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Why a liberal Zionist rabbi isn’t taking to the streets over Israel’s judicial reform plan
(JTA) — Israel’s 75th anniversary was supposed to be a blowout birthday party for its supporters, but that was before the country was convulsed by street protests over the right-wing government’s proposal to overhaul its judiciary. Critics call it an unprecedented threat to Israel’s democracy, and supporters of Israel found themselves conflicted. In synagogues across North America, rabbis found themselves giving “yes, but” sermons: Yes, Israel’s existence is a miracle, but its democracy is fragile and in danger.
One of those sermons was given a week ago Saturday by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, expressing his “dismay” over the government’s actions. Hirsch is the former head of ARZA, the Reform movement’s Zionist organization, and the founder of a new organization, Amplify Israel, meant to promote Zionism among Reform Jews. He is often quoted as an example of a mainstream non-Orthodox rabbi who not only criticizes anti-Zionism on the far left but who insists that his liberal colleagues are not doing enough to defend the Jewish state from its critics.
Many on the Jewish left, meanwhile, say Jewish establishment figures, even liberals like Hirsch, have been too reluctant to call out Israel on, for example, its treatment of the Palestinians — thereby enabling the country’s extremists.
In March, however, he warned that the “Israeli government is tearing Israeli society apart and bringing world Jewry along for the dangerous ride.” That is uncharacteristically strong language from a rabbi whose forthcoming book, “The Lilac Tree: A Rabbi’s Reflections on Love, Courage, and History,” includes a number of essays on the limits of criticizing Israel. When does such criticism give “comfort to left-wing hatred of Israel,” as he writes in his book, and when does failure to criticize Israel appear to condone extremism?
Although the book includes essays on God, Torah, history and antisemitism, in a recent interview we focused on the Israel-Diaspora divide, the role of Israel in the lives of Diaspora Jews and why the synagogue remains the “central Jewish institution.”
The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You gave a sermon earlier this month about the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding, which is usually a time of celebration in American synagogues, but you also said you were “dismayed” by the “political extremism” and “religious fundamentalism” of the current government. Was that difficult as a pulpit rabbi?
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch: The approach is more difficult now with the election of the new government than it has been in all the years of the past. Because we can’t sanitize supremacism, elitism, extremism, fundamentalism, and we’re not going to. Israel is in what’s probably the most serious domestic crisis in the 75-year history of the state. And what happens in Israel affects American Jewry directly. It’s Israeli citizens who elect their representatives, but that’s not the end of the discussion neither for Israelis or for American Jews. At the insistence of both parties, both parties say the relationship is fundamental and critical and it not only entitles but requires Israelis and world Jews to be involved in each other’s affairs.
For American Jewry, in its relationship with Israel, our broadest objective is to sustain that relationship, deepen that relationship, and encourage people to be involved in the affairs in Israel and to go to Israel, spend time in Israel and so forth, and that’s a difficult thing to do and at the same time be critical.
American Jews have been demonstrating here in solidarity with the Israelis who have been protesting the recent judicial overhaul proposals in Israel. Is that a place for liberal American Jews to make their voices heard on what happens in Israel?
I would like to believe that if I were living in Israel, I would be at every single one of those demonstrations on Saturday night, but I don’t participate in demonstrations here because the context of our world and how we operate is different from in Israel when an Israeli citizen goes out and marches on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. It’s presumed that they’re Zionists and they’re speaking to their own government. I’m not critical of other people who reach a different perspective in the United States, but for me, our context is different. Even if we say the identical words in Tel Aviv or on West 68th Street, they’re perceived in a different way and they operate in a different context.
What then is the appropriate way for American Jews to express themselves if they are critical of an action by the Israeli government?
My strongest guidance is don’t disengage, don’t turn your back, double down, be more supportive of those who support your worldview and are fighting for it in Israel. Polls seem to suggest that the large majority of Israelis are opposed to these reforms being proposed. Double down on those who are supportive of our worldview.
You lament in your book that the connections to Israel are weakening among world Jewry, especially among Jewish liberals.
