America Is Falling Out of Love with Israel*

*Editor’s note: On March 4, 2022, Russia enacted a law that criminalizes public opposition to, or independent news reporting about, the war in Ukraine. The law makes it a crime to call the war a “war” rather than a “special military operation” on social media or in a news article or broadcast. The law is understood to penalize any language that “discredits” Russia’s use of its military in Ukraine, calls for sanctions or protests Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It punishes anyone found to spread “false information” about the invasion with up to 15 years in prison.

The U.S. is urgently increasing the supply of arms and ammunition to bolster Israel’s defense and security. According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he flew to Israel to deliver this news not only in his official capacity but also “as a Jew.”

Of course, Blinken mentioned his ancestry only to provoke Russia again, proclaiming that “my grandfather, Maurice Blinken, fled pogroms in Russia.”

Technically, this is true. However, Blinken’s father fled from Kyiv, where his son now likes to travel with expensive gifts — and anti-Jewish pogroms at the time of the Russian Empire took place mainly in today’s Ukraine and Moldova.

So Blinken is, first of all, a scoundrel, and the fact that he is a Jew is just a coincidence. The U.S. would have come to Israel’s aid anyway, regardless of whether any of its officials were Jewish. After all, Israel is an indispensable outpost of the U.S. influence in the Middle East that Washington cannot lose, regardless of which party the president belongs to.

As such, the U.S.-Israeli alliance is a constant. But with each passing year, it corresponds less and less to America’s changing social landscape. Simply put, the government has not kept up with its people.

Notably, polls show that more than half of Americans support Israel in the conflict. On the other hand, less than a third, 31%, sympathize with Palestine. However, the pro-Palestine support is stronger than ever and significantly more potent than 15 years ago, when the Israelis conducted the previous massive Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

Most importantly, among Democrats, the party in power, pro-Palestinian voters are now a majority, even though Muslims comprise just 1.5% of the U.S. population. The other Palestine sympathizers are liberals and leftists, often Black, although there are some peculiar exceptions, such as white American anti-Semites.

But we are not talking about them now, but, on the contrary, about pro-Palestinian Jews who also participate in the protests.

In a critical distinction, these are not the Orthodox Jews of the 1940s, who believed that establishing Israel was a sin because it contradicted God’s will that a Jewish state should be formed only after the coming of the Messiah. Those people only brought additional exoticism to the Middle East controversy.

Instead, the pro-Palestinian Jews of today are young, non-religious Jewish Americans. The story of a grandmother from Haifa calling her grandson in New York (where there are more Jews than in Tel Aviv) and learning that she lives “in an occupier state” is no longer simply Brighton Beach gossip, but the experience of actual people.

While the Israel Defense Forces were avenging the Hamas attack and leveling the Gaza Strip to the ground, the campuses of America’s most prominent universities were rallying and demanding that the Israeli military be dealt with, just as the Ural steelworkers and the Komsomol members from Belgorod area had demanded during the Soviet era.

Even the Black Lives Matter movement supports Palestine. As we know, in the past American mainstream media argued that BLM’s demands must be met — be it reparations for slavery or the defunding of police in metropolitan centers — so that the aggrieved could restore justice (basically, so that they could loot at their own pleasure).

Despite all this, there are almost no congresspeople who are opposed to the cross-party policy toward Israel. The exceptions are the few isolationists in the Republican Party, who don’t want to help anyone at all, and their antipodes, a group of eight “red” lawmakers under the informal leadership of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They call themselves the “The Squad,” promote far-left values and constitute a small minority in the 435-seat House of Representatives.

This imbalance is unlikely to last: America is experiencing a leftward turn, abolishing old dogmas. And the dogma of unwavering support for Israel may also be in the hands of a new generation.

Already, Blinken has been forced to compromise. For example, he promised Israel weapons and said that the consequences of the Hamas attack were “the equivalent of 10 9/11s” (if you consider the number of victims in proportion to the size of Israel’s population). However, after that, he still met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Now that sends a message. The Americans are not pretending that Hamas is the only problem. They acknowledge that what happened was part of a larger Middle Eastern conflict centered on Palestinian self-determination.

The Americans have been gently pushing Israel toward creating a full-fledged Palestine state despite all the “ifs,” “ands” and “buts.” It is only a matter of time before Americans push for this even harder. The Israelis themselves know how such changes happen. For example, many European countries where there are far more leftists and Muslims than in the U.S. switched from unequivocal support of Israel to regular criticism a couple of decades ago.

The U.S. will not abandon the Israelis in the coming years, but it will undoubtedly abandon them at some point in the future, just as it betrayed its allies in Afghanistan. This will happen later than in the case of Ukraine, and the alliance is unlikely to be entirely revoked. However, the future’s international landscape will become much more anti-Israeli than in the last quarter of the 20th century.

For Israel to face that future in an existential conflict with its Arab neighbors would mean betraying its civilian population. When Hamas attacked, they died by the hundreds, despite the technological sophistication of Israeli forces, American aid and vast experience — everything believed to be the reason for Israel’s continued existence.

Excessive self-confidence, absolute intransigence and unbending faith in its diaspora around the world already led to a wake-up call for the entire Armenian nation, when it witnessed images of the depopulated Stepanakert in Nagorno-Karabakh — in some ways no less terrible than those from the destroyed Gaza.

It is possible to avoid this by preparing for the day when Israel’s enemies will be deadly strong and its allies will be hopelessly distant. But only at the cost of recognizing the new demographic, military, technical and foreign policy realities and making concessions to Palestine. For Israel, these concessions will be very painful but not fatal, unlike the possible catastrophe of an alarming future.