According to many American as well as some Israeli pundits, the marked decline in Israel’s popularity can be primarily attributed to one man. Those who cite the many polls that document the shrinking support for the Jewish state believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the one to blame for the problem.
It seems logical. The downward trend has unfolded on his watch as the man who has led Israel for 15 and a half of the last 17 years. MS NOW morning host Joe Scarborough spoke for many when he claimed that the explanation couldn’t be that the United States had become 67% more antisemitic in the last decade. The only reason was, he asserted, Netanyahu’s alleged “radicalism.” And he was not being facetious.
The missing element
Still, in the most recent incident that once again demonstrated the widespread belief that Israel is the villain in the Middle East conflict, Netanyahu’s name didn’t come up.
The appalling dustup involving pop-music star Ed Sheeran, rapper Macklemore and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft may be fading from the headlines. But the melodrama that widely pilloried Sheeran and Kraft among the chattering classes, while Macklemore became the darling of the “Free Palestine” crowd, didn’t center on Netanyahu’s “radicalism.” It was predicated on the assumption of commentators in venues ranging from The New York Times to Variety that claims whereby Israel was actively perpetrating a “genocide” are not merely credible but an unchallenged truth.
Macklemore, who has a history of not merely extreme leftist advocacy but open antisemitism, was dropped from his position as the opening act for Sheeran after spouting blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” and being an “apartheid” state on stage at a concert at MetLife Stadium in northern New Jersey. At that point, Kraft—a longtime Jewish philanthropist and prominent supporter of both Israel and efforts to combat antisemitism—along with other owners of National Football League stadiums where Sheeran was to perform, dictated that the rapper not appear at their venues. That led to a firestorm of criticism from Israel-bashers, including many in the arts world who also regularly make false claims about the Jewish state.
The wave of support for Macklemore’s stance, coupled with the abuse of Kraft and Sheeran, didn’t save the singer’s gig. But it did lead Sheeran to make a craven apology for not tanking his tour by standing by Macklemore at his next concert at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field on Sept. 18, while also pleading to be allowed to sing without being dragged into politics.
Though denouncing the atrocities of Oct. 7, he also felt compelled to bend the knee to the “genocide” claim. He said that Israel’s effort to prevent more such attacks by defeating the Islamist terror group that led the Palestinian-Arab assault on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, was illegitimate. “What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate,” Sheeran said, apparently without noting that the war actually ended with a ceasefire and release—three years later—of the final Israeli hostages in October 2025. “My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilian life and loss of children’s lives. And the systemic injustice we’re seeing unfolding in the West Bank cannot be overlooked.”
Unsurprisingly, that didn’t save the singer-songwriter from being roundly denounced by many in the arts world, with only a few Jews like the singer Pink, who is Jewish, speaking up against the trend while also being bashed by the same people praising Macklemore.
The ‘genocide’ blood libel
The problem wasn’t the false claims that Kraft and other stadium owners, with Sheeran’s complicity, were repressing free speech, something that New York Times columnist Roxanne Gay characterized as “cartoon villainy” in a piece in which she actually described a vulgar antisemite like Macklemore as an eloquent and courageous advocate for human rights. Nor was the issue the allegedly outrageous policies of an Israeli prime minister.
The point of the argument, which resonated around the world, was something greater than a critique of one man or even his government. It was the claim that Israel’s attempt to defend its civilian population against a group that openly demands the destruction and the genocide of Israel’s Jewish population was itself misguided. The Israel-bashers don’t want a kinder and gentler Israel; they want no Jewish state at all.
What this controversy spells out is that the arguments about Gaza in venues like the Times newspaper, MS Now cable TV and other liberal outlets that covered the Macklemore story have largely ended. It is now possible to write or speak about the post-Oct. 7 war in such outlets as a “genocide” without even bothering to back up such preposterous claims. The claim that Israel is in the middle of an ongoing campaign to wipe out the Palestinian Arabs in the same manner that the German Nazis murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust or other acknowledged genocides, like that conducted by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Pol Pot in Cambodia in 1994 or the mass slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, has been accepted as a historical fact rather than an outrageous lie.
We are at the point where an antisemitic blood libel about the Jewish state committing mass murder is routinely asserted in public discourse in the same manner as one might note any obvious, widely accepted fact.
