Uriel Zehavi’s sweeping essay on the “sorting” of American politics and its implications for Israel advocacy, which I recommend reading in full, is unsettling precisely because so much of it rings true. His central argument is not that Israel lost Democratic support because of any one war, settlement announcement, or even because of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long and increasingly open alliance with Republicans. Rather, he argues that Israel became trapped inside the broader “great sort” of American politics, the decades-long process by which nearly every politically salient issue gets absorbed into partisan identity. Once that happened, a bipartisan consensus on Israel became structurally unstable.

Zehavi’s argument deserves serious attention because it explains trends that simpler narratives cannot. If the shift were only about Netanyahu, or only about Gaza, we would expect Democratic opinion to rebound whenever Israeli governments changed tone or policy. But as Zehavi notes, Democratic support for Israel had already been eroding for years before October 7 or the current war. The same partisan polarization that transformed attitudes toward climate change, immigration, and Ukraine increasingly transformed attitudes toward Israel.

The logic is straightforward. In an earlier era, both parties contained ideological diversity. Liberal Republicans and........

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