Brookings Institution: Younger Evangelicals Are Walking Away From Israel

This is very encouraging news.

The days of Israel being OUR GREATEST ALLY are numbered.

Brookings Institution:

“As the recent eruption in Israel/Palestine brought attention to shifting Democratic attitudes toward Israel, including among younger Jewish Americans, Israel’s focus on the evangelical right as a cornerstone of U.S. support for the Jewish state has proven increasingly important. As our University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll research has shown, evangelical attitudes toward Israel account for most of the Republican Party’s support for Israel; without evangelicals, Republican attitudes on Israel do not substantially deviate from the rest of America. …

But a new survey commissioned by University for North Carolina at Pembroke researchers, carried out by Barna Group, has exposed what we have been finding for some time: younger evangelicals are much less supportive of Israel than older evangelicals, by a widening margin. The poll found a dramatic shift in attitudes between 2018 and 2021: support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped from 75% to 34%. This raises questions about the sustainability of the strong evangelical support for Israel that the Israeli right has cultivated for years and that proved reliable during the Trump administration. …

First, our 2018 poll showed a dramatic drop in young evangelicals’ support for Israel since 2015, accompanied by a dramatic rise in those wanting to see the U.S. lean toward the Palestinians. While 40% of young evangelicals wanted the U.S. to lean toward Israel in 2015, only 21% said the same in 2018. At the same time, while only 3% of young evangelicals wanted to lean toward the Palestinians in 2015, 18% gave that reply in 2018. The difference between the partisans of the two sides shrunk from 37 percentage points in 2015 to three points in 2018 — a virtual tie (within the margin of error). …

The bottom line is that there is evidence of a substantial and unusual shift. If the Israeli right is pinning its hopes on solid support from evangelicals as the backbone of U.S. patronage of the Jewish state, anchored in a biblical narrative that sidesteps international law and norms — as witnessed during the Trump administration — the trends among young evangelicals raise questions about the trajectory of strong religiously-driven evangelical support for Israel.”

Younger evangelicals are moving away from the Christian Zionism of their Boomer parents.

American Jews themselves are increasingly divided over lockstep support for Israel and particularly for Bibi Netanyahu’s government.