Why this happened is a subject that can be debated. Even though its primary responsibility was to defend the country in the actual war being fought on several fronts against Iranian terror proxies, Israel’s government can be faulted for its failure to fight the public information war.
But contrary to Scarborough’s claims that it was Netanyahu and not antisemitism, what we have witnessed in the last three years was something that transcended the usual give-and-take of public diplomacy.
The war that followed the Oct. 7 attacks was destructive and bloody and replete with tragic episodes, as is the case with all armed conflicts. Israel was faced with the difficult military problem of defeating a genocidal terror movement dug into a crowded urban area that Hamas had turned into a fortified enclave during the period from 2007 to 2023, when it governed the Gaza Strip as an independent Palestinian state in all but name.
While objective military experts have maintained that Israel’s conduct in the Strip resulted in fewer civilian casualties than any other example of modern urban conduct, that’s not how the war has been portrayed in mainstream media. A generation of journalists who had been indoctrinated in toxic leftist ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism has come to believe the myth that Israelis and Jews are “white oppressors” and colonizers from Europe. Just as troubling, they have come to believe that their duty is political activism to spread such falsehoods, not the objective reporting of facts and truth.
In this way, outlets like the Times and countless other liberal outlets, in addition to podcasters on the far right like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have become willing stenographers for Hamas propaganda that has fueled the global swell in antisemitism that ensued after Oct. 7.
Seen in that context, the notion that Jerusalem could have singlehandedly reversed this with greater proficiency in advocacy or manipulating the algorithms of social-media platforms doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Just as wrong is the notion that all of this is a reaction to Israel’s prime minister.
The split between American and Israeli opinion
Contrary to Scarborough’s assumption, Netanyahu’s policies on fighting the war against the Islamist regime in Iran and its terror proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis—are not radical but actually centrist in an Israeli context.
Israelis, who will head to the polls on Oct. 27 to elect a new government, may be split on the question of how much blame Netanyahu should shoulder for Oct. 7 or whether he should go on leading their nation, especially with the coalition partners he’s been forced to include since other Zionist parties wouldn’t work with him except as part of unity wartime cabinets. But they are not divided on the question of pursuing that conflict. Indeed, the prime minister’s main opponents are all doing their best to claim that they will be equally, if not more zealous, in seeking the defeat of their country’s enemies.
The current disconnect between Israeli and American public opinion is stark.
As the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll on the subject showed, support for Israel is now largely a partisan issue. Democrats now back the Palestinians against Israel by 58% to 17%, and Republicans support it by a margin of 77% to 6%. Even when adding in those who identify as independents, who support the Palestinians by a smaller though still decisive 42% to 26% margin, it still leaves Americans as a whole split about the conflict, with 39% in favor of Israel, 36% for the Palestinians, 12% declaring they back both, and 13% saying they don’t know or didn’t answer.
That Democrats and Republicans are operating with different sets of facts about the Middle East is the tip-off that what we are seeing isn’t a normal reaction to a bad leader but the result of biased media.
Americans live in a hyper-partisan era in which they have effectively become part of a bifurcated society. They read, listen and watch different sets of media outlets which put forward competing narratives about virtually every issue. With respect to the Middle East, that is especially true. The point being is that if you get your news from places like the Times and by scrolling social-media platforms whose algorithms promote anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda, including the blood libel about “genocide,” you’ve heard little if anything to refute such smears.
And that won’t change no matter who wins the next Israeli election.
If, in a few months, the prime minister of Israel is Gadi Eisenkot or any of the others who hope to replace Netanyahu, the circumstances that led to the Macklemore-Sheeran-Kraft debacle won’t have altered one bit.
At a moment when international media, academia and the arts world treat the genocide blood libel as a fact, antisemitism rooted in the ideas that Israelis and their Jewish supporters are bloodthirsty monsters killing children will continue to spread. Supposedly respectable outlets like the Times are backing up the blood libels with pieces that valorize antisemites like Macklemore or treat the documentary “NAZA” as an accurate depiction of Israeli criminality by writers like Gay or Michelle Goldberg, who are open about their opposition to the existence of a Jewish state. So long as that is true, the idea that all of this is Netanyahu’s fault falls apart.
Think what you like about Netanyahu. But keep in mind that his lengthy tenure in office has resulted in a situation where he has become a symbol of his country and the false assumptions about it more than anything else. In a media environment where antisemitic blood libels are treated as inarguable, Israel’s image isn’t likely to improve no matter who is leading it.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
