I told a Jewish friend, a member of AIPAC and against Obama’s Iran deal, that Bibi’s address to Congress and throwing Israel’s lot with the Republicans would not serve Israel well for the future with upcoming generations. He Pooh-pooped my comments—Bibi knows what he’s doing.
Interesting Eli and I see that address as a pivotal moment.
I think a lot of the sharp drop in approval over the past year is almost entirely thermostatic. You'll never get back what you lost but I can be better with new leadership.
This piece is speculation ungrounded in fact. Jews as the cause of Jew hate, if only the Jews did this or that differently, has a long and unpleasant history & this time, that if only Israel rid itself of Bibi, is no different.
The American Left has been turning on Israel for decades. Israel and now Jews (🤣) are seen as White- and the anti whitey machine has been running in America for 60+ years especially on campus. The American Left switched to gay race communism in the 1990s because of the fall of the USSR and as importantly Boomer Tenure. Given the cost of American education the Profs needed that anger directed somewhere away from themselves.
As for this articles Get Bibi thrust… and what?
The Israeli Left gets to make a suicide pact to give the Palestinians the vote and get back into office? The results of which won’t be even South Africa but far worse very fast.
The American Left isn’t going to reconcile with anyone white while it draws breath, Jews just happen to be perceived as White and another colonial oppressor. Israel will make peace with the Palestinians before the American Left makes peace with whites. Ultimately peace will be made on identical terms in both countries.
The Irony from the American POV is not lost on anyone in America, that doesn’t mean Israel has to commit suicide.
No, feeding the mob Bibi will not placate the American Left.
Author, the destruction of Israel won’t restore campus status. You’re a white in America, author.
The Irony is lost on no American of any race, color or creed. 😉
Relax a little, Israel-America is taking a vacation from the world. Long overdue and we earned it.
What is most critical of course is not to get on the sanctions list ala South Africa, Rhodesia et al. It is easier to avoid the sanctions list if we 🇺🇸 forget that you are around and….
Firstly, this is a great analysis and very well written. That said, I have 2 things that is quite hesitant:
1. The article undermines how much Oct 7 changes things. Even with a different isreal goverment, a war Gaza war is still happening, so a drop in support was inevitable. However, the qn should be kf a centrist goverment could've kept the drop to lets say 15 points instead of 40.
2. The left's anti-Zionism is treated too gently. Yes it is a 'moral framework', but its antisemitism, which denis Israel's right to exist. Framkng it as more respectable doesnt make it less dangerous .
Israel is a Hitlerian project from first principles. It is antithetical to humanism and basic human decency besides.
Netanyahu is correct in his assumption that only nazis, only moral degenerates, will ever support Israel in the US again.
Yes, many nazis will not, because they're nazis. But authoritarians can and do put aside their racism if convenient friends further their aims (Nazi Germany undoubtedly had nothing but contempt for Asians, but that didn't prevent them from allying with Imperial Japan.)
Support for Israel on the American left is done forever. It will never return.
Support for Israel among American fascists will depend on what the fascists think Israel has to offer the US, and to any rational person the answer is nothing. But, Israel is in luck, insofar as fascists are irrational people.
That doesn't guarantee their support (right-wing anti-semitism has a long history in the US, and it appears to be making a comeback,) but there is at least a chance that the fascists will cleave to one another, because fascism is weak and needs all the help it can get.
But there is no argument a genocidal ethnostate is going to make to progressives that will be given the slightest time of day, and the world is finally accepting what Israel is and has always been.
I’m a 46 year old American who politics are center left. I would have considered myself mostly supportive of Israel - the U.S. should support Israel and peace efforts, for a 2-state solution, against the expansions of settlements in the West Bank. The October 7th attacks were horrific and I supported the initial response. I argued that charges of genocide was unfair.
Now though, I think the U.S. should neither give nor sell weapons to Israel.
I do think Israel can win back support but it’ll take a willingness to recommit to a two state solution.
The implication that anti-Israel sentiments on college campuses are a Qatari op always bugs me, because as a Jewish former student at a public university, Israeli lobbying was inescapable.
Hillel is one of the two mainstream organs of Jewish life on campus and support for Israel is literally in their online mission statement. Can't speak for Chabad, but I assume it's the same. Israel fellows, Birthright, summer internships, semester abroad program, Israeli Independence programming all over campus. You are not getting a nuanced opinion about Israeli politics from the supermajority of people that you meet in these organizations. This is all very explicit with no shadowy conspiracy theories required, but it gets a pass because tropes are bad? Because pro-Palestinian opinions are political (bad) but pro-Israel opinions are religious (good)?
