America is turning on Israel It can no longer ignore the bloodshed

 

America is turning on Israel

It can no longer ignore the bloodshed

 

Will Trump stand by Netanyahu?

 

Rajan Menon

May 13, 2025  

https://unherd.com/2025/05/america-is-turning-on-israel/

 

For the last 19 months, Gaza has provided an object lesson in human inhumanity. Between Hamas’s massacre on October 7, the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the ongoing disaster that has engulfed the Strip’s Palestinians, it’s hard to comprehend the toll of shattered lives and broken homes. Yet if the grimness only looks set to continue — Israel’s draconian restrictions on the flow of aid into Gaza, made even tighter since the collapse of the 15 January ceasefire it signed with Hamas, means hunger and malnutrition, and the spread of infectious diseases, of which has been no shortage in Gaza, could become even worse, hard though that is to imagine.

 

Having jettisoned the ceasefire accord on 18 March and resumed its war, Israel hopes to reoccupy the Strip, and perhaps even reintroduce settlers.

 

While few in the West rejected Israel’s right to retaliate following the October 7 atrocities, the ferocity and duration of its war of retribution have turned public opinion in the West against Israel as never before. The protests on American college campuses have been all but shut down following pressure from the Trump administration, Congress, powerful pro-Israel organisations, and wealthy donors. Even so, they illustrated the outrage produced by the relentless killing in Gaza.

 

It’s common to hear that the demonstrations — on and off campuses — sprang from antisemitism or “pro-Hamas” ideology. This claim ignores the reality that it was the humanitarian catastrophe created by Israel’s war that ignited the protests and that Jews have been the most statistically overrepresented community in the antiwar demonstrations. And on 8 May, 38 leaders from some of the most prominent American Jewish organisations, which have been Israel’s most stalwart supporters, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to warn the Jewish community against permitting Trump to undermine universities, civil liberties, the freedom of speech, and the rule of law, all in the name of stamping out antisemitism.

 

“Trump has shown that his moves won’t necessarily align with those of an Israeli government.”

 

Referring to Israel’s war in Gaza  as genocide is routinely painted as antisemitic. But this indictment, which has been echoed by the Trump administration, has begun to ring hollow given that the genocide charge comes from people like Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-born historian of genocide. Bartov, who did not rush to judgement, concluded recently that “it has been impossible to describe the Israeli operation as anything but genocidal”. He is not alone. Numerous other scholars of the Holocaust, and Jewish history more generally, have reached a similar conclusion—including more than 20 from Israel itself. The Oxford professor Avi Shlaim — who, like Bartov, grew up in Israel — who has rendered this same verdict in a recent book. And if criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza and occupation of the West Bank stem from antisemitism, Bernie Sanders, a Jew, would qualify as the Senate’s most antisemitic member.

 

American Jews between the ages of 18 and 34 remain strongly supportive of Israel. Still, the Gaza war has created a noticeable divide between them and their parents, and more so their grandparents. For the latter two generations, October 7 rekindled traumatic memories of the Shoah, strengthening their conviction that Israel is a haven for Jews that needs to be defended unconditionally. The younger cohort tends to be more critical of the war and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians more broadly. As for the wider American population, public opinion polls show that goodwill toward Israel has decreased substantially as Gaza’s catastrophe has worsened and become more widely known. The drop-off in Americans’ support for Israel isn’t new. As Mitchell Bard, an expert on US-Israel relations, noted in late March, referencing Gallup polls: “Sympathy for Israel peaked at 62% between 2010 and 2019 but has dropped every year since, falling to just 46% in 2025 — the lowest since 2001. Meanwhile, sympathy for the Palestinians hit a record high of 33%.”

 

The Gaza war has contributed to these shifts. As Gallup observed in late March, “the 46% expressing support [for Israel] is the lowest in 25 years of Gallup’s tracking of this measure.” These findings are replicated in other polls: a 2025 Pew Research Center survey showed that 53% of Americans viewed Israel unfavorably, compared to 42% in a 2022 poll. Since 2000, meanwhile, over half of all Americans have supported the creation of a Palestinian state, something that Netanyahu, and more so the members of his cabinet who lead far-Right religious parties, state publicly and repeatedly that they will never permit.

 

More to the point, Israeli plans could make the relationship with the US even more fraught. If Israel’s current government follows through on its vision of resettling Gaza (Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled the settlements there in 2005), and expelling some or all its Palestinian population, Israel’s reputation will take a much bigger hit. The reintroduction of settlements in Gaza and the expulsion of its Palestinian population isn’t, by the way, a fanciful scenario. Netanyahu has endorsed, more than once, Trump’s idea of relocating Gazans and turning their homeland into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. In March, Defense Minister Israel Katz created a “Voluntary Emigration Bureau” for the Strip, while Israel and the US have reportedly approached officials in Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland about resettling Palestinians. If Gazans refuse the offer, what then?

