President Biden on Monday proposed a $7.3 trillion budget packed with tax hikes on corporations and high earners, new spending on social programs and a wide range of efforts to combat high consumer costs such as housing and college tuition.

The proposal includes only relatively minor changes from the budget plan Biden submitted last year that went nowhere in Congress, though it reiterates his call for lawmakers to spend about $100 billion to strengthen border security and supply of aid to Israel and Ukraine.

Most of the new spending and tax increases included in the FY 2025 budget again have almost no chance of becoming law this year as Republicans control the House and outright oppose Mr. Biden’s economic agenda. Last week, Republicans in the House of Representatives adopted a budget proposal outlining their priorities, which are far removed from what Democrats have asked for.

Instead, the document will serve as a draft of Mr. Biden’s policy platform as he seeks reelection in November, along with a series of contrasts intended to distinguish him from his presumptive Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Biden has sought to regain his strength on the economic front from voters who gave him low marks amid high inflation. This budget aims to portray him as a champion of greater government support for workers, parents, manufacturers, retirees and students, and of the fight against climate change.

Speaking in New Hampshire on Monday, Mr Biden announced the budget as a way to raise revenue to pay for his priorities by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and big corporations.

“I’m not against business,” he said. “I’m a capitalist, man. Earn all the money you want. Just start paying your fair share of taxes.”

The budget proposes about $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy over the next decade. Administration officials said Monday that these increases would be split evenly between corporations and the nation’s highest earners, and that Americans earning less than $400,000 a year would get tax cuts totaling $750 billion under their plans.

“We can make all our investments by asking those in the top 1 and 2 percent to pay more into the system,” Shalanda Young, the director of the White House budget office, told reporters.

The president is already trying to portray Trump as the opposite: a supporter of further tax cuts for the wealthy. “Do you really think the rich and big corporations need another $2 trillion tax break?” Mr. Biden asked in New Hampshire, referring to Mr. Trump — but not by name. “Because that’s what he wants to do.”

Speaker Mike Johnson and other members of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives criticized Mr. Biden in a statement released Monday afternoon. “The price tag of President Biden’s proposed budget is yet another glaring reminder of this administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility,” they said.

Polls have shown that Americans are dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the economy and prefer Trump’s approach to economic issues. But the president has been steadfast in his core economic policy strategy, and the budget shows he is not deviating from that plan.

Biden’s budget proposes about $3 trillion in new measures to reduce the federal deficit over the next decade. That’s in line with his budget proposal last year, which reduced deficits by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy and having the government negotiate more aggressively with pharmaceutical companies to reduce spending on prescription drugs.

The budget again calls for an increase in the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, the level Trump set in the tax bill he signed in late 2017. It raises a new minimum tax on large companies and quadruples a tax on stock buybacks. including efforts to generate more revenue from companies and individuals making more than $400,000 a year.

These cuts would build on the discretionary spending limits that Biden and Republicans in Congress agreed to last year to resolve an impasse over raising the nation’s borrowing limit. They would still leave the country with historically high budget deficits: an average of about $1.6 trillion a year over the next decade, according to government forecasts. As a share of the economy, deficits would decline over that time, but total government debt as a share of the economy would rise.

Republicans in the House of Representatives released a budget last week that aims to reduce deficits much faster – bringing the budget to a balanced position by the end of the decade. Their savings were based on economic growth forecasts well above the expectations of mainstream forecasters, along with steep and often unspecified budget cuts.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget called the Republican plan “unrealistic in its assumptions and results.” On Monday, the group called Biden’s proposed deficit reduction “a welcome start, but too timid a start.”

Mr. Biden and his aides have repeatedly said they believed projected deficits in his budgets would not hurt the economy. Ms. Young and Jared Bernstein, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, reiterated that position Monday, even after acknowledging that the budget now projects higher government borrowing costs over the next decade than previous budgets.

Rather than focusing on more aggressive deficit reduction, as previous Democratic presidents have done after losing control of a chamber of Congress, Mr. Biden has focused on the need for new spending programs and targeted fiscal stimulus to boost growth and to stimulate the middle class.

The new proposal continues that trend. It would create a national paid leave program for workers. It would restore an expanded child tax credit that Mr. Biden temporarily created in his $1.9 trillion economic stimulus law in 2021. That credit helped significantly reduce child poverty in the span of a year before it expired. That recovery would last just a year, but administration officials said Monday they hope to make it permanent as part of a broader debate on taxes in 2025.

