The days of right-wingers uniformly advocating for the Israeli regime on the basis of a battle for “Western civilisation” and unity against “Islamic terrorism” now seem to be long gone. This represents a major defeat for the Zionist lobby and ultimately throws the regime’s future into question.

Israeli propaganda in the West was once close to air-tight, with only a small portion of the Left in the United States entertaining solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Throughout Europe, primarily due to long-standing socialist movements and traditions that had aligned themselves with Global South struggles, support for Palestine was always much higher. Yet, now, in both Western Europe and North America, the consensus is anti-Zionist.

“A land for a people, for a people without a land” and “the Jews needed a place after the Holocaust” once captured the imaginations of vast swathes of the collective Western public, who believed in the foundational myths of the Zionist regime. When these notions began to falter, that Palestine was empty and/or that the Palestinians had to hand over their homes to European Jews due to Europe’s persecution of the minority group, then came the shared enemy and shared civilization arguments.

The first excuse for the existence of the Zionist entity is based upon a moral appeal, working on Western collective guilt, but also provides a practical solution that appears ethical and justified. Eventually, this argument lost its credibility on the Left, as the facts demonstrate that the Zionist regime was created through atrocity and that the land of Palestine was not empty and was home to a flourishing culture and a people rooted there for thousands of years.

Nevertheless, the collective ignorance of the vast preponderance of the American population allowed for Israeli propagandists to continue making their case on the basis of “morality”.

As their narratives slowly began to fall apart in front of more educated Leftist audiences over time, another series of arguments began to form, primarily, the argument that “Israel” was on the frontlines of a global fight against “Islamic extremism” and “terrorism”. This is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once said that the September 11 attacks of 2001 were good for the Zionist regime.

The Zionist project was originally founded by secular ethno-supremacists, meaning their language and approach to the rest of the Western world, which they saw themselves as being part of, was geared toward an understanding of the values of the West at the time. Due to a complete domination of the media landscape at the time, very little beyond what the likes of the US and UK wanted their people to see was published for their own people to consume.

Chinks in this narrative certainly occurred over time, but the reality on the ground did not begin to really receive the attention it sorely deserved until the beginning of the First Intifada in 1987, when the videos and images of children throwing stones at occupying tanks took the world by storm.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, during which the Zionist regime murdered between 15,000 to 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of whom were civilians, there was certainly a shift in how it was perceived globally, yet this didn’t make a huge dent in Western public opinion.

Each of the Israeli major assaults on the Gaza Strip, since Hamas took power in 2006, began to gradually shift perceptions, as did the disintegration of the so-called “peace talks” between Tel Aviv and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). This eventually led to a predicament whereby the liberal human rights groups like Amnesty International eventually accused the Israelis of apartheid.

Following October 7, 2023, the popular position among those leaning Left would become overwhelmingly pro-Palestine, as one would expect. However, the other major shift was on the Right, where the Israelis failed to contain the outrage at how Western nations were paying for the atrocities that have been unfolding for 22 months straight.

Why the sudden shift on Western Right?

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When Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in late 2023, the Israelis instantly pursued a propaganda campaign that was heavily tailored to a Right-wing audience. Even the October 7 hoaxes, like the beheaded babies and mass rape campaign lies, were geared toward playing into Islamophobic depictions of Muslims and Arabs.

The clear goal of the Zionist propagandists was to present the entire population of Gaza as Islamic fundamentalists who are seeking the annihilation of “Western civilization”. This meant pushing a narrative that Palestinians were "barbarians" who flooded over into “Israel” and began butchering Jewish babies and gang-raping women.

In a post-9/11 West, this strategy may have succeeded. Anti-Islam narratives, that relied on widespread ignorance, managed to convince the vast majority of Americans that their illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified. The lies in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq worked to persuade the people that the so-called “War on Terrorism” was justified.

However, even among right-wingers, the war on Iraq is now viewed as a catastrophic mistake and a “forever war” based upon the lies of mainstream media. When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he made a point during the Republican Party primaries of going after Jeb Bush for the Iraq War and rallying his base against costly conflicts abroad.

This has become the populist right-wing perspective that the US and its allies should orient themselves around a domestically focused policy approach that prioritizes the homeland, while rejecting taxpayer funding for overseas wars. Regime change is now a dirty phrase.

In addition to this, it cannot be discounted that regardless of how far to the right people may be, including those who identify as White Nationalists, they do adhere to Western Liberal values. A great example of this is the recent Jubilee debate show, on which journalist Mehdi Hassan debated 20 far-Right conservatives.

While the Right-wingers disagreed with Hassan on basically every issue, when the topic of whether Donald Trump seeks to ethnically cleanse Gaza came up, even individuals who espoused openly racist rhetoric were opposed to the Israelis and what they were doing. This shows just how far the Western public has come, especially among younger demographics, on the question of the Israelis. 

The reasons behind this are two-fold: Firstly, the daily stream of atrocities committed against the innocent people of Gaza is simply too much for even those who align themselves with hardline Right-wing positions. The second has to do with the evident influence of the [foreign] Israeli lobby in Washington and other Western capitals. 

Both of these points are important to consider, because although Westerners on the Right can assume positions that are discriminatory, they still largely adhere to a Liberal value system to one extent or another. Seeing a steady stream of mutilated children on a daily basis, especially when it is a foreign regime doing the killing, is not something that any large segment of the Western public is going to stand for.

Then there is the shift in the positions of Right-wing commentators in the United States, like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who often take Christian Nationalist or “America First” positions on foreign policy. Mixed in with this is a clear rise among the far-Right of classical anti-Israeli sentiments, embodied by social media figures such as Nick Fuentes.

The Israeli anti-Muslim playbook is, of course, in play here, yet the main proponents of a “clash of civilizations” or “Islamic takeover” narrative are being rapidly discredited and exposed as paid agents of the Zionist regime. Take, for instance, Douglas Murray, who has made a career on the back of bashing Muslims in a pseudo-intellectual fashion. Once challenged on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, he became a laughing stock. So too has Jordan Peterson faded into irrelevance after siding with the Israelis. 

Now, one could argue that none of this is actually genuine on the part of Right-wing commentators. Yet, this question is somewhat irrelevant. Even if the shift is purely calculated to pander to an audience, it demonstrates that these commentators, journalists, and media personalities have recognized and reacted to the positions of their audiences. On the other hand, those who attempt to stick to defending the Zionists are almost always funded by them.

The Ukraine war is another important issue that shaped a good portion of Right-wingers on the topic of foreign military aid expenditure. Although the MAGA base of Donald Trump rallied against the Democratic Party’s choice to send their tax dollars to fund Kiev’s war effort against Russia, this quickly opened the door for criticism of Washington’s aid packages to their allies in Tel Aviv.

The Israelis are now stuck, because their extremist Jewish Supremacist regime does not align with the values of the majority of people across the collective West. Even the attempts to fearmonger about Muslims are no longer as effective as they once were. This is a bad sign for the Zionist entity going forward, because whether it is someone on the Left who is appalled at bombing hospitals or a Right-winger outraged at Tel Aviv’s influence in Washington, nobody stands with the Israelis any longer among the younger generations of voters.