The Portrait

In November 1995, Yigal Amir shot Yitzhak Rabin at point-blank range at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. I was in Brazil when it happened, and I remember the sensation of understanding, even then and from so far away, that something had ended. Rabin was the Israel I admired from another continent, the soldier who had become a peacemaker, the man who shook hands with Yasser Arafat while the whole world watched and held its breath. The assassin believed that a Jewish prime minister who negotiated with Palestinians was a traitor to his people and deserved to die for it.

Itamar Ben Gvir, who kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the man who massacred twenty-nine Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994, hanging in his living room, is today Israel’s Minister of National Security. He was rejected by the Israeli army for being considered too extremist to serve. The movement that created him politically is the direct heir to Yigal Amir’s ideology; this is the factual chain that links Rabin’s assassination to the cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2026, and those who live here know it and prefer not to think about it.

A Gallup poll published this year showed that 41 percent of Americans identify as pro-Palestinian and 36 percent as pro-Israel. Among Democrats, the margin is even wider. This number matters because the United States is the country that provides Israel with the military, diplomatic, and financial support without which the country’s security equation would be different. But it also matters for a reason harder to admit from within the country the figure describes. American public opinion is not a moral court, but it is a mirror, and what the mirror is showing is an image that has changed.

Two decades ago, it would have been almost unthinkable for a Democratic senator to write an op-ed classifying the occupation of the West Bank as apartheid. Chris Van Hollen, Senator for Maryland, wrote it. The New York Times published Nicholas Kristof on allegations of sexual violence committed by members of the Israeli security forces against Palestinians. Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and Stephen Colbert criticize the Netanyahu government on their programs watched by tens of millions of people. Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News anchor, publishes anti-Israel videos on social media with a regularity that would have once been politically suicidal. The American left and right have arrived at the same place via opposite paths, and when the entire spectrum points in the same direction, the argument that it is merely antisemitism ceases to be sustainable.

What happened in Gaza accelerated this process. After October 7 and the death of 1,200 of my brothers, there was broad and genuine solidarity with the country. The Israeli response in the two following years eroded this solidarity with an efficiency that no external enemy of Israel could have managed to produce. Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and an independent UN commission classified Israel’s actions as genocide. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, and I received this news trying to understand why it still surprised me.

Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York, which is home to more Jews outside of Israel than any other city in the world, with a platform openly critical of Israel. What is happening with American public opinion regarding Israel is similar to what happened with the legalization of marijuana, an issue that began on the left, seemed impossible, and then crossed the political spectrum until it became the majority. I am not saying the result will be the same, but I am saying that the speed and direction of the change are the same, and for those who have followed the legalization of marijuana with particular interest, the topography of this movement is recognizable.

I do not know if Israel will be able to reverse this scenario. With Netanyahu in power, it seems unlikely. His international image is toxic in a way that has already passed the point of recovery within his term. But the deeper problem is neither image nor leadership. It is that the Israel the world is rejecting is not Rabin’s Israel. It is the Israel of those who killed Rabin, and this confusion between the two is what keeps me awake, wondering if there is still time to show that they are different countries.