The budget also includes new efforts to help Americans struggling with high costs. That issue has dogged Mr. Biden among voters since inflation rose to the highest level in four decades on his watch, even as price increases have cooled over the past year. Mr. Biden previewed many of those efforts in his State of the Union address last week, including new tax breaks for certain homebuyers and expanded help for people to get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Mr. Biden also called for new efforts to improve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. In the budget, he opposed cuts to benefits for the programs and any additional contributions from workers making less than $400,000 a year.

On Monday, Ms. Young suggested that Mr. Biden would try to strengthen Social Security in part by targeting a cap on income subject to the payroll taxes that fuel the program — a move he has endorsed specifically for Medicare. She said Mr. Biden would improve his solvency “by asking high-income Americans to pay their fair share.” If you make a million dollars in this country, you will finish paying your Social Security taxes sometime in February.”

In another key area, Mr. Biden’s proposal focuses on key details: what to do about provisions of the 2017 Republican tax law, including tax cuts for individuals, that expire in 2025. The budget calls this expiration, which is laid down in law to keep the estimated costs within limits, ‘fiscally reckless’. But it does not specify how Mr. Biden would handle the expiration dates if he wins a second term.

Instead, the budget says Biden would seek to extend tax breaks for people making less than $400,000 a year, offset by “additional reforms to ensure wealthy people and big corporations pay their fair share.”

As the color faded from the sky, a group gathered in front of the white-stone Basilica of St. Denis, where dozens of French kings are buried, to pay tribute to their ancestors.

Not to King Louis XIII, who authorized the slave trade in 1642, or to his son, the Sun King, who introduced the slavery code; both remains are buried in the Gothic building. They came for the victims, who are honored outside with a modest memorial.

“This is Jean-Pierre Calodat,” said Josée Grard, 81, as she ran her fingers along the name written on the bulbous sculpture as tambour drums echoed around her. “He was released four years before the abolition. His wife, Marie Lette, must be nearby.'

There are only four such memorials in all of France. Last fall, the government announced it would do more: build a “National Memorial to the Victims of Slavery” in the Trocadéro Gardens, the Instagram-favorite tourist destination for its clear view of the Eiffel Tower.

But the monument, intended as a gesture of reconciliation in a country reluctant to address the unsavory parts of its past, has itself become a source of division.

It will bear the names of approximately 224,000 people who were freed from slavery by France in 1848, made citizens and assigned a family name.

While some see it as a hopeful sign of progress, others have dismissed it as contradictory lip service. Specifically, they say, by listing the names of people freed, the monument will once again glorify France for abolishing slavery, not for atoning for the fact that some four million people over two centuries have been held in slavery.

The group that has been lobbying for the monument for decades, which also includes Parisians who grew up in Guadeloupe and Martinique, hopes it will offer something more intimate.

“This is not a memorial for political confrontation, but one to give people peace,” said Serge Romana, a doctor who was named co-director of the monument along with a cabinet minister. “If the state honors these people, you don't have to be ashamed.”

In a country where national history is so important that the president has a special memorial advisor, the history of slavery — and its lingering effects — remains largely taboo. The capital is full of historic statues and plaques, but only a handful of people are speaking out about the issue. None of the more than 130 museums in Paris are entirely devoted to slavery or the history of colonialism.

President Emmanuel Macron promised to change that and 'face our past'. He has taken some steps, such as officially established the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery in 2018 and last year a tribute to Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture in the French prison where he died.

The acute sensitivity among French leaders underlines a contradiction at the heart of national identity: how could the country that bills itself as a revolutionary champion of universal human rights enslave millions of people at the same time?

“The challenge is to integrate the complexities and contradictions of a society into a common story,” explains Jean-Marc Ayrault, a former prime minister who heads the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery. “Our goal is not to pit communities against each other or create a war of personal histories. It's about building a shared history.”

His foundation often does this by spotlighting French fighters against slavery over those who profited from and perpetuated it.

The committee that pushed for the monument was born in protest against exactly that kind of national reframing. On the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery in 1998, the government announced national celebrations with the slogan: “All born in 1848.”

“We said no – our people were created in slavery,” said Emmanuel Gordien, 65, another doctor and former independence activist from Guadeloupe. “We didn't want to erase history.”

