How Netanyahu Lost America - The Atlantic

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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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>And the collapse is bipartisan. This month, Vice President 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.<br>Read: The opening after Netanyahu<br>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 find safety only 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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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...