By Jiggy Jaguar
Look, I’m not here to recite talking points from either the neoconservative war machine or the campus radicals who treat every foreign conflict like a morality play. I’m a libertarian who still believes progressive values mean something when they’re applied consistently: individual rights, skepticism of concentrated power, opposition to empire, and the basic idea that governments should not pick permanent favorites with other people’s money and lives. From that vantage point, a growing number of Americans—across the usual left-right divide—are simply done with the special relationship as it currently operates.
The Core Grievance Is Not “Hate.” It’s Pattern Recognition.
People notice the same things repeating. Decades of multi-billion-dollar aid packages, automatic diplomatic cover at the UN, and a domestic political culture in which criticizing specific Israeli government policies is treated as something close to heresy. They notice statements from certain Israeli officials and lobbyists that treat American domestic politics as an extension of Israeli strategy. They notice the casual talk—sometimes from Israeli politicians themselves—about regional dominance and the assumption that American power will underwrite it indefinitely.
That is not “antisemitism.” It is pattern recognition about any client relationship that has become lopsided. Libertarians have said for years that foreign aid is welfare for other governments. Progressives who care about human rights have pointed out the civilian costs of prolonged occupation and blockade. Both observations can be true at the same time without requiring conspiracy theories about secret cabals “controlling America.” Influence is real. Lobbying is real. Strategic dependence is real. Pretending otherwise insults the intelligence of ordinary people who pay the bills.
Libertarian Non-Intervention Meets Progressive Consistency
A consistent libertarian view starts with American sovereignty and the consent of the governed. The United States does not exist to guarantee another nation’s preferred borders or security doctrine in perpetuity. Progressive values, properly applied, demand the same standard for Palestinian civilians that they demand for Israeli civilians: neither population is expendable, and collective punishment is still collective punishment whether the bombs are dropped by the IDF or by Hamas. You can condemn terrorism without endorsing indefinite occupation. You can support Israel’s right to exist and defend itself without treating every critical question about settlements, aid conditionality, or regional adventurism as existential betrayal.
The Middle East does not need another permanent American blank check. It needs fewer external powers treating the region as a chessboard. “Taking over the Middle East” is not a sober description of Israeli policy, but the perception that Israeli strategic goals are routinely folded into American foreign policy with minimal public debate is not imaginary. That perception feeds exhaustion. People are tired of being told that questioning the arrangement makes them morally suspect.
What Fed-Up Actually Looks Like
It looks like ordinary taxpayers noticing that domestic priorities—infrastructure, medical debt, border enforcement, basic competence—get less urgency than the next supplemental package. It looks like free-speech advocates watching institutions police language about Israel more aggressively than they police language about almost any other foreign government. It looks like realists on both the left and the right asking why American military and financial commitments in the region keep expanding while measurable strategic returns for the United States remain elusive.
None of this requires denying Jewish history, the Holocaust, or the legitimacy of a Jewish state. It requires refusing to treat any foreign government as exempt from the same scrutiny we apply to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, or our own officials. Special relationships that cannot survive ordinary democratic debate are not special. They are brittle.
A Cleaner Path
End the blank checks. Condition remaining aid on transparent, measurable outcomes instead of ritualistic annual renewals. Stop conflating legitimate criticism of policy with collective ethnic guilt. Apply the same human-rights standard to every party that kills civilians. And recover the older American instinct—shared by many classical liberals and progressives alike—that the first duty of the United States government is to the people who actually live under its jurisdiction.
People are not “fed up with Jews.” They are fed up with a foreign-policy arrangement that treats American resources and American political space as permanently available for another nation’s priorities, while any serious pushback is pathologized. That exhaustion is rational. Pretending it is not only accelerates the backlash.
The alternative is simple and hard: treat Israel like a normal country with interests of its own, treat American taxpayers like adults who get a say in where their money and risk go, and stop demanding that every conversation about the Middle East begin with a loyalty test. Sovereignty is not antisemitism. Consistency is not bigotry. And enough is enough.
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