How Netanyahu lost America

As Benjamin Netanyahu began his latest visit to Washington, DC, to reaffirm Israel’s indispensable alliance with the United States, a public opinion survey offered a remarkable measure of how profoundly that relationship has changed. An Economist/YouGov poll released on July 28 found that 49 percent of Americans believe the Israeli prime minister should be arrested under the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.Even more striking, 47 percent said they believe the prime minister has committed war crimes in Gaza. Only a decade ago, such findings would have been politically inconceivable. Today, they are the clearest evidence that Netanyahu has accomplished what generations of Israeli leaders worked to avoid: transforming Israel from a bipartisan cause into one of the US’s most polarising foreign policy issues.That transformation did not begin with the October 7, 2023, attack, nor solely with the genocide and devastation in Gaza. Those events accelerated a process Netanyahu set in motion years earlier. His greatest strategic failure was political. By tethering Israel ever more tightly to one US party, treating Republicans as permanent guarantors while dismissing Democrat...