Is Israel Losing America? Thanks Bibi.

How Netanyahu’s survival instinct, his embrace of the hard right, and twenty years of partisan choices have destroyed the bipartisan consensus that kept Israel safe, empowered Antisemites on both ends of the political spectrum, and left the Jewish state more isolated than at any point in its history.

The Paradox

I’ve been writing about Israel and the Jewish world for a long time. I’ve watched wars, elections, intifadas, peace negotiations, and their collapse. I’ve seen Israel celebrated and condemned, misunderstood and wilfully misrepresented. I’ve argued, sometimes in these very pages, for Israel’s right to defend itself, for the complexity of its situation, and for the good faith of the many Israelis who genuinely want peace and security for everyone between the river and the sea.

So when I tell you that I have never been more worried about Israel’s future, not because of Iran, not because of Hamas, not because of Hezbollah, but because of decisions made in Jerusalem and their consequences in Washington, I want you to understand that this is not the complaint of someone who doesn’t love Israel. It is precisely because I do that I can no longer stay quiet.

Here is the paradox that should be keeping every Israel supporter awake at night. Israel today is militarily stronger than it has ever been. It has struck Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It has degraded Hamas and Hezbollah to a degree that would have seemed impossible three years ago. It has a sitting American president who calls himself the most pro-Israel president in history. And yet: Israel’s standing in American public opinion has never been lower. Support for Israel among Americans under 50 has collapsed. The Democratic Party, which has governed the United States for most of the past three decades and which will govern it again, has swung so sharply against Israel that two-thirds of Democratic voters now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis. The bipartisan consensus that sustained American support for Israel through ten presidencies and across every previous war is in ruins.

How did we get here? The answer is not October 7. The answer is not Gaza. The answer is not Iran. The answer is one man, one survival instinct, and twenty years of choices that prioritized his political future over his country’s strategic security. The answer is Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Man Who Bought Bibi a Newspaper, and Changed Everything

To understand how Israel arrived at this moment, you need to go back to the morning of July 30, 2007, when young Israelis in red jumpsuits fanned out across Tel Aviv’s bus stations, gas stations, and supermarkets and began handing out copies of a brand new free daily newspaper called Israel Hayom, “Israel Today.”

The newspaper had been founded by Sheldon Adelson, an American casino billionaire from Boston who had made a fortune building gambling empires in Las Vegas and Macau, and who had decided to use a portion of that fortune to solve what he and Netanyahu both considered an existential political problem: the Israeli media’s perceived hostility to the right in general, and to Benjamin Netanyahu in particular. Prevented by Israel’s strict campaign finance laws from simply writing Netanyahu checks, Adelson found a more elegant solution. He would buy Netanyahu’s media environment instead.

Adelson put Israel Hayom largely at the disposal of Netanyahu and the promotion of his policies. The paper attacked Netanyahu’s opponents on the left as vigorously as on the right. It framed his activities positively, refuted his critics, and amplified the failings of his opponents. Israelis were not slow to notice. They gave the paper a nickname so perfectly observed it became permanently attached to both publication and politician: Bibiton, a combination of Bibi, Netanyahu’s nickname, and iton, the Hebrew word for newspaper. Right-wing politician Avigdor Lieberman compared it to Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party’s mouthpiece. Former Knesset member and journalist Miki Rosenthal was more direct: “It was more propaganda than a newspaper. It wasn’t merely a right-wing paper. It was a means to support a leader.”

Adelson reportedly spent $200 million keeping Israel Hayom afloat, distributed free, subsidized entirely by a foreign billionaire with no accountability to Israeli voters. The effect on Israel’s media market was devastating. The paper pushed down advertising revenues across the industry, wrecking the business models of Israel’s established papers, several of which effectively ceased to exist as independent journalistic enterprises. Within a few years, Israel Hayom surpassed the once-dominant Yedioth Ahronoth as Israel’s most widely read daily newspaper, and its relentlessly pro-Netanyahu editorial line is credited with helping Netanyahu win the 2009 election and maintain power for most of the years since, moving Israeli political discourse sharply rightward, particularly on settlements.

But Adelson’s significance goes beyond one newspaper. He was simultaneously the dominant financial force in American Republican politics. According to federal records, from 2010 through 2020, Adelson and his wife donated more than $500 million to Republican Party campaigns and super PACs, making him Donald Trump’s largest individual donor in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, providing the largest donation to Trump’s 2016 campaign, his inaugural, his legal defense during the Mueller investigation, and his 2020 campaign. He was, in other words, the single person most responsible for fusing the Netanyahu project with the Trump project, for building the ideological and financial bridge between Israeli right-wing politics and the American Republican Party that Netanyahu has since made the cornerstone of his diplomatic strategy.

Here it is worth pausing to give credit where it is genuinely due, because Sheldon Adelson was not simply a cynical political operator. He and Miriam were also among the most significant Jewish philanthropists of the modern era, and their giving to causes with no obvious political benefit was substantial and real. The Adelson Family Foundation donated $140 million to Birthright Israel, which finances free trips to Israel for Jewish young adults worldwide, a program that has introduced hundreds of thousands of young diaspora Jews to the country their grandparents fled to or dreamed of. He donated $25 million to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and millions more to medical research, addiction treatment, and Jewish education. These were not investments in political influence. They were genuine expressions of Jewish identity and commitment to collective memory.

The complexity of Adelson is precisely the complexity of the entire story this piece is trying to tell: a man who genuinely loved Israel and genuinely loved the Jewish people, and who also deployed that love in the service of a political project that has proved deeply damaging to both. Love for something does not automatically produce wisdom about it.

There is one additional, largely forgotten detail that explains how Adelson ended up in the Republican camp in the first place. He was not always a Republican. He began his political life broadly aligned with the Democrats, the natural home of most American Jews of his generation. What changed was money, and the specific threat that Democratic-leaning policies on online gambling posed to his business empire. Adelson’s casinos were built entirely on brick-and-mortar establishments. Online gambling was an existential competitive threat. The Republican Party, with its more sympathetic posture toward protecting existing business interests through federal legislation, was the vehicle he needed. Once he had purchased his entry into Republican politics at scale, spending over $500 million with his wife on Republican campaigns and super PACs between 2010 and 2020, he found that the investment had extraordinary ancillary benefits for Israel. Republicans were more loudly pro-Israel. The embassy could be moved to Jerusalem. Netanyahu could be championed. And Adelson could use his Republican political infrastructure to cement Netanyahu’s hold on both Israeli and American conservative politics simultaneously.

