By Amotz Asa-El

 

IT was raining in Manhattan on Sunday, May 16, 1948, but 75,000 people still crowded the sidewalks outside Madison Square Garden, hoping to attend a hastily organized salutation of the newborn Jewish state.

Only 19,000 could make it in, the New York Times reported, but thousands stayed put and followed the event through loudspeakers that blared, for all America to hear, the multitude’s resounding “Amen” after a rabbi said the blessing of great news, she’hekheyanu.

Inside the arena, there were no barriers: not between Jews and Jew, not between Gentile and Jew, and also not between Gentile and Gentile. “I congratulate President Truman on his prompt recognition of the new republic,” said Congressman Robert Taft, a Republican and son of former president William Taft. “The new Jewish state is built on the concept of American freedom and equality,” said former New York governor Herbert Lehman, a Democrat.

It was the beginning of an era, a political honeymoon between the American people and the Jewish state that lasted nearly 80 years, and now faces a groundswell of discontent.

 

AS last week’s midterm election made plain, Israel is no longer consensus. Yes, the likes of Taft and Lehman are still abundant. However, in their days, and for another three generations, the US had no equivalent of senator-elect Abdul el-Sayed, who denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, says its war of defense is genocide, and hollers that Israel is evil, as evil, in his view, as Hamas.

What initially seemed anecdotal, with the virulently anti-Zionist Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib’s emergence in the US Congress, was later multiplied with the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, a successor to William O’Dwyer who back in that gathering at Madison Square Garden told Harry Truman:

“Mr. President, our city thanks you for being the first to recognize the new republic.” And lovingly calling Israel “the little infant republic” O’Dwyer then implored Truman: “Mr. President, follow through and lift that arms embargo,” referring to Washington’s refusal at the time to sell arms to the embattled Zionist state.

That was then. Now the mayor of New York is pretty much O’Dwyer’s inversion. Oldtimers like President Donal Trump remain staunchly pro-Israeli but younger politicians are pointing elsewhere, and they are not just Muslims like Sayed, Tlaib and Omar, or Muslim convert André Carson, an Indiana congressman. Christians like congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Delia Ramirez or Cori Bush are in this as well.

And the anti-Israeli trend is no longer exclusive to Democrats, nor to congress. Republicans are also joining the fad, and they are not just attention seekers like Tucker Carlson, but also decisionmakers like Vice President J.D. Vance, who now openly calls to “change our relationship with Israel.”

Now, with a much less pro-Israeli Democratic Party controlling the Hill, and with a trounced Republican Party increasingly attentive to anti-Israeli rhetoric, US backing of Israel is set to diminish – psychologically, politically, and financially.

How did this happen?

 

THE midterm elections dealt a blow not just to Trump, but also to the American-Israeli alliance. Anti-Israeli candidates like Sayid defeated AIPAC's preemptive attack hands down.

Ironically, this happened a mere several months after the historic Israeli-American alliance reached its climax, with joint military action in Iran. This is one reason anti-Israeli energy traveled from the political margins to the electoral epicenter. Since the war became controversial, Israel became controversial, and so did the military aid it gets from Uncle Sam.

These, then, are two reasons Israel lost support in America: First, it should not have appeared to drag a foreign nation, even if it is its closest ally, into its war with Iran. And second, it should have long ago initiated a plan for ending American military aid, as this writer suggested years ago.

Sadly, Israel didn’t do this. Instead, the retreat from US aid is being imposed on it by a Trump administration that now openly scapegoats Israel as a major cause of the Republicans’ electoral debacle.

Then come the effects of the war in Gaza.

Set aside the obsessively anti-Israeli likes of Sayid, Tlaib, and Mamdani. Their problem is not Israel’s actions, but its existence. The question is how mainstream Americans became vulnerable to baseless charges against Israel, particularly genocide. This failure is about education, or more accurately, ignorance.

People who were taught precious little history are unequipped to judge a war’s events and carnage when encountering, out of any context, footage from a conflict about which they know almost nothing: not who started it, not who shaped it, not what its initiator’s tactics and aims are, and not how this war compares to any other.

Then again all these causes dwarf compared with the moral vertigo into which the American-Israeli alliance’s two current leaders have swirled in recent years.

 

TO be America’s natural ally, Israel had to do two things: embody America’s ideals, and embrace all Americans.

Israel did all this – until 2015. When Benjamin Netanyahu went to Congress and attacked from its podium America’s elected president, he antagonized half its political establishment. The organizers of that 1948 rally in Madison Square Garden knew better. They made sure to treat with equal respect Democrats lie O’Dwyer and Republicans like Taft.

That’s what happened politically. Morally, both allies’ leaders hammered at their nations’ shared ideals: Netanyahu by besieging the judiciary, fighting the media, and denying the Israeli democracy’s electoral fairness, Trump by denying America’s electoral fairness, cheerleading a riffraff’s attack on Capitol Hill, and waltzing with dictators like those of Turkey and North Korea.

Set against this backdrop, there was no way the American-Israeli alliance would endure. Led by a pair of arrogant, cynical, self-serving hypocrites, it lost its idealistic innocence, moral drive, and innermost soul.

Jerusalem Post 13 November 2026