For weeks, the Israeli news media has been obsessing about the once-ironclad U.S.-Israeli relationship.
President Trump’s pursuit of a peace deal with Iran, which many Israelis see as a betrayal, and his repeated berating of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have raised doubts about whether they can still call Mr. Trump the best friend in the White House that Israel has ever had.
Then came Tuesday’s election results in New York City. Three pro-Palestinian candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a harsh critic of Israel, defeated moderates in hotly contested Democratic congressional primaries.
No one in Israel is suggesting a pivot to China or Russia quite yet. But those who have studied or steered the U.S.-Israel relationship say that the strains and tensions are fast becoming worrisome for Israel.
“I’m extremely concerned,” said Asaf Zamir, a deputy mayor of Tel Aviv who was Israel’s consul general in New York from 2021 to 2023. All three candidates had made fierce criticism of Israel central to their campaigns and political identities. “And they say it out loud in the most Jewish city in the world, after Jerusalem.”
Experts on the relationship warn that Israel may not be able to count on solid support from Washington for much longer — whether in concrete assistance like billions of dollars in yearly military aid, in symbolic backing like reliable vetoes of anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations or even in tax exemptions for U.S. charities benefiting Israeli causes.
“There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
Some pro-Israel moderates also won House primaries in New York on Tuesday. But the victories by the candidates Mr. Mamdani aided — Brad Lander and Claire Valdez, who accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza; and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has questioned Israel’s right to exist and, like Ms. Valdez, calls it an apartheid state — landed like bold new dots on a scatter chart revealing a clear trend of rising American hostility to Israel.
Mr. Zamir, the Tel Aviv deputy mayor, said, “I’m waking up and hearing that we’re ‘genocidal’ and ‘apartheid.’”
“I’m a left wing, two-state, pro-peace Israeli, but I’m not blind or crazy,” he added. “I know what the situation in Israel is, and we’re not those things we’re being called. And yet, more and more Americans are buying into and voting on those grounds. That troubles me.”
Israel was already hemorrhaging popularity in the United States, and in both parties, largely over its prosecution of the two-year war in Gaza after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, in which about 1,200 people were killed and some 250 taken hostage. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed in the ensuing war, food shortages caused widespread famine and the enclave has been largely destroyed by Israel’s campaign.
Americans’ sympathy for the Palestinians exceeded their sympathy for Israel for the first time in a New York Times/Siena poll in September. And 60 percent of Americans said that they held unfavorable opinions of Israel in a Pew survey in April, up from 42 percent in 2022.
“If I were the Israelis, I wouldn’t necessarily be concerned with three or four members of Congress who are way out to the left,” Michael Koplow, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group, said of Tuesday’s primary results.
But, he said, those new lawmakers signaled a broader Democratic turn against Israel. “Opposition to Israel is now the major foreign policy issue,” he noted. “It’s not on the fringe anymore, it’s not even relegated to the sidelines in terms of its importance. It’s front and center in campaigns and in worldviews.”
It could well be front and center again in the 2028 presidential primaries, and Israelis watching American politics say they can imagine the eventual nominees of both parties agreeing on little except that U.S. policy toward Israel needs to change.
For Democratic critics of Israel, the rift has focused on the perception that the two countries no longer share the same values, chiefly when it comes to human rights and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
“The ‘specialness’ of this relationship was pleasant and easygoing and taken for granted for decades,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster who grew up in New York. That was until Israel’s war with Hamas, she added, when many Democrats and a growing number of Republicans “realized that a special relationship was all well and good as long as Israel wasn’t killing thousands of babies in Gaza. People just broke over that.”
Israel’s claim to being the “only democracy in the Middle East” has been tarnished in American eyes both by its oppressive treatment of the Palestinians and by its right-wing government’s efforts to overhaul Israeli institutions and consolidate its power.
That claim is also arguably less important to the United States at a time when the Trump administration is emphasizing the exertion of raw power and geopolitical transactionalism over America’s traditional self-image as the leader of the free world.
For Republican critics, many of whom accuse Israel of dragging the United States into fighting its wars — most recently in Iran — the argument centers on how much American and Israeli national interests really still overlap.
“After 40 years of Israel calling itself a strategic asset to the U.S., there’s a legitimate question: Is Israel an asset or is it becoming a liability?” said Alon Pinkas, who was Israel’s consul general in New York in the early 2000s.
The more American voters feel they are paying for the Iran war in higher prices at the gas pump, he said, the more their elected officials will wonder, “What does America get from this relationship with Israel?”
Even so, the United States has a long way to go before support of Israel could fairly be called into question. The Trump administration has accelerated billions in arms sales and emergency military aid to Israel, backed Israel in peace talks with Hamas, eased some pressure on West Bank settlement expansion and taken a host of actions to curb anti-Israel protests on American college campuses.
Should the alliance fray further, however, there is a lot that Israel could lose.
Already, because of the talks with Iran, the Trump administration is trying to constrain Israeli actions against its enemies in the region — most noticeably in Lebanon — in ways that Israelis say they never anticipated.
Israelis also can no longer count on receiving billions of dollars a year in U.S. military aid, something that Mr. Netanyahu effectively acknowledged this year when he proposed that Israel gradually wean itself from that assistance.
Other measures that an increasingly frosty Congress, White House or both could take to express displeasure with Israel include stripping charities supporting West Bank settlement of federal tax-exempt status. Ms. Valdez, one of the House primary winners in New York, had tried to do that at the state level in Albany.
“These are all things that Israel has assumed would never come from the U.S.,” Mr. Koplow, the analyst, said.
Experts say it is easy now to imagine even this administration publicly lashing out at Israel — such as by withholding its veto from U.N. Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, a step it has taken only rarely over the years.
Mr. Kurtzer, the former U.S. ambassador, suggested that Mr. Trump might use a withheld veto to try to punish Israel if he is blamed for Republican losses in the midterm elections.
“Right now, even today in this environment, a U.S. veto is almost automatic, but who knows?” Mr. Kurtzer said. “You have a mercurial president who judges everything not on the basis of our relationship with Israel but on the basis of what it does for him.”
The strained relationship is starting to enter the Israeli political conversation in the prelude to elections this fall. Naftali Bennett, who toppled Mr. Netanyahu in 2021 and is trying to repeat that feat, said this week that the U.S.-Israeli alliance was at an all-time low and that repairing it would be a huge undertaking.