Together with Mr Romana and other Guadeloupean activists, he called for a funeral march through the streets of Paris to pay tribute to ancestors who had been enslaved. Tens of thousands came.

The group later formed an association named after that protest – the May 23, 1998 Committee – to search for that history. They spent years digging in various French archives.

Mr. Gordien grew up learning that his great-great-grandfather Bouirqui was born in West Africa, sold into slavery and named George, and that his family owned land in Guadeloupe that had been part of the former slave plantation.

“That kind of knowledge was lost through shame,” Mr. Gordien said, “and also through French assimilation.”

For most others, their personal connection to this history remained vague. Enslaved people in the French colonies were typically referred to only by their first names, making in-depth genealogical research very difficult.

But the group discovered that in the wake of abolition, the French government had ordered its administrators to give every new citizen a surname so that men could at least vote. The names, the guideline states, must not be those of former masters, must be inspired by ancient history and the calendar, and must vary infinitely.

“If you had an officer who was interested in fruit, you would have a fruit name. If he liked rocks, you got rocks or sand,” said Mr. Gordien, whose ancestor was named Roman emperors.

The names were recorded in registers, which often included personal details: the names of the enslaved person's parents, the type of work they performed, their village or former plantation, and where they were born.

Volunteers collected more than 160,000 records from Guadeloupe and Martinique and compiled all the information into two books and a searchable online registry. Those names will be combined with others found by historians and activists in other former French colonies — now overseas departments — where slavery was enforced.

Since then, the group has been organizing weekly genealogy and research sessions from its small office in the 20th arrondissement of Paris to help people track down their own family stories. In some cases, their searches have turned up pre-abolition documents – old notarial deeds for the sale of enslaved people, which they have been able to verify were the ancient relatives of community members. Their research often provokes strong reactions.

'One woman fell to the ground, as if she had had a stroke. Another person left straight away – she didn't want to know,” said Ms Grard, who, after finding her own ancestors, spent years volunteering with the group to help others do the same. “It's a huge shock.”

But for others, the research leads to a deeper understanding of their past, themselves and how they fit into the bigger story of France. “This is my family,” Ms. Grard said as she hung a paper lantern on the monument with the names of her ancestors. “They are a part of me.”

The monument will provide both respect for their ancestors and healing for their living descendants, the group's members say.

“We have to be at peace with this history and our relationship with this history,” Mr. Romana said. “It's a way forward.”

Names on memorials are important, says Sarah Gensburger, president of the International Association for Memory Studies and a sociologist and historian at Sciences Po University in Paris.

“It gives families a place to grieve if they don't have graves,” she said. “It's also a way to write yourself into the full story.”

However, critics question the decision to honor only 224,000 people and not the millions who suffered under French slavery.

“They want to pay tribute to people who were enslaved, but they put the names of people who were freed by the Republic,” said Myriam Cottias, director of the International Research Center on Slavery and Post-Slavery in Paris. “That's why they managed to get this monument – ​​it glorifies the Republic.”

Lilian Thuram, a former French football star and anti-racism educator, supports the idea of ​​a memorial, but not with names assigned by the same French state that enslaved them.

“Why not mark in marble all the names of the former slave owners and the people who enriched themselves through slavery?” he said.

Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican and a staunch conservative, this week trumpeted the immigration compromise he negotiated with Senate Democrats and White House officials as one that will be “by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades.” become.

Speaker Mike Johnson, on the other hand, sent a fundraising message Friday denouncing the pending deal as a Democratic scam. “My answer is NO. Absolutely NOT,” his post read, adding: “This is the hill I will die on.”

The Republican disconnect explains why, with an elusive bipartisan deal on immigration seemingly as close as it has been in years on Capitol Hill, the prospects for a bill are bleak. It's also why hopes of breaking the impasse over sending more U.S. aid to Ukraine are likely to be dashed by hardline Republicans in the House of Representatives.

The situation reflects the divide that divides the Republican Party. On one side are the right-wing MAGA allies of former President Donald J. Trump, an America First isolationist who implemented draconian immigration policies while in office. On the other side is a dwindling group of more mainstream traditionalists who believe the United States should play an assertive role in defending democracy on the world stage.

The two wings coalesced last fall around a bit of legislative racketeering: They would only agree to President Biden's request to send some $60 billion more to Ukraine for its fight against Russian aggression if he agreed to their demands to ease migration in the United States. border with Mexico. But now they disagree about the price they should charge.

