Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is back in Washington this week, and his presence at the Capitol produced the usual round of Bibi-bashing. His arrival set off alarms among two very different American constituent groups that view him with both distaste and fear: the anti-Israel right and Jewish liberals.
The former are angry about something that is actually true: the strong relationship between Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, as well as the support for the Jewish state to be found among the vast majority of Republicans and conservatives. Jewish liberals are also upset, though most of their complaints are about something that isn’t true: the claim that it was Netanyahu who lost the Democrats for Israel.
The isolationist wing of the GOP worries about Netanyahu. It fears that he will persuade Trump to continue fighting to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and to stop its support for international terrorism, rather than surrendering to it, as isolationists within the administration—a group apparently led by U.S. Vice President JD Vance—would prefer.
But their real problem is that the majority of Republicans still back Israel. And despite the occasional tensions and policy differences between Trump and Netanyahu, the alliance is not broken.
A scapegoat for liberal failure
Liberals, especially Jewish liberals, also use Netanyahu as a scapegoat. But for very different reasons.
For them, he is the reason why their party hasn’t just gone cool on Israel. As recent congressional votes demonstrated, it is now the anti-Israel party, with the majority of Democrats voting to oppose even the sending of defensive weapons to Israel. That includes the Iron Dome missile-defense system, which has saved countless lives that might have been lost to fire from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as from their Iranian paymasters.
AIPAC has become a punching bag for Democrats. Many of even those who call themselves pro-Israel moderates are now either refusing their support or being asked to return donations after betraying their constituents by siding with leftist, anti-Zionists and voting for the resolution proposed by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)—the lame-duck sole anti-Israel member of the GOP caucus—to ban military aid to Israel. Among them was Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), who represents the most Jewish district in New England but, feeling the pressure from the prevalent anti-Israel faction in his party, has joined the ranks of Democrats signaling their opposition to the Jewish state.
His excuse, like that of other Democrats, is to blame it all on Trump and Netanyahu, and the war on Iran. That position makes sense in a strictly partisan context since Democrats feel obligated to oppose anything the president does. But if he was actually interested in defending the security of Israel, it’s difficult to see how he could square that stand with one that regarded efforts to stop Tehran from getting nuclear weapons as a deal-breaker for the alliance. Instead, he seemed to echo the claims of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum by falsely labeling the conflict as being fought only for Israel, rather than something as basic as the common defense of the West against an Islamist terror regime.
Yet Democrats like Auchincloss argue that it’s not their fault that their party has become alienated from Israel. They say it’s because Netanyahu aligned his country with the Republicans.
For a good summary of this thesis, turn to a recent article in The Atlantic—the reliable source of liberal conventional wisdom disguised as intellectual analysis for the inside-the-Beltway crowd—by Franklin Foer, its current resident “expert” on American Jewry. He has written about the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism and what he termed the looming end of a “golden age” of American Jewry. Yet Foer, like many liberals, has it backwards when discussing what happened to the Democrats with respect to Israel.
He claims that Netanyahu—a man who understood America better than any other Israeli leader for having studied and spent many of his formative years in the country—inherited a great relationship. But he allegedly ruined it by embracing Republicans like Trump, and rejecting the good advice and friendship of Democratic presidents like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and by generally acting and sounding mean to Palestinian Arabs.
Not only does this represent a fraudulent account of the history of the last three American presidencies but also ignores the trend of the last few decades, during which Democrats became increasingly hostile to Israel while Republicans became its most ardent supporters.
During the George W. Bush administration, Jewish Democrats complained nonstop about the GOP boasting of its backing for the Jewish state. But what they really objected to was the reality of a shifting political landscape in which progressives had turned on the Jewish state. Noticing this trend was wrong, since they said it undermined the increasingly shaky bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in Washington.
