America’s generational differences in support for Israel

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“My insistence is what has prevented — over the years — the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel,” Benjamin Netanyahu said recently. “As long as I am prime minister, I will continue to strongly insist on this.”

There is politics here, as everywhere. A two-state solution is dismally unpopular in Israel. A Gallup poll found backing for it among 25% of Israelis. The Israel Democracy Institute posed the question to Jewish Israelis with even more torque: Would you support a two-state solution if it were the only way to continue receiving U.S. assistance? A majority said no.

Perhaps the only thing as unpopular in Israel right now as a two-state solution is Netanyahu himself. A recent Maariv poll found 28% of Israelis believe Netanyahu is still suited to be prime minister. If elections were held today, his party would be crushed. There are few paths to victory, much less absolution, for him, but this is one of the few that might work: Persuade Jewish Israelis he’s the only leader tough enough to beat back American and European pressure to form a Palestinian state.

But consider Netanyahu’s boast. He is not just saying he opposes a Palestinian state now. He is saying he has opposed it for years. That he has worked to make it impossible. That he has succeeded.

The record backs him up. He allowed Hamas to hold the Gaza Strip, and Qatar to finance the group, because its presence kept the Palestinian leadership divided. No one could demand that Netanyahu accept a Palestinian state so long as that state would be governed by Hamas. This was his strategy, and he and his advisers said so.

In recent months, I’ve been thinking, as many American Jews have, about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus. And I’ve been thinking, too, about the polls showing that support for Israel, in America, is generational. Look at the age breakdown in the December New York Times-Siena poll:

• Asked whether they sympathize more with the Israelis or the Palestinians, 63% of Americans age 65 and older said the Israelis. Among those ages 18 to 29, 27% sympathized more with Israelis.

• Some 70% of those age 65 and older supported additional aid to Israel; 55% of people ages 18 to 29 opposed it.

• Asked whether Israel should end its military campaign, even if Hamas has not been fully eliminated, in order to spare civilians, 67% of people ages 18 to 29 said they should. Only 30% age 65 and older agreed.

• Asked whether Israel is seriously interested in peace, 54% of people older than 65 said it was, while 59% of people ages 18 to 29 said it wasn’t.

Then there’s what I think of as the straddle generation. This is my generation. We only ever knew Israel as the strongest military power in the region. A nuclear Israel. An Israel that occupied Palestinian territories, sometimes brutally. But we also knew an Israel that seemed to be trying to find its way toward peace and coexistence. We knew the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. We saw that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit was met by the second intifada, by years of suicide bombers rather than years of counteroffers. We also watched Israel build settlements across the West Bank, creating a one-state reality even as it spoke of a two-state solution. Polling shows, predictably, that our views of Israel are more mixed.

Then there are younger Americans. They know only Netanyahu’s Israel. He has, after all, been prime minister almost continuously since 2009. They know an Israel that is the strongest country in the region, by far. They know an Israel where messianic ethnonationalists serve in the Cabinet. They know an Israel that controls Palestinian life and land and intends to keep it that way. They see this as simpler: a country that oppresses and a people that is oppressed. They are not entirely right — too little agency is offered to Palestinians in this telling — but they are not entirely wrong.

Is there antisemitism on campuses? Absolutely. But I visit colleges constantly. Antisemitism isn’t what is bringing most of those students out to the rallies. Antisemitism is not why most 18- to 29-year-olds see Israel as the aggressor nation. Antisemitism is not why the images and facts out of Gaza horrify. They are opposed to the Israel they know: an Israel that has no interest in peace — that has actively sabotaged efforts at peace — and that can imagine no security for itself absent the endless control of Palestinian lives.

Which is one reason I think the response to the protests on campus has been misguided. This is not a problem you can solve by firing college presidents or blackballing student radicals. Israel is losing the support of a generation, not a few student groups. And it is losing it because of what it does, not what it is.

Netanyahu’s comments reflect a reality: There is no two-state solution in the offing. This is a region gripped by fury and fear and grief and hate. Gaza is rubble, and Israeli hostages remain in captivity, and the dead are legion. I am sympathetic to those in the region who rage at Americans who insist on fantasizing about a partition that they themselves will not live within. I would not, as an Israeli, want to live next to a state where most people applauded the massacre of my neighbors. I would not, as a Palestinian, want to live next to a state that had just flattened my home and killed tens of thousands of my countrymen.