Sheldon Adelson died in January 2021. His widow Miriam Adelson has continued the project, and in some respects intensified it. An Israeli-born physician, the current publisher of Israel Hayom, and as of late 2025 the 48th richest person in the world with an estimated fortune of $34.6 billion, Miriam had by early 2024 already surpassed her late husband’s lifetime total of $273 million in political donations, reaching $284 million of her own. She was the third largest donor to Trump’s 2024 election bid, contributing $106 million. The combined Adelson family has given more than $600 million to support Trump’s three presidential campaigns and Republican candidates since 2015. The Adelson Foundation gives $200 million annually to Jewish and Israeli causes, the largest of any existing private foundation with that aim, and the couple together donated around half a billion dollars to Birthright Israel.

The political returns on that investment have been tangible. The Adelsons pressed Trump in their very first meeting in 2015 on moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a demand every previous president had declined for decades, and Trump eventually followed through. When Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset in October 2025 to celebrate a Gaza ceasefire deal, he pointed to Miriam Adelson in the gallery and publicly asked whether she loved the United States or Israel more, noting she had refused to answer. The crowd gave her a standing ovation.

There is one uncomfortable coda to the Adelson-Netanyahu relationship. It soured significantly. Miriam Adelson and her husband cut off contact with Netanyahu and his wife Sara around 2019. Miriam regards Sara Netanyahu as having undue influence over her husband and testified at Netanyahu’s corruption trial that Sara had exerted pressure on her to provide gifts and favorable media coverage. The man whose newspaper empire was built specifically to keep Netanyahu in power ended up providing damaging testimony against him in a corruption trial. Even Bibi’s most loyal patron found the relationship too transactional to sustain.

When we ask how Israel ended up with all its eggs in the Republican basket, the answer begins in 2007, in red jumpsuits, at a Tel Aviv bus stop. And it runs through a casino mogul’s fear of online competition, his widow’s $106 million bet on Donald Trump, and a prime minister who was willing to make Israel a partisan project in the most powerful democracy on earth, in exchange for the political cover he needed to survive.

The Architects: Finkelstein, Birnbaum, and the Export of the Playbook

The political machinery Netanyahu used to dominate Israeli politics was not entirely homegrown. It was American-imported, courtesy of one of the most consequential and least-known political consultants of the 20th century.

Arthur Finkelstein was a New York-based Republican consultant who worked for conservative and right-wing candidates across the United States, Israel, and Eastern Europe over four decades, helping elect Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Benjamin Netanyahu. He was famously, almost pathologically secretive. He flew in, gave instructions, and disappeared. He was never present on election day. His proteges, whom he called “Arthur’s Kids,” handled the ground operation.

According to the Times of Israel, Finkelstein was largely responsible for the strategy that brought Netanyahu victory in the 1996 election. He was behind the “Peres will divide Jerusalem” slogan that helped Netanyahu overcome Shimon Peres, who had been forecast to sweep to power in the wake of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, in a close upset. That election was credited with changing Israeli campaign culture, introducing American-style aggressive negative campaigning to Israel. Netanyahu’s biographers were blunt: “Everything that Bibi did during the campaign was determined by Arthur.”

Finkelstein’s protege was George Birnbaum, who became Netanyahu’s chief of staff and later his partner in a global right-wing consulting operation. And it was Netanyahu himself, according to multiple accounts, who introduced this operation to Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. Birnbaum later described how Netanyahu passed on the two consultants to his old friend, who wanted to return to power in Hungary. Finkelstein moved to Budapest, and in 2010, applying the same formula of constructing a clearly defined enemy, helped Orbán win two-thirds of the vote.

What followed was the most consequential and morally grotesque chapter of this story. Finkelstein and Birnbaum devised the campaign against George Soros, constructing the Jewish-born Hungarian-American philanthropist as an existential globalist enemy of the Hungarian people. Orbán’s campaign never explicitly used the word “Jew,” but it was often implicit, and Antisemitic graffiti regularly appeared on the “Stop Soros” posters. The octopus imagery, the classic Antisemitic motif of Jewish tentacles controlling the world, began appearing online. Even Netanyahu’s son Yair posted an Antisemitic meme showing Soros and reptilians controlling the world.

The grim irony is almost unbearable. This campaign was created by two Jews whose families had fled Europe. Birnbaum’s father was an Auschwitz survivor. And Netanyahu, the self-appointed guardian of the Jewish people, the man who invokes the Holocaust in virtually every speech about Iran, sent them there, introduced them, and then embraced Orbán as a brother leader.

“Arthur always said that you did not fight against the Nazis but against Adolf Hitler. Not against al-Qaeda, but against Osama bin Laden. You needed a face for the enemy.” The face Finkelstein and Birnbaum chose for Hungary was a Jewish one. That is the legacy Netanyahu’s political consulting empire left on European democracy.

There is one final detail about Finkelstein that belongs in any honest account of this story. In an echo of Roy Cohn, Finkelstein was gay and later married his long-term partner, all the while working for and electing politicians who opposed gay rights. The man who built Netanyahu’s political identity, who exported Netanyahu’s playbook to Orbán’s Hungary, who helped create the conditions for the most virulent Antisemitic political campaign in 21st century Europe, was a gay Jewish man from Brooklyn whose entire career was devoted to electing people who would have legislated against both his sexuality and his people. Finkelstein died of lung cancer on August 18, 2017. The machinery he built outlived him by years, and is still running.

The One Rule: Survival Above All

To understand every significant decision Netanyahu has made since then, you need to understand the single principle that governs them all. It is not security. It is not the Jewish people. It is not even ideology, though ideology is useful when it serves the principle. The principle is this: Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival takes precedence over everything else, over Israel’s strategic interests, over its international relationships, over its democratic institutions, over ceasefire negotiations, over hostage deals, and yes, over the bipartisan American support that has been the bedrock of Israel’s security since Harry Truman recognized the state in 1948.

This is not a controversial claim among Israelis. It is the conclusion of Netanyahu’s own former allies. In leaked recordings from 2021, Ayelet Shaked, a right-wing politician who had spent years in Netanyahu’s orbit, was heard describing Netanyahu and his wife Sara as “dictators” and “tyrants” with a “lust for power,” saying the premier “only cares about his ongoing corruption trial.”

That corruption trial matters enormously to this story, because it explains the logic behind choices that otherwise appear simply self-destructive. Netanyahu is the first sitting Israeli prime minister to stand trial as a defendant, facing charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust across multiple cases. He denies everything and calls the prosecution a witch hunt. But the practical consequence of these trials is that his political survival and his legal survival are the same thing. A Netanyahu who is no longer Prime Minister is a Netanyahu who faces prison. And a Netanyahu who faces prison will do whatever it takes to remain Prime Minister.

