Did Netanyahu Undermine Israel’s Most Valuable Asset?

For the first three decades of Israel’s existence, the principle was so widely understood it rarely needed stating. But when it was stated, in moments of stress or when someone broke ranks, the words were unambiguous.

In 1972, Yitzhak Rabin, then serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, was summoned before the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Reports had surfaced that he’d made remarks favorable to one side in the Nixon-McGovern race. Rabin denied it and used the occasion to articulate what he called a “long-standing practice”: Israel would remain nonpartisan in U.S. presidential elections and would not intervene in the internal politics of other countries.

Note that phrase. This was 1972. Israel was 24 years old. The rule was already old.

Eight years later, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the right-wing Likud founder who deeply loathed Jimmy Carter, reiterated the same principle at a foreign press luncheon. His own defense minister, Ezer Weizman, had publicly endorsed Carter’s reelection. Begin didn’t attack Weizman directly. He simply reasserted: the Israeli government would not interfere in the democratic election process of the United States.

Begin had every reason to abandon the principle. He believed Carter intended, in a second term, to impose a Palestinian state on Israel through arm-twisting and collusion with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. And yet he stayed silent, issued warm congratulations to the incoming Reagan and kept Israeli interests scrupulously separate from American partisan politics.

From the other side of the spectrum, Shimon Peres put it plainly in a 2016 Times of Israel interview: “We shouldn’t take sides in internal American issues. We have to appreciate that the U.S. friendship with Israel is bipartisan, so we cannot show an involvement in American politics, just as Americans are careful not to show involvement in Israeli politics.” When asked about Netanyahu’s drift, Peres was equally direct: “The right thing was to have the bipartisan support. Anything that endangers it is a mistake.”

Right and left, Labor and Likud — the rule was the same. It was not a courtesy; it was the strategic foundation of Israeli-American relations.

Benjamin Netanyahu blew it up.

Netanyahu’s partisan turn was calculated and incremental. According to Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, “whenever Netanyahu felt Obama was pressuring him, he would go to Republicans in Congress who would then issue statements blasting Obama and create multi-week political headaches for the White House.” Rhodes’ verdict: Netanyahu was “duplicitous, self-interested and relentlessly meddled in American politics to undermine President Obama, and frankly was indistinguishable from a Republican political operative in his tactics.”

The defining breach came in March 2015. Without notifying the Obama White House (which learned of the visit from news reports) Netanyahu accepted an invitation from Republican Speaker John Boehner to address a joint session of Congress, two weeks before Israeli elections, explicitly to sabotage Obama’s Iran nuclear negotiations. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff and a lifelong pro-Israel Democrat, later described the damage with precision: “The seeds to where Israel is today weren’t planted three years ago, they were planted a decade ago. What the prime minister was doing was setting a course where Israel would become a partisan issue in American politics.”

The provocations continued. In March 2024, Netanyahu appeared via video at a closed Senate Republican caucus lunch and attacked Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, calling Schumer’s call for Israeli elections “wholly inappropriate and outrageous.” When Schumer declined his request to address Senate Democrats the same day, the tableau was complete: an Israeli prime minister using the Republican caucus as a stage to attack the Democratic leadership, a first in the history of the alliance.

In June 2024, Netanyahu posted a video on X accusing the Biden administration of “withholding weapons and ammunition,” a charge the Pentagon denied with bewilderment. High-level security talks were canceled in the aftermath. In July 2024, he addressed a joint session of Congress at the height of a presidential campaign, in an event Democrats widely read as an in-kind contribution to Trump. Dozens boycotted.

The Israeli-American relationship, carefully tended as a bipartisan asset for 75 years, had been conscripted into the American culture war.

To understand why even the most loyal pro-Israel Democrats have finally said “enough”, one must reckon with what they actually did for Israel, and how Netanyahu repaid them.

The dominant narrative cast Barack Obama as an adversary of Israel. Netanyahu promoted it relentlessly.

But over eight years, the United States provided Israel with more than $23.5 billion in foreign military financing, making Israel the leading recipient of U.S. military assistance every year of Obama’s presidency. The administration invested over $3 billion in missile defense, including more than $1.3 billion for Iron Dome. Then in September 2016, after the 2015 congressional speech and years of public contempt, Obama signed a Memorandum of Understanding committing $38 billion in military assistance over 10 years: the single largest military aid pledge to any nation in American history. The White House described it plainly: “No other American administration in history has done more for Israel’s security.”

