New polling shows the firewall Israel built on the American right is quietly cracking

On Tuesday I watched Benjamin Netanyahu twice in one day — fielding Dana Bash’s questions on CNN, then Greta Van Susteren’s on Newsmax — and I found I could recite the arguments along with him. The only democracy in the Middle East. Muslim citizens on the Supreme Court and in the Knesset. Iran, totally untrustworthy. He was fluent, polished, in command of every line, because he has been delivering those lines, nearly word for word, since he was explaining Israel to American cameras in the 1980s. Let me say plainly what I believe, because everything that follows depends on it: there is no Israeli leader — and few world leaders — comparable to Netanyahu as a communicator. No one matches his command of a camera, his fluency in the American political language of an earlier era, his sheer endurance at the craft. That is what made it so uncomfortable to watch. Not the arguments themselves — I have made some of them myself — but the serene obliviousness with which they were deployed, as though the audience on the other side of the lens were the same one that existed forty years ago.

Somewhere in the Bash interview I recognized whom he was actually speaking to: me. A viewer who first heard these arguments decades ago and found them persuasive. He was not speaking to my 16-year-old son, whose picture of Israel has been significantly formed by the events of the past few years — the same events that have reshaped how much of his generation, left and right alike, sees this alliance.

That audience no longer exists. And that same day, after a week of American media hits, the evidence landed in the headlines.

The AP-NORC poll released Tuesday produced an irresistible headline: American Jews view Zohran Mamdani more favorably than Benjamin Netanyahu, 44 percent to 32 percent. Within hours it was everywhere — proof, depending on your politics, that American Jewry had lost its mind or found its conscience. Commentators dutifully religated the mayor’s record. The discourse machine did what it does.

But the Mamdani number is not the finding that should keep anyone in Jerusalem awake at night. Buried below the headline is a statistic with far greater strategic weight: Republicans under 45 now tilt unfavorable on Netanyahu, and they are more likely than their elders to say the United States is too........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)