In 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu was the marketing director of a Jerusalem-based furniture maker when Israel’s ambassador in Washington decided that the 32-year-old had been pitching the wrong product. Instead of selling cupboards to Israelis, he should have been selling Israel to Americans. The ambassador, who met Netanyahu at a conference a few years earlier, brought him to Washington as his deputy. Almost instantly, Netanyahu became the face of Israel on American television—a fixture on Nightline and Larry King Live, pugnacious, eloquent in unaccented English acquired as a boy in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
For the next four decades, through nearly every office he held, Netanyahu’s portfolio never changed: He was the guardian of Israel’s standing in America, a task he never delegated, since he believed that nobody understood it better than he did. And it is a task at which Netanyahu, as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has failed abjectly.
Just over a decade ago, support for Israel was one of the last remaining bipartisan reflexes in American politics. The harshest thing most mainstream Democrats said about the country was that Netanyahu’s government was obstructing a two-state agreement with Palestinians. But in the years since the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of Israelis and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, that consensus, which was already losing ground among the Democratic rank and file, gave way. Two years ago, 19 senators in the Democratic caucus voted to block arms sales to Israel; this April, 40 out of 47 did—including most of the presidential aspirants within the caucus. Now, the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the world is an avowed anti-Zionist who campaigned on the promise that he would arrest Netanyahu; a Columbia University activist who joined an October 8, 2023, rally celebrating the Hamas attacks will almost certainly be elected to the next Congress. Leading liberal senators, including Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, have made criticism of Israel a central part of their message.
And the collapse is bipartisan. This month, Vice President J. D. Vance—perhaps the likeliest Republican presidential nominee in 2028—told the podcaster Joe Rogan that the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” a theory for which no evidence exists. Vance accused Israel of scheming against his own diplomacy with Iran. A decade ago, a Republican who talked this way would have been drummed out of the party. Now he is in line to lead it.
[Read: The opening after Netanyahu]
Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, would have shrugged at this turn. A historian of the Spanish Inquisition, he raised his son on the belief that Jewish history is a “history of holocausts”; that anti-Semitism is an immutable fact of Jewish existence in the diaspora, and has been so since Judaism’s daughter religion, Christianity, turned against its mother; that Jews could only find safety behind the iron wall of their own state. Yet the world that Benjamin Netanyahu inherited in the 1980s seemed to refute his father’s dour view. Israel faced enemies sworn to its destruction, but its orchestra played the concert halls of Europe. Its scientists taught in the great universities. American politicians competed to prove their devotion. The diaspora lived with a sense of security unprecedented in Jewish history.
Netanyahu’s early political career also seemed to disprove his father’s fatalism. By 1984, he was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, and his ubiquity on the airwaves embodied the premise that Americans could be persuaded by Israel’s case, that goodwill could be earned by a telegenic man with carefully calibrated arguments.
The hostility that both Israel and the Jewish diaspora have faced since October 7 can be read as Benzion’s vindication: Anti-Semitism was never really gone, only dormant. But eternal hatred alone can’t account for the severity of the whiplash. It is perfectly fair to stipulate that anti-Semitism accounts for the double standard by which Israel is routinely judged, but hatred isn’t what has caused formerly supportive Democrats to view Israel as a political liability. Anti-Semitism isn’t the principal reason that many Americans have come to view Israel as indifferent to Palestinian suffering. Netanyahu’s choices, rhetoric, and actions encouraged these perceptions, and at every point where the damage might have been contained, he made it worse.
Israeli prime ministers had periodically feuded with American presidents. When Yitzhak Rabin balked at withdrawing farther from the Sinai, Gerald Ford announced a “reassessment” of the entire relationship; Ronald Reagan sold weapons systems to the Saudis over Menachem Begin’s opposition; George H. W. Bush withheld loan guarantees to protest Yitzhak Shamir’s construction of Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied territories. Each Israeli premier pushed back the same way, by rallying Israel’s support in Congress. When Ford threatened Rabin, 76 senators from both parties signed a letter insisting that U.S. support continue. The fight stayed a dispute between governments. Prime ministers assiduously avoided turning Israel into a partisan cause.
Netanyahu brought a different set of instincts to the job. His politics were formed in his American years, and he was a dual citizen until 1982. What he absorbed in America was a distaste for the Democratic Party and for the liberalism of most American Jews, who, he believed, valued social justice above their Jewishness. They were, in a phrase he used for Rahm Emanuel, “self-hating.” “Earlier during his career,” according to his biographer Anshel Pfeffer, “Netanyahu made more of an effort to hide these feelings and work on his relationship with liberals.” But the longer he governed, the less he concealed them.
On March 3, 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a joint session of Congress and warned that Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic initiative—a nuclear accord with Iran—would pave the Islamic Republic’s path to a bomb. The Republican speaker of the House had brokered the appearance with Israel’s ambassador, a veteran of GOP politics before he was a diplomat, without informing the White House. No foreign leader had ever been brought into the Capitol by the president’s opposition to argue against him.