I agree with much of what you said, but I would add that Netanyahu’s government could’ve done vastly more to protect the lives of Palestinian civilians, and to make sure that they get adequate humanitarian aid. And supporting terrorism by Israeli settlers, so they can drive Palestinians from their land and take it, obviously, this will create enormous opposition in the United States, as it should.
Finally, corrupt, Trump and Orban like Netanyahu trying to end democracy in your own country, horribly hurts the image of your country amongst members of the Democratic Party.
I don’t know what the solution is to this, but if the voters of Israel do not reembrace democracy, human rights for everyone, and a two state solution, by opposing Netanyahu and the far right, then Israel will become more and more of a pariah, and thus weaker and poorer, alone in the world. Of course, we have our own fight to save democracy in the United States.
In a rational world, Israel will be less important to the U.S. than Guam and about as important an Ecuador or Slovenia. A healthy but arms length relationship.
There is no good reason for America to get down in the mud that will be thrown up when the inevitable one state, from the river to the sea, outcome occurs. That outcome won’t because of the indigenous Gentiles. It will because of the right wing pro-squatter Jewish crazies as represented by the reprehensible Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
As in every other country, we should promote a democratic outcome in that new single state (Palesrael?), with absolutely equal rights for all and zero ethnic supremacy. We’ve all learned lessons from the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. Good luck to the citizens of this new land.
One land, two tribes, 3 religions. Living in peace.
This largely the fault of Netanyahu, he's been just endorsing Republicans for years. So good will amongst Dems was already low so they were primed to be targets of disinformation. A change in leadership is needed.
Good take. However, I disagree with the argument that only the anti-Israel American left is persuadable. Much of American right-wing anti-Israel sentiment is indeed irrational, conspiratorial, and simply antisemitic. But we can't let the crazies have the last word. If Israel were to take decisive steps toward regional integration, it would also cool some of the anti-Israel fervor on the isolationist right by reducing Israel's dependence on the US. The Israeli government also needs to take religious intolerance, some of which targets Christians, more seriously, as it provides catnip for demagogues like Tucker Carlson (in addition to simply being morally wrong). See Nadav Eyal's article at https://www.nadaveyal.com/p/israel-has-a-growing-religious-intolerance
Point taken on the right. Regional integration, a Palestinian horizon, and a path off aid are the same project, and getting them right takes most of the material from the isolationist critique. Not sure how much of Tucker's audience is persuadable on policy though. Their complaint is about Jewish power, and I don't think any Israeli course correction really fixes that. Agree with you on religious intolerance. Today's events are just another example of how badly this coalition has failed on it.
The continued demographic decline of the largely liberal non-Orthodox Jewish community, and the demographic growth of the right-wing Orthodox Jews, might "persuade" Tucker's audience by giving them less of a reason to resent Jewish power.
Your piece is a-historical. Netanyahu didn’t “coordinate” with the Obama team because, as you yourself certainly know, but forgot to mention, Obama and Bibi were not on speaking terms. Bibi came in 2015 to try to convince the US that the JCPOA was a bad deal. Because it WAS A BAD DEAL. The rest of your piece is the usual anti-Bibi Drek. Israel hasn’t “done” anything to lose so much support in the US. The Palestinians and their supporters have been building this anti-Israel project right here in our backyard for years, and they have been quite successful. Your piece reflects badly upon you. One more Jew apologizing for Jews exerting strength and defending themselves.
Polls show roughly 80% of Israelis support their government’s genocide. Fuck every fucking one of them. This is about way more than Israel’s government. We’ve spent the past 2.5 years watching a live streamed genocide. I don’t want a single penny of my taxes going to that apartheid state and I refuse to vote for any politician who still supports that evil country. Its end cannot come soon enough.
I'm an American who doesn't really pay attention to internal Israeli politics and has no particular opinion, favorable or unfavorable, about Netanyahu. But I think blaming him for the bad turn the Democrats have made is getting things backwards. When he addressed Congress in 2015, he was coming in with the Democratic party ALREADY the party where anti-Israel people (Obama, anyone?) felt most at home. Obama was already in the process of downgrading the relationship in favor of a relationship with Iran (!).
