According to the conventional wisdom, Jews in the U.S. are losing sympathy for the Jewish state because of its failure to make peace with the Palestinians, or because of its alleged rightward drift, or because of the building of new housing in the West Bank, or because of the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu (under whom settlement growth has in fact slowed). But a recent poll conducted by the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby group J Street, which is itself deeply invested in this conventional wisdom, suggests otherwise. Elliott Abrams writes:

The survey asked, “Compared to five-to-ten years ago, do you feel more positive, more negative, or about the same toward Israel?” The result: 55 percent said “about the same,” 26 percent said “more positive,” and 19 percent said “more negative.” Respondents were asked “Does the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank make you feel positive about Israel, negative about Israel, or have no impact on how you feel about Israel?” The result: 48 percent said it had “no impact,” 32 percent said “a negative impact,” and 19 percent said expansion of settlements had a positive impact on [their attitudes].

Similar results emerged from questions about Israeli policies regarding non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism. Abrams continues:

Those numbers cannot have made J Street’s publicists very happy, nor can they cheer the propagandists who are constantly telling us that such Israeli actions (or more narrowly, Netanyahu’s policies) are simply ruining relations between the American Jewish community and Israel. But relations are not ruined and more people said they felt more positive about Israel now than said the opposite—with most saying their views had not changed. And the impact of the great brouhaha about treatment of non-Orthodox Judaism turns out to be exaggerated. . . .

[In short], the J Street survey suggests that there is no great crisis in relations between the American Jewish community and Israel.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].