The ongoing war in Iran is highlighting a widening gulf between center and center-left voters in Israel and Democrats in the United States. While Democrats in the United States are mostly opposed to the war, Israelis are overwhelmingly supportive of the effort.

Recent polling from Israel has shown that 92.5% of Jewish Israelis and 81% of Israelis overall support the war

Over two weeks into the war with Iran, American and Israeli leaders’ public statements about the effort and their goals remain largely in sync, with President Donald Trump praising Israel on Sunday for helping secure the Strait of Hormuz, while other countries with greater oil interests in the region have yet to offer to help.

However, the populations of the two countries have markedly different views of the war, which is popular in Israel while most Americans oppose it, which likely puts Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on different timelines. That, in turn, could impact the level of cooperation moving forward.

After months of an increasingly bitter campaign characterized by tens of millions in outside spending and increasingly heated debate over Israel policy, Democrats in the Chicagoland area head to the polls on Tuesday, with the outcome of the primaries potentially reshaping the political landscape in Chicago, one of the most Jewish cities in the country. 

The races are also set to be a test of AIPAC and the pro-Israel community’s political strategy and heft. There are four House races that pro-Israel groups are reportedly engaged in, and their success rate in those primaries will be an early indicator of whether resources can overcome the shifting winds in a party that is becoming increasingly hostile to the Jewish state. 

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) has become one of the harshest critics of Israel in the House, in recent months associating with some of the leading anti-Israel figures within the Democratic Party — at one point proudly declaring his ties to a far-left antisemitic podcaster.

In his pushback to the U.S. war against Iran, he has caricatured those supportive of taking military action against the Islamic Republic as part the “Epstein class” — which critics have accused of being an antisemitic trope — while defending right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan from past charges of antisemitism. 

Six weeks ago, Danny Phillips, the director of security at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., arranged for the FBI to hold an active-shooter training for the congregation, one of the largest Reform synagogues in the county.

That training potentially saved the lives of 140 children and their teachers on Thursday when an assailant rammed a truck full of explosives and weapons into the building.

The vehicle ramming and shooting attack on a Michigan synagogue last Thursday was the latest example of a “direct connection between hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews,” Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, a prominent Reform rabbi who leads Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, said during a sermon on Friday evening.

From the pulpit, Hirsch urged both the Jewish community and U.S. elected officials — including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — to take seriously the “moral and political blindness” that is “casting a darkening shadow over all that we hold dear.”

The anti-Israel campus protest movement is facing “fear and exhaustion” amid the Trump administration’s crackdown, Mahmoud Khalil, who led demonstrations against Israel on Columbia University’s campus in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, said on Sunday at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.

“With the Biden administration, you protest because you feel you can move the needle a little bit,” said Khalil. “But with Trump, it’s like plain tyranny. They would not listen.” 

The suspect in the attack last week at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., was the brother of a Hezbollah commander, the IDF said on Sunday.

The IDF announced in an X post on Sunday that Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali, the brother of Ayman Mohammad Ghazali, “was responsible for managing weapons operations within a specialized branch of [Hezbollah’s] Badr Unit. The unit is responsible for launching hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians throughout the war.”