Democrats say Netanyahu is the problem - but their opposition to Israel runs deeper - opinion

Party leaders, activists, and editorial boards repeat it until the alliance itself slips out of the sentence.

The focus buys time. It lets Democrats appease a radicalizing part of their base without saying how far that base has moved from even conditional support for the US-Israel relationship.

He called for Israeli elections. The speech treated a change of prime minister as the remedy for a strained alliance. A different man in Jerusalem, the argument ran, and the old partnership could resume its familiar pace.

Sen. Bernie Sanders went further the next month. Responding to Netanyahu, he said, “Do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government.”

The objection had already left one man’s calculations and landed on the government as such. Policy, coalition, and character were folded into a single charge.

That implication is the hedge. Leaders can tell older voters and traditional donors that they still support Israel and object only to its present prime minister. They can tell campus organizations and the progressive wing that they have broken with the man those organizations have spent years branding as the obstacle to justice. The two assurances occupy the same week and different rooms. Each audience hears what it came to hear.

The arrangement holds only as long as Netanyahu remains available as the villain. His coalition partners supply ready language about extremism. His long tenure supplies a story about one politician clinging to power. A Democrat can point at Jerusalem and say the difficulty sits there, in a single career, and that a different Israeli government would restore the old terms.

Many Democrats still expect those old terms to return. Criticize the government of the day. Vote for aid. Affirm the alliance in a speech. Move on. The formula belonged to a party whose disagreements with Israel concerned settlements, timing, and tone, and whose voters still treated a Jewish state as a settled fact. Support came with arguments. It did not come with a question mark over the state’s existence.

Surveys have tracked the same movement for years among younger Democrats, whose sympathy for Israel has fallen well below the levels their parents reported. Party leaders know the numbers. They also know that saying them aloud costs a coalition that still includes pro-Israel voters, Jewish communities, and members of Congress who will not abandon the alliance. Silence about the shift, paired with volume about Netanyahu, has been the working compromise.

So the Netanyahu frame continues and postpones the admission. Support that remains intact only until the loudest faction demands something more extreme is support on a timer. The faction has grown more maximalist with each cycle.

Conditional language about occupation gave way to language about an illegitimate state. Calls for a ceasefire gave way, in some quarters, to calls for the end of the state conducting the war. Each step was described as a response to the current government. Each step survived the news cycle and hardened into doctrine.

The choice will come. A party either grounds its support for Israel in principle, in the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination and in the reality of a democratic ally under attack, or it ties that support to the mood of a wing that has turned uncompromising. There is no stable third position in which leaders condemn a prime minister forever and never answer the people who condemn the country. Coalitions can delay a reckoning; they cannot cancel one.

Netanyahu will not be prime minister forever. Israeli politics has removed him before and can remove him again.

His departure will not retire the argument; it will end the postponement. A successor will still lead a Jewish state. That state will still control territory won in wars it did not start, still face groups sworn to its destruction, and still elect governments that American activists dislike. The adjectives will transfer. They already moved from earlier prime ministers to this one, with barely a pause for the difference between their records.

On that day, Democrats will have to answer a plain question. Were they drawing a line around one man, or were they moving, quietly and for years, toward a break with the alliance itself?

The voters who treated Netanyahu as a convenient objection will still be in the coalition. The voters who want the alliance intact will still be there, too. Neither group will accept the old double message once the named obstacle is gone. A new prime minister cannot do the work a party declined to do with its own base.

The Jewish state will remain after this prime minister, as it remained after the ones before him. American leaders who spent the Netanyahu years treating him as the whole issue will then have to say what they actually support.

The delay is the policy. The day Netanyahu leaves office, the policy expires. What remains is the argument they have been postponing, and it will be harder to hide.