Seven years earlier, as he ran for president, Barack Obama was unabashedly sympathetic to Israel. In an interview with this magazine, he professed his “great affinity for the idea of social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement”; a secure Jewish state, he said, was “a fundamentally just idea.” Pfeffer noted that more Jews voted for Obama that fall than have ever cast a ballot for Netanyahu’s Likud party under his leadership. In office, Obama signed the largest military-aid package America had ever extended to any nation. Yet from nearly the beginning, Netanyahu treated the president as an adversary to be outmaneuvered, lecturing him on Jewish history in the Oval Office while cameras rolled, footage that the prime minister later cut into a campaign advertisement for himself. He barely disguised his preference for Mitt Romney in 2012. Among Netanyahu’s closest supporters, a hostile portrait of Obama took hold: a latter-day Chamberlain, a naïf, more friendly to Muslims than Jews.
His jibes against Obama added to the alienation of the American left, which was already drifting from Israel. After the collapse of the peace process, there was no longer a compelling vision of coexistence. Successive Israeli governments kept expanding settlements in the West Bank. And Palestinian activists on college campuses shrewdly cultivated allies on the left who had never given the conflict a moment’s thought. Netanyahu had great power to stop the drift, simply by respecting the president, a liberal icon, and expressing his own desire for a just and equitable solution to the Middle East crisis, even if he privately believed that the Palestinians weren’t interested in compromise. But by attacking a Democratic president so directly and courting his opposition, he began pushing his country to one side of America’s partisan divide.
Then came Trump, whom Netanyahu came to see as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” In Trump, Netanyahu saw his main chance. His obsequious devotion to the president went beyond the flattery other foreign leaders forced themselves to perform. His campaign plastered billboards of the two men shaking hands. He named a settlement “Trump Heights”; his allies announced that a new rail station near the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, would bear Trump’s name. Trump rewarded this loyalty by delivering nearly the whole of Netanyahu’s wish list: He moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, tore up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and refrained from pressuring Netanyahu to negotiate with the Palestinians.
Once Netanyahu lashed Israel to Trump, many Americans who despised the one duly transferred their loathing to the other. But the Israeli leader figured that it didn’t matter. A Democratic Party steeped in secularism and progressive ideology, he assumed, was ultimately going to loathe Israel regardless. Prominent Jewish figures, both in the Democratic Party and in national Jewish organizations, warned him that he was misreading American politics in general and the Democrats specifically, but their warnings were ignored.
As if to prove their point, the president who followed Trump’s first term sacrificed more for Netanyahu than any of his predecessors. After the October 7 massacre, Joe Biden flew to Israel to show solidarity with a distraught nation, then armed and defended its counteroffensive at serious political cost—despite his growing concern that Netanyahu’s goal of eradicating Hamas was unachievable and would exact an unacceptable toll on civilians.
In return for the president’s support, Netanyahu shirked nearly every piece of strategic advice the Biden administration proffered. In June 2024 he posted a video in English, presumably targeting an American audience, in which he accused the administration of withholding U.S. weapons. He complained that Biden was preventing him from winning the war. The accusation was wildly exaggerated—the administration ultimately held back a shipment of only one type of bomb—and made Biden look like a chump. As Biden absorbed blows from his left on Netanyahu’s behalf, Netanyahu attacked him from the right.
[Avi Issacharoff: Israel’s human wrecking ball]
The left wing of Biden’s party turned on him, blaming him for the war’s carnage. In the 2024 Michigan primary, where the incumbent president didn’t face a real challenger, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” to protest a president they deemed responsible for Gaza’s suffering. What began as a revolt against Biden turned into a revolt against the Democratic Party’s historic support of Israel. Activists on the left portrayed that support as evidence of the party’s feckless gerontocracy. AIPAC, the lobbying group that had spent more than half a century making support for Israel a bipartisan reflex, became the foil that many Democrats defined themselves against.
The organization’s symbolic importance ballooned as its influence weakened. Gavin Newsom, Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, and Seth Moulton—none of them stalwarts of the Democratic Socialists of America—all pledged to refuse AIPAC’s money. Moderate Democrats concluded that taking risks to defend Israel had no upside, and not just because of the growing animosity within the party’s base. Netanyahu’s treatment of Biden had shown that loyalty would never be reciprocated. Democrats running for president absorbed the new calculus and have attempted to glean attention for their nascent candidacies through high-profile confrontations with Israel. The divide had been opened by the man who assured Israelis that no one understood the Americans better.