Far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives, who are much more opposed to aid to Ukraine, have argued that the bipartisan border compromise brokered by their Senate counterparts is unacceptable. And they say outright that they don't want to give Mr. Biden the opportunity in an election year to take credit for the crackdown on unauthorized immigration.

Instead, with Mr. Trump protesting the deal From the campaign trail, they are demanding a return to the stricter immigration policies he imposed, which have no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate. That includes a revival of the Remain in Mexico policy, under which migrants seeking to enter the United States were blocked and forced to stay elsewhere while they waited to appear in immigration court to plead their cases.

While Republican Senate leaders have touted the emerging deal as a unique opportunity for a breakthrough at the border, far-right members of the House of Representatives have dismissed it as the work of establishment Republicans out of touch with the Republican base.

“Let's talk about Mitch McConnell — he has a 6 percent approval rating,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said of the Senate minority leader. “He wouldn't be the one he would listen to if he was making deals at the border.”

She said that after Trump's decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses, “it is time for all Republicans, the Senate and the House of Representatives, to get behind his policies.”

On the proposed aid to Ukraine, Ms. Greene threatens to remove Mr. Johnson from the speakership if he brings it up.

“My red line is Ukraine,” she said, expressing confidence that the speaker would follow through on her threat. 'I make it very clear to him. We will not see it in the House of Representatives – that is my expectation.”

The situation is particularly fraught for Mr. Johnson, the novice speaker of the House of Representatives whose own sympathies lie with the far right but who faces enormous institutional pressure — from Mr. Biden, Democrats in Congress and his fellow Republicans in the Senate – to embrace an agreement. combining changes in border policy with aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Johnson has positioned himself as a Trump loyalist, quickly backing the former president after winning the gavel and saying he has spoken regularly with the former president about the Senate immigration deal and everything else. After enraging hard-right Republicans on Thursday by pushing through a short-term funding bill to avoid a shutdown, the speaker has little reason to enrage them again and defy the wishes of Mr. Trump, who pushed the Senate compromise into has brought into disrepute.

“I don't think we should make a border deal at all unless we get EVERYTHING it takes to stop the INVASION,” Trump wrote on social media this week.

Democrats have already agreed to substantial concessions during the talks, including making it harder for migrants to seek asylum; expanding detention and deportation authorities; and halting the flow of migrants when crossing attempts reach levels that would overwhelm detention centers – around 5,000 migrants per day.

But far-right Republicans have rejected the compromise out of hand, saying the changes would still lead to many immigrants entering the country without permission every year.

Politics during the elections play a major role. Representative Bob Good, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said passage of the Senate bill would give Mr. Biden “political cover” for his failures at the border.

“Democrats want to give the impression that they care about the border, and then run out the clock so that Biden wins reelection,” Mr. Good said. “It would be terrible if the country gave political cover to the facilitators of the border invasion.”

Rep. Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, said that while Mr. Johnson broke with federal spending rights because he feared a government shutdown, “I think there is more unity on immigration.”

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, warned that the immigration compromise was a “unique opportunity” that would not be available to Republicans next year even if they win majorities in both chambers of Congress and back would win. the White House.

“The Democrats won't give us anything close to getting 60 votes in the Republican-majority U.S. Senate,” he said.

Many mainstream Republicans in the House of Representatives believe Johnson would be making a terrible mistake if he heeded the advice of the most far-right voices and refused to embrace an immigration deal. They argue that this would squander an opportunity to effect important policy changes and the political momentum that would follow if we showed that Republicans can govern.

“Mayors of big cities are talking about the same thing that conservatives in Texas are talking about,” said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, a close ally of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “Take the moment, dude. Take the policy victory, put it aside and go back for more. That is always the goal.”

But for some Republicans, achieving a policy victory is less important than continuing to fight a political issue in an election year.

“It is worse than doing nothing to provide political cover for a sham border security bill that does nothing to actually secure the border,” Mr. Good said.

Mr. Burchett, one of eight Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. McCarthy, rolled his eyes when asked about Mr. McHenry's pleas not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

“McHenry is leaving,” he said of the congressman, who has announced he will not seek re-election next year.

As the afternoon light softened, a man with a megaphone stepped forward in front of a crowd of about 200 people in the Bahraini capital Manama and began shouting at the top of his lungs.

The demonstrators, waving Palestinian flags, echoed his words with gusto and begged their authoritarian government of their allies to expel the Israeli ambassador. appointed two years ago, after Bahrain established diplomatic ties with Israel.

