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Israel’s Election Can’t Fix What Netanyahu Broke

The fundamental problem is not the name of the prime minister, but rather the actions of the Israeli government and the urgent issues that need to be addressed.

In 1996, a brash right-wing politician was sworn in as Israel’s youngest prime minister. He had led the right-wing Likud party back to power just months after an assassin killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose pursuit of peace included recognizing the Palestinian national liberation movement and establishing what seemed at the time to be a path to ending the occupation.

That fresh-faced prime minister was Benjamin Netanyahu, and 30 years later, he leads an Israeli government that has abandoned even the pretense of being grounded in liberal democratic ideals. His government has embraced Orbán-style neoauthoritarianism and the dehumanization of Palestinians. We see the changes in the weakening of Israel’s always-flawed democracy, the political attacks on the media and the courts, and the shrinking space for dissent for Israel’s own citizens. Most disturbingly, we see it in the Israeli government’s increasingly belligerent conduct toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

For Americans who have long understood the US-Israel relationship as a partnership between two democracies with shared liberal values, that transformation is not abstract. It raises a basic question: What does Israel’s transformation mean for the relationship between our two countries?

Some of the most devastatingly consequential actions by Netanyahu’s current government have to do with the Gaza war. Consider, for example, the allegations in the new documentary NAZA, based on testimony from Israeli military personnel, about the high level of collateral damage and civilian casualties that were anticipated and accepted in planning strikes throughout Gaza.

Or consider the government’s decision from March 2025 to block all food, fuel, and medicine from reaching Gaza. This was official policy, justified as an effort to gain leverage, to use humanitarian aid as a weapon of war. This sort of collective punishment is a war crime.

These decisions are anathema to Americans’ basic sensibilities about the sacredness of human life. The Israeli government’s embrace of these policies is the best explanation for the dramatic drop in sympathy for Israel among the American public. For decades Americans, by and large, had supported Israel because we saw it as a democracy that shared our liberal values and was seeking, however imperfectly, to find a way to live alongside the Palestinians. The actions of the Netanyahu government are not reconcilable with that vision of Israel.

The decline is dramatic. In a Quinnipiac poll released last week, for the first time more registered voters said that their........

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