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Netanyahu’s new government could lose a critical constituency: American conservatives
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The op-ed was typical of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page, extolling the virtues of moderation in all things.
The difference was that the author of the piece published Wednesday, Bezalel Smotrich, has a reputation for extremism, and the political landscape he was imagining is in Israel, not America.
Experts who track the U.S.-Israel relationship say the op-ed had a clear purpose: to quell the fears of American conservatives whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long cultivated as allies and who may be rattled by his new extremist partners in governing Israel.
Those partners include Smotrich, the Religious Zionist bloc leader and self-described “proud homophobe” whom Israeli intelligence officials have accused of planning terrorist attacks — and who was sworn in as finance minister in Netanyahu’s new government Thursday. They also include Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been convicted of incitement for his past support of Jewish terrorists, who will oversee Israel’s police.
The presence of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and their parties in Netanyahu’s governing coalition has alarmed American liberals, including some in the Biden administration. But insiders say conservatives are feeling spooked, too.
“The conservative right was with [Netanyahu] and now he seems to be riding the tiger of the radical right,” said David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who just returned from a tour of Israel where he met with senior officials of both the outgoing and incoming governments. “And I think that is bound to alienate the very people who counted on him being risk-averse and to focus on the economy.”
In his op-ed published on Tuesday, two days before the new Israeli government was sworn in, Smotrich sought to persuade Americans that the new government is not the hotbed of ultranationalist and religious extremism it has been made out to be in the American press.
“The U.S. media has vilified me and the traditionalist bloc to which I belong since our success in Israel’s November elections,” he wrote. “They say I am a right-wing extremist and that our bloc will usher in a ‘halachic state’ in which Jewish law governs. In reality, we seek to strengthen every citizen’s freedoms and the country’s democratic institutions, bringing Israel more closely in line with the liberal American model.”
The op-ed is at odds with the stated aims of the coalition agreements; whereas Smotrich says there will be no legal changes to disputed areas in the West Bank, the agreements include a pledge to annex areas at an unspecified time, and to legalize outposts deemed illegal even under Israeli law. He says changes to religious practice will not involve coercion, but the agreement allows businesses to decline service “because of a religious belief,” which a member of his party has anticipated could extend to declining service to LGBTQ people.
Netanyahu has alienated the American left with his relentless attacks on its preference for a two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he perceives as dangerous and naive. (He also differs from them on how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.) He has instead cultivated a base on the right through close ties with the Republican Party and among evangelicals, made possible in part because he has long espoused the values traditional conservatives hold dear, including free markets and a united robust Western stance against extremism and terrorism.
But his alliance with Smotrich and others perceived as theocratic extremists may be a bridge too far even for Netanyahu’s conservative friends, who champion democratic values overseas, said Dov Zakheim, a veteran defense official in multiple Republican administrations.
“Traditional conservatives are much closer to the Bushes, and Jim Baker and those sorts of folks,” he said, referring to the two former presidents and the secretary of state under the late George H. W. Bush.
Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the op-ed was likely written at Netanyahu’s behest with those conservatives in mind.
“The Wall Street Journal piece was designed to appeal to traditional conservatives,” he said. “It was designed to send a message to the American public writ large that the way in which Smotrich and perhaps [Itamar] Ben Gvir have been described is based on past utterances and not necessarily their forward-looking policies.”
The immediate predicate for the op-ed, insiders say, was likely a New York Times editorial on Dec. 17 that called the incoming government “a significant threat to the future of Israel” because of the extremist positions Smotrich and other partners have embraced, including the annexation of the West Bank, restrictions on non-Orthodox and non-Jewish citizens, diminishing the independence of the courts, reforming the Law of Return that would render ineligible huge chunks of Diaspora Jewry, and anti-LGBTQ measures.
Smotrich in his op-ed casts the changes not as radical departures from democratic norms but as tweaks that would align Israel more with U.S. values. He said he would pursue a “broad free-market policy” as finance minister. He likened religious reforms to the Supreme Court decision that allowed Christian service providers to decline work from LGBTQ couples.
“For example, arranging for a minuscule number of sex-separated beaches, as we propose, scarcely limits the choices of the majority of Israelis who prefer mixed beaches,” Smotrich wrote. “It simply offers an option to others.”
In the West Bank, Smotrich said, his finance ministry would promote the building of infrastructure and employment which would benefit Israeli Jewish settlers and Palestinians alike. “This doesn’t entail changing the political or legal status of the area.”
Such salves contradict the stated aims of the new government’s coalition agreement, Anshel Pfeffer, a Netanyahu biographer and analyst for Haaretz said in a Twitter thread picking apart Smotrich’s op-ed.
