America and Israel: Where to Now?

A Democratic Congress, a vice president turning against the alliance, and a cornered ally

By David W. Virtue, DD www.VirtueOnline.org  November 6, 2026

This week's midterm results could be a disaster for Israel. Could be.

Democrats took both houses of Congress, and Republicans lost Senate seats in states like Kansas and Texas that haven't voted that way in decades. It was not a setback. It was a rout.

The day after, Vice President JD Vance named the cause in seven words: "The reason we lost is the war." He then went further than any senior Republican has gone in a generation. He said winning back the party's lost voters will require ending the war in Iran, dealing with the cost of living, recommitting to America First, and changing America's relationship with Israel.

Read that last item again. It did not come from Bernie Sanders. It came from the man most likely to lead the Republican Party after Donald Trump.

Many voters would put it differently. They felt the war at the gas pump and the grocery checkout, along with tariffs that never made sense and an America First promise that seemed to stop at the Strait of Hormuz. Either way, the war and the household budget have become one grievance, and Israel's name is attached to it.

Trump has not backed down. He called Vance's verdict "largely true" but said the Iran war had to be fought and is still being fought. So the problem for the alliance is plain. The president who stands with Israel now faces a Congress that doesn't, and a vice president who is openly preparing for the day after Trump.

Will Netanyahu survive? That is still an open question. Israel's October 27 election made Likud the largest party but left his bloc short of a governing majority. Coalition talks may run for weeks.

By any fair reckoning, the war was necessary and timely. Israel understood the nuclear threat Iran posed to its existence and urged Washington to act. Trump did. But the job is not finished, and the political ground under it is shifting.

Opposition to Israel is no longer at the fringe of the Democratic Party. It is in the Senate. Michigan has elected Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and epidemiologist who will be the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate. He has called Israel "bloodthirsty," and his campaign drew Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders to Michigan to stand beside him. Sanders has spent the past year pushing to cut off American arms to Israel. America's Muslim voice is rising, and this week it won a seat at the table.

The money matters most. America's current ten-year aid agreement with Israel, $3.8 billion a year, expires in 2028. Netanyahu himself has proposed phasing out direct military aid over the next decade, a move Trump reportedly found baffling. But a new agreement has to be negotiated, and every dollar has to be appropriated by Congress. From January, the purse strings belong to Democrats.

The best case is that Trump's evangelical base keeps standing with Israel against Iran and holds enough Republicans in line to protect the alliance. The worst case is that Trump's hands are tied, and he cannot give Israel what it needs to defend itself against Iran, its proxies, and a worldwide antisemitism that grows bolder by the month. Israel may be forced to go it alone.

A cornered lion is a dangerous animal. When he has nothing left to lose, he fights.

Backing Israel into that corner would be the height of political stupidity. Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons, though it has never said so. To push a nation toward the point where it considers the unthinkable is foolishness of the highest order.

Trump's Two Cards

Trump has two cards left to play.

The first is theological. He can argue that America has a duty to honor God's covenant with His chosen people, and rally his evangelical base to fresh resolve. But that base is not what it was. Younger evangelicals are drifting from the certainties of their parents, and the old dispensational consensus no longer holds the pews.

The second is cultural. He can make the case that the coalition now determined to cut Israel loose is the same coalition determined to remake America's moral order. The same progressive left that calls Israel an apartheid state wants a radical sexual and gender agenda to set the nation's cultural direction. If that agenda wins, the Christian voice in public life will be silenced, even though some 62 percent of Americans still call themselves Christian. Christians should resist this with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength.

Do nothing, and America goes the way of Rome, swallowed up by barbarians already within her gates.

Trump can play these cards, but how well is anyone's guess. He has very little political capital right now, and railing at the media won't fix that.

The religious left now has a seat in the Senate too. Texas has just elected James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian who preaches a progressive gospel in which the spirit of the age outranks the authority of Scripture. He will bring that gospel to Washington, and Christian language will be used to sanctify the very agenda orthodox believers are called to resist.

So the question stands. Will America slide into a new dark age, helped along by secularists and liberal mainline denominations? Or will it resist the siren call of materialism and hedonism and secure the freedom it won with blood, sweat, and tears?

A new political day has dawned in America, and where it leads is up for grabs. Christians need to gird their loins for spiritual battle.