Recent polling on U.S. attitudes toward Israel points to a troubling and accelerating shift. Favorability has declined sharply, particularly along partisan and generational lines. Among Democrats, unfavorable views now exceed favorable ones. Among Americans under 30, surveys routinely place unfavorable views in the range of roughly 60–70%, with favorable opinions well below a majority. These numbers vary across polls, but the trend itself is consistent and difficult to ignore. Given that Israel has relied on a strategic, diplomatic, military, and cultural alliance with the United States for decades, this shift carries obvious long-term implications.

Unsurprisingly, these trends are gleefully welcomed by all actors openly hostile to Israel: Islamist supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah, the anti-colonial left, and elements of the antisemitic right feel quite comfortable in the common anti-Israel bed, even if they arrive there through entirely different ideologies, arguments, and moral convictions.

Also unsurprisingly, many supporters of Israel look for an explanation for this deterioration in its standing. The most common theory, especially in social media discourse, is that what we are witnessing is simply a new form of Jew-hatred, often labeled antizionism (deliberately written without a hyphen). The omission serves an ideological purpose: it signals that this is not genuine opposition to Zionism, but a rebranded hostility toward Jews in a more socially acceptable form. Adherents of this view point to the afterlife of Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, academia’s embrace of anti-colonial frameworks, and a well-funded ecosystem of anti-Israel advocacy.

There is some truth in this. Scrolling through social media can feel like living in the middle of a worldwide pogrom. The volume of hatred, distortions of Israel’s actions, and falsifications of Jewish history is staggering. It is difficult to see it as purely spontaneous outrage; it often resembles a sustained campaign that demoralizes Israel’s supporters and erodes sympathy for Jews.

It is also true that many of these narratives originate in seemingly respectable academic settings, where concepts such as “genocide,” “settler colonialism,” or “apartheid” are stretched well beyond their conventional meanings to fit Israeli actions in Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon. In the process, scholarly integrity gives way to intellectual dishonesty, blurring the line between the pursuit of knowledge and political activism. These reframings are then adopted by mainstream media and repackaged in the language of human rights—focused on the plight of Palestinians or Christians, or whoever happens to be cast as oppressed by evil Israelis today. By the time they reach the broader public, they carry the imprimatur of scholarship, even as context has been stripped away and the concepts themselves are emptied of meaning.

Emotionally, it is very understandable to look at all of this and conclude that one is dealing with a hate movement, and to stop there. As one of my friends said: “I have no wish and no strength to dig through all this shit.” I understand this reaction. I see exactly where it is coming from. But understanding it does not mean accepting it. Emotions are a poor guide to understanding complex problems, and an even worse guide to solving them. Declaring that antizionism is simply a new form of racism, solely responsible for the reputational decline of the Zionist project, may get you invitations to podcasts, interviews with like-minded audiences, and publications in sympathetic media ecosystems. It works very well within its own echo chamber. What it cannot do is provide real understanding of the phenomenon. And without that, there is no serious path toward restoring Israel’s standing.

In the meantime, everything Israel has reason to be proud of, its achievements in science, technology, medicine, agriculture, is being buried under tons of this shit. And someone, whether we like it or not, has to dig through it.

The central problem with the “everything is........

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