In 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu was the marketing director of a Jerusalem-based furniture company when Israel’s ambassador in Washington decided that the 32-year-old was promoting the wrong product. Instead of selling cabinets to Israelis, he should be selling Israel to Americans.
The ambassador had met Netanyahu at a conference several years earlier and brought him to Washington as his deputy. Netanyahu quickly became Israel’s face on American television, appearing regularly on Nightline and Larry King Live. He was bold and articulate, speaking fluent, accent-free English, acquired during his childhood in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
Over the next four decades, Netanyahu’s role remained largely unchanged across nearly every position he held. He saw himself as the guardian of Israel’s standing in the United States, a responsibility he entrusted to no one because he believed no one understood it better than he did.
Yet Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has failed catastrophically in that mission.
The Collapse of Bipartisan Support
Little more than a decade ago, support for Israel was one of the last remaining bipartisan instincts in American politics.
The harshest criticism most establishment Democrats directed at Israel was that Netanyahu’s government was obstructing a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
But in the years following the Hamas-led attack against Israelis on 7 October and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, that consensus, already weakening among Democrats, collapsed.
Two years ago, 19 senators from the Democratic caucus voted against arms sales to Israel. In April last year, 40 of the caucus’s 47 members did so, including most of those seeking to lead it.
The mayor of the city with the world’s largest Jewish population is now an outspoken anti-Zionist who campaigned on a promise to arrest Netanyahu. A Columbia University activist who joined a rally on 8 October 2023 celebrating the Hamas attacks is almost certain to be elected to the next Congress.
Prominent liberal senators, including Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, have made criticism of Israel a central part of their political message.
The collapse now extends across both parties.
This month, Vice President JD Vance, the Republican frontrunner for the 2028 presidential nomination, told podcaster Joe Rogan that financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “clearly had connections at the highest levels of Israeli intelligence”, a theory for which no evidence has been produced.
Vance also accused Israel of conspiring against his diplomatic efforts with Iran.
A decade ago, a Republican who spoke in such terms would have been driven from the party. Today, Vance appears positioned to lead it.
The World Netanyahu Inherited
Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, would likely have met this transformation with indifference.
A historian specialising in the Spanish Inquisition, he raised his son to believe that Jewish history was “a history of holocausts”, that antisemitism was a permanent feature of Jewish life in the diaspora, and that it had been so since Christianity, the “daughter” religion of Judaism, turned against its “mother”.
He believed Jews could find safety only behind the iron wall of their own state.
Yet the world Benjamin Netanyahu inherited in the 1980s appeared to contradict his father’s grim outlook.
Israel faced enemies who had sworn to destroy it, but Israeli orchestras performed in European concert halls, its academics taught at major universities, and American politicians competed to demonstrate their loyalty to it.
Jews in the diaspora lived with a sense of security without precedent in Jewish history.
Netanyahu’s early political career also appeared to disprove his father’s pessimism.
In 1984, he became Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. His frequent television appearances embodied the belief that Americans could be persuaded of Israel’s case, and that goodwill could be earned through a compelling media performer presenting carefully constructed arguments.
The hostility directed at Israel and the Jewish diaspora since 7 October can be interpreted as confirmation of Benzion Netanyahu’s view that antisemitism never disappeared but merely remained dormant.
Yet eternal hatred alone does not explain the intensity or suddenness of the shift.
It is fair to argue that antisemitism helps explain the double standards routinely applied to Israel. But hatred is not what caused previously supportive Democrats to regard Israel as a political liability.
Nor is antisemitism the principal reason many Americans now see Israel as indifferent to Palestinian suffering.
Netanyahu’s choices, rhetoric and actions encouraged these perceptions. At every point when the damage could have been contained, he made it worse.
Turning Israel Into a Partisan Issue
Israeli prime ministers have long clashed with American presidents.
When Yitzhak Rabin refused to withdraw from Sinai, Gerald Ford announced a “reassessment” of the entire relationship.
Ronald Reagan sold weapons systems to Saudi Arabia despite Menachem Begin’s opposition.
George HW Bush withheld loan guarantees in protest against Yitzhak Shamir’s construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
Each Israeli prime minister responded in the same way, by mobilising congressional support for Israel.
When Ford threatened Rabin, 76 senators from both parties signed a letter stressing the need for continued American support.
The disagreement remained a dispute between governments, while Israeli prime ministers carefully avoided turning Israel into a partisan issue.
Netanyahu brought a different set of assumptions into office.
His political outlook had been shaped during his years in the United States, where he held dual citizenship until 1982.
He may have developed there an aversion to the Democratic Party and to the liberalism of most American Jews, whom he believed valued social justice more than their Jewish identity.
He described them, as he did Rahm Emanuel, as “self-hating”.
According to his biographer Anshel Pfeffer, Netanyahu “made a greater effort early in his career to conceal these feelings and improve his relationship with liberals”.
The longer he remained in power, however, the less he hid them.
The Break With Obama
On 3 March 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a joint session of Congress and warned that Barack Obama’s most prominent diplomatic initiative, the nuclear agreement with Iran, would pave the Islamic Republic’s path to a nuclear bomb.
