Michelle Goldberg writes:

It’s been obvious for some time that Americans are souring on Israel, but a Gallup poll that came out on Friday marks a turning point. For the first time in the poll’s 25-year history, it found, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The shift wasn’t just among Democrats, whose opinion of Israel has been in free fall in recent years. According to Gallup, only 30 percent of independents now sympathize with Israel; 41 percent sympathize with the Palestinians. Among adults under 35, support for Israel has fallen to a record low of 23 percent. With numbers like this, bipartisan backing for Israel, long a constant in American politics, will in time become unsustainable.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel famously prides himself on his ability to shape American policy. As he said in a secretly recorded 2001 conversation, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Yet he has presided over an ongoing collapse in American Zionism and could eventually go down in history as the prime minister who lost Israel’s most important ally.

Israel’s imploding reputation is largely a consequence of its oppression of the Palestinians, in particular the mass killings in Gaza, which millions of Americans watched up close on social media. At the same time, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — which is increasingly turning into outright annexation — is making Zionism and liberalism seem incompatible. Today, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, about 7.2 million Jews preside over a slightly larger number of Arabs, if you combine Israel’s Palestinian citizenry with the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. The majority of those Palestinians are stateless and have almost no guaranteed rights, as we see in the growing number of settler pogroms in the West Bank and the systematic ethnic cleansing of villages.

As long as the possibility of a Palestinian state remained alive, liberals who feel warmly toward Israel could tell themselves that this system of de facto apartheid was only temporary. But Netanyahu’s government has done everything in its power to make a two-state solution impossible, including, before the attacks of Oct. 7, propping up Hamas. In theory, a state that’s both Jewish and democratic may be possible. Today, on the ground, it looks like a pipe dream.

But it’s not just Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians that have eroded Americans’ good will toward Israel. Perhaps as important has been Israel’s role in American politics. [Continue reading…]