Culturally both are fairly similar - both are "western"-style democracies (e.g. representative democracies with constitutions that value rule of law, independent judiciary, etc)
And, the following might be controversial - but many of americas strategic allies do much worse shit than israel, they just get called out on it less. Hell, Saudi arabia is literally murdering people in embasies and still seems to have a good relationship with the usa somehow.
The point is swap out the people in those geographies, rerun the timeline, and you’ll find them in conflict. The reasons they each come up with in this iteration is dressing.
What reasons do you think Israel "has come up with"? To me it's quite clear there's one side that's bent on destroying the other, there is no symmetry.
Look at abortion for example, do right wing evangelicals value this issue less than their support for a 10-thousand+-kilometer-away country? did they manage to make it controversial and costly to not adopt their position on it?
Right wing evangelicals do performatively praise Israel more often, but actual lobbying is strongly bipartisan and cuts across the conservative-progressive divide.
Being anti-abortion is a political litmus test in many parts of the US.
Contrast that with majorities that pro-Israel laws always get in congress. Trump even recently complained outright that "Israel used to control the congress" and he didn't even mean it in a bad way, the ADL shat its pants and quickly tore into him saying that it's AntiSemitic (^TM) to say that. Nobody in the Democrats is willing to approach criticising Israel with an INT_MAX foot pole except possibly old-school anti-imperialism marxists, and they are fringe.