The Republican speaker of the House had arranged the appearance with Israel’s ambassador, a veteran Republican political operative before becoming a diplomat, without informing the White House.
Never before had opponents of an American president brought a foreign leader into the Capitol to speak against him.
Seven years earlier, while campaigning for the presidency, Obama had expressed open sympathy for Israel.
In an interview with this magazine, he spoke of his “strong connection to the idea of social justice embodied by the early Zionist movement” and described a secure Jewish state as “an idea that is fundamentally just”.
Pfeffer noted that more Jews voted for Obama that autumn than had ever voted for Netanyahu’s Likud Party.
As president, Obama signed the largest military assistance package the United States had ever provided to another country.
Netanyahu nevertheless treated Obama as an adversary to be defeated from the beginning.
He lectured him on Jewish history in the Oval Office before television cameras, footage he later turned into an election advertisement for himself.
He made little effort to conceal his preference for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.
Among Netanyahu’s closest supporters, a hostile image of Obama took root: a new Chamberlain, a naive figure more sympathetic to Muslims than to Jews.
Netanyahu’s contempt for Obama deepened the alienation of the American left, which had already begun distancing itself from Israel.
After the collapse of the peace process, there was no longer a convincing vision of coexistence.
Successive Israeli governments continued expanding settlements in the West Bank, while Palestinian activists on university campuses skilfully built alliances with left-wing groups that had previously shown little interest in the conflict.
Netanyahu could have slowed this drift relatively easily by respecting the president, a liberal symbol, and expressing a desire for a just and equitable solution to the Middle East crisis, even if he privately believed the Palestinians were unwilling to compromise.
Instead, by openly attacking a Democratic president and courting his opponents, he began pushing Israel towards one side of America’s partisan divide.
Netanyahu’s Embrace of Trump
Then came President Donald Trump, whom Netanyahu described as “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House”.
Netanyahu saw Trump as his great opportunity.
His commitment to flattering the president went far beyond the courtesies normally required of foreign leaders.
His election campaign filled Israeli streets with billboards showing the two men shaking hands.
A new settlement was named Trump Heights.
His allies announced that a new railway station near the Buraq Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, would bear Trump’s name.
Trump rewarded this loyalty by granting Netanyahu almost everything on his list of demands.
He moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, tore up the nuclear agreement Obama had signed with Iran, and refrained from pressuring Netanyahu to negotiate with the Palestinians.
Once Netanyahu tied Israel to Trump, many Americans who hated one transferred that hostility to the other.
The Israeli leader did not care.
He assumed that the Democratic Party, immersed in secularism and progressive ideology, would eventually come to hate Israel anyway.
Prominent Jewish figures, both in the Democratic Party and in national Jewish organisations, warned him that he was misreading American politics generally and Democrats in particular.
Their warnings were ignored.
Biden’s Support and Netanyahu’s Response
As if to prove those warnings correct, the Democratic president who succeeded Trump after his first term sacrificed more for Netanyahu than any of his predecessors.
After the 7 October attack, Joe Biden travelled to Israel to demonstrate solidarity with a state in shock.
He armed it and defended its counterattack despite the enormous political cost, even as he grew increasingly concerned that Netanyahu’s objective of eliminating Hamas was unattainable and would produce unacceptable civilian casualties.
In return for the president’s support, Netanyahu ignored almost every strategic recommendation made by the Biden administration.
In June 2024, he released an English-language video apparently aimed at an American audience in which he accused the administration of withholding American weapons.
He complained that Biden was preventing him from winning the war.
The accusation was highly exaggerated. The administration ultimately paused only one shipment of a single type of bomb.
Yet the video made Biden appear weak.
While Biden was absorbing attacks from the left for defending Netanyahu, Netanyahu attacked him from the right.
The left wing of Biden’s party turned against him, blaming him for the massacre produced by the war.
In Michigan’s 2024 Democratic primary, where the incumbent president faced no serious challenger, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” in protest against a president they considered responsible for Gaza’s suffering.
What began as a revolt against Biden became a revolt against the Democratic Party’s historic support for Israel.
Left-wing activists portrayed that support as evidence of the failure of the party’s ageing leadership.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which had spent more than half a century making support for Israel a bipartisan reflex, became the adversary against which many Democrats defined themselves.
Its symbolic importance grew even as its influence declined.
Gavin Newsom, Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego and Seth Moulton, none of them icons of the Democratic Socialists of America, pledged to reject AIPAC funding.
Moderate Democrats concluded that taking political risks to defend Israel offered no benefit, not only because hostility was increasing within the party’s base.
Netanyahu’s treatment of Biden demonstrated that loyalty would never be reciprocated.
Democratic presidential hopefuls absorbed the new equation and sought attention for their emerging campaigns through high-profile confrontations with Israel.
The divide was opened by the man who had assured Israelis that no one understood Americans better than he did.
A Second Front for Israel’s Survival
Israel waged war against Iran and its proxies in the name of survival, arguing that they openly sought the elimination of the world’s only Jewish-majority state.
But Israel’s survival now faces a second front: American public opinion.
Netanyahu confronted military threats aggressively, but began losing on the battlefield that had made his career.
