If Israel doesn’t like how it’s perceived, it should change its behavior

There are always persuadable audiences — it’s worth trying

A large pro-Israel march in Washington, D.C., that was held weeks after the October 7 terrorist attacks. (Photo by Noam Galai)

I kicked up a little social-media shitstorm over the weekend with the observation that Israeli conduct since Ehud Olmert left office in 2009 has played an important role in declining support for Israel within the Democratic Party.

Because Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister for virtually this entire period, it’s a little bit hard to tease apart which elements of this are specific to him and which reflect broader trends in Israeli politics and society.

A lot of American liberal Zionists who I know like to very precisely personalize this around Netanyahu, who genuinely does seem to relish the prospect of turning Israel into a polarized partisan issue in the United States, and these Zionists are very much hoping he will fall from power in Israel’s upcoming elections.

That said, while Netanyahu is a controversial figure in Israel, the most divisive issue in Israeli politics right now has to do with the government’s approach to Haredi Jews, not its approach to the Palestinian issue. I think a government led by Naftali Bennett or Gadi Eisenkot would try harder at public diplomacy — and would not have figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir in its cabinet undermining its efforts — and that would probably make a difference.

But the scale of the difference will be pretty modest without a different approach to Palestinians.

Since I tend to get lumped together with Ezra Klein a lot, I want to be clear that I am a good deal more sympathetic to the substance of the Israeli view on this than he is. I used to be a big peacenik and as a result got to go on a peacenik junket to the West Bank where I met Palestinian Authority officials but also a range of Palestinian civil-society actors. And I was taken aback by how genuinely unreasonable they were.

That being said, it’s still the case that Israel’s post-2009 posture of saying it wants to rule indefinitely over a subject population of non-citizens is a huge public-relations problem and, to the extent that Israelis care about foreign perceptions, they should consider doing something about this.

What I actually think is interesting here, though, is the extent to which the backlash to this take among pro-Israel Jewish Americans just exactly parallels dysfunctional political approaches normally associated with the left.

The thinking starts with the fact that some people are biased against Israel for bad reasons and jumps to the conclusion that opponents are all motivated by bigotry, so your own conduct is totally irrelevant and the best posture to take is maximum aggression at all times. This is just not a reasonable way to approach politics — it’s the same kind of expressive, counterproductive identity politics the right complains about from the left, just assigned a different valence by the happenstance of coalition alignment.

There are always persuadable audiences and, especially when you think people are biased against you, it’s in your interest to think of ways to overcome those biases.

You cannot escape the slow boring of hard boards.

Don’t just focus on the worst people

To go all the way to the other end of the political spectrum, it’s clearly true that a non-trivial fraction of the population has retrograde views about gender and sexual orientation and is not particularly interested in a nuanced conversation about trans rights.