The liberal part of the Jewish world is where I am and where the people I serve are by and large, and where at least 80% of American Jewry resides. It’s a difficult process because we’re operating here in a context of weakening relationship: a rapidly increasing emphasis on universal values, what we sometimes call tikkun olam [social justice], and not as a reflection of Jewish particularism, but often at the expense of Jewish particularism.
There is a counter-argument, however, which you describe in your book: “some left-wing Jewish activists contend that alienation from Israel, especially among the younger generations, is a result of the failures of the American Jewish establishment” — that is, by not doing more to express their concerns about the dangers of Jewish settlement in the West Bank, for example, the establishment alienated young liberal Jews. You’re skeptical of that argument. Tell me why.
Fundamentally I believe that identification with Israel is a reflection of identity. If you have a strong Jewish identity, the tendency is to have a strong connection with the state of Israel and to believe that the Jewish state is an important component of your Jewish identity. I think that surveys bear that out. No doubt the Palestinian question will have an impact on the relationship between American Jews in Israel as long as it’s not resolved, it will be an outstanding irritant because it raises moral dilemmas that should disturb every thinking and caring Jew. And I’ve been active in trying to oppose ultra-Orthodox coercion in Israel. But fundamentally, while these certainly are components putting pressure on the relationship between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, in particular among the elites of the American Jewish leadership, for the majority of American Jews, the relationship with Israel is a reflection of their relationship with Judaism. And if that relationship is weak and weakening, as day follows night, the relationship with Israel will weaken as well.
But what about the criticism that has come from, let’s say, deep within the tent? I am thinking of the American rabbinical students who in 2021 issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for the “violent suppression of human rights.” They were certainly engaged Jews, and they might say that they were warning the establishment about the kinds of right-wing tendencies in Israel that you and others in the establishment are criticizing now.
Almost every time I speak about Israel and those who are critical of Israel, I hold that the concept of criticism is central to Jewish tradition. Judaism unfolds through an ongoing process of disputation, disagreement, argumentation, and debate. I’m a pluralist, both politically as well as intellectually.
In response to your question, I would say two things. First of all, I distinguish between those who are Zionist, pro-Israel, active Jews with a strong Jewish identity who criticize this or that policy of the Israeli government, and between those who are anti-Zionists, because anti-Zionism asserts that the Jewish people has no right to a Jewish state, at least in that part of the world. And that inevitably leads to anti-Jewish feelings and very often to antisemitism.
When it came to the students, I didn’t respond at all because I was a student once too, and there are views that I hold today that I didn’t hold when I was a student. Their original article was published in the Forward, if I’m not mistaken, and it generated some debate in all the liberal seminaries. I didn’t respond at all until it became a huge, multi-thousand word piece in The New York Times. Once it left the internal Jewish scene, it seemed to me that I had an obligation to respond. Not that I believe that they’re anti-Zionist — I do not. I didn’t put them in the BDS camp [of those who support the boycott of Israel]. I just simply criticized them.
Hundreds of Jews protest the proposed Israeli court reform outside the Israeli consulate in New York City on Feb. 21, 2023. (Gili Getz)
You signed a letter with other rabbis noting that the students’ petition came during Israel’s war with Hamas that May, writing that “those who aspire to be future leaders of the Jewish people must possess and model empathy for their brothers and sisters in Israel, especially when they are attacked by a terrorist organization whose stated goal is to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State.”
My main point was that the essence of the Jewish condition is that all Jews feel responsible one for the another — Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. And that relationship starts with emotions. It starts with a feeling of belongingness to the Jewish people, and a feeling of concern for our people who are attacked in the Jewish state. My criticism was based, in the middle of a war, on expressing compassion, support for our people who are under indiscriminate and terrorist assault. I uphold that and even especially in retrospect two years later, why anyone would consider that to be offensive in any way is still beyond me.
You were executive director of ARZA, the Reform Zionist organization, and you write in your book that Israel “is the primary source of our people’s collective energy — the engine for the recreation and restoration of the national home and the national spirit of the Jewish people.” A number of your essays put Israel at the center of the present-day Jewish story. You are a rabbi in New York City. So what’s the role or function of the Diaspora?
