From ‘Mr. America’ to America’s Problem

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address the United Nations General Assembly in a few hours so we still don’t know what he will say. Still, it is safe to assume that the speech will probably include some of his favorite topics such as Iran, Hamas, Gaza, antisemitism, and Western hypocrisy. We can also estimate that many delegates will not be in attendance or will performatively leave the room once he takes the stage and starts speaking. While the American mission to the UN will remain seated, we do know that the president Donald Trump will not meet Netanyahu while he is in New York.

There is a striking irony in Netanyahu’s relationship with the United States: few Israeli politicians have understood America as intimately as he once did, yet few seem so poorly equipped or willing to understand the America that exists today. While Israel has been experiencing an unprecedented reputational damage in the United States (and the world), this is, to a large extent, a Netanyahu problem.

While other elements in Netanyahu’s coalition have attracted major criticism in the US, including Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, Netanyahu has become the face and voice of Israel, and not in a good way. A poll recently conducted for the Jewish Electorate Institute found that nearly 90% of American Jews identified as pro-Israel but more than 60% of respondents said they had a negative view of Netanyahu.

Hardly any Israeli politicians have spent as much time in the United States. Netanyahu moved to the Philadelphia area as a teenager when his father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, took an academic position at Dropsie College. Benjamin Netanyahu went to high school in Pennsylvania, studied at MIT and Harvard, worked at the Boston Consulting Group, and later served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. He speaks fluent American English, knows the language of Washington politics, and has spent decades navigating the American political establishment. Ultimately, these experiences molded his character and helped secure his first election as Prime Minister in 1996.

He prides himself on being “Mr. America,” constantly asserting that no other Israeli politician understands the United States and its people as deeply as he does. In a recent interview for Channel 14 (the Israeli equivalent of Fox News), Netanyahu bragged that he was able to get Trump to attack Iran because he has “the ability to influence the United States, with an intimate knowledge of all its leaders, both those who support us, and those who don’t support us, with the ability to navigate in this field.” Yet there is a striking paradox at the heart of Netanyahu’s flattering self-portrait: the longer he has remained a central figure in Israeli politics, the more his understanding of America appears rooted in a bygone era.

Netanyahu seems, at times, to be operating from a political map drawn in the 1970s or 1980s, an era in which Israel enjoyed broad bipartisan support, American Jewish opinion was largely aligned with the Israeli government, and American foreign policy can be understood primarily through the lens of strategic alliances and Middle Eastern power politics. Tragically for Netanyahu and Israel today, America has changed dramatically since then.

The United States that Netanyahu experienced as a teenager and learned to read during the Reagan era has been transformed by demographic change, generational turnover, the rise of social media, increasing political polarization, changing attitudes toward race and social justice, a profound reconfiguration of the American left and right, as well as within the Democratic and Republican parties themselves. Most important for Israel, many Americans, including many American Jews, now approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a very different moral and political vocabulary than the one that dominated Washington four decades ago. A recent poll found that younger American Jews tend to emphasize alternative avenues of cultural connection to their faith, such as observing traditional holidays, rather than emphasizing the role of Israel in their lives.

October 7, 2023, and the war that followed further accelerated those changes. Hamas’ attack produced enormous shock and sympathy for Israel, particularly in the immediate aftermath. But the subsequent conflict in Gaza generated images that most Israelis were not exposed to and have profoundly affected how Israel is perceived, particularly among younger Americans. For many of them, Israel is no longer understood primarily as a small democracy surrounded by hostile states. Increasingly, it is viewed through questions of occupation, Palestinian rights, civilian casualties, displacement and the massive abuse of military power against civilians.

Whether one accepts that interpretation or rejects it is almost beside the point. The political reality is that the framework exists, and it is increasingly influential among Americans. Netanyahu’s difficulty may be that he continues to interpret American politics according to the assumptions of an earlier generation and only based on the interactions he has with Donald Trump or his interviewers on Fox or Newsmax.

