The old case, the new audience

Earlier this week, I wrote that Benjamin Netanyahu had delivered, twice in one day and with undiminished skill, an argument written for an America that no longer exists. That earlier America remembered Israel as small, endangered, and surrounded; saw its wars as plainly defensive; and treated the alliance, broadly, as a moral inheritance. The America listening now inherited none of those assumptions.

Several readers asked the fair question: fine — then what should he be saying? What does the new argument sound like?

Let me try to answer plainly, because criticism without prescription is only commentary, and this moment calls for more than commentary.

The skeptics we failed to see

Start with the skeptics themselves. It is tempting to sort them by party: the progressive who marched last spring; the young conservative nodding along to a podcast host asking why America underwrites foreign wars. Their politics could hardly be more different, and any strategy that treats them as one audience will fail.

But before the differences, notice what they share — because what they share is exactly what defeats the old script.

They share an absence. They do not remember Entebbe, or the Yom Kippur War, or the image of a small state surrounded and outnumbered. Their earliest picture of Israel is a regional power at war, because that is what Israel has been for all of their conscious lives. The old argument assumed a listener who arrived with the founding story already installed and needed only to be reminded of it. These listeners arrive with two decades of war on their screens, and lately the worst of it. No argument that ignores their opening picture will replace it.

They share a media diet. They did not grow up on the eight-minute cable interview, where a disciplined communicator controls the frame and the clock runs out before the third follow-up. They grew up inside the internet, where every claim meets its counterclaim within seconds, where the comment section is part of the broadcast, and where fluency itself can sound suspicious. A generation trained to detect talking points does not necessarily hear polish as command. Often, it hears polish as evasion.

And they share an allergy: to being managed. That is exactly how the current approach, however expertly executed, often feels to them.

If that is the audience, then the new argument is not simply a new list of facts. Israel’s advocates do not lack facts. The new argument is not “Israel is good and its critics are wrong.” It is: here is what you have seen, here is what we owe, here is why the alliance still matters, and here is the future we are prepared to build.

This is what........

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