The prolongation of the Gaza war has served a dual purpose: to maintain his grip on power given his uncertain electoral prospects, and to provide a public distraction and delay to his pending corruption cases. During his ongoing trial, Netanyahu can use the powers of his office and national security claims to delay legal proceedings. The judicial overhaul that convulsed Israel in 2023, bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets in the largest protest movement in Israeli history and threatening the IDF’s operational readiness as reservists threatened to stop reporting for duty, was not at its core a philosophical project about the separation of powers. It was a survival operation aimed at restructuring the legal system before it could deliver a verdict.

The pattern of eliminating potential rivals fits this model with depressing consistency. When Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked’s party failed to cross the electoral threshold in April 2019, Netanyahu fired them from their ministerial posts the very next day, what Haaretz bluntly described as an act of spite, and then appointed himself Justice Minister while under active investigation in three corruption cases. When Bennett eventually became Prime Minister in 2021, leading a historically diverse coalition that included an Arab party for the first time, Netanyahu worked systematically to delegitimize him, encourage threats against him, and collapse his government. He succeeded. Bennett has now returned to political life, registering his party ahead of elections scheduled for later in 2026, and hiring senior American consultants with ties to the Trump administration, a telling indicator of how thoroughly Netanyahu has redefined what it takes to be taken seriously in Israeli right-wing politics.

The through line from Adelson to Ben Gvir runs directly through this survival logic. Adelson’s money moved Israeli political discourse rightward. Netanyahu rode that rightward movement and accelerated it. By 2022, having alienated every other potential coalition partner through years of political maneuvering, Netanyahu found himself needing the 20 seats controlled by Ben Gvir and Smotrich to form a coalition, and he handed them the keys to Israeli domestic and foreign policy to get them. Not because he shares their ideology, but because he needed their votes. The tail began wagging the dog, and the dog had nuclear weapons.

Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and the Cost of Extreme Company

Let’s be precise about who these men are, because the international media’s coverage has sometimes obscured just how far outside the boundaries of acceptable political discourse they sit, or sat, before Netanyahu legitimized them.

The contrast with Likud’s own history is instructive. When Meir Kahane served his single term in the Knesset in the 1980s, Likud lawmakers would walk out en masse when he rose to speak. Then-Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir denounced his movement as “dangerous.” Kahane was subsequently banned from the Knesset entirely for racism. His movement, Kach, was designated a terrorist organization by Israel itself.

Itamar Ben Gvir joined Kach at age 16, serving as one of its youth coordinators. In 1995, he vandalized Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s official car, appearing on television to flaunt the hood ornament and announce “we got his car and we’ll get to him too.” Weeks later, Rabin was assassinated. Ben Gvir was convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He was considered so extreme that the IDF refused to draft him. Bezalel Smotrich, during Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, was arrested by the Shin Bet on suspicion of planning to blow up a major highway, caught in possession of 700 liters of gasoline. He has described himself as a “proud homophobe.” He has called for the complete destruction of Gaza and opposed every ceasefire and hostage deal.

Extensive reporting found that in April 2024, Netanyahu was prepared to make compromises for a ceasefire, but Smotrich told him in a cabinet meeting: “If a surrender agreement like this is brought forward, you no longer have a government.” Later that summer, a potential deal involving Saudi normalization brokered by the Biden administration collapsed because Ben Gvir and Smotrich blocked it.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy warned explicitly before Netanyahu formed his coalition with these men that their inclusion would be catastrophic for the US-Israel relationship. “Their open hostility toward Israeli Arabs and their intended legal reforms will weaken Israel’s image as a democracy,” the Institute wrote. “Those who have no love for Israel will seize on this. They will use it to expand their appeal in Congress and the country. They will exploit it to try to undo aspects of the relationship, and certainly to challenge Israeli military requests.” Netanyahu formed the coalition anyway.

Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway have since imposed sanctions on both men, freezing their assets and banning their entry, citing “incitement to extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights.” When the UK announced its sanctions, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the decision, putting America in the humiliating position of defending sanctioned extremists against its closest allies. The UAE’s foreign minister had warned Netanyahu before the 2022 coalition was formed that including Ben Gvir and Smotrich would damage relations with the Emirates. Netanyahu included them anyway.

The settlers’ vigilante violence, attacks on Palestinian villages, on Palestinian supporters, on IDF soldiers attempting to intervene, has accelerated under their watch. The perpetrators are rarely arrested, rarely convicted, and are occasionally defended by ministers. The recently passed death penalty law, which many legal scholars consider a profound perversion of Israeli jurisprudence, is the latest milestone on a road that leads somewhere Israel’s founders would not recognize.

The Kahanist Infection Spreads Into Likud Itself

It would be comfortable to believe that the extremism embodied by Ben Gvir and Smotrich is contained within their own parties, that Likud, whatever its faults, remains the mainstream national-liberal movement Menachem Begin founded. That comfort is no longer available.

In November 2025, Nissim Vaturi, Likud Deputy Knesset Speaker, stood at the podium of the Israeli parliament and said of Meir Kahane: “Kahane was right in many ways where we were wrong, where the people of Israel were wrong.” When challenged that Kahane was a terrorist and asked directly if he supported Jewish terror, Vaturi replied: “I support it.”

A sitting Likud Deputy Speaker, from the podium of the Israeli parliament, declared support for a movement Israel itself had banned as a terrorist organization. An opposition Democrat MP responded: “There is a clear line between the escalation of Jewish terror in the territories and the normalization of Kahane in the Israeli Knesset. Netanyahu has turned the Knesset building into a breeding ground for Kahanists.”

Vaturi is not an isolated case. He is the most flamboyant example of a broader rot. On October 7, 2023, he tweeted that Israelis had one common goal, “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” He co-signed a letter to the Defense Minister recommending that the IDF destroy all remaining sources of food, water, and energy in Gaza, followed by “a complete cleansing of the enemy’s nests” and the killing of any residents who did not immediately surrender. In February 2025, he described Palestinians as “subhumans,” called for separating women and children and killing all adult men in Gaza, saying “we are being too considerate.” When told his rhetoric could be used as evidence of Israeli genocide in South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice, he was unrepentant: “I don’t regret anything I said.”

