Shibley Telhami: "younger evangelicals are much less supportive of Israel than older evangelicals"

[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.

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The bottom line is that there is evidence of a substantial and unusual shift.  If the Israeli right is pinning its hopes on solid support from evangelicals as the backbone of U.S. patronage of the Jewish state, anchored in a biblical narrative that sidesteps international law and norms — as witnessed during the Trump administration — the trends among young evangelicals raise questions about the trajectory of strong religiously-driven evangelical support for Israel.

~ Shibley Telhami, "As Israel increasingly relies on US evangelicals for support, younger ones are walking away: What polls show," Brookings Institute, May 26, 2021