Dana Milbank: Israelis Need to Understand that America Is About to File for Divorce

We know from the new Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan book that President Trump threatened Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu last year with “divorce.”

“Everybody’s sick of you, Bibi,” Trump told the Israeli prime minister in a phone call with envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. “All the Jews are sick of you. Even the two Jews on this call are sick of you.”

I don’t get to say this often, but Trump was right.

Israel will be holding elections no later than Oct. 27, and it’s time for American Jews to tell Israelis: We’re sick of Netanyahu. His regime has done more damage to the Jewish State than Hamas or Hezbollah could ever hope to do.

Its war crimes against Palestinians and its relentless warmongering have turned Israel into a pariah among nations and spurred a resurgence of antisemitism around the world. Its theocratic and ultranationalist ways have shredded support for Israel on the American left and in the Democratic Party, home to about 70% of American Jews. And now Israel’s support is crumbling among young evangelical Christians and others on the right.

The bipartisan alliance that sustained support for Israel since its founding is dead, and that “divorce” Trump talked about is becoming reality. If you doubt this, consider the events of June 18:

In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani referred to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee as “monsters” who “move millions in dark money … to preserve their power” — evoking classic antisemitic imagery. After voters elected three Mamdani-backed insurgents in Democratic primaries, the crowds chanted “f--- AIPAC” at one celebration and “free, free Palestine” at another.

A few hours before that, Vice President JD Vance, the early front-runner for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, went out of his way to criticize the Israeli government from the White House briefing room: “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

Pew Research Center polling this year, conducted mostly after the Iran war began, found that 60% of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 42% in 2022 (and just 23% in 2018 in other polling). Democrats are far more critical of Israel, but even among Republicans, 57% of those under age 50 have a negative view.

In Democratic primaries, accusing Israel of genocide — a word that originated in the Holocaust — has become a litmus test. Forty of 47 Democratic senators voted in April to block a U.S. weapons sale to Israel.

On the right, figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes have found huge audiences for anti-Israel (and sometimes antisemitic) messages, while Trump has teed off in private on the “f---ing crazy” Netanyahu and publicly admonished him to “behave better.”

This is all the predictable (and predicted) result of Netanyahu’s decision over the last dozen years to abandon the bipartisan tradition of U.S. support for Israel in favor of a Republican-only coalition more likely to green-light his attempts to annex the West Bank, wage war and strip Palestinians of their rights. He feuded bitterly with the Obama administration and became a de facto surrogate for the GOP — and AIPAC went along with it, transforming into a heavily partisan coalition of evangelical Christians and conservative Jews.

Most American Jews are appalled by what Netanyahu has done. Washington Post polling found that 61% say Israel has committed war crimes, and four in 10 say it has committed genocide. Other polling has found that a plurality of young American Jews would like to see Israel and Palestine become a binational state — which would likely make Jews a minority under Palestinian rule.

Until now, many American Jews have felt anguished, and hesitant to condemn Israel. We didn’t experience the trauma Israelis did on Oct. 7, 2023. There’s an obvious double standard among anti-Israel activists who slap the genocide label on Israel but turn a blind eye to horrors perpetrated by China, Russia and others. There’s an antisemitic overtone to much of the Israel criticism.

But while we hesitate, the Jewish State is dying.

“The time for silent hedging is past,” Jonatan Shimshoni, a retired Israeli general who is now a leader of Commanders for Israel’s Security, wrote this month in the journal eJewishPhilanthropy. “The outcome of these elections will determine which future Israel will pursue: will it be a messianic, theocratic-autocratic, apartheid, insecure pariah state, or will it reaffirm its embrace of the liberal-democratic Jewish tradition to be a member of the Western family of liberal democracies and a constructive partner in its own neighborhood?”

Shimshoni, who splits time between Israel and the United States and is affiliated with the MIT Security Studies Program, told me that Israelis do not understand how dramatically Americans are turning against Israel. “They understand there’s a problem, but not quite how extreme.”

And American Jews don’t quite grasp how far gone Israel already is. “The Zionist dream that we dreamt is slipping away, and if it is hanging on it’s hanging on by a thread,” is the view of my rabbi, Danny Zemel. The Netanyahu regime is powered by the ultra-Orthodox who have no use for pluralism and democratic freedoms. Many embrace a messianic theology that entitles them to all Palestinian land, by violence and state-sanctioned terrorism.

Zemel wants local Jewish federations, and his fellow American rabbis, to speak up. “I hear so often how people don’t want to hear their rabbis discussing politics from the bimah,” he says. But “this isn’t politics. This is the moral definition of what it means to be part of Jewish peoplehood.”

Right now, polling shows opposition parties with a narrow lead, and centrist Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces chief, emerging as Netanyahu’s chief rival. Israelis overwhelmingly (and justifiably) believe Iran prevailed in the Netanyahu-instigated war. But no coalition is on track for a majority in the Knesset.

If Netanyahu prevails, “there is a real break coming, not only between the U.S. and Israel, but really between the majority of Jewish Americans and the majority of Israeli Jews,” argues Jeremy Ben-Ami, the longtime leader of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street. “The majority of Jewish Americans remain committed to a set of values that are oriented around equality and justice,” he adds, “and we’re not going to put the land of Israel ahead of our values and our morals.”

Israelis need to hear from us that if they return Netanyahu to power, they will be utterly alone.

Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.