Can we be anti-Netanyahu and pro-Israel?

True support for Israel means backing the nation itself, not just the leaders we like.

photo: Benjamin Netanyahu/X

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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When California Governor Gavin Newsom recently tried to walk back his comments calling Israel an “apartheid state,” he reached for a now-familiar formulation: “I revere the State of Israel. I’m proud to support the State of Israel. I deeply, deeply oppose Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership…”

It sounds reasonable, even balanced.

On its surface, it reflects something intuitive: that we can support a country while opposing its leadership. After all, democracies are not their governments.

But in practice, especially when it comes to Israel, that distinction is rarely so clean — and often not so honest. Because increasingly, what passes as “pro-Israel” in Western political discourse comes with an asterisk: “I support Israel — only when I agree with its politics.” And that is not support. That is conditional approval dressed up as principle.

To understand why, we have to understand Israel itself — not as a projection of Western expectations, but as a country shaped by decades of war, terror, and failed peace.

Israel did not begin as a Right-wing state. Quite the opposite. For decades, it was dominated by the political Left — by leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, and Golda Meir, who believed deeply in territorial compromise and coexistence. The early Israeli ethos was rooted in socialist ideals, collective responsibility, and a genuine willingness to trade land for peace.

And Israel tried.

It tried in the 1990s Oslo Accords, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. It tried again in 2000 at Camp David. It tried in 2005 when it unilaterally withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza — removing thousands of its own citizens, dismantling entire communities, and leaving behind infrastructure that could have formed the basis of something different.

What followed was not peace, but the rise of Hamas and years of indiscriminate rocket fire into Israeli cities. As the Palestinian Authority lost its footprint in Gaza to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, it too hardened its policies to “compete” with the extremes of these other two Palestinian factions, including adding its now-infamous “pay for slay” doctrine, in which individuals who carry out attacks against Israelis — and the families of those who are killed or imprisoned — receive financial stipends and institutional support.

These were not abstract geopolitical developments. They were lived experiences that reshaped Israeli society from the inside out.

Over time, Israelis did what voters everywhere do: They adapted. They changed their politics based on reality.

When buses explode, when nightclubs are bombed, when rockets fall, when concessions are met with violence, electorates do not double down on idealism. They become more cautious, more skeptical, more security-focused. In Israel’s case, that shift meant moving to the political Right.

Citizens who had once trusted in negotiation and compromise saw that even the most generous concessions were met with attacks and terror. Security concerns became not just a policy debate but a matter of daily survival. Over time, the desire for strong leadership, robust defense, and deterrence outweighed ideological preferences, reshaping the country’s political landscape and making leaders like Netanyahu and others electorally viable.

And here is where a deeper gap emerges — one that often goes unspoken. Many of Israel’s loudest critics operate with something Israelis do not have: distance. The ability to treat security as a policy preference rather than a daily reality. It is easy to insist on political idealism when our borders are stable and our enemies are theoretical. It is harder when those enemies are explicit about wanting another country’s destruction. What looks like moral clarity from afar can, in practice, be a kind of moral luxury.

This is not unique to Israel. After the September 11th attacks, the United States reshaped its policies around security, from surveillance to foreign intervention. Those shifts were debated, even criticized, but broadly understood as responses to trauma and threat. When Israel undergoes similar shifts, they are far more often framed not as reactions to reality, but as evidence of moral failure.

So when critics single out Benjamin Netanyahu as though he is some kind of aberration — an unfortunate detour from Israel’s “true” self — they misunderstand the country entirely. Netanyahu is not an anomaly imposed on Israel. He is, in large part, a product of it.

Outsiders don’t have to like him. Some Israelis don’t. Israel is a loud, argumentative democracy where political disagreements are practically a national sport. Protest movements, elections, coalition collapses — these are features, not bugs.

But that internal dissent matters precisely because of what it is, and what it is not. Israelis argue fiercely about how to run their country. They protest policies, leaders, and decisions. But that debate takes place within a shared commitment to the state’s legitimacy and survival. It is a disagreement over direction, not over existence.

And that raises an uncomfortable question: If millions of Israelis, across repeated elections, choose leaders like Netanyahu based on their assessment of security and survival — who are outsiders to say that supporting Israel means rejecting the choices Israelis make?

At what point does “pro-Israel” become “pro-the Israel I wish existed”?

This is where the contradiction reveals itself, because it is one thing to critique policies; it is another to delegitimize the outcomes of a democratic society under existential pressure. And it is something else entirely to label that society (selectively, and often uniquely) as morally illegitimate unless it conforms to our political preferences. Part of what fuels this selective judgment is a common Western tendency to map domestic politics onto foreign states: the assumption that our ideological alignment at home must dictate whom we support abroad.

Another layer to this contradiction comes from this Western lens: the belief that our domestic political alignment should dictate foreign allegiances. Many Western Left-leaning commentators assume that if they are liberal or progressive at home, then being “pro-Israel” must also mean they have to reject Israel’s Right-wing leaders by default.

This is a false equivalence. Expecting Israel to mirror the politics of California or London ignores context, history, and lived reality. Conditionally supporting a country only when it aligns with our domestic ideology is not support; it is projection, imposing our values on the choices of another people navigating circumstances we will never face.

We cannot meaningfully claim to support a country while condemning it in terms reserved for history’s most reviled regimes — unless our support is conditional, fragile, and ultimately superficial.

To be clear: Being pro-Israel does not require supporting every policy, every government, or every leader. Democracies invite criticism. Israel, perhaps more than most, thrives on it.

But genuine support means accepting the legitimacy of its democratic choices even when they make us uncomfortable. It means understanding the context in which those choices are made. It means recognizing that Israeli voters are not theoretical actors in a policy debate, but people making decisions under the shadow of real and repeated threats.

Because if our support disappears the moment Israel fails to align with our politics, then what we support is not Israel. It is an idea of Israel, shaped at a distance, insulated from consequence, and often indifferent to the reality Israelis actually live in.

And that is not solidarity. It is conditional love masquerading as principle.

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