Our existence in the Diaspora needs no justification. For practically all of the last 2,000 years, Jewish life has existed in the Diaspora. It’s only for the last 75 years and if you count the beginning of the Zionist movement, the last 125 years or so that Jews have begun en masse to live in the land of Israel. Much of the values of what we call now Judaism was developed in the Diaspora. Moreover, the American Jewish community is the strongest, most influential, most glorious of all the Jewish Diasporas in Jewish history.
And yet, the only place in the Jewish world where the Jewish community is growing is in Israel. More Jewish children now live in Israel than all the other places in the world combined. The central value that powers the sustainability, viability and continuity of the Jewish people is peoplehood. It’s not the values that have sustained the Jewish people in the Diaspora and over the last 2,000 years, which was Torah or God, what we would call religion. I’m a rabbi. I believe in the centrality of God, Torah and religion to sustain Jewish identity. But in the 21st century, Israel is the most eloquent concept of the value of Jewish peoplehood. And therefore, I do not believe that there is enough energy, enough power, enough sustainability in the classical concept of Judaism to sustain continuity in the Diaspora. The concept of Jewish peoplehood is the most powerful way that we can sustain Jewish continuity in the 21st century.
But doesn’t that negate the importance of American Jewry?
In my view, it augments the sustainability of American Jewry. If American Jews disengage from Israel, and from the concept of Jewish peoplehood, and also don’t consider religion to be at the center of their existence, then what’s left? Now there’s a lot of activity, for example, on tikkun olam, which is a part of Jewish tradition. But tikkun olam in Judaism always was a blend between Jewish particularism and universalism — concern for humanity at large but rooted in the concept of Jewish peoplehood. But very often now, tikkun olam in the Diaspora is practiced not as a part of the concept of Jewish particularism but, as I said before, at the expense of Jewish particularism. That will not be enough to sustain Jewish communities going into the 21st century.
I want to ask about the health of the American synagogue as an institution. Considering your concern about the waning centrality of Torah and God in people’s lives — especially among the non-Orthodox — do you feel optimistic about it as an institution? Does it have to change?
I’ve believed since the beginning of my career that there’s no substitute in the Diaspora for the synagogue as the central Jewish institution. We harm ourselves when we underemphasize the central role of the synagogue. Any issue that is being done by one of the hundreds of Jewish agencies that we’ve created rests on our ability as a community to produce Jews into the next generation. And what are those institutions that produce that are most responsible for the production of Jewish continuity? Synagogues, day schools and summer camps, and of the three synagogues are by far the most important for the following reasons: First, we’re the only institution that defines ourselves as and whose purpose is what we call cradle to grave. Second, for most American Jews, if they end up in any institution at all it will be a synagogue. Far fewer American Jews will receive a day school education and or go to Jewish summer camps. That should have ramifications across the board for American Jewish policy, including how we budget Jewish institutions. We should be focusing many, many more resources on these three institutions, and at the core of that is the institution of the synagogue.
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Are you there Hashem? It’s me, Clara
“I can complain no more of what brutal tongue-abuse I suffered today. I have exhausted all manners of expression for my grievances.”
I wish I could tell you I don’t recognize those words. I wish I could say they were written by a beleaguered 19th-century governess, or a soldier in the Continental Army afflicted with gangrene. Unfortunately, they were written by me. The day was May 20, 2016. I was 12 years old and full of spite.
I am not sure what, exactly, provoked me that day (since I had exhausted all manners of expression for my grievances), but judging from other angry rants found in this deceptively cute, panda-covered journal, it probably had something to do with: A) My obsession with school, B) My enemies, let’s call them Kyle and Reese, C) My parents’ attempts to discipline me, and D) My conviction that the whole world was conspiring against me. These were heavy burdens for a sixth-grader to bear. Fortunately, the school year was almost over. Reform Jewish summer camp was just around the bend, and I was praying for change. Literally.
“God, if you can hear me, please let me have an amazing camp-experience,” I wrote a few weeks before the session started. “It’s my only escape.” Also, while I had His ear, could He make sure I got a really good part (preferably Belle) in the summer musical, Beauty and the Beast? The previous year, in Aladdin, I’d been relegated to some sadsack ensemble role that clearly did not make use of my incalculable dramatic potential. Please, Hashem!!
