A generational shift is transforming the US-Israel relationship | Kenneth Roth

A generational shift is under way in the relationship between the United States and Israel. Tensions were already palpable because of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu’s role in pushing Donald Trump to join a counterproductive war against Iran was the last straw.

Stopping unconditional US support for Israel would certainly be important for curbing US complicity in Israeli war crimes. It may also be the best thing for Israel if it is to have any hope of avoiding the dangerous dead end of relentless military escalation. And it is a prerequisite for Palestinians to have any prospect of escaping Israel’s endless occupation.

The relationship between the two countries was not always as close as in recent decades. At Israel’s founding in 1948, Washington was supportive but with a certain reserve. President Harry Truman refused to send weapons to the new state. In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw from the Sinai.

But things changed when neighboring states attacked Israel in 1967 and 1973. Israel also benefited from portraying itself during the cold war as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East.

For many years, it became impossible to question Israel in discussions with most US officials. When in 2021 Human Rights Watch issued a report on Israel’s apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory, it was widely welcomed around the world but landed in Washington like a lead balloon.

That extreme deference was visible even as Israel committed genocide. President Joe Biden stopped delivering the 2,000lb bombs that Israel used to indiscriminately decimate Palestinian neighborhoods but kept billions flowing in other military aid and arms sales. Rather than condition military assistance on an end to Israel’s starvation strategy in Gaza, he organized an expensive and ineffective effort to deliver food on a makeshift floating pier. The starvation worsened.

Biden was behind the times. Israeli atrocities in Gaza were alienating a growing percentage of the Democratic party and even younger Christian evangelicals. Christian evangelicals, far more than Jews, comprise Israel’s base within the Republican party.

A Pew poll in April showed that 60% of American adults have a negative view of Israel, up 7% since last year and 20% since 2022. Among Democrats and Democratically inclined independents (which include most American Jews), a striking 80% have an unfavorable opinion of Israel. Among Republicans, a majority still supports Israel, but 57% of those aged 18 to 49 have negative views.

Perhaps reflecting these trends, Trump showed more backbone than Biden when it came to standing up to Netanyahu. Mired in a 1967-era view of Israel as David surrounded by the Goliath of the combined Arab states, and fearful of attacks from the political right, Biden never used Washington’s enormous leverage to force Netanyahu to stop the slaughter.

Trump did. To his credit, Trump saw Netanyahu as the regional bully, and after initially endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, came around to recognize that the starvation and killing had to stop. Trump insisted on a ceasefire, and Netanyahu had to agree, although since then, after announcing with great fanfare his Board of Peace for Gaza, Trump seems to have lost interest while Israel squeezes Palestinians into ever-narrower parts of Gaza.

The disastrous war with Iran has accelerated Israel’s plummeting esteem in the United States. Netanyahu bamboozled the naive Trump into starting the war with enticing yet unrealistic visions of regime change – and no plan B. Instead, Netanyahu saddled Trump with an albatross – an Iranian regime emboldened by having survived an all-out assault with much of its missile and drone capacity intact, no further damage to its nuclear program, and a newly discovered weapon in the strait of Hormuz that made Trump desperate for a deal to avoid a midterm electoral drubbing. To make matters worse, Netanyahu kept trying to sabotage Trump’s negotiations with Tehran by periodically launching new assaults in Lebanon.

US and Israeli interests no longer align. Trump wants a ceasefire; Netanyahu wants endless war. Trump wants to focus on business deals in the Gulf; Netanyahu is fixated on Iran. In utter frustration, Trump called Netanyahu “fucking crazy” for jeopardizing an accord with Iran by continuing attacks in Lebanon, while Vice-President JD Vance chastised Israeli officials for criticizing Trump’s agreement with Iran when Washington is pretty much the only ally that Israel still has.

Within the Republican party, Trump is stuck between the competing demands of his isolationist “America First” Maga base, which thought from the outset that the war of choice with Iran was a mistake, and the traditional Republican hawks, who want a tougher deal with Iran, even though that is beyond the weakened Trump’s capacity to deliver.

Meanwhile, Israel is becoming toxic for Democrats. In last week’s primary election in New York City, home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel, a place where candidates’ embrace of Israel used to be axiomatic, support for Israel has become the kiss of death. Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the pro-Israel lobby group Aipac “monsters”, and candidates spotlighted to devastating effect their opponents’ support from the group. Victorious candidates openly recognized Israel’s genocide and apartheid.

Some Democratic dinosaurs such as the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, still cling to the past, but their time has come. The future of the party lies in those who want to end the blank check to Israel and the resulting aiding and abetting of Israel’s genocide, apartheid, war crimes and endless occupation.

Netanyahu sees the writing on the wall. Making a virtue of necessity, he speaks of the need to wean Israel from US military aid. But he talks optimistically of doing so over a decade. Israel will be lucky if the aid survives the next Democratic administration.

Netanyahu may still lose the coming election, which must be held by late October. He is unpopular not only because of the paltry showing for his endless wars but also because of the long-pending corruption charges against him and the sense that he was so preoccupied by his far-right side projects that he ignored clear warning signs of Hamas’s deadly 7 October 2023 attack.

But switching leaders will not end Israel’s pariah status if its policies remain unchanged. Repudiating Netanyahu’s callous indifference to Palestinian civilian life would require a new government to take a bold step such as surrendering him to face pending war crime charges in The Hague, much as the Serbian government did in 2001 to former president Slobodan Milosevic to secure the lifting of sanctions for Belgrade’s atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo.

That would be good for Israel, even if the Israeli public at the moment disagrees, and Netanyahu’s main opponents, even to his left, seem more hawkish than he is.

There are limits to Netanyahu’s vision of forever war. Unconditional US support has enabled Israel to operate with a sense of impunity, knowing that the world’s superpower would stand behind it militarily, as well as at the UN security council if mandatory sanctions are ever threatened.

That has left Israel with inveterate opponents – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Islamic Republic in Iran. Tehran has a nuclear program that was contained by the deal struck by President Barack Obama but unleashed when Trump, egged on by Netanyahu, ripped it up. How much longer will it be before the Iranian government learns the North Korean lesson and wards off further attacks by building, or buying, its own nuclear weapon?

There have been times when Israeli governments have seen the virtue of a less bellicose approach. Peace deals made with Egypt and Jordan removed them as threats. The Abraham accords neutralized other Arab governments. The Oslo accords even generated the unthreatening, if corrupt and ineffectual, Palestinian Authority.

Why can Israel trust the large Palestinian population of Jordan to live in peace but not the Palestinian population of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza? The distinction suggests that the problem is not the inherently violent character of the Palestinian people, as the Israeli government’s self-serving mythology would suggest, but Israel’s endless occupation – Israel’s refusal to recognize Palestinians’ right of self-determination, their right to a state. South Africa’s negotiated end to its apartheid regime despite the fears of its white population has positive lessons for Israel.

Unconditional US support for Israel has allowed the combative approach of Netanyahu and his ilk to prevail. It has left them with the view that anything goes in the name of “self-defense”, that there is no such thing as a legitimate Palestinian quest for a nation state, only a Palestinian security threat. An end to that support would force a reckoning with reality, a recognition that the unrelenting subjugation of a people is a recipe for recurrent rebellion, while acceptance of their humanity is a prerequisite for peace.

• Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist, visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, and former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments