On Oct. 12, 2017, then Congressmember Matt Gaetz spoke on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce a resolution condemning the United Nations for ostensible anti-Israel bias. “I rise today to support our friend and ally, Israel,” the representative from Florida announced, claiming that the UN was trying to “rewrite history, to condemn Israel and call it an occupying power in Jerusalem.” Gaetz slammed the international body’s “antisemitism” and “attempts to punish and delegitimize Israel,” and encouraged his colleagues to “show solidarity with Israel.”

His two-minute speech was boilerplate AIPAC fare, the kind we still hear today from politicians like Senator Ted Cruz, who introduced a parallel resolution with Gaetz on the Senate floor. At the time, Gaetz was less than a year into his first term and already a leading figure in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) wing of the Republican Party, with President Donald Trump at its head. But eight years later, Gaetz’s tune has changed.

“Doesn’t it feel like Israel’s seduction of U.S. foreign policy is some kind of regime-change mad lib?” he asked on June 16, 2025 during a segment for The Matt Gaetz Show, aired on the far-right One America News Network, as Trump debated joining Israel’s war on Iran. “If Israel is a Democracy,” he posted on X three days later, “when do all the Arabs who live there get to vote?” And on June 21, he discussed “Jewish supremacy” in Israel with a guest on his show, highlighting the country’s repression of Palestinian Christians.

Although no longer an elected official, Gaetz has emerged as one among many avatars of a growing strand of Israel-skepticism within the MAGA movement. Since October 7, a panoply of prominent far-right pundits, including Tucker Carlson, Jack Posobiec, and Steve Bannon, as well as MAGA politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene have grown increasingly critical of U.S. support for Israel. They fiercely opposed the prospect of U.S. military intervention in Israel’s 12-day war on Iran. And while some pivoted to praise the strikes once it seemed that a longer war had been averted, voices like Carlson and Greene remain wary that Trump may still be swayed to plunge the U.S. into war in the Middle East. 

Carlson and others are joined by an array of popular voices across the right-leaning YouTube and podcasting ecosystem, including commentators like Joe Rogan and Theo Von and libertarian comedian Dave Smith. The more radical corners, meanwhile, have adopted increasingly hard-edged and openly antisemitic critiques of Zionism, such as popular misogynist “manosphere” voices like Andrew Tate and Jake Shields, conspiracy-mongers like Alex Jones and Candace Owens, and outright white supremacists like Nick Fuentes. Some of these figures have rejected Trump entirely, insisting he has been utterly compromised by Zionists and that an authentic nationalist movement can only arise from the ashes of Trumpism.

In the first Trump administration, few would have believed a transformation as radical as Gaetz’s could occur at the heart of the seemingly ironclad relationship between the U.S. and Israeli right. But in the nearly two years since October 7, support for that relationship has steadily eroded among the MAGA base and vanguard. And since the Israel-Iran war in June, the cracks on the surface have widened into a chasm — pointing to a seismic shift that stands to remake the American right.

Shifting the battlefield

Since Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2015, the central “America First” message of the MAGA movement has included a strong rebuke of the post-9/11 neoconservative consensus that mired the United States in decades of endless Middle East wars. Many activists on the right openly acknowledge that anti-American animosity in the region reflects a kind of blowback, fueled in no small part by U.S. support for Israel, and they claim that countries like Iran, despite their bellicose rhetoric, pose little concrete threat to U.S. safety. They reject most overseas military and humanitarian aid, arguing taxpayer dollars should support Americans instead.

Many are also genuinely horrified by Israel’s unending campaign of annihilatory destruction in Gaza and don’t want taxpayer dollars funding such atrocities. Some have even pushed back against the pro-Israel right’s efforts to unconstitutionally suppress criticism of Israel. Libertarians in the MAGA coalition claim to defend free speech rights in the public square, while Christian nationalists worry that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which critics argue muzzles criticism of Israel, would limit the ability of Christians to profess classical anti-Jewish theology, such as holding Jews collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. 

But most right-wing Israel-skeptics are not anti-militarists. While they inveigh against U.S. support for war in the Middle East or Ukraine — a similarly contested fault line in the MAGA movement — they saber-rattle just as loudly against China, who they deem a civilizational threat to American geopolitical dominance. Pentagon officials like Elbridge Colby, a self-described foreign policy “realist” who promotes these views in his current role as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Department of Defense, may be loathed by pro-Israel policymakers, but calling them “isolationists” would be a misnomer. What they really want is to reduce America’s Middle East footprint, only to redeploy military muscle in the Indo-Pacific.

Whether it presents as political calculus or as concern for the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the American right’s criticism of Israel often floats atop the restless waves of conspiracy theories and antisemitism. As the discourse radicalizes, condemnations of the military-industrial complex and the entrenched and hawkish “deep state” intelligence bureaucracies are often difficult to disentangle from overheated grumbling against covert Zionist cabals, which — in the conspiracists’ imagination — are made up of hostile, disloyal, and demonically all-powerful American Jewish elites orchestrating U.S. support for Israel from behind the scenes.

