By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion
Huzzah, hosanna and hallelujah: To President Donald Trump for brokering a ceasefire that could, possibly, mark the beginnings of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. To the hostages and their families, who are reunited at last. To the Gazans who can finally face their trauma without new bombs dropping on them. And yet, and yet.
It may seem saturnine at this moment of hope to dwell on more slow-moving developments, but those exist. One is the evolving relationship between Israel and the U.S., the most important international bond for the former and among the most fraught for the latter. After two years of war in Gaza, a question mark hangs over this affinity.
The importance of U.S. support for the state of Israel ever since its founding is hard to overstate. The ties are political, economic, technological, psychological, cultural, religious and human. But I’ll use two other aspects as proxies: American military support and diplomatic protection.
The United States is by far the most important supplier of arms to Israel. Only Germany, the distant second, even bears mentioning; between 2020-24, the U.S. provided 66 percent of Israel’s major weapons imports, Germany sent 33 percent. Moreover, America ensures by law that Israel maintains a “qualitative military edge,” meaning that the U.S. always gives Israel weapons that are more cutting-edge than those it sells to anybody else.
The U.S. also shields Israel from the most severe consequences of the opprobrium that Israel regularly reaps at international organizations, from the United Nations to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Unlike Germany (which considers its support for Israel a Staatsräson, or government priority), the U.S. wields a veto on the UN Security Council, which it uses whenever that body comes close to censuring Israel. (The word Staatsräson, which sounds vague and woolly even in German, was popularized by former Chancellor Angela Merkel, but the pro-Israel stance by West Germany and then the reunited nation is of course part of German atonement for the Shoah.)
At home, this American stance has rested on bipartisan support in Congress, where many Democrats and almost all Republicans in recent years have been pro-Israel. That consensus was in turn underpinned by pro-Israel lobbies, from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to evangelical associations such as Christians United for Israel. (America’s current ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, hails from that latter tradition.)
Israel has been able to rely on this American aegis even as it has become isolated internationally in the course of its war in Gaza. But something has shifted in the U.S. too, as recent polls (conducted before the ceasefire) show.
According to one, half of Americans think that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, and 60 percentoppose sending more military aid to Israel. In another, 61 percent of Jewish Americans said that Israel has committed war crimes, and 4 in 10 believed it was guilty of genocide. In yet another, 59 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the Israeli government.
To uncover the trends hidden within these aggregates, I talked to Shibley Telhami at the University of Maryland, a scholar of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict who has been polling on the subject for decades. The most salient split is no longer between Democrats and Republicans, he told me, but between the young and old. Left or right, “the young are increasingly angry at Israel,” he said. In particular, “young evangelicals are walking away from Israel.” Israel, he told me, “is now the villain for a new generation of Americans.”
Philip Gordon, a foreign-policy veteran (who would be national security adviser now if Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election), comes to the same conclusion: “An entire generation of Americans no longer sees [Israel] as a sympathetic, democratic victim surrounded by hostile neighbors, but as a regional hegemon responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths and the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in their lifetime.” This suggests that, over time, isolated (if high-profile) Republican voices in Congress that criticize Israel will become more audible and sing in tune with Democrats.
And then what? The obvious policy targets for a rethink are those two main levers of American influence over Israel, the arms sales and the protection in the UN Security Council. In August, Germany put a halt on exports to Israel of offensive weapons that could be used in Gaza. (That made no noticeable difference, because Germany mainly provides frigates and torpedoes – that is, water weapons.) America, by contrast, has only dabbled in restrictions; the administration of Joe Biden put a hold on certain shipments of huge bombs, a hold that Trump then lifted.
This summer, Senate Democrats tried and failed to block the sale of large bombs and assault rifles to Israel. One of the senators who spoke in favor of the resolutions was Sen. Chris van Hollen, D-Md., who had just gone on a fact-finding trip about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. I asked van Hollen what should and could happen in the coming months and years, as American public opinion turns more skeptical toward Israel.
It all depends, van Hollen told me. If the ceasefire holds and leads to a peace process in which Israel drops plans of militarization, occupation and even annexation and works with the U.S., Arab nations and others toward Palestinian dignity and statehood, American and Israeli interests will be aligned again. If Israel chooses a different path, they won’t be aligned. Either way, he said, the U.S. message must be that there is “no blank check when it comes to offensive weapons or anything else.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a lobby that is pro-Zionist and pro-peace, uses the same metaphor. “There will no longer be a blank check,” he told me; if Israeli “continues to make itself into a pariah nation, then it is going to lose support,” including that U.S. cover in the Security Council.
Trump is well aware that opinions have changed in America and among his own base, just as he knows that he is far more popular in Israel than its prime minister is. Both factors give him, and possibly his successors, a kind of sway over Israeli policy that Biden and their predecessors didn’t have. Whatever the fate of Trump’s 20-point peace plan — and may it succeed in every point — U.S.-Israeli relations will never be the same again.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
