The post-Oct. 7 period has seen, in many ways, a strengthening of the U.S.-Israel alliance under two different presidents from different parties — even as the relationship has been under strain and faced substantial tests. 

Former President Joe Biden was a stalwart supporter of Israel, even amid growing counter-currents from his party’s base, but later paused some weapons shipments as his administration sought to halt the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Under the Biden administration, the United States used its own military resources to defend Israel from Iranian attacks, and the Trump administration later followed suit and closely worked with the Jewish state to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. 

Trump, who has welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House four times in less than a year, has backed Israel’s military operations in Gaza with less equivocation than his predecessor, but there have also been some notable moments of disagreement, most recently when the president criticized Israel’s strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar and pressed Israel to halt operations in Gaza after Hamas’ partial acceptance of a hostage deal. 

Both administrations spent months negotiating hostage and ceasefire agreements that usually ended in failure, and in recent days, the Trump administration has been intimately involved in negotiating with Israel and allied Arab states a possible end of the war in Gaza in exchange for the release of all the remaining Israeli hostages.

There have also been major changes in the tenor of U.S. policy debates towards Israel. On the Democratic side, anti-Israel trends have accelerated: 27 Senate Democrats voted in August to suspend some arms transfers to Israel, more than 50 congressional Democrats backed stringent permanent conditions on arms sales to Israel and dozens of Democratic lawmakers called for U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state.

On the Republican side, skepticism of U.S. aid to Israel and outright anti-Israel sentiment has grown rapidly among the increasingly influential isolationist faction of the party. Twenty-one Republicans voted last year against aid to Israel and some vocal skeptics of the U.S.-Israel relationship have found roles in the Pentagon and Office of the Department of National Intelligence. These political trends, combined with the stream of anti-Israel invective from far-right media figures such as Tucker Carlson, have led some pro-Israel conservative leaders to see the isolationist faction of their party as a serious concern

“Alongside the horror, Oct. 7 was a historically clarifying event, and in particular it clarified two realities, one domestic and one international. Domestically, Oct. 7 ripped the mask off the genocidal antisemitism that had been developing on American college campuses and in our media. Internationally, the attack showed that our Israeli allies could no longer tolerate allowing Hamas to exist along its borders. I said that day the U.S. interest was straightforward: to provide Israel with all the security assistance and diplomatic support it needed to utterly destroy Hamas.”

“On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas carried out the deadliest terrorist attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust and took hundreds of innocent people hostage. This senseless act of brutal violence was one of Israel’s most vulnerable moments, but it showed the world that its allies stood by the only democracy in the Middle East. Since this fateful day, I’ve been working across party lines to make it clear in Congress that America stands with Israel in support of its security, and that the American people also broadly support peace between Israelis and Palestinians, a surge of humanitarian aid and the hostages coming home. We’ll continue to make it clear: Support for Israel is, and will remain, bipartisan.”

Elliott Abrams

Former U.S. special representative for Iran, 2020–2021

“The Hamas attack and the Israeli response accelerated trends that were already visible, namely declining support for Israel on the left, including among very many Democrats, and the end of Israel as a truly bipartisan issue. The Israeli reliance on American weaponry and resupply, and on the U.S. to finish the job in Iran, also suggest that the era of Israel defending itself ‘by itself’ (as the slogan went) is over, but that will lead Israel to try to grow its domestic military industries and try to limit that reliance to the degree practicable.”

Dana Stroul

Former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, 2021–2024; research director at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

“From a military perspective, the U.S.-Israel relationship reached new heights in the post-Oct. 7 period. The U.S. significantly changed its military plans to prioritize Israel’s defense by surging aircraft carriers and other capabilities into the Middle East, and supplied Israel from its own military stocks — all without precedent when considered in the aggregate. The region witnessed in real-time the value of integrating air-defense systems with the U.S. and Israel … and this summer saw the U.S. enter the Iran war alongside Israel as a co-combatant. … A key feature of the current strategic landscape is the divergence between the deepening military partnership on the one hand, and the increasing criticism of Israel’s actions outside of military lanes.”

Daniel Gordis

Author and Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem

“Oct. 7 made Israel more dependent on the U.S. (for weapons and diplomatic support) than it has ever been, while tectonic shifts in American politics make American support uncertain. A Democratic White House could well be hostile to Israel, but an isolationist Vance (or similar) White House would also be dangerous. … Whichever way American politics turns, America’s support for Israel will be both more critical than ever even as it proves more tenuous than we once imagined possible.”

Josh Hammer

Senior editor-at-large, Newsweek

“It has never been clearer that Israel can no longer rely, as it long did, on unwavering bipartisan support from political leaders in the United States. Israel must grapple with this inescapable reality — and it must do so quickly. The Jewish state should endeavor to make itself as self-sufficient as it possibly can.”

Michael Koplow

Chief policy officer, Israel Policy Forum

“The U.S.-Israel relationship rests on shared values and shared interests. The aftermath of Oct. 7 and the ongoing Gaza war has caused many in the shared values camp to doubt that the two countries are on the same page, and many in the shared interests camp to doubt that the two are on the same page, precisely when these are becoming more prominent issues in domestic politics. It has turned Israel into something that not only increasingly divides Democrats and Republicans from each other, but something that creates intraparty divides as well.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami

President, J Street

“The horrific violence of Oct. 7 and all that has followed has pushed U.S.–Israel debates to new extremes. The divides are deeper and the harshest voices are even louder – with positions on both sides hardening, making it harder to find common ground. Yet at the same time, I’m seeing more and more people quietly searching for a voice of reason and sanity in the middle.”

Eliot A. Cohen

Professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and former counselor of the U.S. State Department, 2007–2009

“What is possibly most surprising is how little Oct. 7 changed the fundamentals in the U.S.-Israeli relationship; it may have accelerated some trends or damped down others, but that is it. The drift of younger, more secular and liberal Jews away from Zionism (and the continued commitment of the more religious and conservative Jewish community to it), the increased animosity against Israel on the extremes of the left and right (more the former than the latter), the generally strong support of political conservatives and devout Christians — all of these have continued.”

Aaron David Miller

Senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former U.S. peace negotiator

“The most important takeaway since Oct. 7 is that for the first time in the history of the state, Israel has escalation dominance — the capacity to control the pace, focus, intensity of military action with its adversaries; escalate at will and block [adversaries’] ability to do so. Under Biden and Trump, the U.S. rode Israel’s military power almost without constraint. The question going forward is whether a reluctant Israeli prime minister determined to keep his seat will cross a U.S. president eager to end wars and press Israel to convert its military power into more durable political arrangements.”

Norm Ornstein

Senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute

“Of course, Oct. 7 and its aftermath has increased visible and open antisemitism — and more open Islamophobia at the same time. It has created major schisms in many universities — internally, on how to deal with dissent, disruption and free speech, and as a lever for Donald Trump to attack and defund the most prestigious ones. One other major effect has been to accelerate the partisan divide over Israel. As Israel has prosecuted its all-out war on Gaza, turned a blind eye to or assisted settler thugs burning Palestinian villages and assaulting their residents in the West Bank, and threatened annexation, many Democrats who have otherwise been strong supporters of Israel have been more outspoken in their criticism. The fallout from Oct. 7, not just in Israel but in America, is profound and deeply unsettling.”