If Obama counts as “anti-Israel”, than so do Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. Bush vetoed loan guarantees for Israel, and publicly told Shamir to “call me when you’re serious about peace”. Obama doesn’t come anywhere close to that. But you’d never know it talking to Jewish Trump voters.
When people care more about the well-being of another country than the one they live in to the extent it makes them one-issue voters, I think they should move there and participate in the politics of that country rather than ours.
So if any American president publicly disagrees with whatever the Israeli government wants to do, and threatens to *do* something about it, they are an “Israel-hater”?
You can’t see why Americans increasingly roll their eyes at the pro-Israel movement?
Obama came in out of the gate with the idea that he wanted to "put sunlight" between the US and Israel. That's not about a particular policy about a particular Israeli government. Then, like on Day 2, Bibi had an official visit and Obama left him standing in the hall. Like, who does that? Has any American president ever done that to any foreign dignitary in its history? That's beyond bizarre and, again, bespeaks hostility way beyond a disagreement about this or that policy that Likud promotes. Well, I guess it makes sense if you consider the company Obama kept before he became president -- Lefty Israel-haters of the kind that is a lot more commonly seen today.
Who leaves Bibi standing in the hall? Who hollers at another country’s PM that he’s ungrateful on tv? Presidents do this stuff all the time in their power games. Sheesh.
Bibi publicly said someone with the middle name “Hussein” couldn’t be a friend to Israel, Yet Obama increased the aid from $30 billion over 10 years to $38Billion over 10 years. Nothing about the U.S.-Israel relationship is or ever was straightforward.
What’s the matter with putting sunlight between the U.S. and Israel? Especially when Israel was engaged in an ongoing settlement program that the U.S. opposed for decades?
Why is Israel entitled to absolute fealty from American administrations in a way no other country in the world expects?
I told a Jewish friend, a member of AIPAC and against Obama’s Iran deal, that Bibi’s address to Congress and throwing Israel’s lot with the Republicans would not serve Israel well for the future with upcoming generations. He Pooh-pooped my comments—Bibi knows what he’s doing.
Interesting Eli and I see that address as a pivotal moment.
I think a lot of the sharp drop in approval over the past year is almost entirely thermostatic. You'll never get back what you lost but I can be better with new leadership.
This piece is speculation ungrounded in fact. Jews as the cause of Jew hate, if only the Jews did this or that differently, has a long and unpleasant history & this time, that if only Israel rid itself of Bibi, is no different.
The American Left has been turning on Israel for decades. Israel and now Jews (🤣) are seen as White- and the anti whitey machine has been running in America for 60+ years especially on campus. The American Left switched to gay race communism in the 1990s because of the fall of the USSR and as importantly Boomer Tenure. Given the cost of American education the Profs needed that anger directed somewhere away from themselves.
As for this articles Get Bibi thrust… and what?
The Israeli Left gets to make a suicide pact to give the Palestinians the vote and get back into office? The results of which won’t be even South Africa but far worse very fast.
The American Left isn’t going to reconcile with anyone white while it draws breath, Jews just happen to be perceived as White and another colonial oppressor. Israel will make peace with the Palestinians before the American Left makes peace with whites. Ultimately peace will be made on identical terms in both countries.
The Irony from the American POV is not lost on anyone in America, that doesn’t mean Israel has to commit suicide.
No, feeding the mob Bibi will not placate the American Left.
Author, the destruction of Israel won’t restore campus status. You’re a white in America, author.
The Irony is lost on no American of any race, color or creed. 😉
Better strap up and gird your loins, pardner 🤠
Relax a little, Israel-America is taking a vacation from the world. Long overdue and we earned it.
What is most critical of course is not to get on the sanctions list ala South Africa, Rhodesia et al. It is easier to avoid the sanctions list if we 🇺🇸 forget that you are around and….
…….Not.fucking.hear.the.word.Israel.for.5.fucking.minutes….
Really without a doubt absence will allow the heart to grow fonder.
We stopped hearing about Japan about 35 years ago and we just both remembered each other last month and we’re such great soul mates suddenly!!!
….Stop.Stalking.us.online.and.In.every.news.cycle.
And in a few years we’ll suddenly be besties !
Firstly, this is a great analysis and very well written. That said, I have 2 things that is quite hesitant:
1. The article undermines how much Oct 7 changes things. Even with a different isreal goverment, a war Gaza war is still happening, so a drop in support was inevitable. However, the qn should be kf a centrist goverment could've kept the drop to lets say 15 points instead of 40.