But God had His work cut out for Him.
During my first summer, I had established a reputation for myself as a puritanical hardass thanks to my clashes with the popular girls of Bunk 15. Let’s call them Samantha, Madison and Lindsey. Lindsey slept in the bunk bed next to mine, and every night she would amuse the other girls by pretending that she was singing Taylor Swift hits in her sleep. This enraged me. I hung up towels around my bed so I could silent-scream in private. Soon, the trio began to whisper that I was “gossiping” about them. I don’t think the counselors bought that story, though, since successful gossiping requires you to spread lies to many people, and I knew around three. I spent seven weeks in non-stop kvetch mode, writing pathos-ridden letters home, crying a lot, and making petty demands on God in a prior journal that I am scared to open. It got so bad that the camp director had to call up my parents on vacation.
Yet when the long-awaited last day came and my parents loaded up the car with all my musty-smelling camp stuff to take me home, something inexplicable happened: On my first night back in my own bed, I cried that I missed camp. Maybe I had been wrong all along! Send me back!
I don’t know how I got sucked back into another year. Maybe I’d been hoodwinked by ritual — the s’mores, the songs, the tie-dyed shirts, the crying around the lake as we promised to come back — or the fantasy that next year, I would finally be accepted. In any case, nostalgia had caused me to keep secrets from myself. “When does the memory keep secrets?” the Italian writer Alda Merini asks cryptically in her 1989 book Delirio amoroso, or Amorous Delirium, a collection of poems inspired by her experiences with love-induced madness. “When it forgets.”
I had forgotten, and now I was going to pay the price.
On my first day back, I arrived to find that all my complaining to the camp director had backfired: I’d earned an exile worthy of Napoleon, except instead of Elba, I was going to Bunk 20, where I knew nobody. I had no foes, and also no friends.
According to 12-year-old me, I spent the next seven weeks fighting back an unstoppable tide of hostilities. In reality, I probably spent just as much time swimming, kayaking, trying to play volleyball, hanging out with my new friends Lana, Hannah and Sabrina, painting clay pots, and pretending I wasn’t spending Shabbat services writing installments of a bleak tale called “Gertrude’s Life,” about a long-suffering Victorian girl with a mangled left leg. But 12-year-old me was fluent exclusively in “kvetch.” A couple of times a week, a cadre of rabbis with guitars tried to counteract my natural crankiness by teaching us key principles of Reform Jewish wisdom: Shalom (keeping calm), Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), and Hineini (present awareness). Unfortunately for the rabbis, I was too far gone. I had braces on my teeth and eczema on my skin, an intimidating combination of blood and steel.
You probably won’t be shocked to learn that I didn’t get Belle. Instead I got cast as something more fitting, the wicked crone who turns the Prince into the Beast to begin with. It seemed unfair to me that such an important catalyst didn’t have any lines, just menacing gestures. Later in the summer, our bunk went on a camping trip where I broke a glow-stick on myself and my sleeping mat, and I became convinced that I was going to die. I briefly developed “enamorous feelings” for a young fellow before concluding that “he was really into cursing and being a general idiot.” On the bus back from some field trip, a kid named J.T. said he wanted to kiss me, which was repugnant and secretly flattering.
And of course, I somehow still managed to scrap with my tormenters from the year before. On a visit to Bunk 18, the lair of my enemies and also a few friends, Madison told the counselors that she felt “uncomfortable” changing out of her swimsuit in front of me. For my part, I felt uncomfortable that she was framing me as a pervert.
Looking back on this journal, I may have had myself to blame for the isolation I spent so much time complaining about. How would anyone make friends with a 12-year-old nudnik who wrote things like “I had to go to the compost bin thrice during breakfast” and “I started off the morning by crying the equivalent of Taghaza, the city made of salt”? Even Job would not have had the patience.
One way or another, by summer’s end, I was ready to leave camp forever. Or so I claimed. “At the moment, our bunk is creating a plaque to commemorate the summer. Everyone’s laughing, sharing inside jokes I’ll never be a part of,” I wrote. “To be honest, I’m rather sick of this camp thing and going home in two days is perfectly fine with me. Camp days are too frivolous. I need something with which to occupy the mind.”