If Israelis like Netanyahu were willing to be friendly to Republicans, it was because they understood that one party was almost universally interested in promoting the alliance while the other was becoming deeply divided over it. While Democrats openly endorsed Netanyahu’s left-wing domestic opponents, they expected him to shun their GOP rivals in spite of their unabashed embrace of the Jewish state.
More than that, intellectual fashion was shifting inside the United States in a way that ensured that this transformation of opinion on Israel within the left became an unstoppable force. It was during this period that the intersectional left—fueled by toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism—completed its long march through American institutions.
Over the course of the last generation, mainstream liberal ideas that embraced Zionism as a just cause were replaced by the notion that Israel and the Jews were “white” oppressors always in the wrong. Meanwhile, the Palestinians and other opponents of Israel, like Iran, were viewed paradoxically as oppressed “people of color” who were always in the right, no matter what they did.
Obama was no friend
Deeply influenced by leftist ideologues, Obama was smart enough not to publicly promote such ideas. But in retrospect, much of what he did in office to exacerbate racial relations at home and alienate the United States from Israel is better understood when placed in this context.
Yet according to Foer, Obama “was unabashedly sympathetic to Israel” and was repaid for it with lectures, sniping and sabotage by Netanyahu. Obama could talk a good game about supporting the Jewish state while running for the presidency in 2008, and again during his re-election year Jewish charm offensive in 2012 (when he pledged to end Iran’s nuclear program during his foreign-policy debate with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney). But he spent two terms in the White House doing quite the opposite.
Obama was a pragmatist who knew that he was operating in what was then still a pro-Israel environment in which open hostility to the alliance would have been political poison. But his policies, first hinted at in his infamous Cairo University speech (the highlight of his first Middle East tour, when he pointedly snubbed Israel), during which he falsely compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust, sought to realign the Middle East. His goal was a rapprochement with the Muslim world—specifically, with the Islamist regime in Iran—while relegating Israel to secondary status.
While Foer and other Democrats cite Netanyahu’s 2011 public “lecture” of Obama about Israel’s security as an intolerable affront to the president, they forget its context. The day before, Obama had ambushed Netanyahu by giving a speech declaring the imperative of forcing Israel back to the 1949 armistice lines and the creation of a Palestinian state.
Obama spent eight years in office seeking more “daylight” between the United States and Israel by the constant baiting of Netanyahu on the part of both the president and his staff. Once re-elected in 2012, Obama largely dropped the pretense that he was Israel’s friend and focused on his primary foreign-policy goal: appeasing Iran. After repeatedly lying to the American public and deceiving the Israelis about his objective, he was able to get Tehran to agree to a disastrous accord in 2015 that, far from denying them nuclear weapons, actually guaranteed that they would eventually get them with Western acquiescence.
Democrats treated Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama on Iran as an insult. Still, it galvanized opposition to a disastrous policy and ultimately paved the way for its reversal by Trump in 2018. Whatever one might think of Netanyahu, his confrontations with Obama were forced on him.
Misunderstanding Israel
As for Netanyahu’s embrace of Trump, Democrats—most especially, liberal Jews—have never seemed to understand that expecting Israelis to adopt their attitudes toward the president, in which he should be treated as beyond the pale, wasn’t just unreasonable. Given that Trump was willing to do more for Israel than any of his predecessors—such as moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and demanding that the Palestinian Authority stop funding terrorism—Netanyahu’s efforts to ingratiate himself with him were the only rational option.
Foer’s claims about the Biden administration are similarly false. According to The Atlantic, Biden did everything possible to back up Israel after the tragedy of Oct. 7, 2023. But while his initial statements and visit to Israel after the attack were the right thing to do and warmly appreciated by the Israelis, he began reversing that stand almost as soon as he took it.