Netanyahu called it “historic” at the signing. He had spent his presidency using Congress to humiliate Obama before a global audience. Conservative Jewish groups made no effort to credit the administration that had just written Israel the largest check in American history. The narrative of Obama as Israel’s enemy continued unabated.

Joe Biden’s commitment to Israel was not political calculation. He described himself as a “non-Jewish Zionist” and told audiences his support “began at my father’s dinner table.”

After Oct. 7, 2023, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Biden flew to Israel. No sitting American president had ever traveled to Israel during one of its wars. He embraced Netanyahu on the tarmac, sat with the war cabinet, and told the Israeli people: “You are not alone.” He deployed two carrier task force groups to the Eastern Mediterranean, dispatched a nuclear-armed submarine and orchestrated two coordinated multinational responses to Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Israel. By the time he left office, the United States had provided $20 billion in military assistance since Oct. 7 alone. Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides summarized it plainly: “Biden’s support for Israel has been rock solid, and he did it at enormous political cost.” Biden’s Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk described the ledger at the close: “Biden left office with a ceasefire in Gaza, a ceasefire in Lebanon with Hezbollah defeated, Iran in its weakest position since 1979 after two failed missile attacks. His commitment to Israel’s security was unwavering throughout the crisis.”

In January 2026, at a press conference marking the return of the last Israeli hostage, Netanyahu, unprompted, declared that IDF soldiers had fallen in Gaza because “at a certain point, we simply didn’t have enough ammunition, and people fell, heroes fell. Part of the loss of ammunition was also a result of the embargo.” He noted the situation improved only “with the entry of President Trump’s administration.” He did not name Biden. He didn’t need to.

What he called an “embargo” was a single paused shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, over civilian casualty concerns in densely populated Rafah, during an otherwise uninterrupted $20 billion flow of wartime assistance. NSC spokesman John Kirby called Netanyahu’s claim “perplexing, to say the least.” Biden’s envoy Amos Hochstein was blunter: “Netanyahu is both not telling the truth and ungrateful to a president that literally saved Israel at its most vulnerable moment.”

The party that signed the largest military aid package in history, deployed carrier groups and a nuclear submarine and sent its president to physically stand in Tel Aviv: that party was told, at the moment of Israel’s military success, that it had cost Israeli soldiers their lives.

The consequences are arriving at a level few anticipated.

In a Senate vote this spring, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block weapons sales to Israel, up from 24 in 2025 and 19 in 2024. J Street, the left-leaning pro-Israel organization that had long supported Iron Dome funding, announced it would no longer back the annual military aid package at all. Its president Jeremy Ben-Ami declared: “The era of a blank check for Israel is over.”

The most telling voice is Rahm Emanuel. He is not a progressive; he is the man who as Obama’s chief of staff personally directed more than $1.3 billion into Iron Dome. He is a proud Jew, a hawkish centrist, and a likely 2028 presidential candidate. Netanyahu once called him a “self-hating Jew.” On Bill Maher’s show this year, Emanuel was unequivocal: “The days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel militarily — that’s over. No more financial aid.” When asked about Iron Dome, he made no exception: “You’re going to pay full price. You don’t have special status.”

These are not people who hate Israel. They are people who concluded, after years of watching Netanyahu treat Democratic presidents as adversaries and Jewish Democrats as enemies, that the relationship as currently structured no longer serves American, Israeli or Jewish interests.

Netanyahu’s gamble was premised on a simple calculation: locking in Republican support was worth alienating Democrats. That bet now looks far less certain, for reasons entirely separate from his partisan tactics.

The Iran war has strained the Trump-Netanyahu relationship in ways Netanyahu did not foresee. Trump, who ran as the president who would end foreign wars, has found this one harder to exit than to enter. He has publicly told Netanyahu Israel is “PROHIBITED” from bombing Lebanon. The Israeli press dubbed the parade of senior American officials dispatched to Jerusalem “BibiSitters,” sent not to coordinate but to constrain. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert observed: “Netanyahu thought he was the friendliest of all people to Trump, and it appears that he’s not.”

The events of mid-June 2026 only reinforced the pattern. When the Trump administration finalized a 14-point memorandum of understanding with Iran — extending the ceasefire, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and setting the stage for permanent nuclear talks — Netanyahu’s government was, by its own officials’ admission, not shown the actual draft text before Trump said he’d given Israel a copy. Netanyahu’s office tried to characterize the relationship as still aligned, but Trump’s own remarks told a different story: he publicly called Netanyahu “f—ing crazy” over the continued strikes in Lebanon, told reporters he was “perturbed” with him, and warned him directly to “stop this.” Within days Trump pivoted to calling Netanyahu a “great partner” and a “warrior prime minister” — a reversal so abrupt that it reads less like a steady alliance and more like a patron managing a subordinate.

