According to Michael J. Koplow in Foreign Policy, Israelis will face three reckonings after the Gaza deal takes effect. He explains that Israelis will need to reckon with their relationship to their leaders, to the Palestinians, and to the United States. He concludes:

The third reckoning is between Israel and the United States. The Gaza war has brought a seismic shift in Americans’ relationship to Israel. Polls show a majority of U.S. voters now oppose military support for Israel, while a plurality sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis and believe that Israel intentionally kills civilians. Among Democrats, it has become increasingly mainstream to advocate restrictions on security assistance to Israel. And the most influential voices in the MAGA-verse—from Tucker Carlson to Steve Bannon to Candace Owens—speak about Israel in dark terms as a drain on U.S. resources. There is little question that the U.S.-Israel relationship is going to change. The only question is how much.

While the Gaza war was going on, it was easy to dismiss Israel’s faltering status as a short-term dip driven by the daily news images and to argue that everything would go back to the status quo ante with the war’s end. Now that the war is over, Israelis are likely to discover that the opinions developed by many Americans over the past two years will not easily dissipate. Israelis will have to develop new ways to explain their country to Americans, new arguments for why Israel is an important and worthy ally, and new strategies for operating in a world where U.S. support is not necessarily as fulsome or automatic.

Israel may be able to win over some of the skeptics on the question of Israel’s strategic value. This will be particularly true if improved relationships between Israel and its neighbors allow the United States to reduce its presence in the Middle East and if Israel is seen, as with Russia during the Cold War, as a critical bulwark against China.

It will be harder to convince skeptics about Israel’s democratic values and participation in the rules-based order amid genocide accusations, International Criminal Court indictments of Israeli leaders, and the ongoing effort of the Israeli right to pursue annexation and transfer in the West Bank. If Israeli leaders rely on the old saws about Israel being the only democracy in the Middle East or the Israel Defense Forces being the most moral army in the world without making a genuine shift in policy, they will only compound the problems that the country is already facing.

Israelis will spend the coming days and weeks consumed with the return of hostages from brutal captivity and mourning the loss of those who do not return alive. But they will quickly have to turn to the new challenges on the horizon and steer their country in new directions to deal with the massive currents that Oct. 7 has brought.

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