Israel's Special Place In American Politics May Never Recover
With the undeniable horrors coming from Gaza, something has shifted. Could Israel become just another U.S. ally?
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Have you felt the shift? Just in the last week or so, the debate over Israel and Gaza has taken a turn. Perhaps this will eventually seem like nothing more than a momentary blip, but for now at least, something has definitely changed. As an American Jew who has spent the last year and a half agonizing about my own feelings about Israel and those of my people, it has me wondering what will happen in the coming years to the painstakingly constructed political, social, economic, and military relationship between the two countries.
I’m coming to think that we’ll look back on this as a breaking point, when that relationship transitioned to a new phase, 58 years after the last transformative moment — the Six Day War in 1967 — created the reality we still live in today. That will be true for America in general, but especially for American Jews, whose entire identity has been called into question.
It’s possible that Israel will never recover the position it has held in American politics. Nor should it.
Here are some recent developments:
As the food situation in Gaza has worsened, news media around the world have been full of images of emaciated children clearly starving to death. Even Donald Trump, whose sympathy for Palestinians would have to be located with an electron microscope, can’t deny it; asked if he agreed with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s laughable assertion that “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,” Trump replied, “Based on television, I would say not particularly, because those children look very hungry.” For once, Trump’s impulse to believe only what he sees on the teevee led him to a correct conclusion.
In the last week, two prominent Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have issued reports documenting the reasons why, for the first time, they are accusing their government of committing genocide against the people of Gaza. I’d rather not get into a discussion here about the word, because there’s a tendency to believe that if you win the argument about the word then you will have won the argument about the war. But the point is, coming from inside Israel, even from left-coded groups that are decidedly in the minority, it’s a significant development.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced that his country will recognize Palestine as a state. Prime Minister Keir Starmer then said that Great Britain will do the same, “unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution. And this includes allowing the U.N. to restart the supply of aid, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.” Netanyahu’s government is not inclined to do any of these things.
Forty-four Senate Democrats wrote a letter to the administration decrying the humanitarian situation in Gaza, criticizing the catastrophe that the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” set up by the American and Israeli governments to take over the distribution of food has created, and demanding that the U.S. move immediately to address the crisis. A more strongly worded letter condemning the GHF was signed by 21 senators.
Even among Republicans, doubts are being heard. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, called what is happening in Gaza a genocide (though none of her colleagues have joined her). It is now common to hear longtime supporters of Israel raise their doubts; as never-Trump conservative Charlie Sykes writes, “This is an especially painful moment for those of us who have spent our lives supporting Israel as a redoubt of democracy and symbol of human decency and courage,” but “Bibi Netanyahu will be remembered as one of history’s monsters, the architect of unspeakable atrocities.”
A new Gallup poll shows that just 32% of Americans approve of the actions Israel is taking in Gaza. For the first time in their polling dating back to 1997, Netanyahu has a net negative rating among Americans. While the declines are concentrated among Democrats and independents, this is also to a great extent a story of age differences:
This relationship may never be the same
For the vast majority of American Jews over the age of 30 or so, Jewish identity was for their whole lives inextricably linked to support for Israel. Reform and Orthodox temples might disagree about whether women can be ordained as rabbis, but they both hang Israeli flags. Jewish day schools teach love of Israel along with Hebrew and the meaning of the holidays. You don’t have to believe in God, Jews were taught, but you have to believe in Israel.
This became particularly true after the 1967 war, when the vulnerable and threatened nation now appeared strong and heroic, fulfilling its historic destiny. But that took none of the power away from the narrative of victimhood that has defined Jewish identity. It is that narrative that was always offered as the justification for the oppression of Palestinians, that allowed both Israelis and diaspora Jews to push Palestinian claims to human rights into their peripheral vision, blurry and indistinct as long as you don’t look at them too directly. Ask why Israel had the right to push them out in 1948, and the answer is the Holocaust; ask why it can force them to endure violence and oppression today, and the answer is Palestinian terrorism. They did that to us, and their sins provide a moral get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to inflict upon them any suffering and deprivation of rights we can devise.
That was always problematic, to say the least. But now it has become intolerable. Which brings us to a fundamental question so many young Jews (and plenty of older ones) are asking: Are we just a tribe, fearful and vengeful like any other, or are we something better?
To be clear, there have always been Jews who answered by saying we’re just a tribe, and we should do anything necessary to survive. But for generations, American Jews were taught that we are something more. Our commitment to education and scholarship and debate and achievement has lifted up all humanity, we were told. Albert Einstein and Itzhak Perlman and Jonas Salk and Sandy Koufax! A full 22% of all Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish!
