Not in our names

Something historic is stirring inside the American Jewish community. Not a murmur of dissent, but a seismic re-evaluation — of identity, of loyalty, of the weaponised invocation of Jewish safety in defence of mass destruction. Gaza did not merely divide opinion. For a critical and growing fraction of Jewish Americans, it shattered a foundational consensus that had endured for decades: that support for Israel was not just politics, but patrimony.

The numbers are no longer on the fringe. A landmark Washington Post poll conducted in September 2025 — the most comprehensive of its kind — found that 61 percent of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. Nearly four in ten — 39 percent — go further, using the word genocide. A University of California, Berkeley and University of Rochester survey released the same year found that only 31 percent of American Jews support Israel’s military campaign, while 58 percent oppose it outright. Among young Jews — those between 18 and 34 — emotional attachment to Israel has collapsed: only 36 percent now feel a bond, down from 68 percent among those over 65.

Half of young American Jews call what is happening in Gaza genocide. These are not the numbers of a community closing rank. They are the numbers of one in the midst of a crisis of conscience.

The partisan chasm is equally stark. Whereas 85 percent of Jewish Republicans approve of Israel’s conduct, only 31 percent of Jewish Democrats agree — a 54-point gulf that maps perfectly onto the broader realignment of the party’s base. American sympathy for Israel, tracked by Gallup for a quarter century, fell below 50 percent for the first time in 2025, driven overwhelmingly by a collapse among Democrats and independents. The old bipartisan consensus — AIPAC’s most jealously guarded asset — is no longer operational.

“The pressure is mounting in ways that I’ve certainly never seen.”

Phyllis Bennis, Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies, International Adviser to Jewish Voice for Peace

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Bennis, a Jewish American activist and author of the 2025 primer Understanding Palestine and Israel, has spent five decades in this struggle. Her assessment is not hyperbole — it is a measurement. The movement she represents has found institutional expression in Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), whose trajectory since October 2023 has been nothing short of extraordinary. Founded in Berkeley in 1996 with a handful of students, JVP has grown to over 32,000 dues-paying members and a network of 750,000 supporters. Its revenue nearly tripled in a single year — from $3–4 million annually pre-Gaza to $11 million in the fiscal year 2023–2024 — making it, by any financial measure, a major advocacy force. Its largest-ever national conference, held in Baltimore in April 2025, drew hundreds of activists, as well as figures including Rashida Tlaib, Naomi Klein, and Linda Sarsour.

The organisation’s own annual report captures the moment’s moral tenor: “Not In Our Name,” it declares — a repudiation of the claim that Israel acts in the name of Jewish people everywhere. JVP’s explicit mission is to “break the bonds between American Judaism and Zionism for good.” In July 2025, it took a decisive structural turn, reconstituting itself to enter the electoral arena — endorsing candidates, lobbying Congress, and deploying its membership as a political force rather than merely a protest movement. That shift, as one observer noted, “comes amid increasing signs that opposition to Israel is no longer a deal-breaker in the Democratic political sphere.”

Nowhere was that clearer than in New York City.

“There has been a sea change in Jewish politics now, where it’s very clear that there are pro-Palestine Jews, pro-Israel Jews, and Jews who have no relationship to Israel at all.”

 Corinne Greenblatt, Jewish New Yorker, speaking to CNN, November 2025

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In November 2025, Zohran Mamdani — a 34-year-old democratic socialist, the son of Ugandan immigrants, an avowed supporter of BDS, and a man who has repeatedly called Israel’s campaign a genocide — won the New York City mayoral election decisively. He did so with the active support of progressive Jewish organisations, including JVP Action, Bend the Arc, and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. The intellectual infrastructure for this shift has been built steadily by think tanks and scholars working outside the Washington consensus. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has documented that U.S. military aid to Israel more than tripled from 2023 to 2024, with direct American assistance accounting for fully one-third of Israel’s entire defence budget in 2024 — a figure that, according to Brown University researchers, rises to $22.8 billion when indirect U.S. military operations in support of Israel are included. The Institute’s conclusion is unsparing: unconditional American military support, without exercising any leverage, draws the U.S. into “ever-greater military and political commitments in the Middle East, at a major cost to American resources, prestige, and interests.” Senator Bernie Sanders — himself Jewish — became the first sitting U.S. senator to formally accuse Israel of genocide. His declaration that “the conclusion is inescapable” carried the weight not of polemic but of parliamentary record.

But the generational arithmetic is relentless. A poll by the Jewish Voter Resource Center found that half of non-Orthodox Jews under 35 now support a binational state — a position that would have been considered beyond the pale in mainstream Jewish discourse just a decade ago.

The percentage of American Jews supporting a one-state solution has nearly doubled in two years, rising from 13% to 24%. Young Jews have come of age under successive right-wing Israeli governments, scrolling through social media footage of children pulled from rubble. They did not receive the same institutional Zionist formation as their grandparents.

“The growing disaffection of younger Jewish Americans from Israel is a direct consequence of the policies of Bibi Netanyahu and the way the American Jewish establishment has demanded an ‘Israel right or wrong’ loyalty.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami, President, J Street

What Gaza has accomplished, however, may be irreversible at the level of identity and consciousness. A generation of American Jews has looked at the footage, absorbed the testimony, and refused the instruction to look away. They have said — loudly, publicly, at risk of communal ostracism — that Israel does not act in their name.

That refusal is not merely political. It is, in the oldest Jewish tradition, a moral reckoning. Whether it translates into a foreign policy revolution depends on whether protest becomes power.

The slogan was always there, waiting. Not in our names.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.