Trump went further than criticism: he demanded that Israel fall in line with the MOU’s terms, leaning on the fact that his administration, in its current alignment, is functionally Israel’s only remaining great-power friend. That kind of leverage did not rise in a vacuum. It is only available to this American president because Netanyahu spent decades destroying Israel’s bipartisan support that used to give Israel options. Had he preserved Democratic goodwill alongside Republican support, the administration’s pressure would have been mitigated. Netanyahu’s single party approach has enabled Trump to make demands on Israel that no single ally should be able to make alone.

Regardless of Trump, Republican public opinion is fracturing along generational lines no partisan alignment can override. The April 2026 Pew poll found 57% of Republicans under 50 now view Israel unfavorably, up from 35% in 2022. The forces driving that shift include “America First” isolationism, war fatigue and right-wing media figures whose anti-Israel commentary is, in some cases, inseparable from documented antisemitism. Tucker Carlson promoted “great replacement” theory for years, repeatedly cast Jewish philanthropist George Soros as a shadowy puppet master and platformed Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper, who was condemned in a joint statement by all 24 Jewish Democratic House members as a “Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier.” Candace Owens, whom the ADL describes as “one of the most influential promoters of antisemitism and antizionism in the world,” has promoted blood libel tropes, Holocaust minimization, and a 19th-century antisemitic tract on her podcast. These are not good-faith foreign policy critics. They are antisemites who have found, in the current environment, an opening to mainstream hatred that was previously more confined to the fringes. The collapse of bipartisan consensus, which once gave Israel the buffer to weather anti-Israel sentiment wherever it arose, has left no safety net as the Republican coalition fractures as well.

The Pew data captures the wreckage: Sixty percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably. Fifty-six percent of Jewish Americans have little or no confidence in Netanyahu. The only demographic remaining solidly behind him is White evangelical Protestants over 50, a shrinking base that is not a substitute for the durable, cross-partisan coalition that Rabin, Begin and Peres understood to be Israel’s most precious strategic asset.

A final note on the international picture: anti-Israel bias at the U.N. and in certain European capitals is real and longstanding: one need only recall the U.N. General Assembly’s 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, a resolution so indefensible the U.N. itself revoked it in 1991. Israel’s traditional strategy was never to win those arguments but to build relationships strong enough to withstand them. Netanyahu has applied his same partisan logic to Europe, cultivating alliances with authoritarian populists, most prominently Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, whom he welcomed as “a true friend of Israel” even as Orbán was running antisemitic billboard campaigns against George Soros and awarding state honors to writers known for antisemitic views while straining ties with Israel’s most historically committed European ally.

Germany, whose Staatsräson (the principle that Israel’s security is a matter of German national interest rooted in Holocaust responsibility) has been one of the great moral commitments of postwar European democracy, has seen favorable views of Israel drop 10 points since 2021, to 36%, according to Bertelsmann Stiftung polling. Germany imposed a partial arms embargo in 2025 and its new chancellor has delivered sharp public rebukes of Israeli conduct. Netanyahu responded by invoking the Holocaust against the German government, an approach that Israeli defense industry sources privately described as ensuring Israel would “isolate itself from the world.”

Begin understood something Netanyahu does not: that a small state dependent on American military and diplomatic support cannot afford to make permanent enemies of half the American political system. The “long-standing practice” articulated by Rabin in 1972, enforced by Begin in 1980 and defended by Peres in 2016 was not a courtesy, but a survival strategy.

Netanyahu discarded it. He replaced a durable consensus with a partisan alliance always one election cycle from collapse, and it is now collapsing. He destroyed the Democratic relationship that produced the $38 billion Obama package and Biden’s wartime embrace. He alienated Jewish Democrats, then pro-Israel moderates, then hawkish centrists. He bet on Republicans whose own coalition is now fracturing. And he did it all while telling the world that the president who stood on the Tel Aviv tarmac and said “you are not alone” had cost Israeli soldiers their lives.

The bill is being delivered from the Senate floor, from Bill Maher’s stage, from a war-weary American public that now views Israel unfavorably by a 23-point margin.

Rabin called it a long-standing practice. Begin honored it even when he loathed the president he was protecting. Peres defended it with the clarity of a man watching it erode in real time.

Netanyahu called it a weakness. It was Israel’s most valuable asset. History is rendering its verdict.

Michael S. Rosenblum is a Los Angeles business attorney, a graduate of Wharton and UCLA Law with a background in political science, and a former trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.