US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee offered a three-part explanation for declining American support for Israel in a NewsNation interview Thursday: foreign disinformation, hostility toward religion, and insufficient biblical knowledge. "You add all that together, I guess you just want to be mad at Israel and blame them for everything," he said. The framing is notable less for its theology than for what it excludes — any engagement with the policy substance driving the shift. The numbers behind the shift are unambiguous. A Pew Research poll from April shows 60 percent of US adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. While white evangelicals remain favorable at 65 percent, that constituency is shrinking as a share of the electorate. More than half of Americans told Pew they do not trust Netanyahu to do the right thing in world affairs. An AP-NORC poll from July found that Americans who believed Israel committed genocide in Gaza outnumbered those who did not, though roughly half said they lacked enough information to answer. Huckabee flatly rejected both the genocide and apartheid characterizations, telling Americans they would change their minds if they would "look at the truth." This is the ambassador's core rhetorical move: recategorizing a factual and legal dispute — one being actively litigated at the International Criminal Court — as a matter of spiritual deficiency. It places the burden of proof on the American public rather than on the policy itself. The political consequences are already materializing. Prominent critics of Israel have won elections, most visibly Zohran Mamdani, who became mayor of New York City. Netanyahu used his UN General Assembly speech to attack Mamdani by name, claiming Jews in New York told him they no longer feel safe. Mamdani has said he opposes anti-Semitism but pledged to execute the ICC warrant for Netanyahu on war crimes if the Israeli leader visited New York — before concluding the city lacked legal authority to do so. The structural tension here is between an ambassador whose job is to maintain the US-Israel relationship and polling data that shows the relationship's domestic foundation eroding. Huckabee's diagnosis — that Americans simply need more Bible study — is a demand that public opinion conform to theology rather than that policy respond to public sentiment. It is a strategy that works within the evangelical base but accelerates alienation outside it. Netanyahu's direct attack on an elected US mayor at the UN General Assembly underscores the same dynamic from the Israeli side: treating American domestic politics as a battlefield rather than adapting to its signals. Both moves — Huckabee's spiritual diagnosis and Netanyahu's personal attacks — suggest a strategy of doubling down on a narrowing coalition rather than broadening appeal. The 20-year question is whether the US-Israel relationship can survive the demographic math. White evangelicals are a declining share of the US population, and younger Americans poll dramatically less favorable toward Israel. If the only response to that shift is to tell critics they need to read Genesis more carefully, the relationship's political foundation will continue to narrow until it breaks.
