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For weeks, the Israeli news media has been obsessing about the once-ironclad U.S.-Israeli relationship.

President Trump’s pursuit of a peace deal with Iran, which many Israelis see as a betrayal, and his repeated berating of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have raised doubts about whether they can still call Mr. Trump the best friend in the White House that Israel has ever had.

Then came Tuesday’s election results in New York City. Three pro-Palestinian candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a harsh critic of Israel, defeated moderates in hotly contested Democratic congressional primaries.

No one in Israel is suggesting a pivot to China or Russia quite yet. But those who have studied or steered the U.S.-Israel relationship say that the strains and tensions are fast becoming worrisome for Israel.

“I’m extremely concerned,” said Asaf Zamir, a deputy mayor of Tel Aviv who was Israel’s consul general in New York from 2021 to 2023. All three candidates had made fierce criticism of Israel central to their campaigns and political identities. “And they say it out loud in the most Jewish city in the world, after Jerusalem.”

Experts on the relationship warn that Israel may not be able to count on solid support from Washington for much longer — whether in concrete assistance like billions of dollars in yearly military aid, in symbolic backing like reliable vetoes of anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, or even in tax exemptions for U.S. charities benefiting Israeli causes.

“There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.

Some pro-Israel moderates also won House primaries in New York on Tuesday. But the victories by the candidates Mr. Mamdani aided — Brad Lander and Claire Valdez, who accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza; and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has questioned Israel’s right to exist and, like Ms. Valdez, calls it an apartheid state — landed like bold new dots on a scatter chart revealing a clear trend of rising American hostility to Israel.

Mr. Zamir, the Tel Aviv deputy mayor, said, “I’m waking up and hearing that we’re ‘genocidal’ and ‘apartheid.’”

“I’m a left-wing, two-state, pro-peace Israeli, but I’m not blind or crazy,” he added. “I know what the situation in Israel is, and we’re not those things we’re being called. And yet, more and more Americans are buying into and voting on those grounds. That troubles me.”

Israel was already hemorrhaging popularity in the United States, and in both parties, largely over its prosecution of the two-year war in Gaza after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, in which about 1,200 people were killed and some 250 taken hostage. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed in the ensuing war, food shortages caused widespread famine, and the enclave has been largely destroyed by Israel’s campaign.

Americans’ sympathy for the Palestinians exceeded their sympathy for Israel for the first time in a New York Times/Siena poll in September. And 60 percent of Americans said that they held unfavorable opinions of Israel in a Pew survey in April, up from 42 percent in 2022.

“If I were the Israelis, I wouldn’t necessarily be concerned with three or four members of Congress who are way out to the left,” Michael Koplow, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group, said of Tuesday’s primary results.

But, he said, those new lawmakers signaled a broader Democratic turn against Israel. “Opposition to Israel is now the major foreign policy issue,” he noted. “It’s not on the fringe anymore; it’s not even relegated to the sidelines in terms of its importance. It’s front and center in campaigns and in worldviews.”

It could well be front and center again in the 2028 presidential primaries, and Israelis watching American politics say they can imagine the eventual nominees of both parties agreeing on little except that U.S. policy toward Israel needs to change.

For Democratic critics of Israel, the rift has focused on the perception that the two countries no longer share the same values, chiefly when it comes to human rights and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

“The ‘specialness’ of this relationship was pleasant and easygoing and taken for granted for decades,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli pollster who grew up in New York. That was until Israel’s war with Hamas, she added, when many Democrats and a growing number of Republicans “realized that a special relationship was all well and good as long as Israel wasn’t killing thousands of babies in Gaza. People just broke over that.”

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, center, in Manhattan on Tuesday. Three pro-Palestinian candidates backed by Mr. Mamdani, an ardent critic of Israel, defeated moderates in Democratic congressional primaries this week. Credit…Angelina Katsanis for The New York Times

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