Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, has just been published by Wicked Son. Her previous book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, was published in 2025. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.

;(JNS ) Most people in America are against the war with Iran, as they are in Britain, too.

Very few, however, actually understand why this war is as necessary as it is unavoidably complex.

Few seem aware that Iran has been actively at war against America for the past 47 years. Few seem to grasp that Iran’s fanatical Islamic regime has killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, perpetrated numerous attacks on U.S. bases, committed countless terrorist atrocities and taken Americans hostage.

Few grasp that U.S. and Israeli intelligence had discovered that Iran was poised to create both a nuclear bomb and a missile arsenal so enormous and so buried underground that no one would ever be able to tackle the mortal threat posed by the regime.

Instead, the American and British public have been fed a remorseless mainstream media narrative framed entirely by obsessive hatred of U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This presents the war as a reckless choice into which Trump was bounced by Netanyahu, that it was always going to be a disaster, and that it’s already been lost.

Israel, however, which is desperate for the Iranian regime to be prevented from ever harming it again, fears that Washington is once again leaving it hanging out to dry. The Israeli public thinks that Trump’s ceasefire-and then its extension-shows that he hasn’t got the commitment to see this thing through. They fear that he seeks to make a deal he can call victory, but that will leave the Tehran regime in a position where it can rearm and come back even more deadly than before.

Others, though, think that Trump is displaying strategic brilliance. They point out that he’s flipped the script over the Strait of Hormuz by turning Iran’s supposed chokepoint for the world into a deadly weapon against the regime itself.

America’s blockade of the Strait is causing Tehran to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a day in vital revenue, while the buildup of oil will potentially cripple the oil wells themselves and put them out of further use.

The fact is that this war is neither won nor lost. Both sides say they have the upper hand.

Everything depends on Trump. His repeated outbursts on Truth Social, which often seem to contradict each other, are giving many people severe emotional whiplash.

No one knows how this is going to end. But it’s very alarming that opposition to the war in America is feeding into a growing general public animus against Israel.

Public opinion shows that the majority of Americans are now more sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs than to the Israelis. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March, 60% of U.S. adults held an unfavorable view of Israel, including 80% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans.

This animus, reversing decades of general public support for Israel, is due to three things: the education system, social media and increasing political hostility on both sides of the aisle.

Some of this is due to the funding of anti-Israel materials in the education system by Qatar. But mostly, it’s due to the Marxist, “anti-colonialist” and anti-Western orthodoxy that has been standard in the universities for years (much of it funded by Qatar), which has now infused the K-12 syllabus in schools and frames Israel falsely as a colonialist oppressor.

With the education system having widely replaced teaching how to think with what to think, young people have become vulnerable to the enormous pressure of the fashionable consensus. This is disseminated, in turn, by social media, which presents cranks and oddballs as having credibility, and who are accordingly believed by the credulous and ignorant.

At the same time, the political world is increasingly abandoning the rational center ground for extremism. The left has entered into an unholy alliance with Islamists in the common aim of overturning the West-even though their intended replacement societies are the polar opposite of each other-and of hatred of Israel, the Jewish people and Judaism.

Last week, 40 of 47 Democrats voted for a resolution blocking the sale to Israel of bulldozers, while 36 opposed the sale of thousand-pound bombs-in the middle of a war in which America and Israel are fighting side by side.

The frontrunner in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary, Graham Platner, who has a Nazi-associated tattoo on his chest, wrote in 2014 of Hamas military tactics: “From a strictly professional standpoint, this was a damn fine looking and successful raid against a superior opponent. I dig it.”

The Republican Party is fracturing along similar lines, with a significant faction claiming that Israel drags the United States into foreign wars-a charge now given rocket fuel by the war against Iran-such as the 2003 war in Iraq.

This claim is idiotic and untrue. Israel’s prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, advised Washington against the Iraq war, while successive U.S. presidents have repeatedly restrained Israel from doing what it has needed to do to keep itself safe.

Now the left is joining the right in this particular canard. Last weekend, the former Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. vice president, Kamala Harris, spoke about the war to a Democratic convention, saying that Trump “got pulled into it by Bibi Netanyahu, let’s be clear about that.”

And Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff under former president Barack Obama, said on Bill Maher’s TV talk show that there should be no more U.S. taxpayer support for Israel, which should “get the same deal that any one of our allies does,” and that the United States “should never spill any blood for the State of Israel’s security.”

This was an odious and twisted remark. American military assistance to Israel requires much of that funding to be spent on American-made defense systems. This means that the United States profits hugely from the aid flowing back into the American economy through supporting domestic manufacturing, defense jobs and technological development.

Other allies, such as Japan and Germany, have thousands of U.S. troops stationed on their soil at huge expense. And Israel is a unique ally in that it provides America with priceless intelligence, military expertise and technological developments.

These Democrats are singing from the same Jewish-conspiracy song sheet as the vicious Republican faction led by podcast host Tucker Carlson.

Disturbingly, U.S. Vice President JD Vance has refused to repudiate this faction. So if he becomes the Republican presidential candidate in 2028 against an anti-Israel Democrat, Israel’s supporters may feel presented with a choice between the devil and the deep-blue sea.

Israel’s governing class (and its citizenry, ed.) is all too aware of this deeply troubling American trajectory. Concern about Trump’s successor has meant that Israel has begun to develop its own arms industry to reduce its dependency on the United States. The Jewish state is also acutely aware that many American Jews are turning against it, since some three-quarters of them are signed up to the Democratic Party and to progressive ideologies that are anti-Israel and anti-West.

Israel is accordingly developing new partnerships, notably with India and Africa. Whatever the eventual outcome of the Iran war, it is clear that Israel has become the main regional power in the Middle East.

If the Tehran regime finally bites the dust, Israel will be at the heart of trade and infrastructure links that will hugely reduce the blackmail power of Russia, China and North Korea, the evil empire that has revolved around the Iranian regime.

Growing anti-Israel animus in the United States isn’t just a warning sign for American Jews. It suggests that America is going the same way as Europe, if more slowly. Britain and Europe are in the process of succumbing to Islamization and destroying their own historic culture and identity. If Republicans can’t hold the line for the defense of civilized values, then America will be lost.

This is an inflection point for civilization, and Israel is poised to become the fulcrum of a new world order.

Israel is very concerned that it may be losing America. America should be no less concerned that it’s losing Israel.