In the America of the 1980s, Israel could be presented overwhelmingly as a strategic ally and a fellow democracy facing existential threats. Those arguments still matter. But they no longer conclusively settle the conversation. An increasingly large segment of American society asks different questions: What happens to the Palestinians? How is military power being used? What obligations does a stronger party have toward civilians? And what does America’s financial, political and military support for Israel say about American values? These questions cannot simply be dismissed as ignorance, hostility toward Israel, or antisemitism. They reflect broader changes in American political culture that many Israelis, and Netanyahu among them, are not aware of.

The same generational shift is visible within American Jewish life. A generation of American Jews came of age seeing Israel through the defining traumas and triumphs of the 1948 War of Independence, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Such experiences forged a deep identification with Israel as a small, vulnerable nation fighting for its survival. Younger generations of American Jews came of age with a very different image of Israel, shaped not by its early wars of survival but by the 1982 Lebanon War, the First and Second Intifadas, the expansion of the settlements, and the recurring cycles of conflict with the Palestinians. Such different experiences made Israel’s military power, occupation, and treatment of Palestinians central to how many of them came to understand the country. Furthermore, younger Jews are more likely to have grown up in an America where Jewish identity is increasingly diverse and where loyalty to Israel is not necessarily regarded as synonymous with Jewish identity.

This does not mean that American Jews have totally and irrevocably turned against Israel. It means that the political relationship has become more complicated. Netanyahu’s assumption that American Jewish support can be taken for granted, and that criticism of an Israeli government will necessarily translate into weakened support for Israel itself, risks misunderstanding that distinction.

There is an equally important transformation on the American right. Netanyahu’s longstanding relationship with Republicans has often been built around the assumption that American conservatives constitute an increasingly dependable constituency for Israel. That relationship remains powerful, but today’s Republican Party is not the Republican Party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. Its politics have become more nationalist, more skeptical of foreign commitments, and more divided over the costs and purposes of American involvement abroad, and especially in the Middle East. The lesson is not that Republicans have abandoned Israel. They have not. The lesson is that the political foundations of American support for Israel are less stable and less predictable than Netanyahu’s personal experience or established political instincts might suggest.

Netanyahu’s personal image in American public opinion has also changed. For decades, he was able to present himself in Washington as the quintessential political representation of Israel: tough, articulate, strategically minded and capable of explaining the dangers the country if facing to diverse American audiences. But longevity can become a liability. After years at the center of Israeli politics, Netanyahu is no longer simply perceived as the embodiment of Israel’s security concerns. He is increasingly identified with the belligerent, destabilizing, and ideologically radical policies of the Israeli government itself.

That distinction became especially consequential after October 7, 2023. The attack shattered Israel’s assumption of security and raised profound questions about the country’s leadership. The ensuing war then placed Netanyahu at the center of an international debate over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Whatever one’s assessment of those events, Netanyahu’s personal political identity became inseparable from them. That presents him with a problem that cannot be solved by better messaging. The America he is addressing is not merely waiting for a more persuasive explanation of Israel’s position. Beyond Netanyahu’s damaged political standing, this dramatic change carries practical fallout, highlighted by reports that New York City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, may block his plane from remaining parked at JFK Airport throughout the Prime Minister’s upcoming UN visit. Consequently, the visit would be exceptionally short compared with previous trips to the United States. Neyanyahu will not meet with President Donal Trump and a potential meeting with Elon Musk is also off the table.

This is perhaps the greatest danger of Netanyahu’s apparent political nostalgia. He may believe that if he can better communicate Israel’s security concerns forcefully enough, the American political system and American public opinion will return to familiar ground. But contemporary American politics and public opinion do not support such hopes. Generations change. Coalitions change. Moral frameworks change. And once they do, yesterday’s arguments no longer necessarily produce yesterday’s conclusions.

Israel remains an important American ally. The United States remains deeply invested in Israel’s security. None of that is likely to disappear overnight. But the political relationship cannot be preserved simply by invoking the language of an earlier era. If Netanyahu wants to understand America’s relationship with Israel today, he needs to look beyond Washington’s traditional foreign policy establishment, and beyond the politicians who have supported Israel for decades. He needs to understand the Americans who have come of age since the 1980s, and especially what they think about Israel and his government since October 7, 2023. That America is different, and Netanyahu’s America no longer exists.