The ceasefire celebrations in Gaza last January were so exhilarating that Palestinian Al-Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif could barely be heard on air over the shouts of his countrymen. “Now I can finally remove this helmet, which has exhausted me throughout this period, and this vest, which has become part of my body,” he said as he shed the protective equipment he had been wearing almost constantly for 15 months. Al-Sharif was then lifted upon the shoulders of the jubilant crowd.
The ceasefire had produced something rarely felt in the region in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks that killed 1,200 Israelis: hope. Although the tentative agreement emerged from a rare bit of bipartisan collaboration—a team of advisers appointed by America’s outgoing president, Joe Biden, worked together with an envoy from its incoming one, Donald Trump, to secure it—its announcement was auspicious, coming on January 15, 2025, five days before the inauguration. Under Biden, there had been more than a year of bloodshed and suffering. Now, Trump’s disruptive approach to politics, both domestic and international, had come to Palestine, and it seemingly had helped halt the war.
More than six months later, Al-Sharif was killed alongside his colleagues in a targeted Israeli airstrike on August 10. And the situation in Gaza is arguably worse today than it has been at any point since October 7.
The two-month ceasefire did not move the needle on a poisonous status quo that has enabled Israel’s most destructive tendencies. Famine is now widespread—as of mid-August, around 250 people had died of starvation, many of them children—and Palestinians queuing for meager rations provided for them are routinely slaughtered by Israeli bombs, bullets, and shells. Israeli leaders have nevertheless only been emboldened; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been echoing calls from the far right in meetings with his security cabinet to seize and fully reoccupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip.
As a result, a growing international consensus has emerged that Israel is committing war crimes and acting with genocidal intent. Several countries, many of them once steadfast backers of Israel’s war—France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, to name just four—have said that they will recognize Palestine as an independent nation. The distancing of Israel by its former allies is the result not just of public outcry and moral outrage. It also reflects the realization that the West’s attempt to inhibit Israel’s war crimes has been an abject failure—and that the United States, specifically, seems no longer able, or even willing, to flex its might in service of moral or strategic goals.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has doubled down on its full-throated support of Israel, joining strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, but was caught off-guard by Israel’s bellicose military operations in Syria, all while restricting criticism of Israeli policy here at home. The State Department still has not seen fit to condemn the killing of Al-Sharif. In fact, a spokesperson has sought to justify it.
Much of the blame for the diplomatic failure in Gaza has been laid at the feet of the two elderly men who have led the United States since October 7, Biden and Trump. But the Gaza War has exposed America’s larger foreign policy as fundamentally broken—not only out of step with public opinion, it seems increasingly unable to advance the nation’s long-term interests.
To wit: While the moral case for changing policy in Gaza is indisputable, so is the overlapping strategic one. Why then is it so difficult to move forward with either?
After all, the daily starvation of hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza while the United States provides weapons and diplomatic backing to Israel is not only a moral stain but represents a serious security threat to the United States and U.S. interests in the world.
And while Democrats and Republicans have adopted increasingly divergent approaches to foreign policy since the start of this century, there has been broad agreement about its fundamental aims: Great-power competition and countering China in a variety of domains have been the nation’s top priorities.
But backing Israel while it starves Gaza will make it that much more difficult for the United States to partner with countries in the Arab world. The Trump and Biden administrations both aimed to expand normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia. But it’s more and more difficult to imagine that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could take the risk of recognizing Israel while it engages in such brazen war crimes against Palestinians; as popular as he is among a new generation of Saudis, this may be too much to wager on. Indeed, as anti-Americanism related to its support for Israel rises, it could also lead to new threats from the region, including resurgent terrorism against the United States. Fourteen years after Barack Obama pulled troops out of Iraq, and four years after Biden withdrew the U.S. military from Afghanistan, complicity in Gaza has once again inflamed Arab opinion against the United States.
Meanwhile, Israel behaves with impunity, launching strikes on the capitals of Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and has become a liability to the United States, sapping not only its power and bandwidth but also its costly, rare missile defense systems. If the United States should find itself in conflict with Russia, China, or another foe, it will do so with a reduced stockpile of expensive equipment. Above all, Israel has shown the world that, at least in its relationship with the United States, the tail is wagging the dog.