But if I wanted “something with which to occupy the mind,” I was about to get it. Two days later, I was back home. Camp was no longer tormenting me with its frivolity, and I missed it. Memory had worked its hazy rearview magic on my mind once again. I thought about my friends, about singing the evening prayer and swaying back and forth, about the wooden float we’d burned in the middle of the pond like a Viking ship to commemorate the summer. I thought about ice cream sandwiches. “It’s been so fun, and now it seems like it had all been a dream,” I wrote.
A day or so later, missing camp had become a dream, too. I never went back.
It’s been ten years since I was twelve. That time of life is increasingly dream-like. When I reread the cursed document that is my camp journal, I feel the misery. I feel it churn in my stomach sure as suspicious falafel. Yet in photos taken at camp, I see myself smiling, entwined with other girls, my braces glinting in the sun. I cannot tell which person is real. Both girls — the one in the journal and the one in the pictures — seem unknowable.
I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out what I really thought. Memory is made of such blobby, malleable stuff that you can’t touch it without changing it, reshaping it in some way. And since memories make up our “sense of self,” whatever that is, this must mean that we are constantly morphing, too.
The last thing I wrote about camp at the summer’s end was that it seemed like another life, “as if it had all happened to someone else.”
Maybe it did.
The post Are you there Hashem? It’s me, Clara appeared first on The Forward.
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Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus
(JTA) — Cornell University is condemning viral antisemitic remarks made by an undergraduate student who appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” earlier this week, but the school’s president says no further action is planned against the student.
During his appearance, the student, Austin Franco, defended his statement in June that he did not want to work with Jews, saying that he did not like most of the Jews he had met. The remark was made in a private message that the company that received it publicized.
“As a university built on the solid foundations of our nation’s democratic freedoms, Cornell has an obligation to fiercely defend freedom of speech — even when we find that speech abhorrent,” Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said in a statement issued late Wednesday, shortly after the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to the school for comment on Franco.
“The student’s public comments invoked hateful generalizations and uninformed tropes with a long, ugly history of harm,” Kotlikoff said, adding that “antisemitism generally” is “detestable, ignorant, and fully at odds with the values of the Cornell community.”
Kotlikoff, who is Jewish, did not mention Franco by name in his statement, citing federal privacy law, nor did he specify which of Franco’s comments about Jews the school found objectionable.
His comments once again place Cornell on the front line in tensions over antisemitism at colleges and universities. The school reached a $60 million settlement with the Trump administration last year to resolve antisemitism claims and regain $250 million in funding that had been frozen over campus unrest in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Cornell was one of the earliest schools to face antisemitism allegations after Oct. 7, 2023, when a professor spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally and said he had been “exhilarated” by the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
But the latest incident involving Franco had little to do with the subsequent war in Gaza until Tuesday, when the student told Morgan on his YouTube show that he objected to Jews in part because of Israel, which he deemed “a genocidal country.”
The controversy over Franco, a rising junior at the Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York, began in June when he wrote in an internship application that he was “not interested in working for a jew.”
His name and remarks were publicized by the Jewish co-owners of Handshake, the tech company to which Franco had applied for an internship, though Franco has claimed he’d already turned down an offer. His comments prompted online backlash — including from Leo Terrell, the Trump administration’s antisemitism czar, who posted dozens of times about the 19-year-old.
Franco has garnered significant support from the far right, including through a crowdfunding campaign initiated by a YouTuber who had previously drawn criticism for saying he hoped to see “another Hitler.” Franco’s comments to Morgan included positive references to “America First,” the Trump-led nativist movement embraced by the far right.
Cornell had announced it was opening an investigation into Franco when his comments were first publicized. He remained in the headlines after he was secretly filmed by an apparent sting operation led by Accuracy in Media, a right-wing activist group that has targeted pro-Palestinian students and university heads the group deems antisemitic on other campuses. Franco told a hidden camera interviewer connected to the group last week that the university’s investigation had amounted to little and that he would be returning to Cornell.