Then there is Tally Gotliv, described by the Times of Israel as a “rabble-rouser,” who called for Israel to use nuclear weapons for “crushing and flattening Gaza without mercy.” Gotliv has spread conspiracy theories claiming opposition figures collaborated with Hamas on October 7, has been sued for defamation multiple times, has refused police summonses citing parliamentary immunity, and was physically removed from a court hearing for refusing to stop interrupting the judge. In a moment that left even her coalition allies speechless, she compared a court security guard to the Judenrat, the Nazi-established Jewish administrative councils forced to implement Nazi orders against their own communities.

Amit Halevi, also of Likud, told the Knesset during a discussion on the Gaza humanitarian crisis: “I’m not sure you’re speaking for us when you say we want to treat every child and every woman. I hope you don’t stand behind that statement either. When fighting a group like this, the distinctions that exist in a normal world don’t exist.” When a statistician presented data showing tens of thousands in Gaza had fewer than 300 calories a day, Halevi responded: “There is no hungry person in Gaza, not even a single child.” In March 2025, he called for Israel to “occupy and cleanse Gaza.”

Hanoch Milwidsky, currently under active police investigation for rape and witness tampering, was appointed by Netanyahu to chair the powerful Knesset Finance Committee in July 2025 despite the investigation. Milwidsky previously declared from the Knesset podium: “I do not feel any need to justify myself for the fact that I, in the Jewish state, prefer Jews. Yes, Jewish murderers over Arab murderers. And as a general rule, I prefer Jews over disloyal Arabs.” A coalition insider, asked why the coalition would support an alleged rapist for a committee chairmanship, offered a response that inadvertently captured the entire moral condition of this government: “A third of the faction is under investigation or indicted. I don’t see why anyone would think this would be any different.”

May Golan, a cabinet minister in Netanyahu’s government, has described herself publicly as a “proud racist.” She attended the conference calling for Gaza resettlement, whose promotional poster declared “Gaza is ours. Forever.”

That conference, tagged “Preparing to Resettle Gaza,” was attended by seven Likud MKs alongside Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and their coalition partners. Not fringe figures. Not junior backbenchers tolerated at the margins. Senior members of the governing party, openly calling for the ethnic cleansing and recolonization of a territory from which Israel withdrew in 2005.

This is what the Kahanist infection looks like when it has moved from the coalition’s extremist junior partners into the bloodstream of the ruling party itself. And here is why it matters for the American dimension of this story: every statement by Vaturi, Gotliv, Halevi, and their colleagues is ammunition, real, documented, irrefutable ammunition, for Hasan Piker, Tucker Carlson, Ana Kasparian, and every campus activist who wants to argue that criticism of Israel is not Antisemitism but a rational response to Israeli government conduct. Netanyahu did not just empower the extremists. He gave their enemies the tools to delegitimize not just his government, but Israel itself.

The MAGA Right Turns: The Bet That Is Already Failing

Netanyahu’s strategic calculation was always, at some level, this: the American left was lost anyway, captured by progressive identity politics and the influence of Arab-American and Muslim-American communities. The right, Evangelical Christians with their theological commitment to Israel, Republican hawks with their strategic interest in the Middle East, was the future. Better to cement that alliance tightly than to chase a Democratic Party that would never truly be his.

It was always a flawed calculation. It ignored the structural reality that Democrats have controlled the White House for 16 of the last 32 years. It ignored the fact that American Jewish voters, the community most emotionally and financially invested in Israel’s fate, vote Democratic by enormous margins and were already watching Netanyahu’s choices with deep unease. But even on its own terms, even as a cold-blooded bet on the American right, it is now demonstrably failing. The constituency Netanyahu banked on is turning.

The numbers are stark. According to a Gallup poll conducted in February 2026, sympathy for Israelis among Republicans has fallen 10 points since 2024 to its lowest level since 2004. Among Republicans aged 18 to 49, a majority, 57%, now have an unfavorable view of Israel. Republicans now have mixed evaluations of Netanyahu himself: 45% have confidence in him, 44% do not. Among Republicans under 50, only 30% have confidence in the Israeli Prime Minister.

These numbers have faces. And those faces have microphones, podcasts, and tens of millions of followers.

A study by the Jewish People Policy Institute, based on AI analysis of thousands of social media videos, found that Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens significantly intensified their focus on Israel throughout 2025, accompanied by a sharp escalation in anti-Israel rhetoric and, in Owens’ case, explicit Antisemitism. “Antisemitism on the American far right is now overt and out in the open,” said JPPI Director-General Shuki Friedman. “The data should serve as a flashing warning light for Israel and its leadership regarding the kind of support it can expect from the right, today and in the future.”

Carlson, once welcomed in Netanyahu’s Jerusalem as a friendly voice, who conducted reverential interviews with Israeli officials and gave the administration favorable coverage, has now been named StopAntisemitism’s “Antisemite of the Year,” cited for “mainstreaming antisemitism by platforming and praising Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists, while hiding behind irony and plausible deniability.” He hosted avowed white nationalist and Antisemite Nick Fuentes for a friendly conversation. He claimed Chabad was orchestrating the Iran war to rebuild the Third Temple.

The previous year’s StopAntisemitism honoree was Candace Owens, who has promoted a 19th century Antisemitic screed arguing the Talmud is a secret guide Jews use for nefarious purposes, claimed Jews were behind the transatlantic slave trade, and described Israel as an “occult nation.” Both Carlson and Owens have enormous audiences among the very demographic Netanyahu was counting on.

The response from the Knesset was telling. Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz delivered an address in English, specifically to reach American ears, declaring Carlson and Owens a “new enemy”: “We are used to enemies from outside. We fight terror tunnels of Hamas. We fight the ballistic missiles of Iran. But today I look at the West, our greatest ally, and I see a new enemy rising from within.”

Netanyahu spent years courting the world that produced Tucker Carlson. He never built a firewall against what that world also contained.

The Iran War and the “It’s Only for Israel” Problem

Before we turn to the left, it is worth addressing directly the argument being made by Carlson, Piker, and everyone between them on the political horseshoe: that the war with Iran, and American support for Israel more broadly, serves only Israeli interests and not American ones.

It is a seductive argument precisely because it contains a grain of truth. Netanyahu’s choices, empowering Ben Gvir and Smotrich, blocking ceasefire deals, prolonging the Gaza war, have served his political survival and the ideological agenda of the Israeli hard right. They have not obviously served American strategic interests. And Netanyahu has not been honest with his American partners about his calculus. The polling reflects the public’s intuition: 56% of Americans believe the war with Iran benefits Israel more than it benefits America.

