A Test
Now for Israel: Can It Repair Its Ties to Americans?
Israel’s
advocates fear that its conduct of the war has cost it the support of an entire
generation of U.S. voters.
David M.
Halbfinger
By David
M. Halbfinger
Reporting
from Jerusalem
Oct. 12,
2025
The war
in Gaza may finally be ending, after two years of bloodshed and destruction.
But among the damage that has been done is a series of devastating blows to
Israel’s relationship with the citizens of its most important and most stalwart
ally, the United States.
Israel’s
reputation in the United States is in tatters, and not only on college campuses
or among progressives. For the first time since it began asking Americans about
their sympathies in 1998, a New York Times poll last month found that slightly
more voters sided with the Palestinians than with Israelis.
American
Jews, long Israel’s strongest domestic backers, have turned sharply critical of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government over the Gaza
conflict. A majority believe Israel has committed war crimes as it has killed
tens of thousands of civilians and restricted food aid, and four in 10 believe
it is guilty of genocide, a new Washington Post survey found — a charge Israel
denies. The shift has created new incentives for even moderate Democrats in
Congress to get tough on Israel, including by curtailing U.S. military aid.
The
damage is also increasingly bipartisan. Despite Republican efforts to identify
their party with Israel and to tag Democrats as providing aid and comfort to
its enemies, younger evangelical Christians are breaking with their parents on
the issue, seeing Israel as an oppressor rather than as a victim. And the
breakup extends beyond evangelicals.
“Everybody
under 30 is against Israel,” the conservative commentator Megyn Kelly
offhandedly told Tucker Carlson on his podcast last month.
The
question is whether those younger Americans will be lost to Israel long-term —
and what Israel’s advocates will do to try to reverse that.
Shibley
Telhami, a pollster and scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the
University of Maryland, argues that it’s too late.
“We now
have a paradigmatic Gaza generation like we had a Vietnam generation and a
Pearl Harbor generation,” he said. “There’s this growing sense among people
that what they’re witnessing is genocide in real time, amplified by new media,
which we didn’t have in Vietnam. It’s a new generation where Israel is seen as
a villain. And I don’t think that’s likely to go away.”
Yossi
Klein Halevi, an American-born Israeli writer, said he was struck on a recent
campus tour in the United States not so much by the rhetoric of the
anti-Zionist activists he met, but by the degree to which they appeared to be
influencing their apolitical peers.
“They’re
absorbing this toxic idea that there’s something basically illegitimate about a
Jewish state,” Mr. Halevi said. “That’s my concern: this general perception
that Israel has a bad odor attached to it.”
Others
argue that an end to the fighting, and to the horrific images from Gaza that
have flooded social-media feeds for two years, could allow American boosters of
Israel to regain their footing.
“I do
think there would be a bit of a reset in the way Israel is viewed,” said Halie
Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“There is
room for a bounce-back,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-born Israeli
pollster who is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “People
tend to overestimate how bad the damage has been. Just stopping the slaughter
will allow some people to go back to their comfort zone of being supportive.”
What
undergirds that more sanguine view is a belief that the foundation of the
U.S.-Israeli relationship remains solid.
That is
most persuasive when it comes to shared national interests, like the deep,
mutually beneficial collaborations between the two countries’ intelligence
communities, militaries and technology sectors — collaborations that may be
more visible to government officials than to the public at large.
“We’re an
asset in the great-power competition against China. We’re at the core of
American interests in the Middle East,” said Avner Golov, a former official on
Israel’s National Security Council who tracks the Israeli-American relationship
for MIND Israel, a Tel Aviv think tank.
“When my
grandfather came here, he only wanted a safe haven for the Jews,” Mr. Golov
added. “He never dreamt that Israeli technology would be able to play a
significant role in shaping the world order and preserving U.S. superiority
over its adversaries.”
It is
less clear, however, that the two countries, which long shared similar
aspirations — to be a promised land for the persecuted, to be a gleaming city
on a hill and an example for other nations — can count on those ideals as a
basis for continued close ties.
Mr.
Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, said such aims
were now up for debate in both countries, riven as they are by political
polarization.
On one
side, he said, is the liberal Israeli story of the post-Holocaust creation of a
Jewish state that “struggled for liberal values under constant pressure.” That
story, “which is my story,” Mr. Halevi said, appeals to Democrats.
Then
there is the Israeli government’s story, of Israel as America’s “bulwark
against the Muslim world,” Mr. Halevi said, “which resonates for the American
right.”
“It’s
hard to base a relationship between the two countries on shared values,” he
said, “when neither country can agree within itself on its own values.”
Elections
in Israel in the coming year could change things, experts say — not only if Mr.
Netanyahu is voted out, but also if a new government reflects the country’s
broad middle ground.
Mr. Golov
said that the polls portended a rejection of political extremes. He also
suggested that Israel’s democracy had much to commend it, even in comparison
with America’s at the moment, given the way that popular protests in Israel had
pressured Mr. Netanyahu and encouraged Mr. Trump to end the war.
“It’s a
success story of an Israeli public that on one hand is sending its children to
Gaza, and on the other hand is protesting every week,” he said. “And nobody
shot anyone,” he noted pointedly.
“If these
protests will succeed, and I think they will,” Mr. Golov added, “nobody will be
able to say that Israeli society lost its liberal nature. I think it regained
it.”
However
difficult it may be to repair the relationship and to win over Americans who
have turned against Israel over the war, experts agree that Israel will have
little choice but to try, because of the degree to which Mr. Netanyahu has
allowed Israel to become isolated internationally.
“Israel
has no hedging strategy,” said Ted Sasson, a professor at Middlebury College
and a fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. “It
absolutely needs the U.S. It has nowhere else to turn. It’s firmly committed to
that alliance, and it’s going to have to work harder to persuade Congress and a
future American president to provide the kind of support that Biden and Trump
have provided.”
Eventually,
an end to the war should mean an end to the worldwide focus on Israel’s conduct
of it, said Ted Deutch, president of the American Jewish Committee. He said he
eagerly awaited a point at which “the humanitarian situation gets better and
the hostages are released, and Arab countries are investing in the future of
Gaza.” Then, he said, “the conversation can be about what’s next, about what
the region can look like, what Gaza can look like.”
“I’m more
hopeful today than I have been for hundreds of days,” said William Daroff,
chief executive of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations,
an umbrella lobbying group.
Others
are less optimistic. Mort Klein, who leads the right-wing Zionist Organization
of America, said he feared that the war had poisoned attitudes toward Israel
almost irretrievably. “It’s become Jew-hatred,” he said. “I don’t know how that
is resolved.”
What
seems indisputable is that the stakes for Israel, and for its advocates in the
United States, are enormously high.
Mr.
Telhami, the University of Maryland professor, said that Israel’s dependence on
U.S. support had become so glaring over the course of the war — in political,
military and economic terms — that Israel would be motivated to treat its
possible defeat in the court of American public opinion as an “existential
threat.”
“The game
for maintaining the support for Israel is priority No. 1,” he said, adding,
“Because the battle in America for Israel is perceived as part of the battle
for Israel itself.”
David M.
Halbfinger is on his second assignment as Jerusalem bureau chief of The New
York Times, leading coverage of Israel and the occupied Palestinian
territories. After his first tour there, from 2017 to 2021, he served as
Politics editor, overseeing coverage of national politics, threats to democracy
and the 2024 presidential campaign.
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