The two-state solution is losing Jewish support; what's replacing it may surprise you

For decades now, the idea of a two-state solution has been bandied about: a Jewish state living side-by-side with a future Palestinian state. From a geopolitical perspective, it seems to have always been the goal, at least for certain world leaders and countries. Indeed, a majority of American Jews have supported some form of a two-state solution. Not anymore.

A stunning new poll conducted by the Jewish Voter Resource Center now shows that support for a traditional two-state solution among U.S. Jews has dropped significantly over the past six years, while support for alternatives – including a binational state, and even scenarios where Israel controls the territory without granting equal rights to Palestinians – has grown sharply.

The findings point to a major ideological shift underway inside the American Jewish community, particularly among younger members, and they also reveal growing fractures over Zionism itself.

According to the survey, support for a two-state solution among American Jews fell from 66% in 2019 to 54% today. Meanwhile, support for a single democratic binational state shared by Israelis and Palestinians rose from 9% to 24%.

Even more striking, support for a scenario in which Israel controls all the territory while Palestinians do not receive equal political rights rose from 7% to 22%.

Among younger American Jews, the numbers are even more dramatic. Forty-four percent of Jews under 35 years old now support a binational state replacing Israel as a specifically Jewish state, while only 39% support the traditional two-state framework.

It should be noted that the Jewish Voter Resource Center is affiliated with the Jewish Democratic Council of America, so there may be some built-in bias to the poll. A total of 800 registered Jewish voters were surveyed and the margin of error was +/- 3.5 percentage points and +/- 6.9 percentage points for Jews under 35. Those are pretty wide margins.

Still, the generational divide is clearly a problem. Many pro-Israel organizations have long viewed younger American Jews as future defenders of the Jewish state. That’s not as clear today.

Poll after poll has shown how favorability toward Israel has nosedived among virtually every demographic group since 2022 and that includes Jews as well. Shockingly, a recent Washington Post poll found that 61% of Jewish adults believe Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, and an equally shocking 39% believe Israel was guilty of genocide.

It appears this new brand of liberalism is rubbing off on younger secular Jews, too, as Israel is now seen through a different lens, one centered more on human rights and anti-colonialism. You might have thought the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre and the Gaza war would have secured more Jewish support. It actually might have done the exact opposite.

College campus protests, social media activism, and growing accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” or operating an “apartheid” system have had a major impact on younger Americans overall, including younger Jews. Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told ALL ISRAEL NEWS that he believes relentless anti-Israel messaging is largely responsible for the shift.

“The mainstream and social media, by repeating the grotesque, antisemitic lies of Israeli genocide and apartheid, while almost never reporting that the Palestinian regime pays Arabs to murder Jews; promotes hatred and violence against Jews in their schools, media, and mosques, that over half the Arabs killed in this war were terrorists; that Israel has the lowest ratio of civilian deaths to combatants in the history of warfare; that the war continued only because the Arabs refused to release the 251 Israel hostages and continued firing missiles into Israeli civilian areas and Arab leaders repeatedly proclaimed they would continue to massacre Jews as often as possible; that the Muslims have 56 states while the Jews have one tiny state; that the Arabs rejected Israeli offers of a 57th state 8 times in the last 80 years because it would require the Arabs to accept Israel as a Jewish State and more, has all caused Jews and others to have an egregiously wrong and hostile attitude toward the Jewish state. The world’s anti-Israel propaganda has caused inappropriately negative attitudes toward the one and only tiny Jewish state.”

Unfortunately, the concern is not limited to the Jewish community. There is also growing alarm within evangelical Christian circles that younger evangelicals are beginning to turn from Israel as well. For decades, white evangelicals represented one of the strongest pro-Israel voting blocs in America. Many evangelicals viewed support for Israel through a biblical and theological framework tied to God’s covenant with the Jewish people.

While that continues to be largely true, support is softening among younger evangelicals.

A Marquette University Law School survey found that while 70% of evangelicals over age 60 approve of Israel, only 39% of evangelicals between 18 and 29 years old do. The poll is not an outlier. Numerous other polls show the same trend.

If both younger evangelicals and Jews continue to turn away from their support of Israel, it would end up being one of the most consequential long-term political and cultural battles now unfolding in America.