But the conclusion drawn from this, that America should therefore disengage from the region and withdraw its support from Israel, ignores a strategic reality that isolationists on both left and right consistently refuse to engage with honestly. A nuclear-armed Iran is not simply an Israeli problem. It is a threat to every oil-producing Gulf state, to global energy markets, and to the nuclear non-proliferation framework that has prevented dozens of countries from developing their own weapons. Consider what a nuclear Iran, or even a dirty bomb deployed against Gulf state oilfields, would do to the global price of oil, and to the American economy that depends on manageable energy costs. The isolationist fantasy of an America safely withdrawn from the Middle East ignores that the vacuum would be filled by Russia and China, both of which have been systematically building regional influence as American engagement has wavered.

This is not an argument for unconditional support of everything Netanyahu does. It is an argument that the strategic question is more complex than “Israel or America,” and that the people making that binary are doing so in bad faith, for an audience that does not know enough history to recognize what they are being sold. The tragedy is that Netanyahu’s conduct has made this honest argument much harder to make. When a prime minister repeatedly acts in ways that serve his political survival over his ally’s interests, when his coalition partners openly sabotage American-brokered deals, when sanctioned extremists sit in his cabinet, he hands his critics the ammunition they need to make the “it’s only for Israel” argument stick. He has made the truth harder to defend.

The tragedy is that Netanyahu’s conduct has made this honest argument much harder to make. When a prime minister repeatedly acts in ways that serve his political survival over his ally’s interests, when his coalition partners openly sabotage American-brokered deals, when sanctioned extremists sit in his cabinet, he hands his critics the ammunition they need to make the “it’s only for Israel” argument stick. He has made the truth harder to defend.

The Left’s Performative Playbook: Piker, Kasparian, and the Champagne Marxists

If the right’s turn against Israel has been shocking in its speed, the left’s has been more predictable, and in some ways more dangerous, because it has embedded itself in the Democratic Party infrastructure that will govern the United States again.

Hasan Piker is Cenk Uygur‘s nephew. He got his start at The Young Turks, the online progressive network named, with a grotesque irony that seems to have never sufficiently bothered its Armenian co-host Ana Kasparian, after the movement responsible for the Armenian genocide. Piker left TYT in 2020 to stream full-time on Twitch, where he has accumulated over three million followers and become, in the words of multiple mainstream profiles, one of the most influential voices on the American left among young men.

What those profiles have been somewhat reluctant to say clearly, I will say clearly. Piker has called Orthodox Jews “inbred,” compared Zionism to Nazism, declared “Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel,” praised Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as “a pretty brilliant person,” and in 2019 said “America deserved 9/11.” He is a self-described Marxist who preaches against capitalism from a $3 million mansion in West Hollywood, drives a $100,000 car, and profits from sponsorships and subscription revenue on the platform whose existence depends entirely on the capitalist system he condemns daily. He is, in the precise definition of the term, a nepo baby champagne Marxist, his career launched by his uncle’s media empire, his ideology worn as aesthetic rather than lived as conviction.

In November 2025, Piker visited China and appeared on state-run Chinese television, saying he wanted to see what America could “adopt and emulate” from the country, describing the trip as “a dream come true” and receiving a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book as a souvenir. He has called Crimea “a part of Russian territory, bitch,” supporting Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukrainian land while simultaneously presenting himself as a champion of occupied peoples. The progressive activist who supports Hamas, Hezbollah, Putin’s Russia, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Houthis, while living in a $3 million mansion in Los Angeles, is not a revolutionary. He is an entertainer who has built a brand on outrage, with Palestinian suffering as his content.

The hypocrisy extends to his personal conduct. Early in his career, a 2018 Cosmopolitan interview documented Piker displaying explicit fan messages, including intimate images sent by female fans, to a reporter, narrating their contents while scrolling through them. This behavior, sharing intimate images without consent, constitutes a violation of privacy regardless of how the images were originally sent, particularly striking for a man who markets himself as a feminist champion. In July 2020, he called police on his ex-girlfriend for not responding to his messages, despite living twelve minutes away and despite her best friend warning him not to make the call. His ex later wrote that she was not suicidal and had not implied she would harm herself. Using a wellness check as a tool against an ex-partner, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in which Piker was loudly condemning police overreach, is about as stark a hypocrisy as one can find.

In October 2025, a viral clip from his stream showed his dog yelping at a moment when he appeared to reach off-screen, sparking widespread accusations that he had used a shock collar to keep the animal immobile during his long streams. Piker denied the allegations and showed the collar on stream, saying it was a vibrating training collar. The allegations remain disputed and unproven. What is not disputed is a recorded statement Piker made about pet ownership: “When you have an animal, you have a literal slave that you shackle, every day, pulled from their neck to take them wherever you want to take them. And this slave is just for personal consumption.” From someone who presents himself as a compassionate voice for the oppressed, the framing is jarring.

When Congressman Brad Schneider, who is Jewish, called Piker “an unapologetic antisemite,” Piker’s response was to post that there were “lotsa AIPAC dogs barking today.” He did not engage with the substance of the criticism. He invoked, instead, the oldest available shorthand: the Jewish congressman wasn’t speaking his conscience, he was operating at the behest of his puppet master. This is the dual loyalty libel dressed in the language of campaign finance criticism, and it works because millions of young people encountering it for the first time don’t recognize it as something that has been used to send Jews to their deaths for centuries.

Gavin Newsom, widely expected to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, agreed to appear on Piker’s stream. Piker’s own assessment of why was refreshingly candid: that Israel “has shifted so much towards the side of truth and justice that even people with 2028 ambitions are leaning into anti-Israel sentiment.” In other words: pure political calculation. Palestinian lives are not the point. Votes are.

The Newsom calculation deserves a moment’s examination beyond its cynicism about Israel. This is a man who, in 2007, admitted to an affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the wife of Alex Tourk*, his close friend and campaign manager of ten years, and entered outpatient rehabilitation for alcohol abuse in the same week. He survived it politically and has thrived. Good for him, in the sense that people deserve second chances. But a man whose personal history includes this specific betrayal of friendship and trust, now wrapping himself in the moral authority of Hasan Piker’s “movement,” presents a particular kind of character portrait that voters may eventually consider.
(*BTW if you are tempted to feel bad for Alex Tourk, please do not. Alex? If you’re reading this, we know what you did to L. If you think she hasn’t told anyone, well, you’re wrong. The truth will come out eventually. You and Newsom are two peas in a pod.)