2. The left's anti-Zionism is treated too gently. Yes it is a 'moral framework', but its antisemitism, which denis Israel's right to exist. Framkng it as more respectable doesnt make it less dangerous .
I think you get this wildly wrong.
There is no fixing the argument with the left.
Israel is a Hitlerian project from first principles. It is antithetical to humanism and basic human decency besides.
Netanyahu is correct in his assumption that only nazis, only moral degenerates, will ever support Israel in the US again.
Yes, many nazis will not, because they're nazis. But authoritarians can and do put aside their racism if convenient friends further their aims (Nazi Germany undoubtedly had nothing but contempt for Asians, but that didn't prevent them from allying with Imperial Japan.)
Support for Israel on the American left is done forever. It will never return.
Support for Israel among American fascists will depend on what the fascists think Israel has to offer the US, and to any rational person the answer is nothing. But, Israel is in luck, insofar as fascists are irrational people.
That doesn't guarantee their support (right-wing anti-semitism has a long history in the US, and it appears to be making a comeback,) but there is at least a chance that the fascists will cleave to one another, because fascism is weak and needs all the help it can get.
But there is no argument a genocidal ethnostate is going to make to progressives that will be given the slightest time of day, and the world is finally accepting what Israel is and has always been.
I’m a 46 year old American who politics are center left. I would have considered myself mostly supportive of Israel - the U.S. should support Israel and peace efforts, for a 2-state solution, against the expansions of settlements in the West Bank. The October 7th attacks were horrific and I supported the initial response. I argued that charges of genocide was unfair.
Now though, I think the U.S. should neither give nor sell weapons to Israel.
I do think Israel can win back support but it’ll take a willingness to recommit to a two state solution.
The implication that anti-Israel sentiments on college campuses are a Qatari op always bugs me, because as a Jewish former student at a public university, Israeli lobbying was inescapable.
Hillel is one of the two mainstream organs of Jewish life on campus and support for Israel is literally in their online mission statement. Can't speak for Chabad, but I assume it's the same. Israel fellows, Birthright, summer internships, semester abroad program, Israeli Independence programming all over campus. You are not getting a nuanced opinion about Israeli politics from the supermajority of people that you meet in these organizations. This is all very explicit with no shadowy conspiracy theories required, but it gets a pass because tropes are bad? Because pro-Palestinian opinions are political (bad) but pro-Israel opinions are religious (good)?
I agree with much of what you said, but I would add that Netanyahu’s government could’ve done vastly more to protect the lives of Palestinian civilians, and to make sure that they get adequate humanitarian aid. And supporting terrorism by Israeli settlers, so they can drive Palestinians from their land and take it, obviously, this will create enormous opposition in the United States, as it should.
Finally, corrupt, Trump and Orban like Netanyahu trying to end democracy in your own country, horribly hurts the image of your country amongst members of the Democratic Party.
I don’t know what the solution is to this, but if the voters of Israel do not reembrace democracy, human rights for everyone, and a two state solution, by opposing Netanyahu and the far right, then Israel will become more and more of a pariah, and thus weaker and poorer, alone in the world. Of course, we have our own fight to save democracy in the United States.
In a rational world, Israel will be less important to the U.S. than Guam and about as important an Ecuador or Slovenia. A healthy but arms length relationship.
There is no good reason for America to get down in the mud that will be thrown up when the inevitable one state, from the river to the sea, outcome occurs. That outcome won’t because of the indigenous Gentiles. It will because of the right wing pro-squatter Jewish crazies as represented by the reprehensible Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
As in every other country, we should promote a democratic outcome in that new single state (Palesrael?), with absolutely equal rights for all and zero ethnic supremacy. We’ve all learned lessons from the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. Good luck to the citizens of this new land.
One land, two tribes, 3 religions. Living in peace.
Wow, if Israelis make massive security compromises, maybe they can become South Africa. What a sales pitch!
This largely the fault of Netanyahu, he's been just endorsing Republicans for years. So good will amongst Dems was already low so they were primed to be targets of disinformation. A change in leadership is needed.
