by Jonathan S. Tobin
Jewish liberals blame the prime minister for the collapse of support for the Jewish state because it absolves them of not stopping the antisemitic left from hijacking their party.
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| Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu attends a vote at the Knesset in Jerusalem, July 16, 2026.
Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90. |
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 the Jerusalem News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek
and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American
political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle
East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice”
podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily”
program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube.
Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief
political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other
writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and
foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia
University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/opinion/column/jonathan-s-tobin/netanyahu-didnt-lose-the-democrats-for-israel
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