Does Israel Want to Be Saudi Arabia?

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Ross Douthat

Opinion

Does Israel Want to Be Saudi Arabia?

April 21, 2026,

5:05 p.m. ET

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Illustration The New York Times; source image by Wong Yu Liang, via Getty Images

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By

Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

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I have

written

repeatedly

about why I think the United States can accept some degree of geopolitical embarrassment as the price of ending our war with Iran, without that embarrassment being an era-defining debacle or inflection point.

A different question, though, is whether this war will be remembered as an inflection point for Israel in its relationship with the United States.

For now, the war seems to have

accelerated

the broad anti-Israel shift in American public opinion, sharpest among Democrats but increasingly important among young Republicans as well, while also pushing critiques of Israel in a more radical direction — toward a deeper anti-Zionism, a more conspiratorial world picture and an

assertion of moral equivalence

between the Israeli government and Hamas.

I don’t share any of those radical critiques, but I still find myself participating in the larger shift. Because I thought the Gaza war

became unjust

and because I think the American war with Iran was a bad idea that wouldn’t have been embraced without strong encouragement from Benjamin Netanyahu, I am more personally skeptical of the American-Israeli relationship that at any point I can recall.

That skepticism puts me in a somewhat similar place to center-left Democrats like Matthew Yglesias, who has been having a running argument with pro-Israel writers about

whether Israeli conduct matters much

to the political trend described above, or whether the storm around Israel is an inevitable result of larger forces — left-wing identitarianism, right-wing nationalism, digital conditions — that have converged to make anti-Zionism bigger and bring antisemitism back.

It’s a complicated debate because Yglesias’s interlocutors are correct that much of the shift is overdetermined. On the left, even a liberal Zionism just doesn’t fit into the paradigms of contemporary progressivism, and Israel is both an exemplar of nationalist and religious values that left-wingers increasingly reject and a place where American progressives can

project critiques

of Manifest Destiny and “settler colonialism” that otherwise feel purely antiquarian.

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