Some analysts now assert that Israel is in the strongest position in the Middle East that it’s ever been in. As evidence, they cite its assassinations of Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s leadership, the airstrikes on Iran, and the fall of Syria’s Bashar Al Assad. But whether such aggressive moves harm or help the cause of Middle East peace in the long run is open to question. As Emma Ashford, author of First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, summed it up, “Israel’s wars are potentially setting up the Middle East for further destructive conflict. Is this really good for the U.S.?”
Indeed, despite battlefield wins and the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel appears to lack any sense of how to translate those victories into actual statecraft that will help promote eventual stability in the region. Instead, the country lurches from crisis to crisis: The strangulation of Gaza is why ragtag rebels in Yemen launched missile strikes on Israel that led to such severe shipping disruptions that the port of Eilat in Israel is now bankrupt, and why the Iranian government launched missile strikes that were likely much more damaging to Israel than has been publicly acknowledged—and have led the United States to use up about a quarter of its expensive and not easily replenishable THAAD missiles protecting Israel. None of this has brought an end to the conflict, nor even returned any of the remaining 50 or so hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. Israeli civil society is increasingly gripped by instability, with calls from the far right to seize all Palestinian lands, protests demanding Netanyahu and military leaders do more to bring the hostages home, and the prime minister’s approval rating falling as the public questions his handling of the war.
And where instability reigns, the bipartisan global priority of countering China by any means is threatened. Previously, the United States has sought buy-in from allies and partners who we can reasonably assume are now questioning American leadership, or even, perhaps, quietly deciding to go their own way—a situation that is exacerbated by the Trump administration’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine War and approach to global trade.
Still, it’s the moral stain that may linger the longest. An emphasis on democracy and human rights has long been a secondary consideration in U.S. foreign policy but has remained central to America’s narrative about itself and how it distinguishes itself—to its own citizens as well as to other nations—from China and Russia. Now, at least with regard to Gaza, that moral high ground has been ceded.
While much of the world has shifted in its views of the Israel-Hamas war and the occupation of Gaza, and American voters have shifted, too, the gatekeepers of the Democratic Party remain largely unmoved, The party’s inertia was summed up in this comment in August from Pete Buttigieg, who consistently comes in the top three in polling on the 2028 Democratic presidential primary: “I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” As one Democrat strategist told Politico, “When your friend kills 60,000 people and starves an entire population for months at a time, shouldn’t the question be: Why the fuck am I friends with this guy?”
By contrast, Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary and provided an emphatic message on Gaza: End U.S. military and diplomatic support for the war. He was pilloried by the Democratic establishment for it, but his full-throated embrace of the Palestinian cause contrasted him with an establishment that aggressively tried—and conclusively failed—to turn that support into a liability: He won a clear plurality of Jewish voters in the primary and, as of mid-August, continues to a hold a double-digit lead with Jewish voters. And it’s not just New York: Sixty-six percent of registered Democrats believe Israel is perpetuating a genocide in Gaza, according to a Data for Progress poll fielded in early August. And, per Gallup, only 8 percent of Democrats approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
But the party still doesn’t get it. Only in July did 27 senators vote for arms sanctions on Israel, and few lawmakers—notable among them is Chris Van Hollen of Maryland—have been consistent in their pursuit of accountability for Israel. With the Democratic presidential primary set to ramp up after the 2026 midterms, the war in Gaza will almost certainly quickly emerge as a wedge issue—perhaps even one comparable to the pivotal role that support for the Iraq War played in 2008.
In the meantime, Trump will focus on splashy “deals” and may, simply by balking at convention, somehow get some elements of Middle East policy right. But it won’t be enough to address the gravity of catastrophe, and he may face growing criticism from MAGA firebrands like Marjorie Taylor Greene who see Israel as a threat and a liability. Mainstream Democrats, meanwhile, risk ceding the issue to their younger and more progressive counterparts who have been outspoken on it. For a party that has hemmed and hawed about the need to embrace more popular positions, ending military support for Israel is an easy win—and it’s a good foreign policy plank as well. It will also provide an opening for Democrats who can press the realist case for shifting policy on Gaza and Israel, even if they’re still unwilling to fully make the moral one.
