Why the American Jewish Distancing from Israel Is So Heartbreaking

I’m grateful to Hillel Halkin, Evelyn Gordon, and Jordan Chandler Hirsch for their enlightening responses to my essay. All four of us entertain slightly differing views on the current disconnection between American Jews and Israel, and ascribe to it somewhat disparate causes, but we’re in agreement not only that the divide is widening but (in contradistinction to many other commentators) that the principal reason for this state of affairs lies not in Israel’s policies but in what is happening in American Jewish life.

In approaching that latter phenomenon, Jordan Hirsch adopts a fascinating angle: the extent to which American Jewish sentiment about Israel can be tied to the vicissitudes of American foreign policy. As he notes, the more thoroughly foreign-policy thinking in Washington and liberal opinion more generally have been penetrated by the view of Israel as morally compromised and strategically burdensome, the more tentative has become American Jewish support for the Jewish state. But attitudes change, and Hirsch sees grounds for a certain optimism: “even as Democratic sympathy for Israel has plummeted,” he writes, “Republican sympathy has skyrocketed.” Not only that, but “the traditional and deep-seated moral and strategic alignment between America and Israel, and between the American people and Israel, still very much exists.”

Those statements are undoubtedly true. And had we been holding this discussion a year ago, I would have shared Hirsch’s hopefulness. Today, I’m not so sure. Some 150 days into the Trump administration, the president’s foreign-policy strategy is still unclear, and it seems difficult to say much about the Republican party itself with any degree of certainty.