Israel waged war against Iran and its proxies in the name of survival; they have as their plainly stated goal the elimination of the world’s only Jewish-majority state. But survival has a second front: American public opinion. Netanyahu aggressively confronted the military threats—but proceeded to lose on the battlefield that made his career. He had risen to power by persuading Americans on the correctness of his cause, but came to govern as though persuasion were futile, as if his father had been right all along. He never seemed to recognize that his old successes had come amid tailwinds: the Cold War, the wars on terror, decades when America was predisposed to sympathize with Israel’s case. When the zeitgeist turned, Netanyahu did not adjust the argument. He concluded there were no minds to change: The hatred of the Jewish state was immutable. Under Netanyahu, Israeli public diplomacy has treated each new critic not as someone to be persuaded or corrected, but as an anti-Semite revealed.
His indifference to global opinion is on display in his choice of cabinet ministers. In 1988, Israel banned the political party of Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born rabbi whose platform was the mass expulsion of Arabs; on many occasions when Kahane rose to speak in the Knesset, the chamber would empty. When Netanyahu assembled the current government in 2022, he anointed one of Kahane’s disciples, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as his minister of national security. Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric could have been written by Hamas propagandists. Last year, as humanitarian groups and even some Israeli commentators warned of an impending famine, he declared there was “no reason for even a gram of food or any aid whatsoever to enter Gaza” and endorsed the bombing of aid depots. Later that year, he championed the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s residents.
Ben-Gvir’s racist bluster has become star testimony in the case alleging Israel’s genocidal intent. Yet Netanyahu has never meaningfully condemned him, let alone fired him. Ben-Gvir’s party is part of the ruling coalition. He is therefore essential to keeping Netanyahu in power—in protecting the prime minister from prosecution on long-simmering corruption charges.
Still, Netanyahu could have shown the world somehow that Ben-Gvir spoke only for himself. He could have flooded Gaza with food, a policy that would have undercut Hamas’s domination of the aid market and its profiteering from scarcity. Instead, he pushed out the UN’s main relief agency and entrusted the feeding of 2 million people to an untested outfit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—an operation so ill-conceived that its own director resigned before it began, and whose distribution sites periodically became scenes of chaos and death.
[Read: The Israel of October 6 is never coming back]
Netanyahu has never put forward a serious plan for governing Gaza, or for rebuilding it, or for removing Hamas from power—not during the war, and not now. The Biden administration implored him to hand captured territory to a reformed Palestinian Authority, backed by Arab peacekeepers. Netanyahu countered that the PA was weak, corrupt, and unloved in Gaza. Every objection was true, and none of it was the reason for Netanyahu’s refusal. He refused because any realistic form of Palestinian self-governance would have alienated the furthest-right parties in his coalition, which preferred resettling Gaza. So Israel kept fighting without any vision of how the conflict might end. As the destruction mounted, Netanyahu allowed the world to draw its own conclusions about his country’s intentions.
When the Trump administration finally brokered a cease-fire, Israeli troops remained in a buffer zone in Gaza. Netanyahu promised total victory, but failed to dislodge Hamas. Even then, Netanyahu was handed an opportunity without precedent in Israeli history to bolster his nation’s damaged image. The Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, was prepared to broker Saudi recognition of Israel—the custodian of Mecca and Medina conferring the legitimacy the Muslim world had withheld for almost eight decades. Normalization might have emboldened other Muslim countries—Indonesia, Qatar, a slew of African states—to take the same leap. Having alienated the American left, Israel could have wrapped itself in the embrace of the Islamic world. But Netanyahu would not supply the one thing the Saudis required: a process toward creating a Palestinian state. Such a promise, no matter how vague, would have cost him support on his right, and possibly his coalition. So the Saudi deal went neglected, although the Trump administration now wants to revive it. The nation that styled itself as the leader of the Islamic world was apparently prepared to officially change its mind about the Jews, and Netanyahu declined.
Even if his father was right about anti-Semitism being an unshakeable fact of Jewish existence, diagnosing that condition shouldn’t require acceding to it. Netanyahu has governed as if there were nothing he could do to prevent his country from becoming a pariah or to combat the rising hatred directed at the diaspora. He learned nothing from the example of Ukraine’s Volodmyr Zelensky, who supplied the playbook for how an invaded country cultivates international sympathy. Every gesture that might have plausibly improved Israel’s case—the dismissal of a minister, a plan for Gaza, a show of openness to Palestinian statehood—would have threatened his governing coalition and put him in legal jeopardy. He always chose himself.
Bigots would have found a pretext to hate Israel, no matter what. Anti-Israel extremism was flourishing in the American university before October 7, which is why a succession of suspiciously well-organized protests against Israel erupted the day after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. But Israel will come to regret how much American political support it has sacrificed on Netanyahu’s watch—and not just on the left. Political independents have come to sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis; 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Netanyahu’s country; a majority of Republicans under the age of 45 oppose renewing Obama’s military-aid package; support among young evangelicals, once the pro-Israel bastion of the electorate, is cratering. Netanyahu’s legacy is Israel’s isolation. Perhaps that wasn’t preventable. His failure is that he never tried to avoid this fate.
The post How Netanyahu Lost America appeared first on The Atlantic.
