“I don’t see a path to repairing Israel’s deteriorating standing in the United States on both sides of the aisle,” Dan Shapiro, a former US ambassador to Israel, said this week, “without a change of leadership in Israel.”
It’s a common refrain these days among leading Democratic and Republican officeholders and influential pundits that, in prosecuting Israel’s wars against Hamas and Hezbollah and directing Jerusalem’s controversial government, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has almost single-handedly undermined what traditionally has been strong bipartisan support for the Jewish state.
According to this thinking, were Israeli voters to oust Netanyahu in October and replace him with a less toxic figure more sensitive to US opinion, US-Israeli relations would invariably improve.
Perhaps that’s true to some extent in the short term, when a new Israeli leader with a less bombastic style would enjoy a political honeymoon in Washington. In part to nourish more US support, that leader would likely take steps such as cracking down on settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which is helping tarnish Israel’s image in the United States and elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the argument that Netanyahu’s ouster alone will significantly improve US-Israeli relations over the long term is both overblown and misguided. It fails to account for the security challenges that Jerusalem now faces and, in turn, the likelihood that any Israeli leader would take action in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere that would foster anti-Israeli sentiment across the West.
In fact, blaming Netanyahu for falling US support for Israel is an all-too-convenient way for leaders in both parties to sidestep some very thorny issues—such as the refusal of Hamas and Hezbollah to abide by global calls to disarm, and the unwillingness of any nation other than Israel to commit arms and manpower to disarm them.
The first responsibility of leaders in any nation, after all, is to protect their people from threats at home and abroad.
That’s particularly true in Israel, which has been surrounded by enemies that seek its destruction since the state was established in 1948. In recent polling, 71 percent of Israelis ranked “law and order”—a term encompassing wars abroad and public safety at home—as their top concern.
Whether it’s Netanyahu or someone else running the show after Israel’s October elections, the country will continue to face attacks from multiple directions. It will continue to respond forcefully, as any nation would.
Hamas, which continues to run the part of Gaza that Israel has not occupied since the group’s slaughter of 1,200 Israelis in October 2023, recently announced it will dissolve its government to make way for a technocratic Palestinian committee to run Gaza under President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan. However, it still won’t lay down its arms.
Unless it does, future attacks on Israel from Gaza are inevitable. The group, which reportedly retains “tens of thousands of automatic rifles and heavier weapons like anti-tank rockets,” also will continue to hide its fighters and weapons under schools, hospitals, and other civilian centers to increase the deaths of innocent Palestinians when Israel invariably responds. That, in turn, will virtually guarantee more US disdain for Jerusalem, whoever Israel’s leader happens to be.
The same dynamic will likely play out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah likewise has refused calls to disarm.
With Lebanese President Joseph Aoun meeting with President Trump in Washington this week to discuss ideas for disarming Hezbollah, The Wall Street Journal reports that “US, Israeli and Lebanese officials are pushing ahead with a plan to train and vet elite units of the Lebanese Armed Forces” to do the job.
But Lebanon’s army is notoriously weak, infiltrated by Hezbollah sympathizers, and lacking the needed strength and will to succeed. Meanwhile, the Shia militia also continues to seek Israel’s destruction, and Syrian authorities say they’ve foiled multiple attempts in recent days to smuggle grenades as well as advanced weapons and missiles to the group.
Unless Lebanon’s army dislodges Hezbollah (or lets Israel remain in the country to do so), Hezbollah will again fire rockets at Israel and, like Hamas, hide its troops and weapons in population centers to boost civilian deaths when Israel responds—and, as with Gaza, US disdain for Jerusalem will grow.
Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and the Jewish state could indeed use a fresh face. But let’s not pretend a new leader in Jerusalem won’t do whatever is necessary to protect the Israeli people against attack from terrorists on multiple borders, whatever the fallout in Washington and elsewhere ends up being.
