The pollster Frank Luntz recently published his findings that the Democratic party’s “opinion elites” have markedly less positive attitudes toward Israel than their Republican counterparts. However, argues William Jacobson, they do not represent the party as a whole:

If there were a sea change [in American attitudes toward Israel], one would expect to see a change in broad-based national surveys such as [those] by Gallup, which has been asking the same questions for decades.

What Gallup shows is that support for Israel among the U.S. population is near all-time highs. In polling released in February 2015, after the effects of the 2014 Gaza conflict would have been factored into public opinion and when the Obama-Netanyahu dispute was blossoming, Gallup polling showed overwhelming support for Israel.

Gallup showed that there had been a drop in Democratic support for Israel versus the Palestinians from the prior year, but that support for Israel merely dropped back to historical levels of support seen in the 2006-2010 time period. Moreover, support for Israel versus the Palestinians was substantially higher than in the 1990s. . . . So Gallup surveying does not reflect any broad national turn against Israel, and at worst a return by Democrats to levels seen just a couple of years earlier. . . .

If Israel were losing support among Democrats, we also would expect it to show up in the political process. But among Democratic lawmakers, there is no visible drop in support for Israel, even if there was consternation over Netanyahu’s visit to Congress.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.