He rose to power by persuading Americans of the justice of his cause.
He came to govern as though persuasion were pointless, and as though his father had been right all along.
He never appeared to understand that his earlier successes had occurred under favourable conditions: the Cold War, the wars on terror and decades during which the United States was inclined to sympathise with Israel’s cause.
When the prevailing mood changed, Netanyahu did not adjust his argument.
He concluded that no minds could be changed, and that hatred of the Jewish state was permanent and immutable.
Under Netanyahu, Israeli public diplomacy treated every new critic not as someone to persuade or correct, but as an antisemite.
Ben-Gvir and the Cost of Coalition Survival
Netanyahu’s indifference to global opinion is most clearly reflected in his choice of ministers.
In 1988, Israel banned the political party of Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born rabbi whose platform centred on the mass expulsion of Arabs.
On numerous occasions when Kahane rose to speak in the Knesset, the chamber emptied.
When Netanyahu formed his current government in 2022, he appointed one of Kahane’s followers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as national security minister.
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 that there was “no reason for even a single gram of food or any aid at all to enter Gaza” and supported bombing aid warehouses.
Later that year, he defended the “voluntary migration” of Gaza’s population.
Ben-Gvir’s racist statements became prominent evidence in the case accusing Israel of committing genocide.
Yet Netanyahu never seriously condemned him, let alone dismissed him.
Ben-Gvir’s party forms part of the governing coalition and is therefore essential to keeping Netanyahu in power and protecting the prime minister from prosecution over long-running corruption charges.
Netanyahu could still have shown the world that Ben-Gvir spoke only for himself.
He could have flooded Gaza with food, a policy that would have disrupted Hamas’s control over the aid market and its exploitation of scarcity.
Instead, he removed the main United Nations relief agency and entrusted the task of feeding two million people to an organisation without sufficient experience for the mission, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
The operation was so poorly planned that its director resigned before it began, while its distribution sites repeatedly became scenes of chaos and death.
Netanyahu never presented a serious plan for governing Gaza, rebuilding it or removing Hamas from power, either during the war or afterwards.
No Plan for Gaza
The Biden administration strongly urged Netanyahu to transfer occupied territory to a reformed Palestinian Authority backed by Arab peacekeeping forces.
Netanyahu responded that the Palestinian Authority was weak, corrupt and unpopular in Gaza.
Each objection was valid.
None of them, however, represented the real reason for his refusal.
He rejected the proposal because any realistic form of Palestinian self-government would have alienated the most extreme right-wing parties in his coalition, which favoured resettling Gaza.
Israel therefore continued fighting without any vision of how the conflict would end.
As the destruction increased, Netanyahu allowed the world to draw its own conclusions about his country’s intentions.
When the Trump administration eventually mediated a ceasefire, Israeli forces remained inside a buffer zone in Gaza.
Netanyahu had promised total victory, but failed to remove Hamas.
Even then, he was presented with an opportunity unprecedented in Israeli history to repair his country’s damaged international image.
The Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, was prepared to mediate Saudi recognition of Israel.
Recognition from the custodian of Mecca and Medina would have provided Israel with legitimacy that the Islamic world had denied it for nearly eight decades.
Normalisation could have encouraged other Muslim-majority countries, including Indonesia and Qatar, as well as a large number of African states, to take the same step.
After distancing Israel from the American left, Netanyahu could have repositioned it within the Muslim world.
But he refused to offer the one thing the Saudis requested: a process aimed at establishing a Palestinian state.
Such a commitment, however vague, would have cost him support from the right and possibly his coalition.
The Saudi agreement was therefore neglected, although the Trump administration now seeks to revive it.
A state that presented itself as a leader of the Muslim world appeared prepared to change its formal position towards Jews, but Netanyahu refused.
Personal Survival Over Israel’s Interests
Even if Netanyahu’s father was correct that antisemitism is an entrenched reality of Jewish existence, diagnosing that condition should not require surrendering to it.
Netanyahu governed as though he were incapable of preventing his country from becoming a pariah state or of confronting the rising hatred directed against the diaspora.
He learned nothing from the example of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who offered a practical model for how an invaded country could win international sympathy.
Every step that could reasonably have improved Israel’s position, dismissing a minister, producing a plan for Gaza or expressing openness to a Palestinian state, would have threatened Netanyahu’s governing coalition and intensified his legal difficulties.
He consistently chose his personal interest.
Fanatics would have found a reason to hate Israel regardless of what happened.
Extreme anti-Israel activism was flourishing on American university campuses before 7 October, which is why a series of suspiciously organised protests against Israel erupted the day after the worst massacre since the Holocaust.
Yet Israel will eventually regret the scale of American political support sacrificed under Netanyahu, and not only on the left.
Independent voters have become more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis.
Sixty per cent of American adults now view Netanyahu’s state negatively.
A majority of Republicans under the age of 45 oppose renewing the military aid package.
Support has also fallen sharply among young evangelical Christians, once Israel’s strongest electoral constituency.
Netanyahu’s true legacy is Israel’s isolation.
Perhaps that outcome could not have been avoided.
His failure is that he never seriously attempted to avoid it.
