Has the US-Israeli honeymoon ended? 

The US-Israel alliance is 78 years old, starting off with instant recognition of the new state in 1948 and strengthening of military ties since the Six-Day War of 1967. But is the iron-clad partnership rupturing now, especially after the Israeli effort to derail the US-Iran deal to end the war initiated by the US and Israel with the aim of regime change in Iran?

Many foreign policy experts and top-notch commentators of the stature of Jeffrey Sachs suggest yes.

To a question whether the US and Israel are growing apart – with the American President Donald Trump forced to even alienate Israeli lobbyists, the first time a US President has done it in a long time – Sachs tells Open, “Israel under (hardline Israeli premier Benjamin) Netanyahu has become a threat to regional and world peace. The reason is Israel’s violent extremism in pursuit of ‘Greater Israel,’ meaning Israel’s complete domination over Palestine and parts of the neighbouring countries. This ideology is extremist and is leading to perpetual war. The American people are against these perpetual wars and have come to oppose Israel’s extremist agenda.”

The war on Iran, launched first in 2025 and later in 2026, envisaged a regime change and what the West called the restoration of democracy.

Sachs, a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, goes on to say that he hopes that Trump breaks with US open support for Israel’s extremism. Israel should either live peacefully next door to Palestine, or the entirety of Palestine (meaning Israel, Gaza, West Bank and Jerusalem) should become a bi-national state with two nationalities living peacefully within it, he notes in an interview to Open.

For his part, acclaimed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh also shares the view that bonhomie is over. He wrote on Substack arguing why President Donald Trump has “walked away from a postwar alliance dating back almost eight decades by telling Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that America’s romance with Israel is over … Trump has told the New York Times and its columnists who bemoan what they fear will be a bereft and vulnerable Israel, in constant peril from a potential Iranian nuclear weapon, that Israel is on its own.”

Hersh rues that Trump has done little in his second term to push Israel to stop either its bombing or the constant encroachment of the Israeli military into Gaza, where it now controls as much as 70 percent of the territory. Nor has Trump raised significant opposition to the steadily increasing Israeli settler violence and plundering of long-held Palestinian property in the West Bank.

An astute analyst of global events, columnist Chris Hedges also believes that US is allowing itself to lose Israel, which, he says “is sabotaging the negotiations with Iran and alienating its last important ally by refusing to halt its attacks on Lebanon and withdraw from its occupation of the south. It is determined to reignite a regional conflagration that could see Iran perpetually close the Strait of Hormuz and plunge the global economy into a global depression. And it continues its genocide in Gaza”. A recurring pattern has been that whenever the US-Iran talks have progressed, Israel has launched significant strikes on southern Lebanon, violating conditions and disrupting the momentum of the peace initiative.

According to Hedges, Israel is contaminated by racism and genocidal violence. “It is blinded by a repugnant moral superiority. It is corrupted by a class of Zionist billionaires in the U.S. who use their wealth to bend foreign policy to serve Israeli interests. It is equipped with a nuclear arsenal Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened to use,” he wrote recently in his column.

In a recent interview with Open, American foreign policy expert and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Michael Kugelman had said that Trump has had limited capacity to deter Israel from continuing hostilities in the Middle East. “And if the US president can't deter the Israelis, it's hard to imagine who can,” he said.

With Washington funnelling billions of dollars in military assistance to Israel each year, it is anyone’s guess who emerges as the bigger loser in this rupture of the relationship.