“No Zionist embassy in Bahraini land!” they sang. “No US military bases on Bahraini land!”

Less than four miles away, American and European men in full military regalia gathered for the Manama Dialogue, an annual dialogue conference which brings together senior officials from Western powers and the Middle East to discuss regional security. Just hours after the protest, they walked around a gilded ballroom at the heavily guarded Ritz-Carlton hotel – largely unaware that it had even happened.

When Bahrain’s Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa took the stage, he delighted much of the audience by condemning Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that controls Gaza and which led the October 7 attack on Israel, which he said about 1,200 people died. to the Israeli authorities.

The war in Gaza that followed the attack has not only exposed a rift between many Arab leaders and their people; it has broadened it.

Bahrain, a Gulf state of about 1.6 million people, has witnessed an outpouring of popular support for the Palestinians and a rise in hostility toward Israel since the war began. The Israeli army responded to the Hamas attack by bombing and besieging Gaza in a military campaign that Gaza authorities say has killed more than 16,000 people.

While there has long been a rift between many Arab states and their citizens over their approach to the Palestinian cause, the war has brought that rift into sharp focus in years. In many protests across the region, people have gone beyond condemning Israel to chant in support of Hamas and criticize their own governments.

In Morocco And JordanThousands have gathered to demand that their countries cut ties with Israel. In Cairo, pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered in Tahrir Square, where Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising began. revived a revolutionary call for bread, freedom and social justice.

And in Bahrain, demonstrators said they not only felt a deep sense of shared Arab and Muslim identity, but also saw connections between Palestinian liberation and their own liberation from political repression.

“I look forward to us being free people,” said Fatima Jumua, a 22-year-old Bahraini woman who attended the protest in Manama. “Our existence and freedom are linked to the existence and freedom of Palestine.”

For decades, most Arab governments have refused to establish ties with Israel before the establishment of a Palestinian state. But that calculus changed in the years before the war, as authoritarian leaders weighed negative public opinion toward Israel against the economic and security benefits of a relationship — and the concessions they could extract from the United States, Israel’s key ally .

“The government of Bahrain wants to be seen as a voice of moderation in the United States, and it is increasingly using its new relationship with Israel to shape this perception in Washington,” said Elham Fakhro, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a thinktank. “But at home it has a different effect.”

In 2020, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco established relations with Israel in agreements brokered by the Trump administration known as the Abraham Accords, joining Egypt and Jordan, which have signed dozens of years of peace agreements with Israel.

The deals were celebrated by Western governments that have long supported the region’s royal families, and in September the Bahraini government signed a comprehensive security pact with the Biden administration.

But polls showed that most ordinary Arab citizens are increasingly reluctant to establish ties with Israel.

In Bahrain – with its Sunni Muslim royal family and a predominantly Shia Muslim population – officials said the accords encouraged tolerance and coexistence. But that sounded hollow to many citizens, while the government continued to crack down domestically disagreement.

The Palestinian cause and opposition to Israel unite Bahrainis across sectarian and political lines: Sunnis and Shiites, secular leftists and conservative Islamists, young and old. Asked inside a poll before the war what impact the Abraham Accords would have on the region, 76 percent of Bahrainis said negatively.

The accords were “forced against the will of the people,” said Abdulnabi Alekry, a 60-year-old Bahraini human rights activist.

Ms Fakhro of Chatham House said Bahrain has been tense for years due to tensions between the government and opposition movements.

“This crisis is widening that divide even further,” she said.

Bahrain crushed an Arab Spring uprising in 2011 with the help of Saudi and Arab forces. It also houses one of the most important US military bases in the region.

Bahraini protesters said they see Israel as a colonial-style occupying power and a Western-backed project designed to dominate the region. Some said Israel shouldn’t even exist.

Ms Jumua said Palestinians and the rest of the region’s population all live under the rule of Western powers.

“So far we see that we cannot move without US approval,” she said.

Back at the Ritz-Carlton hotel the morning after the protest, senior Arab and American officials returned to the glitzy ballroom to debate a path forward for Gaza.

Asked about negative public opinion about the Abraham Accords, Brett McGurk, a top White House Middle East official, said he was focused on the immediate crisis. But otherwise, he said, U.S. policymakers remained committed to the “integration” of Israel and its neighbors.