Then there is Ana Kasparian, Cenk Uygur’s co-host, his partner in building TYT into a media empire, who spent years presenting herself as one of the American left’s most prominent feminist voices. By 2025 she had drifted rightward on many domestic issues, joining a conservative-leaning panel show created by right-wing podcaster Patrick Bet-David, while simultaneously becoming more virulently anti-Israel. In early 2026, she described the Epstein network as a “pedophile ring/Israeli blackmail operation” and asked an Israeli interlocutor “Why are you monsters always slaughtering innocent children and shaking us down for money?” Then came the moment that crystallized her trajectory. Responding to Antisemitism accusations on social media, she wrote: “Hey, bitch, the goyim are waking the fuck up. Deal with it.” She pinned her follow-up to her profile: “I do not regret this comment. I don’t apologize. Israel is evil, genocidal, and has destroyed our country.”

The phrase “the goyim are waking up” did not originate with Ana Kasparian. It is, word for word, the language of Nick Fuentes’ online movement. It is the language of the groypers, the alt-right, the people Kasparian would have described as her political opposite two years earlier. At the bottom of the horseshoe, she and Fuentes are saying the same thing in the same words. They arrived there from different directions. That convergence is not a coincidence. It is the subject of the most important scholarly work being done on contemporary Antisemitism.

Destiny: The Right Argument, the Wrong Messenger

In the fractured landscape of online political commentary, Steven Bonnell, known online as Destiny, occupies a unique and contradictory space. He is a left-leaning influencer willing to push back hard against the progressive consensus on Israel, use actual data and historical argument rather than sloganeering, and directly challenge the most prominent voices in his own sphere, including his long-running ideological nemesis Hasan Piker. In March 2024, he represented the pro-Israel side in a five-hour debate on the Lex Fridman Podcast alongside historian Benny Morris, against Norman Finkelstein and Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani. He is that genuinely rare thing: a left-of-center online figure willing to say clearly that much of what passes for pro-Palestinian activism is performative, counterproductive, and built on misinformation.

Destiny’s core critique of Piker and the broader online “pro-Palestine” left is not simply that they are factually wrong, though he argues they often are. It is that their approach is actively harmful to the people they claim to champion. When your solidarity consists of celebrating Hamas, calling for the destruction of Israel, comparing Zionism to Nazism, and alienating every Jewish ally and moderate Democrat who might actually influence US policy, you are not helping Palestinians. You are building a platform on Palestinian suffering.

This is an intellectually honest argument that deserves to be taken seriously. It is also, unfortunately, made by a deeply flawed messenger. Destiny has mocked the death of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, killed along with family members in a missile strike, and joked that he is “pro-genocide” and that “Palestinians can go live in another place.” He has also streamed with Nick Fuentes, the same figure whose normalization on the right we discussed earlier. These are not careful debates about competing historical narratives. They are the kind of provocations that undermine everything useful Destiny says elsewhere and give his opponents ammunition to dismiss his substantive arguments.

Some commentators have explicitly asked whether Piker is “the Nick Fuentes of the left,” as both parties grapple with online personalities who have gained massive followings through extreme and inflammatory content, and whom mainstream politicians are now courting despite the reputational risks. The parallel is structurally exact. Both built audiences through outrage and provocation. Both have made statements that would, in any earlier era, have disqualified them from mainstream engagement. Both are now being courted by politicians who prioritize follower counts over credibility. Both traffic in versions of the same Antisemitic conspiracy theories, Fuentes from the hard right, Piker from the hard left, just with different aesthetics.

The Soviet Blueprint: Why This Isn’t New

Izabella Tabarovsky is a Visiting Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary Antisemitism, born in the Soviet Union, who emigrated to the United States in 1990 and now lives in Israel. She is not theorizing about Soviet propaganda from the outside. She grew up inside it. And what she has spent the better part of a decade documenting is one of the most important and under-discussed stories of our current political moment.

Her central finding, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, is this: contemporary left-wing anti-Zionist discourse “reproduces with stunning fidelity some of the central tropes of Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, which demonized Israel and Zionism.” The tropes are inextricably linked to Antisemitic conspiracy theory, “containing seeds of anti-Jewish violence that we ignore at our own peril.”

This is not a metaphor. The Soviet Union, after its client Arab armies were humiliated by Israel in 1967, built a systematic propaganda apparatus to delegitimize Zionism and Israel. It manufactured and injected into global left-wing discourse a specific set of tropes: Zionism equals racism and Nazism. Israel is a colonial settler-apartheid state. The Israel lobby controls Western governments. Israeli soldiers are genocidal murderers of Arab children. Jewish solidarity is inherently conspiratorial. These were not organic political insights arrived at through moral reasoning. They were produced by KGB-connected ideologues and distributed through Soviet-aligned movements, publications, and diplomatic channels over two decades.

The resolution “Zionism is Racism” that passed the United Nations General Assembly in 1975 was a direct product of Soviet diplomatic pressure. It was revoked in 1991. The ideological infrastructure it built was not.

Tabarovsky’s scholarship answers the question that this convergence of left and right Antisemitism raises: why does the language of far-left anti-Israel demonization track so closely with far-right Antisemitic conspiracy tropes, effectively landing the far left on the same page as the neo-Nazis and white supremacists? The answer is that they are drawing from the same well. The far right draws directly from 19th and early 20th century European Antisemitism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the blood libel, dual loyalty theory. The far left draws from the Soviet anti-Zionist apparatus, which was itself built on those same foundations, stripped of their overtly racial framing and redressed in the language of anti-colonialism. Different clothes. Same body. Same poison.

This is why Ana Kasparian and Nick Fuentes use the same phrase. This is why Hasan Piker and Tucker Carlson invoke the same puppet-master imagery when they talk about AIPAC. This is why the protest signs outside Columbia carry images that could have been lifted from Nazi-era German newspapers. The horseshoe does not close accidentally. It closes because both ends were always drawing from the same source.

Tabarovsky’s response to all of this is worth holding onto as we reach the conclusion of this piece. In her recent book Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide, she urges Jewish students and communities not to hide, but to take inspiration from the Soviet refuseniks: the Jews who, under genuine state oppression far worse than anything American Jews face today, refused to accept the Antisemitism being demanded of them, strengthened their Jewish identity rather than retreating from it, and ultimately won. “They found each other and created a different reality,” she says. “They wrote their own Jewish story and recreated the Jewish identity that had been taken away from them.” That is the model. Not defensive crouch. Not unconditional deference. But confident, historically literate, morally serious engagement with the argument for why Israel matters and why it must be worthy of the support it needs.

The Recycled Playbook: A Field Guide to Ancient Hatred in Modern Clothing

Understanding what is happening requires being able to identify what you are seeing when you see it. These are not new political arguments. They are a very small, very old package of lies, repackaged for each generation.