For years, pro-Israel conservatives ceaselessly portrayed the left as the primary threat to Jews, even as White nationalist and militia groups, online communities like QAnon, and other radical rightists have long professed conspiracist and antisemitic forms of anti-Zionism. After October 7, these discourses made inroads across the broader right, but right-wing supporters of Israel and their institutions — like the Heritage Foundation, whose Project Esther is laser-focused on combating the Palestine solidarity movement — openly downplayed the seriousness of these sources of antisemitism. Now they have returned to a familiar spin: the “new antisemitism” emanates from both “extremes” of the political spectrum. Israeli officials like Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli have taken to lecturing Charlie Kirk, head of the MAGA Gen-Z campus group Turning Point USA, on X, while hasbaragroups like Israel365 are training Christian influencers to counter critical narratives on the right, eager to shore up the Jewish-Christian Zionist partnership.

But as neoconservative mouthpieces like Mark Levin realize that their familiar talking points against “Islamo-fascism” are no longer as effectively rallying the troops, their breathless polemics against the “woke right” betray their fear that they are losing the narrative. Their frantic conspiracy theories that Qatari or Chinese Communist Party influence operations lurk behind MAGA anti-Zionism are charged with an undertone of uncertainty and foreboding. They feel besieged in their own camp; evangelical pundit Glenn Beck, for instance, recently claimed he has faced death threats from activists on the right for his support of Israel.

The MAGA era has witnessed the return of long-repressed strands of nativism and white Christian supremacy back to the center of American life. Open antisemitism is in many ways the last red line, but with eroding support for Israel, that line may be fading as well. The hawkish neoconservative brand of Zionism has seemed sacrosanct since the 1980s, but it was never truly immortal; it may soon prove the exception, not the norm, in the long arc of the American right.

A fractured alliance

Earlier this summer, the right-wing split over Israel was on full display at the annual student summit for Turning Point USA, held in Florida mid-July. The summit is ground zero for the Gen Z right, and many of the conservative movement’s likely future leaders can be found among its thousands of attendees. This summer, multiple MAGA leaders claimed that Jeffrey Epstein may have been a Mossad asset, while conference programming included a fiery live debate on U.S. support for Israel on center stage. The sharp criticisms of U.S. military aid and neoconservative interventionism won the loudest applause.

TPUSA’s evolution is all the more striking given that, back in 2019, it was at the center of a MAGA controversy when it held the line against young followers of Fuentes, banning the “groypers,” as they called themselves, when they relentlessly asked questions critical of Israel during TPUSA events on campuses across the country. Those lone voices have since turned into a chorus TPUSA can no longer ignore. A March 2025 poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 50 percent of Republican voters aged 18-49 held an “unfavorable” view of Israel.

While the young, energized MAGA base is increasingly critical of Israel, the sentiment hasn’t yet become dominant across the broader coalition. Although polling has long shown a drop-off in Israel support among young evangelicals, older evangelical voters, Trump’s core constituency across the past three presidential elections, still get their takes on Israel from legacy media like Fox News and from pro-Israel Sunday sermons. 

But even here, theological cracks are beginning to form. When Tucker Carlson challenged the Biblical underpinnings of Christian Zionism during his combative interview with Ted Cruz on June 19, clips from the heated exchange went viral, sparking defensiveness and debate across Christian media and in the pews.

Then in July, Israel’s strike on Gaza’s only Catholic church and the settler rampage across the Palestinian Christian town of Taybeh drew a chorus of condemnation across Christian media. This even prompted U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a stalwart Christian Zionist, to visit Taybeh. Days earlier, Huckabee offered an unusually strong condemnation of the settler murder of Palestinian American Sayfollah Musallet, calling for “accountability for this criminal and terrorist act.”

Now, the mainstream Christian Right is scrambling to ward off these internal threats to the dominant pro-Israel consensus. But as a range of both Protestant and Catholic critics within the MAGA movement openly question Christian Zionist orthodoxy, the center may not hold for much longer. 

Dangerous company

On July 24, Charlie Kirk released a video of a focus group of TPUSA students, probing the reasons behind their declining support for Israel. One female student credited an initiative, presumably from a Palestine solidarity group at her college, to raise awareness of the plight of Palestinian children in Gaza. “On our school’s campus, they’ll have these little ‘missing kids’ posters … they try to have us have more sympathy for them.”

And indeed, the right’s civil war hasn’t happened in a vacuum. The mass progressive mobilizations against Israel’s genocidal war have heightened the salience of the crisis in American politics, and this has helped drive a wedge in the MAGA coalition.

MAGA leaders like Kirk don’t want that wedge to widen. They’re worried that even the appearance of disunity could disorganize the MAGA camp and slow the momentum of its authoritarian march, only six months into the second Trump administration. There is reason to hope that these debates may dampen the right’s efforts to repress the Palestine solidarity movement. While mounting MAGA criticism is unlikely to stop the Trump administration’s blank check to Israel overnight, over time it may erode the cover of impunity Israel has long relied upon from its chief imperial patron. 

As the Gaza genocide reaches horrific and unfathomable levels of devastation, any drop in support among portions of the U.S. electorate is certainly welcome and long overdue. But progressives should remain wary of uncritically applauding Israel critics on the right, or collaborating in substantial ways with them. These actors are at the forefront of mass deportation, repression of LGBTQ rights, attacks on left organizing, and other authoritarian advances. 

Their animating grievance is not solidarity with Palestinians, but nationalist humiliation, shame, and rage at the prospect of American decline. And their criticism of institutionalized Jewish supremacy in Israel/Palestine rings as hypocritical, given their enthusiastic support for a parallel white Christian nationalist agenda in the United States.

The need for a mass progressive movement against endless war is greater than ever, as millions across the United States recoil from bipartisan support for Israel’s slaughter. If progressives don’t build it, our competitors on the far right will channel that discontent to ever darker, more dystopian ends.