss listed not only Gaza as a key factor, but also issues tangential to Gaza, such as a sense of disconnection between candidates and the base, and the loss of young voters. Both of those problems are reflective of Democrats’ failure to heed the base on Gaza.

Republicans, meanwhile, have seen a growing chasm in their ranks. The split is coming between traditional Republican voters and more isolationist, “America First” voters. 

Part of that split has played out in public in ugly ways. There is a faction of former Trump acolytes, such as Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Candace Owens who, to varying degrees, are using Palestine to channel hatred of Jews and disguise it as suddenly discovering the suffering of Palestinians. Owens, in particular, has been very open about using classic anti-Jewish tropes and outright expressions of Jew-hatred to advance her case. In her case, her open bigotry has superseded her initial attempts to connect her hate to the Palestinian cause. Carlson and Greene—both of whom have long histories of Judeophobia as well as Islamophobia, and anti-Arab racism—have not repudiated any of their earlier statements but have clung to anti-Israel statements in the current moment, rather than recalling their earlier anti-Jewish ones.

But that surface fight masks a more important development, which is the growing disillusionment of young Republicans with Israel. 

In another, recent IMEU/YouGov poll, 51% of young Republicans said they would prefer to support candidates who would reduce the amount of aid we give Israel. 53% say we should not renew the annual aid commitment to Israel, and 51% oppose the idea of a 20-year enhanced agreement of the type Israel is said to be seeking now.

Some of that is surely rooted in the Jew-hate of figures like Candace Owens and the self-proclaimed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. But there is certainly more to it than that. Much of the rock-solid support of Republicans for Israel is based on various forms of Christian Zionism, particularly the dispensationalist belief in the role the Jewish return to the Land of Israel plays in the coming of the end times and the Rapture. But evangelicals have never been monolithic in that belief, contrary to public perception, and more of them are moving away from supporting Israel. 

As Palestinian-American, evangelical pastor Fares Abraham put it in February of 2025, “A significant generational shift is underway away from a false gospel of empire toward a faith that upholds justice, mercy and truth. Many young Christians recognize that true faithfulness to Christ cannot be reconciled with the destruction of Palestinian lives, the bombing of churches, hospitals and refugee camps or the systematic starvation of an entire population.

This is a trend that has been visible for some time. It comes together with a rise in isolationism among Republicans, an isolationism that was evident even in the carefully chosen words of Vice President JD Vance at the recent Turning Point USA conference. 

Vance said, “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy.”

That was pretty remarkable for a sitting vice president of either party, regardless of what they might really think. 

So, while it was a year of ongoing tragedy and of a familiar helplessness for people who want to end the suffering of the people in Palestine, it was also a year that saw unprecedented progress in the U.S. toward eliminating the support Israel gets for its merciless policies and actions toward the Palestinian people.

That matters. Nothing powers Israel’s apartheid and genocide like the U.S. does. It’s not easy to change American policy that has been entrenched over the course of decades, but the day of that change is finally drawing closer. 2025 provided not just reason for hope but the potential to energize the forces of change for years to come.