“Smotrich says his policy doesn’t mean changing the political or legal status of the occupied territories while annexation actually appears in the coalition agreement and his plans certainly change the legal status of the settlements,” Pfeffer said.
Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said foreign media alarm at the composition of the incoming government was premature.
“I suspect that the vast mass of people will maintain the support that they have for Israel because it hasn’t got anything to do with the passing of one government to another and has everything to do with the principle that Israel is a pro-American democracy in a region that’s pretty important,” she said.
That said, Pletka said, the changes in policy embraced by Smotrich and his cohort could alienate Americans should they become policy.
“I think a lot of things can change if the rhetoric from Netanyahu’s government becomes policy, but right now, it’s rhetoric,” she said. “What you tend to see in normal governments is that they need to make a series of compromises between rhetoric that plays to their base and governance.”
Pletka said Netanyahuu’s stated ambition to expand the 2020 Abraham Accords to peace with Saudi Arabia would likely inhibit plans by Smotrich to annex the West Bank. In the summer of 2020, the last time Netanyahu planned annexation, the United Arab Emirates, one of the four Arab Parties to the Abraham Accords, threatened to pull out unless Netanyahu pulled back — which he did.
“It’s not just the relationship with the United States,” she said. “This might alienate their new friends in the Gulf, which, at the end of the day, may actually have more serious consequences.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly sought to relay the impression that he will keep his coalition partners on a short leash.
“They’re joining me, I’m not joining them,” he said earlier this month. “I’ll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel. I won’t let anybody do anything to LGBT [people] or to deny our Arab citizens their rights or anything like that.”
Zakheim said that Netanyahu, who is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, from 1996 to 1999 and then from 2009 to 2021, has proven chops at steering rangy coalitions — but there are two key differences now.
Netanyahu wants his coalition partners to pass a law that would effectively end his trial for criminal fraud, and so they exercise unprecedented leverage over him. Additionally, Netanyahu in the past has faced the greatest pressure from haredi Orthodox parties, who are susceptible to suasion by funding their impoverished sector. That’s not true of his new ideologically driven partners.
“If you look at his past governments, he has really never been forced into real policy decisions by those to the right of him,” Zekheim said. “Now he’s got a problem because these 15 or so seats of those to his right are interested in policy, not just in money.”
Makovsky said Netanyahu appears to be leaving behind a conservatism that was sympathetic to the outlook of its American counterpart.
“His success has been that he’s a stabilizer. He’s risk-averse. He’s focused on the prosperity of the country, with high-tech success. He’s the one to be seen as the tenacious guardian against Iranian nuclear influence,” he said. “And those are things people could relate to. Now, it just seems like he’s just throwing the playbook out the window.”
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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Spain reports 86% rise in antisemitic incidents, as interior minister takes aim at ‘xenophobia’
(JTA) — Antisemitic offenses in Spain rose 86% last year amid the country’s highest total hate incidents on record, according to a report from the Spanish government.
Jews were targeted in 69 hate crimes and incidents in 2025, up from 37 in 2024, according to a report released last week by Spain’s Interior Ministry. Islamophobic attacks also increased from 15 to 35 incidents.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in a video posted on Facebook that his office documented 2,417 total hate incidents last year, the highest figure since it began recording in 2014. Spain is home to about 70,000 Jews, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
The ministry defined antisemitism as any act of hatred, violence or discrimination directed against Jews or “nationals of the State of Israel.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has become one of Europe’s sharpest critics of Israel and its military action in Gaza, which he says constitutes genocide. Spain imposed a total arms embargo on Israel in 2025 and permanently withdrew its ambassador in March, following Israel’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Spain in 2024.
The Interior Ministry said hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia accounted for the largest number of offenses at 934. Grande-Marlaska called out “public officials” for rhetoric and policies that he said inflamed xenophobic sentiment.
Grande-Marlaska released his report as Spain’s far-right, anti-immigration Vox party advocates for a “national priority” policy that favors Spaniards over others in access to public aid and benefits, such as subsidized housing and healthcare. Vox recently struck deals with the conservative People’s Party to insert the “national priority” clause into coalition agreements in the regions of Extremadura, Aragón and Castile and León.
“The national priority is xenophobia,” Grande-Marlaska said. “It is institutionalized xenophobia, protected and promoted by public officials who legitimize and amplify hate speech that, in the past, would have been condemned when it entered the public sphere.”
Vox is strongly supportive of Israel, whose government has allied with the party despite a history of neo-Nazis in its ranks. Vox leader Santiago Abascal visited Israel in 2024 to show his support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Sánchez recognized a Palestinian state.
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