CAN'T COUNT ON THE JIM CROW GENERATION FOREVER:

These trends in American politics may explain the recent statement by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer that Israel should spend more of its energy reaching out to "passionate" American evangelicals than to Jews, who are "disproportionately among our critics." Criticizing Dermer, Israel's former consul general in New York, Dani Dayan, added that "our embassy in the United States capital has invested most of its energy in the relationship with conservatives, Republicans, evangelicals, and a certain type of Jews only."

But a new survey commissioned by University for North Carolina at Pembroke researchers, carried out by Barna Group, has exposed what we have been finding for some time: younger evangelicals are much less supportive of Israel than older evangelicals, by a widening margin. The poll found a dramatic shift in attitudes between 2018 and 2021: support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped from 75% to 34%. This raises questions about the sustainability of the strong evangelical support for Israel that the Israeli right has cultivated for years and that proved reliable during the Trump administration.

To examine this shift further, I analyzed our two large University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll surveys of evangelicals in 2015, at the start of the U.S. presidential campaign, and 2018, two years into Donald Trump's presidency. The gap in support for Israel between under-35 evangelicals and those 35 and over had widened significantly by October 2018.

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