The blame game: How the US midterm shock is shaping Israel’s race for PM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long sold himself as the leader who will ensure that ties with the United States, the country’s most important ally, remain strong. The endorsement he received in the run-up to Israel’s parliamentary elections last month from US President Donald Trump added to that perception, in the same year as Washington and Tel Aviv jointly went to war against Iran.

Then came the US midterm elections, and the disastrous performance of Trump’s Republican Party. Early analysis of why the Republicans lost so badly has in part focused on that war with Iran, and the United States’s relationship with Israel. Both were highlighted by US Vice President JD Vance.

Suddenly, Netanyahu’s argument that he is the US-Israel relationship’s secret sauce looks much weaker. If anything, it can be argued that Netanyahu, and his policies – resulting in a genocidal war in Gaza, the Iran war, and numerous attacks in the wider region – have made Israel politically toxic in the US.

Many Israelis are now worried that the country can no longer rely on unquestioned support from the US. And as Israel’s political leaders jockey to try and form a government following the parliamentary elections, the opposition has laid the blame squarely at Netanyahu’s feet, and argued that it is another reason he should not be allowed to form the next government.

Yair Lapid, a former Israeli prime minister whose party is a member of the bloc seeking to unseat Netanyahu, stressed his own ties to members of the US Congress in a social media post. He added that he believed US voters were not so much against Israel as “against extremist ministers who say crazy things. They’re against settler violence; they’re against a government they don’t understand; they’re mainly against Netanyahu — for them, anything connected to him is toxic”.

Avigdor Lieberman, another opposition leader, echoed what many in Israel are said to suspect: that Trump’s election-day announcement that US military aid to Israel would end had been traded for his endorsement of the prime minister. “The price of Trump’s support for Netanyahu – $3.8bn dollars a year,” Lieberman wrote on social media.

“With America stopping the money it has channelled to Israel for so many years, the defence budget, already 7 percent of GDP, will have to rise. Israelis will feel it in their pocket. But then, you can’t be a rogue state and expect things to continue as before,” Ahron Bregman, an Israeli security analyst and senior teaching fellow at King’s College London, said. “In Israel, Netanyahu continues to do what he has always done so well, turning one segment of the population against the other. He’s now trying to delegitimise the Arabs by saying they stole the elections, in order to stop the opposition having the Arabs as partners.”

No substantial change

Israel’s general election on October 27 left Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc with 53 seats in parliament, eight short of the 61 needed to form a government.

The opposition bloc led by former army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot got 48 seats, while the Arab-led parties – the United Arab List (Ra’am) and the Joint List – have 19 seats. The Arab-led parties have both said that they will support Eisenkot for prime minister.

Eisenkot and other opposition leaders have rejected suggestions of a unity government with Netanyahu, leaving him without a clear path to a majority.

It is now up to Israeli President Isaac Herzog to nominate a politician to form a government, but he has yet to do so.

As things stand, Eisenkot’s self-styled Zionist bloc, which has previously ruled out serving alongside the Arab-led parties, stands to benefit from their backing from outside the government, despite Netanyahu’s attacks.

Eisenkot’s prospects were boosted further on Thursday when United Torah Judaism (UTJ), Netanyahu’s longtime ultra-Orthodox ally, declined for the first time since 2009 to recommend him or anyone else to form a government, an apparent defection that weakens the prime minister’s position while giving a boost to his opponents.

But Eisenkot replacing Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister does not necessarily mean that he will be able to reverse Israel’s declining popularity in the US. An April Pew Research Center poll suggested that public attitudes in the US are as negative towards Israel as they are towards Netanyahu, noted pollster Shibley Telhami, the director of the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll.

“Our own poll found that most Americans would not change their view of Israel, even if there is a new government without Netanyahu,” said Telhami. “Any government of Israel would be swimming against the rising public tide … I don’t think any government of Israel could return relations back to where they were five years ago.”