The Puppet Master: AIPAC Controls Washington

Before we examine the trope, let’s establish what AIPAC actually is, because the conspiracy theory works precisely by keeping this obscure. AIPAC is an American organization that represents more than 5 million American citizens, including thousands in every congressional district. 100% of its funding comes from American citizens. It takes no direction from any foreign government or individual. Its policies are set solely by its board of directors, American citizens engaging in their First Amendment right based on their own personal views and values.

Crucially, AIPAC is not a foreign government agent acting under direction from Jerusalem. AIPAC’s own board makes independent decisions and does not take a position on the majority of issues related to Israel, including settlements, given the diverse views held by its members. There are also multiple competing pro-Israel lobbying groups that take sharply different positions from one another. J Street, for example, supported the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that both AIPAC and the Israeli government opposed, and consistently advocates for positions on settlements and Palestinian statehood that put it at odds with Israeli government policy. The idea that there is one monolithic “Israel lobby” speaking with one voice at the direction of a foreign government is a fantasy, and a convenient one for those who need a shadowy controller.

The facts about comparative lobbying power demolish the conspiracy entirely. In 2025 alone, Saudi Arabia spent $69 million lobbying the US government. Turkey spent $55 million. Since 2016, China has spent over $534 million on US lobbying, Qatar $266 million, the UAE $262 million. AIPAC ranked 18th in political contributions in 2024. Not one of these vastly larger foreign influence operations, several of them directed by authoritarian governments with zero democratic accountability to American citizens, generates protest signs, congressional resolutions, or Twitch content. Only the one run by American Jews exercising their constitutional rights. Ask yourself why.

And here is where the Qatar comparison becomes particularly instructive. Those foreign lobbying figures represent governments and their agents spending money to shape American policy. AIPAC represents American citizens doing the same thing Americans have always done: organizing, advocating, and donating to causes they believe in. The distinction matters enormously, and it is consistently, deliberately erased by those who want to paint Jewish political participation as inherently suspicious. FARA records show that the Qatari Embassy paid a Washington firm $180,000 per month specifically to penetrate conservative American media, and that firm’s filings identified The Tucker Carlson Show as a “top-priority target.” The firm facilitated the interview between Carlson and the Qatari Prime Minister, which garnered six million views and which Carlson promoted with the phrase “Includes paid partnerships.” Qatar’s foreign agents also pitched story ideas to Fox News employees, with favorable articles appearing within days of those pitches, and ran similar operations targeting the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and other conservative outlets. In December 2025, Carlson announced he was buying a home in Doha, at the Doha Forum, Qatar’s flagship government soft-power event, standing at the podium next to the Qatari Prime Minister, as a supposedly defiant response to accusations of Qatari influence. Qatar, which funds Hamas, hosts Hamas’s political leadership, and bankrolled the most effective pro-Islamist influence operation in the history of American conservative media, generates no comparable outrage from the people who spend their days screaming about AIPAC. The difference, once again, is that only one of them is Jewish.

AIPAC represents five million American citizens exercising their constitutional right to advocate for a policy they believe in. Qatar’s lobbying operation represents a foreign monarchy with documented ties to Hamas purchasing American media access with petrodollars. Only one of these is treated as the sinister puppet master. The difference is that only one of them is Jewish.

The Blood Libel, Updated for 2025

The blood libel, the false charge that Jews murder non-Jewish children, dates to 12th century England. It sparked countless pogroms, became central to Nazi propaganda, and has now been fully revived. Anti-Zionist activists in Washington D.C. have set up displays showing Netanyahu leading American leaders in a feast of dead babies. Protest signs in Toronto showed rats crawling out of a Star of David, directly echoing Nazi imagery. A UN special rapporteur published a cartoon showing Israel at the center of a globe-spanning web dripping with money and weapons, imagery lifted almost directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

When Ana Kasparian asks “Why are you monsters always slaughtering innocent children?”, she is not making a policy argument about Gaza. She is invoking a libel that sent Jews to their deaths for nine centuries. The fact that she doesn’t know this, or doesn’t care, is not a defense.

Dual Loyalty: “They’re Not Really Americans”

The belief that Jews hold allegiance only to fellow Jews, to a Jewish agenda, or to the State of Israel, frames Jews as untrustworthy citizens whose loyalty doesn’t align with their country. Every time Hasan Piker reduces a Jewish congressman’s moral objection to “AIPAC dogs barking,” every time Kasparian calls pro-Israel lawmakers “traitors,” every time the charge is made that American Jews who support Israel are putting Israel’s interests above America’s, this trope is being activated. It doesn’t require the word “Jew.” The structure of the accusation does the work.

The Nazi Comparison: Erasing the Holocaust While Invoking It

When Piker compares Zionism to Nazism, when Kasparian calls the Israeli flag “Modern Day Nazis,” when protest signs fuse the Star of David with a swastika, two things happen simultaneously: the Holocaust is stripped of its historical uniqueness and moral weight, and the Jewish people are recast from victims of the worst genocide in modern history into its perpetrators. This is not anti-fascism. It is Antisemitism wearing anti-fascism as a costume.

“From the River to the Sea”: What It Actually Means

This phrase deserves its own treatment because it is the most frequently defended as “merely political speech” by those who deploy it. The geography is unambiguous. The Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea describes the entirety of the land currently comprising Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. A Palestine “free” across that entire territory is a Palestine in which the State of Israel does not exist and in which seven million Israeli Jews have no homeland. This is not a call for a two-state solution. It is a call for the elimination of the only Jewish state on earth. What happens to those seven million people is left deliberately unspecified, but history does not leave us without guidance on what happens to Jewish populations who are displaced without anywhere to go.

The Epstein Conspiracy: Blood Libel Meets the Protocols

The Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory, as deployed by Kasparian and others, is a particularly efficient vehicle for Antisemitism because it appears to concern a real person who committed real crimes, making it harder to dismiss as pure fantasy. But the move from “Jeffrey Epstein was a predator” to “the Epstein network was an Israeli blackmail operation” to “this explains Jewish power over Western governments” is the ancient playbook executed in three sentences. It fuses the blood libel, Jews preying on children, with the Protocols trope, Jewish control of governments through blackmail, and packages it as investigative journalism. Timothy McVeigh was Christian. Nobody described the Oklahoma City bombing as a “Christian terrorism operation.” The singling out of Epstein’s Jewishness as the explanatory variable for his crimes is not curiosity. It is Antisemitism.