Good take. However, I disagree with the argument that only the anti-Israel American left is persuadable. Much of American right-wing anti-Israel sentiment is indeed irrational, conspiratorial, and simply antisemitic. But we can't let the crazies have the last word. If Israel were to take decisive steps toward regional integration, it would also cool some of the anti-Israel fervor on the isolationist right by reducing Israel's dependence on the US. The Israeli government also needs to take religious intolerance, some of which targets Christians, more seriously, as it provides catnip for demagogues like Tucker Carlson (in addition to simply being morally wrong). See Nadav Eyal's article at https://www.nadaveyal.com/p/israel-has-a-growing-religious-intolerance
Point taken on the right. Regional integration, a Palestinian horizon, and a path off aid are the same project, and getting them right takes most of the material from the isolationist critique. Not sure how much of Tucker's audience is persuadable on policy though. Their complaint is about Jewish power, and I don't think any Israeli course correction really fixes that. Agree with you on religious intolerance. Today's events are just another example of how badly this coalition has failed on it.
The continued demographic decline of the largely liberal non-Orthodox Jewish community, and the demographic growth of the right-wing Orthodox Jews, might "persuade" Tucker's audience by giving them less of a reason to resent Jewish power.
Your piece is a-historical. Netanyahu didn’t “coordinate” with the Obama team because, as you yourself certainly know, but forgot to mention, Obama and Bibi were not on speaking terms. Bibi came in 2015 to try to convince the US that the JCPOA was a bad deal. Because it WAS A BAD DEAL. The rest of your piece is the usual anti-Bibi Drek. Israel hasn’t “done” anything to lose so much support in the US. The Palestinians and their supporters have been building this anti-Israel project right here in our backyard for years, and they have been quite successful. Your piece reflects badly upon you. One more Jew apologizing for Jews exerting strength and defending themselves.
If that’s your view, don’t complain when the majority of Americans—including the majority of American Jews—are ready to pull the plug on Israel.
Polls show roughly 80% of Israelis support their government’s genocide. Fuck every fucking one of them. This is about way more than Israel’s government. We’ve spent the past 2.5 years watching a live streamed genocide. I don’t want a single penny of my taxes going to that apartheid state and I refuse to vote for any politician who still supports that evil country. Its end cannot come soon enough.
I'm an American who doesn't really pay attention to internal Israeli politics and has no particular opinion, favorable or unfavorable, about Netanyahu. But I think blaming him for the bad turn the Democrats have made is getting things backwards. When he addressed Congress in 2015, he was coming in with the Democratic party ALREADY the party where anti-Israel people (Obama, anyone?) felt most at home. Obama was already in the process of downgrading the relationship in favor of a relationship with Iran (!).
If Obama counts as “anti-Israel”, than so do Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. Bush vetoed loan guarantees for Israel, and publicly told Shamir to “call me when you’re serious about peace”. Obama doesn’t come anywhere close to that. But you’d never know it talking to Jewish Trump voters.
Obama was an Israel hater and so was Bush 41. That’s why I voted against them both.
When people care more about the well-being of another country than the one they live in to the extent it makes them one-issue voters, I think they should move there and participate in the politics of that country rather than ours.
So if any American president publicly disagrees with whatever the Israeli government wants to do, and threatens to *do* something about it, they are an “Israel-hater”?
You can’t see why Americans increasingly roll their eyes at the pro-Israel movement?
Obama came in out of the gate with the idea that he wanted to "put sunlight" between the US and Israel. That's not about a particular policy about a particular Israeli government. Then, like on Day 2, Bibi had an official visit and Obama left him standing in the hall. Like, who does that? Has any American president ever done that to any foreign dignitary in its history? That's beyond bizarre and, again, bespeaks hostility way beyond a disagreement about this or that policy that Likud promotes. Well, I guess it makes sense if you consider the company Obama kept before he became president -- Lefty Israel-haters of the kind that is a lot more commonly seen today.
Who leaves Bibi standing in the hall? Who hollers at another country’s PM that he’s ungrateful on tv? Presidents do this stuff all the time in their power games. Sheesh.
Bibi publicly said someone with the middle name “Hussein” couldn’t be a friend to Israel, Yet Obama increased the aid from $30 billion over 10 years to $38Billion over 10 years. Nothing about the U.S.-Israel relationship is or ever was straightforward.
What’s the matter with putting sunlight between the U.S. and Israel? Especially when Israel was engaged in an ongoing settlement program that the U.S. opposed for decades?
Why is Israel entitled to absolute fealty from American administrations in a way no other country in the world expects?
So you admit that you obfuscated when you said “disagree with an Israeli government policy.”