 

Then there’s the West Bank, where settlement-building, land confiscations, and evictions have increased sharply since 2000 — and especially in recent years. The settlement project, to which the Israeli far-Right is deeply committed, has turned the West Bank into Swiss cheese, making it all but impossible to transform the disconnected areas ruled, with varying degrees of authority, by the Palestinian Authority into a territorially-continuous, sovereign Palestinian state, especially since Israel claims exclusive jurisdiction over Area C, which comprises 60% of the West Bank and contains more than 400,000 settlers living in 125 settlements and 100-plus impromptu “outposts”. The prospects for a Palestinian state would diminish further were Netanyahu to deliver on his 2019 pledge to annex the Jordan Valley, which encompasses nearly 30% of the West Bank.

 

Israel has long enjoyed unconditional support from the United States. But the Gaza war and the continued settlement of the West Bank, could make that less reliable. Yes, Donald Trump’s professed devotion to Israel has been celebrated by many of its diehard American supporters, including Jews. But as Eric Alterman recently warned, trusting in Trump is a terrible idea because the President himself has a history of antisemitism — and anyway threatens the rule of law and the civil liberties that have protected them for so long. Trump has denied the details concerning antisemitism, but whatever one’s view of Alterman’s thesis, this much seems clear: Trump has shown that his moves won’t necessarily align with those of an Israeli government and may actually undercut them.

 

Netanyahu dreams of destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, with American military assistance; Trump is pursuing a deal with Iran to end its nuclear enrichment program. The US reached a truce with the Houthis of Yemen (who, in solidarity with Gazans, have fired rockets at Israel); the terms didn’t, however, extend to Israel. American officials recently conducted direct negotiations with Hamas, to secure the release of Edan Alexander, the sole surviving American hostage, apparently bypassing Israel. Israel has been encroaching on Syrian territory and carrying hundreds of air airstrikes against military targets in that country; Trump has now raised the possibility of lifting sanctions so that the new government can have a “fresh start.

 

Putting aside the famously capricious Trump, what might a loosening of US-Israeli ties mean for the Jewish state? The short answer is that it would make a very big difference for the country — and not in a good way. Between Israel’s founding in 1948 and 2024, American economic and military aid, adjusted for inflation, totalled $300 billion. To put this figure in perspective, the second-largest recipient, Egypt, received only a little more than half as much. Netanyahu said this week that “we will have to detox from US security assistance”. Perhaps Israel should, and can, become militarily self-sufficient, but for now the reality is that it could never have waged war in Gaza on the scale that it has without the steady supply of American weaponry. Nor would it be anywhere near as secure as it has been in the tumultuous Middle East.

 

Beyond its foreign alliances, Israeli plans could produce problems for its future on other fronts. If its leaders continue to annex the West Bank, settle Gaza, and expel its people, the two-state solution, already on life support, will die. Israel will then be left with only one solution, if that’s the appropriate word: the continued occupation and policing of Palestinians, who won’t abandon their dream of self-determination, let alone disappear. The mix of occupation and repression will ensure the continuation of a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and accelerate a trend that’s been increasingly apparent since 2000: the increasing power of the country’s religious Right, already a major force in its politics. According to one 2016 survey, 48% of Israelis, and a much higher proportion among those who identify with the religious Right, favoured the forcible expulsion of Arabs.

 

Taken together, the erosion of democracy, greater political polarisation, the increasing influence of groups and parties wedded to religious messianism, and continual violence created by the occupation may induce Israel’s best and brightest to emigrate. This is not a far-fetched scenario. In December, Israel’s Census Bureau reported that the sharp increase in departures from the country last year — half of those who left were between 20 and 45 years of age, more than a quarter were teenagers or younger — produced “net negative migration” and contributed to slower population growth.

 

Israel’s internal transformation toward illiberalism, a metamorphosis produced partly by its repression and occupation of Palestinians and the violence it begets, is hardly foreordained. But if the country continues to move in that direction, its international isolation will increase, and goodwill toward it will diminish, even in the United States, which if not irreplaceable as a patron and protector, comes pretty close. Hamas cannot, of course, destroy Israel, but if the country undermines itself, its archenemy will have scored a victory.

 

Rajan Menon is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor Emeritus at the City College of New York and Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.