Biden was under enormous pressure from his own party to denounce Israel. Taking their cue from a mainstream liberal media that acted more as Hamas stenographers than honest news gatherers, many Democrats responded to Oct. 7 as primarily a story about Israeli brutality, instead of proof of Palestinian devotion to the cause of eradicating the Jewish state and the genocide of its people. At every stage of the war that ensued, Biden sought to hamstring Israeli efforts to destroy Hamas, even slow-walking weapons deliveries to influence the course of the conflict. The “good advice” Biden offered would have left Hamas strengthened, rather than isolated and defeated. Only in a political environment in which his administration was seen by much of his party as insufficiently hostile to Israel could Biden be viewed as a great friend of the Jewish state after Oct. 7.
Foer also argues that Netanyahu’s harsh attitude to the Palestinians alienated Americans. Like former Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, he believes that Israel’s rejection of the two-state solution that Democrats still claim to uphold is a mistake. But that only reflects a profound ignorance among such Jewish liberals about Israeli public opinion.
Israelis may be deeply divided about whether to keep their longest-serving prime minister in office, and Netanyahu may find himself defeated for re-election in October. But they aren’t divided about his policies on war and peace when it comes to the Palestinians and Iran. No conceivable alternative to Netanyahu would be any more willing to endanger his nation with territorial surrenders to a foe that has demonstrated over and over again that it remains uninterested in peace on any terms but the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet.
Buying into blood libels
Any successor to Netanyahu will have the same problems with a Democratic Party that has been captured by people who have accepted blood libels about Israel committing “genocide.” Even figures once deemed moderates, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, now think they must parrot these falsehoods to be deemed acceptable by their party’s voters.
Again, this is a claim rooted more in the sort of disinformation about the post-Oct. 7 war that dominated press coverage in which Israel was (and still is) being portrayed as seeking to starve and deliberately kill as many Palestinian people as possible. One can critique Israel’s public information policies; however, the harsh truth is that there is nothing that Netanyahu could have said or done to convince the Democrats’ leftist base that they were being fed lies about Israel’s so-called “war crimes” by mainstream media outlets like The New York Times.
Liberal failure
Netanyahu didn’t lose the Democrats for Israel. He merely adapted to a change in American politics that was the product of forces and factors over which he had no control. More to the point, liberals like Foer are using Netanyahu as a whipping boy for their own failures.
For a generation, critics of the left had warned liberal Jews that they were ignoring the fact that a Democratic Party that was once overwhelmingly pro-Israel was changing. Instead of fighting the forces working so hard to drive a wedge between the Democrats and the Jewish community, they refused to see any enemies on the left. Instead, they doubled down on the false notion that antisemitism was solely a problem on the political right, even falsely accusing Trump of being the prime source of its growth.
In the last decade, Jewish liberals, including establishment groups like the Anti-Defamation League, bent their knees to the hard left on issues like the antisemitic Black Lives Matter movement. They embraced false narratives about Islamophobia—which, in practice, merely meant those who noticed Muslim antisemitism—being a problem that was as important as Jew-hatred. They pretended not to notice when hatred for Israel and its supporters by the left-wing “Squad” in the U.S. House of Representatives was gradually being adopted by more and more Democrats.
By the time of the Oct. 7 attacks, pro-Israel liberals found themselves isolated. They claim that Netanyahu is responsible for their plight, though they have no one to blame but themselves. They failed to stop the anti-Israel left when it was weak. Even now, they still rally around institutions like elite American universities that encourage and enable antisemitism rather than join with Trump in trying to force them to reform.
Nothing in politics is forever. It’s theoretically possible that the Democrats will, if they suffer disastrous losses after nominating hard-core leftists who hate Israel in this year’s midterms or the 2028 presidential election, come back to their senses and reject the intersectional left. Whether or not that is possible, focusing on Netanyahu is merely a way for Jewish liberals to ignore their own cowardly surrender of their party.
They have stood by and let a faction that has embraced not just hostility to Israel, but the open Jew-hatred of figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the “Squad,” dictate the Democrats’ positions. If they wish to reclaim it, then they need to stop scapegoating Netanyahu and obsessing about Trump, and start fighting the antisemites in their own party.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