Asked by Morgan Tuesday to explain his beliefs, Franco said that a Jewish friend of his at Virginia Tech University, where he was enrolled before transferring to Cornell, “said we should genocide all Palestinians.” He named other “bad experiences with Jews” he claimed to have experienced in college, focusing on Jewish campus figures he said had “made things up about me,” and said Jews had “made my life a living hell.”
As Morgan pushed Franco to admit he was antisemitic, the student insisted he was not.
“Not wanting to be around Jewish people does not mean you don’t like them,” he said, adding that one of his exes “was half-Jewish.” He returned to Israel later in the conversation, chargingthat it is a Jewish-led “genocidal country” that insists upon “killing Palestinians and reporters and dragging America into wars abroad.” He concluded, “No, I am not going to want to associate with those people.”
“This is a common sentiment that is held,” Franco said. “If you think this is just me, you are completely wrong.”
Morgan, for his part, concluded, “You kind of made yourself unemployable.”
Franco is facing more immediate consequences, he announced on X on Wednesday. “My parents are kicking me out,” he tweeted, drawing offers of support from a handful of prominent far-right personalities.
Like many other schools that faced unrest after Oct. 7, Cornell has taken steps aimed at countering campus antisemitism while attempting to balance academic freedom concerns, in part as a result of its settlement with the Trump administration. The university commissioned an antisemitism task force and has undertaken several initiatives, including new campus climate surveys and stricter Title VI enforcement. It has also enforced a range of disciplinary actions against pro-Palestinian students.
But when it comes to Franco, one Jewish faculty member at Cornell theorized, the administration’s hands were tied.
“You sort of have to live with it,” Menachem Rosensaft, a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and former general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, told JTA. “He is engaging in obnoxious thought that is not harming anyone else.”
Rosensaft has been at the center of other antisemitism-related controversies at Cornell, including in 2024, when he prompted Kotlikoff to criticize another Jewish professor’s planned class on Gaza — an action that the school’s faculty union said was a violation of academic freedom.
In the case of Franco, Rosensaft argued that Cornell shouldn’t “turn him into a First Amendment martyr.”
But Rosensaft added that there could be grounds for discipline if Franco returned to campus and made harmful comments about Jews in the classroom or in other public spaces.
In 2025, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised Kotlikoff for what he called “a comprehensive approach to countering antisemitism.” An ADL spokesperson did not return a JTA request for comment on Cornell’s latest statement about Franco.
Franco himself has launched a second crowdfunding campaign to support his housing costs.
“I have reiterated that my parents do not share my views, and it seems they no longer wish to provide me with a home to live in,” he wrote in the description. “I know the road ahead will be difficult, but this is the path I chose. I could have lived a more conventional life, as my parents did, and perhaps in a different time I would have. However, that is not the world we live in today, and because of that, I chose a different path than most.”
This story has been corrected to reflect that the original comments Austin Franco made about not wanting to work with Jews were made in a private message rather than publicly.
The post Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu showcases diplomatic victories that have expiration dates
(JTA) — A rejuvenated Benjamin Netanyahu returned home to Israel Thursday from Washington, having crossed off everything on his diplomatic shopping list.
Grinning photo op with U.S. President Donald Trump? Check. Iran still a top priotiry? Check. Conciliation with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and conflict with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Check and check. Meetings with top-level senators and with salt-of-the-earth pro-Israel Americans? Check, check and Check!
Had he checked his pen, however, Netanyahu might have found that the ink was running out. To the degree that the Israeli prime minister scored public relations victories during his visit to the U.S. this week, they all have impending expiration dates.
Netanyahu, who faces a tough reelection campaign for the elections to be held on Oct. 27, needs to show the Israeli voters that his claimed superpower, influencing Americans to support the Jewish state, is still potent. His rivals are already making the case that his power is spent.
“Netanyahu’s expectation and hope is that Trump will establish, figuratively speaking, a re-elect Benjamin Netanyahu headquarters in Washington for the next three months,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East negotiator under Republican and Democratic administrations who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The prime minister seemed genuinely elated on Tuesday after he and the U.S. president met at the White House. Contrary to reports ahead of the meeting, Netanyahu said he was not seeking to pull the United States back into an all-out war. Instead, he wanted to see eye-to-eye with Trump on what happens if the talks to end the war fail.