What the Surveys Actually Show: Netanyahu Has Poisoned the Word “Zionism”

Here is a finding that should stop every Netanyahu supporter cold. A March 2025 survey by the Jewish Federations of North America found that only one-third of American Jews identify as Zionists, even as nearly nine in ten support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.

How is that possible? How can 90% of American Jews support Israel’s right to exist but only 33% call themselves Zionists? The JFNA’s own chief impact officer offered the answer, and it is devastating. Jews’ reluctance to call themselves Zionists reflects “definition creep” shaped by political agendas. Many Jews “are not rejecting Israel’s existence or the idea of a Jewish state. They are reacting to an understanding of Zionism that includes policies, ideologies, and actions that they oppose and do not want to be associated with.”

The policies and ideologies they don’t want to be associated with are Ben Gvir’s and Smotrich’s and Vaturi’s and Gotliv’s. Netanyahu has not only damaged Israel’s standing in America. He has allowed the enemies of Zionism to successfully redefine the term in the minds of a generation of American Jews, associating it not with Jewish self-determination and survival, but with settler vigilantism, blocked humanitarian aid, and the smiling face of a man who was convicted of incitement to racism and whose chief of staff once said “the only problem with the Nazis is that I was on the losing side.”

Among American Jews aged 18 to 34, only 36% feel emotionally attached to Israel. 39% of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. 32% feel the US is too supportive of Israel, up from 22% in 2020.

These are not the numbers of a community that has abandoned Israel. They are the numbers of a community that has been abandoned by Israel’s government, that looks at what Netanyahu has made of the Zionist project and cannot reconcile it with what they were taught Zionism meant.

The 2026 Midterms, the 2028 Horizon, and the Bill Coming Due

The political consequences are already arriving. For the first time since Gallup began asking the question a quarter-century ago, more Americans say their sympathies lie with Palestinians than Israelis. 56% of Americans believe the war with Iran benefits Israel more than it benefits America. Disapproval of the Iran war has risen to 66%, with just one-third of the public believing Trump has a clear plan. Gas prices have spiked nearly 40% since the start of the war. Trump’s approval rating stands at about 16.9 points.

In a split test conducted by the IMEU Policy Project, a Democratic congressional candidate who says they would reduce support for Israel to focus on domestic issues beats a Republican candidate who prioritizes Israel by 15 points. That number should be read as the political price of Netanyahu’s choices, denominated in future American policy toward the Jewish state.

The 2026 midterms are already being shaped by this landscape. Democratic primary candidates are campaigning with Hasan Piker. Gavin Newsom is scheduling interviews with him ahead of his likely 2028 presidential run. The DNC nearly passed a resolution singling out AIPAC. Two-thirds of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis. Among those 18 to 34, 53% side with Palestinians, a record high for that age group. The party’s base has moved, and the party’s politicians are following.

Here is the 2028 question that should concentrate every pro-Israel mind: whoever wins the presidency, whether a progressive Democrat running on Palestinian rights or a MAGA isolationist following Tucker Carlson’s lead on Israel, will face almost no political cost for significantly reducing American support for the Jewish state. The political infrastructure that made unconditional support for Israel the default of both parties is gone. Netanyahu dismantled it, one partisan choice at a time, across fifteen years.

Conclusion: What Loving Israel Actually Requires

Let me end where I began, with love. Not the uncritical love that demands silence about corruption and ultranationalism. Not the performative love that consists of sharing IDF Instagram posts while Ben Gvir smashes Palestinian property on a West Bank raid. Not the love that tells American Jews their concerns about Israel’s direction are self-hatred, or that asking hard questions makes them traitors.

The love that Israel needs from its diaspora supporters right now is the love that tells hard truths.

The truth is that Benjamin Netanyahu has damaged Israel’s standing in America more than any Palestinian terrorist, any Iranian missile, or any progressive campus protest. He did it deliberately, calculatedly, in service of his own political survival, and the bill is now coming due in the form of collapsed bipartisan support, emboldened Antisemitism from both ends of the political spectrum, and a generation of American Jews who support Israel’s right to exist but cannot bring themselves to associate with what “Zionism” has come to mean under his leadership.

The truth is that Ben Gvir and Smotrich are not defenders of Israel. They are its wrecking crew, men whose presence in government has handed every Israel-hater on the planet a legitimate grievance to amplify, and whose policy agenda, if fully realized, would produce an apartheid state that no democratic government in the world could defend. The truth is that the Kahanist infection has now spread from their parties into Likud itself, where a Deputy Knesset Speaker praises a banned terrorist movement from the parliamentary podium and a cabinet minister describes herself as a “proud racist.”

The truth is that the Antisemitism we are seeing, the blood libel displays in Washington, the Bondi Beach massacre in which 15 people including a Chabad rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, the “goyim are waking up” rhetoric from left and right alike, is not a natural consequence of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. It is ancient hatred finding new channels, fed by Soviet-era propaganda blueprints that have been running on social media algorithms for the past three years. Criticizing Israel’s government is not Antisemitism. But much of what presents itself as criticism of Israel’s government is Antisemitism, and the distinction matters, because conflating the two makes it impossible to hold either Israel or its enemies to honest account.

And the truth is that loving Israel means demanding that it be better than this. Not perfect, no country is perfect, and Israel’s enemies hold it to standards they apply to no one else. But better than a government that sabotages its own hostage deals to protect a prime minister’s corruption trial. Better than ministers who call Gaza’s destruction “a stroke of luck.” Better than a political culture so captured by one man’s survival instinct that it has sacrificed the bipartisan American support that generations of Israelis and diaspora Jews worked to build and maintain.

Izabella Tabarovsky, writing about the Soviet refuseniks, the Jews who refused to let the state erase their identity and eventually won their freedom, offers a model worth holding onto. They did not hide. They did not apologize. They did not accept the Antisemitism that the system demanded from them. But they also did not simply defend everything their government did. They demanded better of everyone, their oppressors and themselves. “They found each other and created a different reality,” Tabarovsky writes. “They wrote their own Jewish story and recreated the Jewish identity that had been taken away from them.”

That is the model. Not defensive crouch. Not unconditional deference. But confident, historically literate, morally serious engagement with the argument for why Israel matters and why it must be worthy of the support it needs.

The bill is coming due. The question is whether Israel’s friends, real friends, not flatterers, will help it find a way to pay it before the account runs dry.

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ck

Publisher at Jewlicious

Founder and Publisher of Jewlicious, David Abitbol lives in Jerusalem. Blogging as "ck" he's been blocked on twitter by the right and the left, so he's doing something right.

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