Wie Netanyahu Amerika verlor
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/bibi-netanyahu-israel-failures-antisemitism/688050/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo
Wie Netanyahu Amerika verlor
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/bibi-netanyahu-israel-failures-antisemitism/688050/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo
7 Kommentare
Franklin Foer: “In 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu was the marketing director of a Jerusalem-based furniture maker when Israel’s ambassador in Washington decided that the 32-year-old had been pitching the wrong product. Instead of selling cupboards to Israelis, he should have been selling Israel to Americans. The ambassador, who met Netanyahu at a conference a few years earlier, brought him to Washington as his deputy. Almost instantly, Netanyahu became the face of Israel on American television—a fixture on *Nightline* and *Larry King Live*, pugnacious, eloquent in unaccented English acquired as a boy in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
“For the next four decades, through nearly every office he held, Netanyahu’s portfolio never changed: He was the guardian of Israel’s standing in America, a task he never delegated, since he believed that nobody understood it better than he did. And it is a task at which Netanyahu, as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has failed abjectly.
“Just over a decade ago, support for Israel was one of the last remaining bipartisan reflexes in American politics. The harshest thing most mainstream Democrats said about the country was that Netanyahu’s government was obstructing a two-state agreement with Palestinians. But in the years since the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of Israelis and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, that consensus, which was already losing ground among the Democratic rank and file, gave way. Two years ago, 19 senators in the Democratic caucus voted to block arms sales to Israel; this April, 40 out of 47 did—including most of the presidential aspirants within the caucus. Now, the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the world is an avowed anti-Zionist who campaigned on the promise that he would arrest Netanyahu; a Columbia University activist who joined an October 8, 2023, rally celebrating the Hamas attacks will almost certainly be elected to the next Congress. Leading liberal senators, including Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, have made criticism of Israel a central part of their message.
“And the collapse is bipartisan. This month, Vice President Vance—perhaps the likeliest Republican presidential nominee in 2028—told the podcaster Joe Rogan that the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” a theory for which no evidence exists. Vance accused Israel of scheming against his own diplomacy with Iran. A decade ago, a Republican who talked this way would have been drummed out of the party. Now he is in line to lead it …
“It is perfectly fair to stipulate that anti-Semitism accounts for the double standard by which Israel is routinely judged, but hatred isn’t what has caused formerly supportive Democrats to view Israel as a political liability. Anti-Semitism isn’t the principal reason that many Americans have come to view Israel as indifferent to Palestinian suffering. Netanyahu’s choices, rhetoric, and actions encouraged these perceptions, and at every point where the damage might have been contained, he made it worse.”
Read more: [https://theatln.tc/mwVXCzWk](https://theatln.tc/mwVXCzWk)
The „never delegated“ detail is the part that sticks. Four decades of one guy treating America’s relationship with Israel as his personal project, and now we get to watch the wreckage. There’s something almost Greek about it, the man who thought nobody understood the job better turning out to be the one who blew it up.
What gets less attention in pieces like this is how much the American political landscape itself shifted. Even a savvier operator would have struggled as the bipartisan consensus frayed on everything from trade to foreign aid. Netanyahu gets blamed for a collapse that was already underway, though he surely accelerated it and made the landing worse.
The Vance quote about Epstein and Israeli intelligence is the giveaway. A decade ago that would have ended a Republican career, and now it’s the vice president on Joe Rogan. That tells you more about where the GOP has gone than about Israel policy specifically. The „guardian“ framing only works if you assume America was a fixed audience. It wasn’t.
I think it’s in is pocket, who are the americans bombing? In the name of what country?
Sorry this title is BS.
Some of the author’s bafflement seems to me to be itself indicative of a Fukuyamist bias in epistemology. Specifically, the decentering of the Epstein fiasco as a central and cross-partisan issue, alleging even that no evidence exists linking Epstein to Israeli intelligence despite numerous documented diplomatic liaisons, payments, etc.
Also, the entire „Great Man Theory of History“ taken by the article too easily attributes to Netanyahu, or Ben Gvir, failures that at the end of the day are more structural to the Zionist project, and its core thesis that antisemitism is a specific as opposed to a generic form of bigotry. I don’t think either the mainstream left nor the reactionaries on the right at all hold that to be true these days.
Finally, the article skirts around the most potent of international controversies: that of the active arrest warrant out for Netanyahu for crimes against humanity. The article’s few mentions to the genocide are hedged in such as to indicate it’s being written for a (minority, I’d say) ingroup in which the genocide itself is not taken as a matter of record, but rather something one must wring one’s hands about and say „it’s complicated“.
Heavily disagree with this article’s premise. It fallaciously assumes people make wholly rational decisions based on other people’s actions and behaviors.
The current anti-Israel wave is fanned by propaganda disseminated through social media. The only POV shared is that Israel is oppressive. It’s much more likely that people’s thoughts on Israel are motivated by rhetoric rather than reason.
Most people want fairness and the plight of the Palestinians et al is injustice at the highest level. And this conflict didn’t start two years ago.
Was it the war crimes? I bet it was the war crimes.