He told ABC News in an interview he was in lock-step with Trump over the three options ahead: “One, to indeed succeed making a deal; two, to continue a blockade; three, to take military action,” Netanyahu said. “Anything that will produce the end of Iran’s nuclear program is what we want. That’s our common goal. We talked about it.”
The problem for Netanyahu is that the deal Trump seeks is anything but satisfying to Israel: The Memorandum of Understanding Vance reached in June, just weeks before the war resumed, allows Iran a stake in controlling – and even profiting from – the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s petroleum transits, a prerogative the Islamic Republic never before enjoyed.
Privately, Israeli officials have said they don’t expect the deal to happen, and that Trump will eventually turn to options two and three, which the Israelis favor. But Trump’s popularity is cratering ahead of critical midterm elections, inflation is not abating and even as Iran takes shots at ships in the Strait of Hormuz and its U.S.-allied neighbors, Trump keeps banking on a deal.
“There are very friendly negotiations going on,” he said Monday, the day Netanyahu arrived. “I think there’s a good chance that something could happen.”
But diplomacy wasn’t the only concern during Netanyahu’s visit. Domestic politics dogged Netanyahu in the U.S. capital. Opposition leader Yair Lapid was also in town. Both were ostensibly there for the funeral of South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a pro-Israel stalwart who backed the Iran war. Lapid in a talk to The Atlantic Council took shots at Netanyahu’s public diplomacy, saying his attacks on Democrats who were critical of Israel were making the country more isolated.
Press releases from Netanyahu’s office sought to reinforce his status as the explainer in chief: He met with prominent senators, he met with Cabinet officials, he met, above all, with Trump.
Yet these releases undercut any claim Netanyahu might have had to the prominence he once enjoyed in the American mind.
The single Democratic senator he met with was John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, whose robust support for Israel makes him an outlier in his party – something Fetterman repeatedly emphasized in the chat Netanyahu’s office posted. “It’s been disappointing as a Democratic politician, how our party continues to behave,” Fetterman said.
Lapid, by contrast, posed for a photo with Democratic senators, including some who have recently criticized Israel stridently, like Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. “Boycotting those who oppose you is not the way,” Lapid said on X. ”Repair relations with both parties. It’s not always fun, but that’s what it takes. Not by whining and not by boycotts.”
Netanyahu’s failure to engage with the American left also was evident in video of his meeting with evangelicals. “I’m very grateful to you for your consistent support, for the constancy of your friendship, and now it’s time to fight, fight, fight,” he said, evoking Trump’s famous call when he escaped an assassin’s bullet in 2024.
That prompted Mike Evans, an author who is an outlier among evangelicals for his stridency in advocating for extreme right positions, to lash out at the left using apocalyptic language. “We are fighting right now against the dark side, the leftist, godless dark side, but by the grace of God, we’re going to win this battle,” he said.
Netanyahu also took on Mamdani, who has called for Netanyahu’s arrest, likening his administration of the city to the Nazi era in an interview on Fox News. Mamdani’s wish was never going to come through – he ultimately acknowledged he had no power to arrest Netanyahu – yet his sentiment had staying power: A poll showed 49% of Americans agree that Netanyahu should be arrested.
Linsey Davis, the ABC reporter who interviewed Netanyahu, pressed him on Israel’s plummeting popularity. Netanyahu blamed the rise of social media and said it concerned him – but notably he did not explain how he planned to counter what he described as a propaganda threat to American and Israeli interests.
“I think there’s been a change because of the proliferation of social media and the fact that sovereign countries have manipulated bot farms and other things, and we can see a direct relationship between the proliferation of the social media and the decline in support for Israel,” he said. “Does it concern me? Yes, yes it does. And I want bipartisan support for Israel because I think that’s the fundament of our national security.”
Netanyahu could point to one seeming public diplomacy success: He met with Vance, likely to be a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028, and the vanguard of the sector of the GOP that is growing disaffected with Israel. A U.S. official told Axios the meeting was “cordial and productive,” diplomatese for not warm.
As for the flurry of photo-ops the prime minister’s office sent out from the trip, the one on one with Vance was not among them.
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