Before the war, the White House held talks with Saudi Arabia on a complex deal in which the kingdom, the most powerful Arab country, would recognize Israel.

“We cannot allow what Hamas did on October 7 to take this permanently off track,” Mr McGurk said.

But some Palestinians feared that an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel would have further undermined their fight for statehood.

A senior Bahraini official said his government believes Israel is here to stay and that the region’s peoples should coexist. Bahrain is concerned about the war fueling anger and extremism, he added, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. The Abraham Accords must be protected as a tool to bring peace, he said.

But when asked about the gap between Arab leaders and public opinion, the official did not directly address the question. Instead, he said Bahrain believed the situation in Gaza was catastrophic and was doing everything it could to promote peace.

The most damning charges against Israel at the conference came from the foreign minister of Jordan – where a large part of the population is of Palestinian descent – ​​and a senior Saudi royal, Prince Turki Al Faisal, who called for sanctions against Israel.

Prince Turki – a former head of Saudi intelligence – rejected the idea that building ties between Arab states and Israel would bring peace, calling it an “Israeli, American and European illusion.”

As Prince Turki spoke, another protest took off about ten kilometers away and stretched for blocks through the narrow streets of Muharraq – a city of low-rise buildings in shades of white and beige. The air smelled of gasoline from idling cars as streams of people blocked traffic, waving Palestinian flags and carrying children on their shoulders.

Freedom of association and assembly remains high limited in Bahrain. But many of the recent protests were given government permission — creating a semi-sanctioned space to let off steam.

Thousands of protesters shouted in English and Arabic until they became hoarse.

“Down, down, Israel!”

“America is the head of the snake!”

Some sang in support of Hamas and urged Hamas to bomb Tel Aviv.

In his speech the day before, Bahrain’s Crown Prince had deplored the “continuous bombardment” of Gaza, calling it an “intolerable situation.” But he did not threaten a diplomatic break with Israel and called the US “indispensable” to any peace process.

When he was done, his guests devoured saffron-poached peaches and chicken breasts stuffed with ratatouille. In a speech on the sidelines of the conference, Bahraini officials told participants they were determined to protect their deal with Israel.

Marc Kornblatt prepared uneasily last month for his daughter, Louisa, to arrive for 10 days with the family. Her homecomings once brought the comfort of movie nights and card games, but this year was different.

Mr. Kornblatt sang under his breath some lyrics from “West Side Story”: “Get cool, boy.” He and his wife discussed: How would they greet their child? Would they acknowledge the emotional distance, the slights that had piled up from afar?

He and his wife, Judith, had moved away from Madison, Wis. to live in Tel Aviv, where they felt a real sense of belonging as Jews. Around the same time, their daughter, attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, came to oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

The political divide between two generations within the family has grown into a painful chasm during the war between Israel and Hamas. Until late November, it was addressed mostly in tense exchanges on WhatsApp. “Really sad that you seem out of touch with where our heads are at,” Mr. Kornblatt had messaged his daughter after she told her parents about a friend speaking out in support of people in Gaza.

As she packed her bags to go to Tel Aviv, his daughter questioned how her parents could argue about a political solution that felt morally urgent to her: a permanent cease-fire.

“It feels so simple — just don’t murder people. Don’t kill people. Just stop it,” said Louisa Kornblatt, 31, who now lives in Brooklyn. “It feels so simple, and a lot of my mom’s responses are like, ‘It’s so complex.’”

The ideological rift between the Kornblatt parents and their daughter is a clash between an older generation of American Jews, who believe Israel has a right to defend itself and that its very survival is at stake, and a younger generation more likely to view Israel as a great military power and an occupying force.

That’s not the case in every family, of course. Many Jewish college students have been vocal and firm in defending Israel; plenty of Jewish Americans in the Boomer generation have criticized Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Many American Jews are united in a fear of rising antisemitism. and last month, tens of thousands of them attended the March for Israel in Washington, D.C.,Yet some Jewish families are grappling with internal divisions, in the heart of a holiday season that is forcing difficult conversations.

“This is an acute, painful moment for many Jewish American families,” said Jackson Schwartz, a Columbia University senior who has found himself pulled to the left even of his liberal parents on the subject of Israel.

For at least a half-century, American Jews — the substantial majority of whom tend to be liberal and vote Democratic — have largely supported the Jewish state across the spectrum of age, partisanship and religious denomination. Recent polling suggests that that is changing.

