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 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,say Ted Deutch,president of American Jewish Committee.He said eagerly awaited point at which "the humanitarian situation gets better and hostages are released and Arab countries investing future Gaza."Then he said,"the conversation can about what's next region can look like Gaza can look like."
"I'm more hopeful today than I have been for hundreds of days," said William Daroff,chief executive Conference Presidents Major Jewish Organizations umbrella lobbying group.
Others are less optimistic.Mort Klein who leads right-wing Zionist Organization America said feared 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 stakes for Israel and for its advocates United States enormously high.
Mr.Telhami University Maryland professor said Israel's dependence U.S.support become glaring over course war—in political military economic terms—that Israel would motivated treat possible defeat court American public opinion an "existential threat."
"The game maintaining support Israel priority No.1," he said adding,Because battle America Israel perceived part battle itself."