Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu: Leave American Jews out of your campaign - opinion

A few weeks ago, I wrote at length to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after he released a video calling you a war criminal and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.”

I wrote not because I believe Israeli prime ministers are immune from criticism, accountability, or justice. I wrote because his video erased vital context: October 7, Hamas, the hostages, and the basic humanity of Israelis and Jews. Leaders must be careful with their words and actions because both can have grave consequences.

Yesterday, I was shocked to see the poster your Likud party launched, and that you personally promoted. It featured Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem, Iran’s Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and, among them, Mayor Mamdani. Above them: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.”

For one impulsive second, my reaction was pure Will Smith at the 2022 Oscars, and you were Chris Rock. Then I remembered that this is not an awards-show spectacle. Your words and images can carry consequences far beyond that.

I have always found these posters of yours sinister. The “Netanyahu: Another League” billboards showing you with US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, or Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi were supposed to demonstrate your strength as a statesman.

I mean, duh. You were Israel’s sitting prime minister for two decades. You should have photographs and some relationships with major world leaders. That is part of the job, not proof of some exceptional leadership.

But yesterday’s poster was a new low.

It is one thing to use Hezbollah, Iran, or perhaps Erdoğan as props in an Israeli election. It is another to place a sitting mayor of New York - a democratically elected official whose influence in American politics is only growing - beside the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah. Are you shameless? Have you lost your mind?

Israel’s previous leaders understood a boundary that you are constantly crossing. In 1950, David Ben-Gurion affirmed that American Jews owed political allegiance to the United States and that Israel did not speak for them.

In 1992, when Yitzhak Rabin believed AIPAC had needlessly inflamed Israel’s dispute with the Bush administration, he rebuked it and insisted on government-to-government diplomacy. The principle was always clear: American Jews and American institutions should not be conscripted into an Israeli leader’s personal campaign.

History will judge the role you played in turning support for Israel into a partisan American issue. Your confrontation with former US president Barack Obama over the Iran nuclear agreement may at least be defended by some as a dispute over what you considered an Israeli national security threat.

But placing an American mayor on a poster with Hezbollah and an ayatollah? That is beyond comprehension. That is only electioneering and political theater.

Who benefits?

Certainly not the Israeli people.

In an August 2026 survey, 41% said the next government’s most important priority should be “lowering the cost of living.” Another 25% chose “equal sharing of the burden and reducing the load on those who serve.”

Israelis need a better economy, greater security, a solution to the draft crisis, confidence in the justice system, credible public diplomacy, and a foreign policy that creates allies and understanding. This billboard advances none of those goals. It may be the opposite. 

Certainly not American Jews.

The latest polling does not show that American Jews have simply stopped caring about Israel. It shows something more complicated and more dangerous. Pew found that 91% of Jewish Americans still consider the Israel-Hamas conflict personally important and 64% view Israel favorably.

Yet 56% have little or no confidence in you. An AP-NORC survey found that 74% of religiously unaffiliated Jews feel little or no emotional attachment to Israel.

That is estrangement. America needs a better understanding of Israeli-Jewish humanity, not more partisan digging, jabbing, and campaign theater.

The only people who gain are the people pictured. For Khamenei, Qassem, and Erdoğan, being condemned by you further caters to their audiences and strengthens their standing among those already hostile to Israel. It simply empowers them.

For Mamdani, the poster may be even more useful. If I were him, I might be personally hurt by the Islamophobia of collapsing four Muslim men. All four with radically different offices, ideologies, and relationships to Israel, into one category.

But I might also thank you.

You have taken a municipal leader and placed him on an international stage beside heads of state and movements. You have not diminished him. You have elevated him into a global adversary of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That can only enhance his stature and potentially help his future political career.

But if I had to guess, he probably doesn’t care very much. He is busy running the largest city in America.

So I ask you kindly: get American Jews and American public servants out of your political campaign. Let us be. Stop using our country, our cities, our elected officials, and our communal anxieties as scenery for your reelection.

Start focusing on the real issues facing your country. Perhaps begin with this question: Why is support for Israel among Americans hovering at historic lows?

Why is Israel’s relationship with so many American Jews, particularly younger generations, weakening? And what will you do, beyond another sinister billboard, to rebuild that relationship across parties and generations?