After next week’s election in Israel, Democrats in Washington will face a decision. They can continue the longstanding practice of imploring Israel to improve its behavior in the region and imposing no consequences. Or they can identify pressure to exert when they return to power in Congress and ultimately the White House.
The case for a new approach will be more compelling if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, remains in office, an outcome that would be worse for Israel, the Palestinians and the United States. In and out of power over the past three decades, Mr. Netanyahu has turned a growing majority of Americans against his country, made himself a partisan actor in our politics and accelerated Israel’s global isolation.
The decision will get more complicated if Mr. Netanyahu loses to an opposition that will most likely be led by Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff. It would be counterproductive, some will argue, to penalize a new and more promising government for the sins of its predecessors, especially if, as seems possible, it takes early steps in the right direction.
Yet while both critics and supporters of Israel should welcome the prospect of Mr. Netanyahu’s defeat, they should not expect major changes on issues that matter most to Americans. During the current campaign, Mr. Eisenkot has encouraged more people to settle in the West Bank. Some of his potential coalition partners have called for the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority. He and his allies have attacked Mr. Netanyahu for going soft on Iran and for once entertaining the possibility of a Palestinian state, a prospect he has long since abandoned and that Eisenkot describes as “delusional.”
These positions, once considered extreme in both Jerusalem and Washington, should not be dismissed as mere electioneering, but rather as reflecting a difficult truth: Israelis across the political spectrum may be deeply divided about Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and integrity, but they broadly support his policies. Their views have only hardened since the Oct. 7 attacks.
Americans are moving in the other direction: 60 percent expressed negative views of Israel in a recent poll; 80 percent of Democrats did. The fact that younger generations in each country are the vanguard of these divergent trends shows the divide is only growing.
The Trump administration will do nothing about this, of course. As they prepare to take more power, Democratic officials are right to try to close the gap with the mainstream of their party on these issues. Rather than offering a new Israeli government the benefit of the doubt, Democrats should learn from the past and make it choose between the abundant and irreplaceable benefits of the U.S. relationship and the indefensible policies that are driving a wedge between our societies.
Democrats faced a similar dilemma — impose pressure or pursue a more amiable relationship — the last time Mr. Netanyahu left office, when the so-called change government took power by a single Knesset seat in June 2021.
That government was easier to work with than Mr. Netanyahu had been. Yet settlement activity in the West Bank actually increased, according to the Israeli human rights organization Peace Now, as the coalition sought to protect its right flank. Settler violence and Palestinian fatalities also rose, with no discernible increase in accountability. And like Mr. Netanyahu before it, the “change” government rejected reopening the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem, a decades-old diplomatic link to Palestinians that President Trump shuttered in his first term and President Biden pledged to restore.
The Biden administration, in which I served, “strongly” opposed the expansion of settlements, warning that it “damages the prospects for a two-state solution.” But it imposed no consequences based on the argument that doing so could fracture the fragile coalition and resurrect Mr. Netanyahu.
The “change” government, led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, who are also members of the current opposition, collapsed anyway. Mr. Netanyahu returned to power with the most extreme cabinet in Israel’s history. Its term has included Oct. 7 and the Gaza war, rapid growth in both West Bank settlements and settler violence, Israel’s plummeting standing around the world and regional conflict that has pulled in the United States.
This time, policymakers should apply real pressure to reduce American complicity in conduct that many in the United States find unconscionable. What might that look like?
America could terminate taxpayer-funded military aid, which even Mr. Netanyahu has said Israel no longer needs. It could halt or condition arms sales on verified compliance with our statutes requiring adherence to international humanitarian law. It could stop wielding the U.N. Security Council veto to protect Israeli policies we actually oppose. It could end, at long last, the default commitment to “no daylight” between its public positions and Israel’s.
Some changes would amount to signaling, but are no less significant.
The Trump administration is negotiating a new 10-year U.S. commitment to Israel’s security assistance to replace the one that expires in 2028. Democratic presidential candidates could make clear in advance that their administration will not be bound by it. Elected officials could also speak more honestly and accurately about these issues — calling the Israeli “occupation” by its name, a term U.S. administrations no longer use. They could describe political violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers as “terrorism,” as many Israeli leaders do. And they could resist delivering rote paeans to our countries’ “shared values,” which are increasingly in doubt, or to Israeli “democracy” without substantial qualification that millions under its rule lack basic rights.
Such steps would be a sea change in U.S. policy, but they would most likely not be enough on their own. A new approach should also start from the principle that U.S. policy will distinguish occupied territory and Israel proper.
