Photo: Shuran Huang/The New York Times/Redux

It was, in the context of an already surreal year, a shocking admission from the American president. “Based on television … those children look very hungry,” Donald Trump said on Monday. “Some of those kids are — that’s real starvation stuff.”

Appearing in Scotland with Keir Starmer, the U.K. prime minister, Trump delivered what amounted to, for him at least, a stinging rebuke of Benjamin Netanyahu. The past few days from an American political standpoint have been rather remarkable — a critical mass of politicians, now including Trump, seems to be acknowledging the cataclysm unfolding in the Middle East. Whether his words will lead to any particular action remains to be seen. He has stood by as Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, wages unrelenting total war in Gaza, and he has giddily supplied Israel with additional weaponry. Republicans still staunchly support the Israeli government — 71 percent approval of the military action in Gaza compared with only 8 percent among Democrats, according to a new Gallup poll — and stray comments on Palestinian starvation will not move them.

But there are broad shifts underway in the Democratic Party, and 2025 may be remembered as a decisive turning point. After long operating on the distant margins of political life, the pro-Palestinian movement has made tremendous gains in the realms of public opinion and party politics.

Zohran Mamdani, who is favored to become the next mayor of New York City, is a proud supporter of BDS and has said Netanyahu should be arrested if he sets foot in the five boroughs. Mamdani is a democratic socialist, but more mainstream Democrats have emerged to fiercely criticize Israel in terms that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Chris Van Hollen, a U.S. senator from Maryland, declared it was a “big lie” that Hamas has systematically stolen U.N. aid, a primary (and misleading) talking point of the Israel lobby. Jon Ossoff, a senator from Georgia who is Jewish, has voted to block certain weapons transfers to Israel and has gone on the record condemning the Israeli government’s conduct in the war in Gaza.

In New York, where support for Israel among Democrats is often strongest, a letter from Attorney General Letitia James calling for unrestricted humanitarian aid into Gaza has won over a large number of local Democrats, including Charles Lavine, a moderate Long Island assemblyman who is a board member of the National Association of Jewish Legislators.

Yet plenty of Democrats, locally and nationally, still have nothing to say about the devastation in Gaza. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, has hewed mostly to AIPAC talking points, as has Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres, who is known as a pugnacious defender of Israel. Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, perhaps the Democratic Party’s most belligerent Israel backer, is unmoved. While Andy Kim, the new senator from New Jersey, has released a statement calling the denial of aid to Gaza “shameful,” Cory Booker, the Garden State’s senior senator, has been silent.

It’s Kim, though, who represents the future of his party — not Booker, not Fetterman, not even Torres, who is only 37. A vast majority of left-leaning voters under 50 take a dim view of Israel, and that trend will only accelerate in the coming years. The median American liberal sees almost nothing to celebrate with Israel since right-wing parties have dominated the Jewish State’s politics for a generation. The Labor Party in Israel is effectively dead, and Netanyahu has survived only by appeasing various far-right factions. Many on the Israeli right do not believe in ever granting the Palestinians their own state. Between the carnage in Gaza and the apartheid in the West Bank, it is virtually impossible to exist firmly on the American left and find all this defensible.

Fewer and fewer Democrats will be willing to do so in the near future. Booker came of age when AIPAC and its attendant organizations set the policy agenda for rising Democrats; absorbing the Israeli government’s de facto propaganda was considered de rigueur for any ambitious politician. Democrats like Kim, though, rose to power without any ties to the Israel lobby. Mamdani’s resounding victory over Andrew Cuomo, an unrepentant Israel hawk, will only embolden newer Democrats to follow the path laid by the Muslim socialist in New York. Despite tens of millions of dollars in attack ads that accused Mamdani of being an antisemite, he triumphed in a Democratic electorate with many Jewish voters. If Orthodox and older Jews repudiated Mamdani, plenty of young progressive Jews joined his winning coalition. (Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for state office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)

In the United States, support for Israel will soon be polarized along party lines, eviscerating the bipartisan consensus that has defined U.S.-Israel relations since at least the 1980s. Republicans, with their Evangelical base, will remain in Israel’s corner with the exception of the America First MAGA wing defined by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s plausible more Republicans will begin to move toward Greene, who has been an outspoken critic of aid to Israel (because she rejects virtually all foreign aid). But plenty will sound like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham: Israel hawks until their final breaths.

On the Democratic side, Kim, Van Hollen, and Ossoff will likely define the party’s future. All three could be considered Zionists in their support of a two-state solution but will not refrain from speaking out against the atrocities in Gaza. A future Democratic president could place conditions on military aid to the Jewish State. The status quo certainly is not tenable, and Israel will find itself only more isolated in the next decade.

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