American Jewish support for Israel is cracking. Occupying Gaza may break it.
Can Israel follow through on its controversial new war plan without losing its most committed defenders?
An aerial view of Gaza City as efforts to drop humanitarian aid supplies through parachute by military cargo planes into the city continued on Aug. 6. Photo by Salaheddin Mohamad/Anadolu via Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman August 12, 2025
If Israel follows through with an occupation of Gaza — resulting in more death, more destruction and, God forbid, more harm to the remaining Israeli hostages — support for Israel among American Jews may come to a breaking point.
These are people who stood by Israel. But only while they believed in what Israel stood for.
Yes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for occupation keeps changing. “There’s been a kind of strategic flopping around trying to find the strategy,” the journalist Haviv Rettig Gur said on the Free Press podcast.
But any Israeli reoccupation of Gaza will leave American Jews feeling that the country they support has betrayed the values they cherish. And Netanyahu has given us plenty of reasons to be wary of the idea that, as he has publicly stated, Israel does not intend to permanently occupy Gaza or remain its long-term governing body.
The operation to attack Gaza City, which Israel’s security cabinet approved last Thursday, is not, Netanyahu has since said, about full, permanent occupation, but rather more limited military objectives. But we know that far-right ministers in his cabinet yearn to resettle Gaza. In response to a Fox News question last week about whether Israel plans to take control of Gaza, Netanyahu said, “We intend to.”
“It’s the same old trick,” Shira Efron, a senior analyst with Israel Policy Forum, said in a phone interview, “which is basically Netanyahu playing for time, kicking the can down the road. So nothing’s clear except of course the grave risk to the lives of hostages, to many, many Palestinians, to IDF soldiers and for the continued isolation of Israel.”
There are ample reasons to suspect that Netanyahu’s goal is not to destroy Hamas and free the hostages, but rather to appease his extremist coalition.
First among them: Hamas, according to numerous former Israeli security experts, no longer poses a threat to Israel. The war of guns is won. In a video message released before Netanyahu’s latest press conference, 19 retired Israeli generals and security officials, including former heads of Mossad, said continuing the war was “useless” and it’s time for diplomacy.
“I don’t think chasing every 16-year-old with a green bandana on their forehead is what defeating Hamas means,” said Efron.
And given Israel’s track record in the West Bank — a “temporary” occupation that just celebrated its 58th anniversary — there’s no reason to take Netanyahu’s assurances of short-term intentions at face value.
That means American Jews who think of themselves as pro-Israel would no longer be defending a democratic, Jewish-majority state. Instead, they would have to justify active support for a country engaged in an endless occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank. Between those territories, an Israeli occupation would deny approximately 5 million people their full rights. And it would keep Israel perpetually engaged in the violent suppression of resistance.
Some will ask: Why was supporting Israel between 1967 and 2005 — decades during which it controlled Gaza and the West Bank — different from now, when it is on the verge of doing so again?
They could argue that, given Hamas’s decision to turn Gaza into a launch site for the Oct. 7 massacre, the argument for Israeli control seems even stronger.
They’re wrong. It is true that Hamas started this war, wanted this war, and could just give up, release the hostages and end it. But Hamas’ immorality doesn’t absolve Israel of its own.
There are signs that American Jews simply won’t go along, and that they are more aligned with the tens of thousands of protesters who massed in Tel Aviv last Saturday against their government’s Gaza plan than with Netanyahu and his governing coalition.
The latest and most telling sign is a statement from the mainstream American Jewish Committee, which normally expresses its opposition to Israeli policies behind closed doors, if at all.
“The profound risks posed by a full military takeover of Gaza City cannot be overlooked,” it wrote, citing many of the concerns expressed by the dissenting generals and security chiefs.
The AJC isn’t alone. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, scion of a family that has poured millions into the Jewish state, vocally supported an unsuccessful Senate resolution to block arms shipments to Israel. Americans’ support for Israel is plummeting, with just a third of Americans in a July Gallup poll saying they approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Even younger Republicans are starting to question Israel’s actions, raising the prospect that Israel may have traded decades of past bipartisan support in the U.S. — choosing to rely, instead, on so-far staunch conservative backing — for future bipartisan opposition.
But, to be clear, the moral perturbations of American Jewry don’t amount to a hill of beans to Netanyahu.
“I don’t think he cares at all about what American Jews think,” said Jonathan Jacoby, national director of the Nexus Project, which works to counter antisemitism. “And I don’t think he cares at all about the fact that these policies are making American Jews unsafe.”
“When Israel takes over Gaza, kills innocent people, starves babies and kills journalists, it creates conditions that lead to violence against Jews,” said Jacoby.
Does Netanyahu care about the backlash for Israeli Jews, either? “History shows that Israeli presence in Palestinian or Lebanese or other land has only intensified terrorism against Israel and the violent resistance to Israel,” Efron said.
There’s a reason the streets of Israel are roiling with protests, and that so many military officials who devoted their lives to keeping Israel safe have started to join them.
For them — and for us — occupying Gaza may be the last straw.