This could mean no longer treating products imported from Israeli settlements in the West Bank as protected by trade agreements between our countries, or even barring such imports entirely, as some European countries recently have. It could mean barring Israeli settlers from the visa-free travel to the United States that their compatriots otherwise enjoy. And it could mean imposing travel bans and financial sanctions against the individuals, businesses and other organizations that undergird the settlement enterprise.
Such actions are not “economic warfare,” as Israel’s defenders hyperbolically label them. They are expressions of opposition to Israeli actions that Americans increasingly see in not just geopolitical but moral terms.
Champions of Israel rightly argue that it is an innovative marvel, with the military capacity to contribute meaningfully to U.S. security. But as the country’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, warned in its infancy, “Israel will be tested not by wealth, not by the army and not by technology, but by its moral character and its human values.”
Failing that test need not result in severing the relationship entirely, as some might seek, or in punishment for its own sake. Rather, the goal should placing the full range of American interests first, not just when we agree with Israel but also when we don’t. That means defending basic rights and statehood for Palestinians, and supporting Israel’s security, our relationship’s popular legitimacy, our symbiotic science ecosystem, fighting antisemitism and reducing regional instability.
Key elements of this approach are now championed not only by Democratic Party figures who have rightly been calling for recalibration of the U.S.-Israel relationship for some time, but also by those like Senator Chris Coons and the Democratic stalwart Rahm Emanuel who have long been among Israel’s staunchest defenders. Many of these positions are captured in bills drafted in preparation for a new Congress and in statements from candidates preparing for elections in 2028.
Whether the consensus for a firmer approach will hold if Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents win is a more open question. Mr. Eisenkot has promised to investigate the security failures leading up to Oct. 7 and to reverse Mr. Netanyahu’s attacks on the independent judiciary and other democratic institutions. He has rightly criticized Mr. Netanyahu for an obstinate approach to negotiations with Hamas that most likely delayed a cease-fire and the return of Israeli and American hostages.
Mr. Eisenkot has also vowed to dismantle some of the hundreds of illegal Jewish outposts in the West Bank. He has criticized the infamous “E1” settlement authorized by Mr. Netanyahu that bisects the West Bank, rendering a future state implausible. He and his partners have spoken out against violence committed by Israeli settlers, vowing accountability.
Mr. Eisenkot’s government might also finally scale back the outrageous practice, common under Mr. Netanyahu, of punitively confiscating Palestinian Authority customs revenues, leaving government salaries unpaid for months at a time and school hours curtailed across the West Bank.
Such steps would repudiate the worst excesses of Israel’s current government. But they would fall far short of the fundamental and necessary change that Americans increasingly demand and that our interests require.
For now, more consequential actions that could justify easing American pressure feel far out of reach. Mr. Eisenkot is unlikely to end the full blockade of Gaza, cancel new settlements entirely or prosecute the settlers and soldiers who perpetrate unlawful violence. To judge from his public statements over the years, he likely won’t acknowledge that Israel’s security ultimately depends on a viable Palestinian state or embark on negotiations to achieve it.
For now, Israeli leaders seem more focused on either building resilience against U.S. policy or blithely manifesting a post-Netanyahu rapprochement. As Mr. Lapid recently put it, “with the right public diplomacy management, it is possible to stop the anti-Israel wave and return us to being a beloved country in the world.”
Democrats seeking real change should be wary of such delusions.
To improve the odds of success, the new approach to Israel should be coupled with far deeper engagement with Palestinians at every level of their society. Rather than merely demand reforms, or treat Palestinians as stakeholders in Israel’s security, or as a bargaining chip for other countries to normalize relations, our diplomacy should engage them as a people who matter in their own right and deserve statehood.
Critics will charge that interacting with Israel more as we do with other countries, with incentives and consequences, is at best a misguided overcorrection, claiming that it is both antagonistic and unlikely to work. The first claim is undeniable — it would unsettle relations with any Israeli government and with its U.S. supporters. But the second claim is unknowable because nothing like this has ever been tried, and it ignores the overwhelming evidence that the traditional approach has failed.
Rather than continuing to subordinate American interests to debatable assessments of Israel’s security needs, a new approach would acknowledge that the world has changed. With so many of Israel’s enemies weakened or vanquished in recent years, the most intractable threats it faces today are political: the disintegration of international support and the corrosive impact of occupation.
Success will not come rapidly or without turbulence. But a new approach applied consistently over time will either persuade Israel to take hard steps to salvage the relationship or lead American leaders to impose limits. For most Americans, either outcome would be preferable to the status quo.
Jon Finer is a distinguished senior fellow at Yale Law School and the Center for American Progress. He is a co-host of the “Long Game” podcast.
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