MAGA Divides Grow as Israel War Intensifies

The Israel-Hamas war has fractured MAGA supporters, dividing conservatives on how the United States should respond to the escalating conflict that has claimed more than 4,000 Israeli and Palestinian lives in the last nine days.

Republicans have long been more united in their support of Israel than Democrats, but an increasing sympathy for Palestinians is popping up among those on the right, as well.

While many conservatives have been steadfast in supporting the Israeli government, several MAGA supporters have spoken against U.S. support for Israel since the fighting began on October 7, when Hamas led the deadliest Palestinian militant attack on Israel in history.

Israel subsequently launched heavy airstrikes on Gaza and warned that it's preparing for a ground invasion as a humanitarian crisis grows in the Palestinian territory. Nearly 2,800 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Associated Press. More than 1,400 Israelis have been killed, the AP reported.

Responding to a post on X, formerly Twitter, that suggested pro-Palestine supporters should be "blacklisted from decent society," conservative fitness influencer Ian Smith drew parallels to the public's reception of individuals who did not want to get the COVID-19 vaccine, writing, "Sounds a lot like people who won't get vaccinated should be banned from society."

"Y'all seeing the machine at work? Just to be clear, when he says support 'Gaza...' he means anything other than full support for Israel," Smith, who has previously made Holocaust denial statements, said, referring to X user @NolteNC. "Wishing for land or neutrality is not allowed."

In another post, Smith pointed to the number of U.S. bombs that were deployed under the Obama administration, saying that not all the casualties involved combatants and that those facts represented a trend in American politics.

"You really care about civilians dying? Then you have no choice but to weap [sic] for and protect both," he said. "That means you do not support US support of Israel's conflict and do support the US demanding peace talks."

Rumble personality Ryan Matta made a similar post about the civilians were were killed in conflicts that involved the U.S., asking "When has the USA ever been involved in a war where we were not the terrorist?"

"It's extremely dangerous to tie the welfare of the USA to the modern state of Israel," podcaster Elijah Schaffer wrote, adding, "This is the same mentality that justified the war on terror of the last 20 years."

The tone of these comments comes in stark contrast to other MAGA figures like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. They stated they would stand with Israel on the war and harshly criticized Democrats who did not outright condemn Hamas or who have expressed sympathies to the lives lost in Gaza.

On Monday, Loomer accused people she knew of "openly supporting and making excuses for Islamic terrorists" over their response to the conflict and labeled those like Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar "jihadists" for highlighting the deaths in Gaza as opposed to those in Israel.

"Where are the 'Jewish Lives Matter' banners outside hipster cafes like we saw after George Floyd? Israeli flags in social media profiles like we saw after Putin invaded Ukraine? What happened to the performative, virtue-signaling left?" former Fox News host Steve Hilton wrote Sunday on X. "Strangely silent on this one..."

Although historical polling shows the greatest change in net sympathy for Israel can be observed among Democrats, Gallup's annual survey, published in March, found that 78 percent of Republicans put their sympathies with Israelis in the ongoing Middle East situation—a figure that has remained largely stagnant since 2012. In 2018 and 2020, that support was 86 percent and above.

Net sympathy—the percentage who are more sympathetic to Israelis minus the percentage who are more sympathetic toward Palestinians—has seen a slight decrease among Republicans, suggesting that more Republicans are beginning to sympathize with the Palestinians. This year's poll found net sympathy to be 67 percent, a decrease from the 70 to 80 percent range that's been seen since 2010.

That splinter has also been seen among the GOP's 2024 presidential primary contenders. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley have blasted frontrunner Donald Trump for his statements accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of failing to stand by the U.S. as it prepared to strike a top Iranian general and remarks praising Lebanon-based group Hezbollah.

"To go out and just take potshots at Netanyahu, and at a time of war right now, I don't see where that's very productive," DeSantis told a town hall in New Hampshire on Friday.

But DeSantis' fierce support for Israel has come under fire from MAGA supporters, who ridiculed him for also telling a Saturday crowd in Iowa that while not all Palestinians are part of Hamas "they are all antisemitic."

"This is insane stuff. It's like we're going back in time to the Bush Era," conservative activist Joshua Fontanilla said on X in response to DeSantis' comments. "All the Trump progress on the Right gone with one Middle Eastern war cry. Neocons rising."

Activist Jackson Hinkle also took issue with Shapiro's comments calling for sympathy for all deaths caused by Hamas, resurfacing an old blog post that Shapiro wrote in which he complained about people who "whine about 'civilian casualties.'"

"Maybe I'm a hard-hearted guy, but when I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don't really care," Shapiro had written on the conservative site Townhall in a 2002 post titled "Enemy 'civilian casualties' ok by me."

"In fact, I would rather that the good guys use the Air Force to kill the bad guys, even if that means some civilians get killed along the way. One American soldier is worth far more than an Afghan civilian."

In a 2018 column for The Daily Wire, Shapiro said that he was 18 years old at the time and it was "something I wish I'd never written."

"While the larger point of the piece -- that we must calculate the risk to American service members when we design rules of engagement -- is partially correct, the piece is expressed in the worst possible way, and simplifies the issue beyond the bounds of morality (particularly by doubting the civilian status of some civilians)," he wrote.

Hinkle also urged GOP Representative Jim Jordan to focus on domestic policies rather than his calls for additional military aid to Israel.

Update, 10/18/23, 5 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional background information.