So yes, we were told that we’re better than others, and this is something we don’t mention too often when speaking to non-Jews. Better not just in our achievements, but morally. We seek justice, we value equality, not just for ourselves but for everyone, precisely because of what we endured at the hands of Pharaoh and Torquemada and Hitler. And Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle East” (if only I had a dime for every time I heard that phrase growing up) embodies that goodness.
Who would believe that now, no matter how many times the IDF calls itself “the most moral army in the world”? Was there anyone who doubted for a moment that the Netanyahu government would respond to the horror of October 7 with its own horror, visiting upon the Palestinians an unspeakable vengeance? And yet it exceeded all expectations. Hamas is awful and guilty of atrocities, the government says (which is true), and that is why whole families must be torn to pieces by bombs, why civilians must be imprisoned by the thousands, why cities and towns must be reduced to rubble, why they must be deprived of food and water and medicine, and why in the end they must literally be starved to death.
This is the final triumph of the tribalist version of Jewish identity. Even Jews who still believe in the superiority and attendant obligations with which they were inculcated in their youth will have a great deal of trouble looking at what Israel has done and continues to do — and in that I include the ongoing brutality, dehumanization, and deprival of rights to which West Bank Palestinians are subjected — and say that we as a people are uniquely virtuous. As with any people, we have amongst us the righteous and the depraved, the humane and the murderous. I wish it were not so, but it is.
Where will this end up?
The argument that AIPAC and other Jewish organizations made in order to build a bipartisan consensus for unflagging support for Israel contained both practicality and affinity. Israel was a reliable Cold War ally in the Middle East, ready to have America’s back and aid us in every fight, they said. It shares our values of democracy and freedom (not for everyone, but never mind that). Its hostile neighbors are dark-complected barbarians. It awaits as a refuge for diaspora Jews, if and when they should need it. And besides, if you stand with Israel, we will stand with you in your campaigns.
That effort was a spectacular success, and not just in Congress, where Netanyahu is regularly invited to speak and criticism of Israel is met with the harshest condemnation. There are at least 38 states with laws and executive orders on the books punishing participation in boycotts against Israel, usually by prohibiting the state from contracting with any person or organization that participates in such a boycott. What this means is that in order to do business with the state, you have to take what amounts to a loyalty pledge to a foreign government.
I’m not predicting that those laws will be repealed any time soon. But the idea that “support for Israel” — i.e., support for whatever the right-wing Israeli government wants and does — is so self-evidently in Americans’ interest that it should not even be questioned? That idea is beginning to crack, and with it the bipartisan consensus it took so long to build.
While it may be a while before it collapses, it will become more and more a Republican position, driven by the party’s evangelical base and its unadorned anti-Muslim bigotry. Through generational replacement, fewer and fewer elected Democrats will remain committed to giving Israel anything it wants no matter what it does. At the same time, fewer and fewer Jews — ordinary people, influential people, elected officials — will believe that they have to “stand with Israel” always and forever.
The result could be that eventually, Israel becomes just an ally like any other, with interests that often align with ours but whom we are free to criticize and even decline to support if we don’t like what it’s doing. Its unique position in American politics and foreign policy could evolve into a relationship that allows the U.S. to make choices that truly align with our values and interests. It could become like Great Britain or South Korea. Both are important allies, economically and militarily, but we don't make speech therapists swear that they will never boycott British or Korean goods in order to get a job in an American public school.
And if Great Britain was killing civilians by the tens of thousands in a land it occupied, we might not be afraid to condemn its actions or stop sending it the guns to do it. Okay, we might — but at least a different course would be possible.
It’s also possible that this moment will fade, and Americans will go back to not worrying too much about the fate of the Palestinians or Israel’s misdeeds, and nothing will fundamentally change about how we approach the ally that enjoys a status like no other. But I do think we’ll look back on the post-October 7 period as the start of a new era in both diaspora Jewish identity and American foreign policy. Maybe even a better one.
This is true and maddening and makes me so sad. My sister-in-law grew up on the kibbutz attacked on 7 October, and I feel her pain so deeply, but what the Israelis are doing now is a moral outrage so profoundly wrong and criminal that NO excuse is acceptable.
Thank you so much for writing this. Signed, a Jewish-American raised to support Israel unequivocally, and who is horrified by its monstrous treatment of the Palestinian people.