“For many young evangelicals, Israel is no longer the embattled democratic ally,” according to Robert Beschel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Doha Center. Beschel, who is quite familiar with evangelical culture, told me, “the Israel that they have grown up with is in some dimensions viewed as an oppressive force.” He added, “The occupation of the West Bank proceeds indefinitely, settlement construction pushes ever higher and the blockage of Gaza exerts a significant humanitarian toll. Not surprisingly, Israel cuts a much less sympathetic picture generationally than it used to.”

Over the past year, I have informally been asking Christians in their twenties about their opinion on modern-day Israel. What is clear is that many Christians of that generation see Israel largely through the prism of the conflict with the Palestinians—“a struggle between the desperately weak and the unimaginably powerful,” as one person who attended a leading evangelical college told me. “And Palestinians, unmistakably, are on the side of the weak.”

“Protecting the weak against the powerful has revealed itself as at the root of most of our social causes,” this individual said, “and the plight of the Palestinians stands as another story exposing the harmful use of power by wealthy, white America.” This corresponds with an observation Matti Friedman made in the Atlantic last year: Many younger Americans associate the Palestinian situation with the problems of race in America, even though they are fundamentally dissimilar. “Although Israel, like America, is deeply messed up,” Friedman wrote, “it’s messed up in completely different ways.”