Even before the war, younger American Jews were generally less attached to Israel than their elders, according to a 2021 Pew Research survey. (Most of the people interviewed for this article did not identify as Orthodox, a small segment of the American Jewish population who tend to have a stronger attachment to Israel than others do.)

A survey that the Democratic pollster GBAO Strategies conducted in November, a few weeks after the start of the war, for the nonpartisan Jewish Electorate Institute, found a striking generation gap in American Jews’ attitudes toward President Biden’s strong support for Israel: Eighty-two percent of those 36 or older supported the president, but only 53 percent of those 18 to 35 felt that way.

Jim Gerstein, who conducted the survey, said that younger American Jews have little or no memory of an underdog Israel surrounded by enemy states or terrorized by suicide bombings. Instead, they grew up when Israel had developed into a thriving economic and regional military regional power, backed by the United States and largely insulated from its neighbors — a perspective that inclined them to judge Israel more harshly, especially under the conservative leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Jewish voters are very liberal, and younger Jews even more so, and hold a different perspective of Israel than older generations,” he said.

‘How do I bridge this?’

The parents of Mr. Schwartz, the Columbia student, said they listen to him with open minds when he tells them about documentaries he has seen or things he has learned from professors like Rashid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian intellectual who is a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia. Dan Schwartz said his son helped him understand the Palestinian perspective on Israel’s founding, which was accompanied by a huge displacement of population that Palestinians call the Nakba, using the Arabic word for catastrophe.

“It wasn’t until Jackson went to Columbia and took classes that I ever heard the word Nakba,” Dan Schwartz said.

Still, he said he felt that his son’s education downplayed “the fact that Israel is and has been surrounded by terrorists who do want to destroy them.”

Jonathan Taubes, who grew up in a right-leaning modern Orthodox community in New Jersey, understands that his own perception of Israel is starkly different from that of his parents, who remember the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 . His mother is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Recently, she went to visit Mr. Taubes in Brooklyn, began discussing her fears of anti-Jewish hatred as soon as she walked into his apartment.

Mr. Taubes, 30, felt torn between wanting to comfort his mother and feeling uneasy with her exclusive focus on Jewish pain.

“I was sort of trying to hold both sides — a progressive left one, and a defensive Jewish one,” he explained. “It’s a feeling of discomfort, like, how do I manage this, how do I bridge this?”

“There’s this feeling of being alienated from the world, but then the added layer of strife and division within our own family,” Mr. Taubes added. “It’s an extra layer of pain.”

In interviews with more than a dozen young people, many of them described feeling estranged from the version of Jewish identity they were raised with, which was often anchored in pro-Israel education. Many young Jews said they believed in Israel’s right to exist and condemned the Hamas attacks, but they believed at least as passionately in Palestinian rights, and condemned Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, its settlements and its treatment of Palestinians broadly.

Mica Maltzman, a junior at Brown University, grew up ensconced in her Reform synagogue in Washington D.C., surrounded by Jews who were pro-Israel and politically liberal.

“My parents were supportive of Israel, but not the government,” she said. “In Hebrew School, it was, ‘This is the Jewish state that we need as a homeland.’”

Ms. Maltzman grew more critical of Israel throughout high school. Since Oct. 7, she has been active with a group called BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now, which organized a sit-in at a university building in November. Ms. Maltzman said that during conversations with her parents, who declined to be interviewed, she had sensed them returning to their earlier brand of support for Israel after years of growing more critical.

“I’m so terrified and horrified by what Israel is doing,” she said. “Fighting with my parents, who will defend various aspects of Zionist ideology, it’s been a constant back and forth.”

‘Did we not talk about the Holocaust enough?’

For Judith Kornblatt, 68, fears of antisemitism lurked throughout childhood. Her mother had fled Austria in 1938, just as the Nazis were taking over, and settled eventually in Evanston, Ill. Ms. Kornblatt, who taught Slavic languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recalled that when the family learned Nazis were planning a march in the neighboring city of Skokie, her mother went into a panic, and flew to Texas to visit a friend.

Her husband, Marc Kornblatt, 69, a children’s book writer, blogger and filmmaker, recalled growing up in suburban New Jersey, where prep school classmates sometimes taunted: “Jew! Jew!”

