American pro-Israel activists may have just had their worst week ever

One party is voting for the loudest critics of Israel; the other is cutting a generous deal with Jerusalem’s top adversary; after years of bipartisan support, a new era is dawning

A telling moment in the New York City congressional primaries on Tuesday night came when, near the end of Darializa Avila Chevalier’s victory speech, the crowd began spontaneously chanting, “Free, free Palestine!”

It’s hard to imagine how a candidate could be more anti-Israel than Avila Chevalier, who just ousted a pro-Israel incumbent. But she didn’t directly mention Israel in her speech. When the chant broke out, Avila Chevalier was delivering an energetic but boilerplate line about taking her fight to Washington, DC.

In other words, her base didn’t chant for Palestine because it’s important to her. They chanted because it’s important to them. They didn’t vote for her in spite of her opposition to Israel; they voted for her because of it.

Avila Chevalier was one of three victorious NYC candidates who were endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and who placed their criticism of Israel at the center of their campaigns. It was the culmination of a trend years in the making.

Polls have long shown that young Democrats have increasingly little sympathy for Israel and endorse the accusation that it committed genocide in Gaza. Mamdani’s mayoral victory last year proved that a harsh critic of Israel could win even in the most Jewish city in America.

But Tuesday’s primary wins, and similar ones across the US, showed that to many voters, Mamdani’s opposition to Israel was a feature, not a bug — playing well even when the candidate isn’t a generational political talent, and even when the voter base is disproportionately Jewish.

Republicans have portrayed this trend as a Democratic problem, and it’s true that GOP politicians haven’t embraced anti-Israel politics nearly to the same extent as their counterparts across the aisle. But the New York primaries happened just days after a Republican administration cut what looks to be a very generous deal with Iran, Israel’s chief adversary, while US Vice President JD Vance criticized Israel and its supporters in one public forum after another.

Avila Chevalier, 32, is young; Vance, 41, isn’t much older. Together they demonstrate what surveys have shown: that disaffection with the Jewish state, especially among young people, is growing across the political spectrum.

After decades during which bipartisan support for Israel was taken for granted, this week showed that the US may be entering an era where the flipside is true: Opposition to Israel, or at least mistrust of it, is crossing party lines.

In 2019, shortly after entering office, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins” in reference to politicians’ pro-Israel stances, and then followed up by claiming that AIPAC paid politicians to be pro-Israel (which at the time was not true).

The resulting news cycle lasted weeks. Omar apologized and deleted the tweet, which led to a congressional resolution weeks later condemning both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Today, that controversy feels quaint. On Thursday, at a rally supporting his endorsed candidates, Mamdani railed against AIPAC, calling the pro-Israel lobby “monsters” and charging that it spends “millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another instead of our leaders turning toward the moral change we all know to be necessary.”

The comments, decried even by some of his allies as antisemitic, came at the end of a campaign in which all three of his endorsees accused Israel of genocide and pledged to oppose all military aid to it. Two of them defeated AIPAC-backed incumbents. A third falsely accused her opponent, who also opposes Israel, of receiving AIPAC support.

Avila Chevalier, especially, makes Mamdani’s criticism of Israel look tame. Like him, she doesn’t believe it should exist as a Jewish state. Unlike him, she called her opponent “AIPAC’s handpicked candidate” and attended the pro-Palestinian rally in New York City on October 8, 2023, where some attendees cheered the previous day’s Hamas-led massacre.

She has pointedly refused to condemn the terror group or its brutal October 7 attack in Israel, claiming that being asked to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have endured.” She won in a district that, among other Jewish institutions, includes Yeshiva University’s campus.

It would be false to claim that such unapologetic anti-Israel politics are nearly as widespread among Republicans as they are among Democrats. In fact, earlier this year a Republican congressman lost his primary in part because of his vociferous Israel criticism.

But something else is happening at the top of the Republican Party: While their criticism of Israel isn’t as harsh or as all-encompassing, Vance as well as President Donald Trump have made an active effort to create daylight between their administration and Israel right as they negotiate a deal with Iran that many Israelis fear will compromise their country’s fundamental security.

Trump has always been a loose cannon, and his freestyling has alternated between praising Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and describing him like a frustrated parent talking about their misbehaving toddler. For what it’s worth, he’s also praised Iran’s leadership and threatened to attack it.

Vance is more consistent. In a series of podcast interviews and a press conference last week, he made clear that while he sees Israel as a partner whose interests sometimes align with the US’s, he doesn’t trust it, is kind of fed up with it and wishes its leaders would be more grateful.

“You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” he said at one point about Israel. At another: “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

Again, this is the vice president from the party that’s friendlier to Israel.

He told one podcast, “Pro-Israel people in the United States make two critical mistakes: One… is not deliberating between America’s interests and Israeli interests, because they’re not always the same. But the second is always always conflating criticism of a particular government with antisemitism.”

Another podcaster asked him: Do you trust Israel?

“I don’t trust anybody,” he replied.

All of that would count as relatively mild in today’s discourse if it weren’t paired with an Iran deal that has caused grave concern among Israel’s security brass for filling Iran’s coffers while demanding little of it and limiting Israeli freedom of action in Lebanon. The cherry on top, for the Israeli government, is a deconfliction mechanism for Lebanon that reportedly includes Iran while excluding Israel.

Has there ever been a worse week for Israel advocates in the US? There have certainly been disagreements between presidents and prime ministers before, but they have usually passed. The Suez Crisis, when the US angrily pressured Israel to withdraw from the Sinai, was a nadir in ties — but that was 70 years ago.

Now, pro-Israel activists may be left wondering which is worse: one party, whose loudest anti-Israel voices are taking more seats in Congress, or the other, whose top officials chide Israel in international forums while inking deals with its most bitter adversaries.

For decades, Israel has counted on the US to have its back in international forums. And for decades, near-unanimous support in Congress was a given. No longer.

When Mamdani called AIPAC “monsters,” he was riffing on a famous quote by Antonio Gramsci, popularly translated as, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Democrats and Republicans may disagree on who the monsters are, and on what they want the new world to look like. But no matter one’s party, when it comes to the place of Israel in American politics, after this week they can all agree that the world we once knew is no more.