“From the beginning, I knew antisemitism much differently than my own children — certainly different than Louisa, who felt comfortable saying to her friends ‘I can’t go tonight, we’re having Shabbat dinner,’” Mr. Kornblatt said. “Judith and I talk about this: Did we not talk about antisemitism and the Holocaust enough with our children?”

Louisa Kornblatt grew up in Madison, spent summers at Jewish sleep-away camp, and shared her parents’ belief that the safety of Jewish people depended on a Jewish state. That began to change when she started attending a graduate program in social work at U.C. Berkeley in 2017.

She said she met classmates and friends who challenged her thinking. She felt one person “pull away” from their friendship, a change that Ms. Kornblatt attributed to her ties to Israel. Another sent her an email telling her that because she wasn’t vocally pro-Palestine, Louisa was on “the wrong side of history.”

At Berkeley, she read Audre Lorde, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other Black feminist thinkers, who prompted her to consider “questions around power, privilege and whiteness.”

Ms. Kornblatt came to feel that her emotional ties to Jewish statehood undermined her vision for “collective liberation.” Over the last year, she became increasingly involved in pro-Palestine activism, including through Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist activist group, and the If Not Now movement.

“I don’t think the state of Israel should ever have been established,” she said. “It’s based on this idea of Jewish supremacy. And I’m not on board with that.”

As Ms. Kornblatt’s political views were shifting, her parents moved in the opposite direction, becoming so attached to Israel that they decided in 2019 to make it their home.

The Kornblatt parents had long felt a unique sense of comfort when spending time in Israel, and realized during a visit to Tel Aviv that might want to put down roots there. Louisa’s older brother Jake Kornblatt, 35, who is politically aligned with their parents, also made Tel Aviv his permanent home..

“We felt like, for the first time, we weren’t going to be the other,” the elder Mr. Kornblatt said.

What he hadn’t expected, he added, was that moving to Israel would b ring on a new kind of isolation. “When I moved to Israel, all of a sudden I was a Jew and colonialist and apartheid lover,” he said, referring partly to comments from American friends and students on social media.

J. Lo and geopolitics

When Louisa Kornblatt arrived at her parents’ home on Nov. 17, the tensions were briefly broken. They watched a Jennifer Lopez movie, “Marry Me.” They played cards. But the day after her arrival, her parents went to the square in Tel Aviv where families of hostages being held in Gaza were rallying for their release, while Louisa went to an antiwar, pro-cease-fire protest.

In Tel Aviv, Mr. Kornblatt asked his daughter why she did not denounce Hamas’s attacks on social media. She wanted to know why her father did not emphasize the historical context — the occupation and Palestinian displacement — that shaped the current war.

The Kornblatt parents have acknowledged the deaths of Palestinian civilians in Israel’s bombardments; Louisa has acknowledged the deaths of Israeli civilians in the Hamas attack.

Jake Kornblatt said he has come to accept and learn from some of the language his sister taught him — like the term “occupation” — but that he struggles with her stark perspective on “good guys and bad guys.”

His sister seems to have “this idea of this insidious plan of Zionists coming in and wanting to subjugate people,” he said. “Has there been racism, has there been a lot of injustice, have there been war crimes, potentially? Yes, but there’s more to it than that.”

He disagrees with her use of the word apartheid to describe Israel. “If you use this type of language, the other side is not going to be able to listen to you,” he said.

Tamar Asnko, 36, an Israeli Jew who is married to Jake, said she doesn’t agree with Louisa on everything, though she found their recent discussions in Tel Aviv interesting.

Ms. Asnko moved to Israel from Ethiopia when she was 4, and Israel is the only place she calls home. “It’s complicated,” she said. “There isn’t black and white here. There’s a middle ground. I feel like people who don’t live here don’t understand the middle ground.”

In the final days of her visit, Louisa Kornblatt felt tension in her parents’ home. She walked into the apartment after volunteering to help Palestinian families harvest olives in the West Bank. She gave her father a hug and noticed that he didn’t hug her back.

Mr. Kornblatt told his daughter that he was hurt that she would use her precious time on a visit with family to volunteer in the West Bank. “Does this have to be the time?” she recalled him asking her, to which she replied: “Yeah, this is the time.”

In the final 45 minutes before departing for the airport, as Ms. Kornblatt was packing, the family had one last noisy argument about what political solutions to the war were possible. Then they walked outside to get her a taxi, and hugged one another.

“I didn’t leave with any doubt that my family loves me,” Ms. Kornblatt said.

Nadav Gavrielov contributed to this story.