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Opinion: It’s time for Israelis to throw out their Trump

FILE — Election campaign billboards for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party that read, front left, "The Right or Palestine," and "They want Netanyahu to lose. Don't let them win," near Jerusalem, Oct. 28, 2026. (Ofir Berman/The New York Times)

FILE — Election campaign billboards for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party that read, front left, "The Right or Palestine," and "They want Netanyahu to lose. Don't let them win," near Jerusalem, Oct. 28, 2026. (Ofir Berman/The New York Times)

Dear Israelis,

As you know, we just had one of our most remarkable elections ever. Americans of all political stripes rose up to reject a president who thought being elected made him untouchable — free to abuse our sacred institutions, free to appoint incompetent sycophants to the most important Cabinet posts, free to use his office to enrich himself, his cronies and his children, free to turn U.S. foreign policy from an obligation to pay any price and bear any burden in the defense of freedom into a deal-making gig with dictators, free to inadvertently kill more than 120 children in an elementary school in Iran and never apologize, free to fire generals because they would not put his politics ahead of their duty to country, free to claim that any election he lost was “stolen” and free to pervert a noble Justice Department into his personal lawfare attack dog.

Some of those sound familiar?

Well, we defeated our Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s now time for you to defeat yours.

In our system, we cannot throw our Bibi out of office in midterm elections, but we would have if we could have. After your recent full-term election, you can. The opportunity is right in front of you now — and if you miss it because of petty squabbling among your opposition parties, which have the votes to finally liberate Israel from the grip of the worst leader in Jewish history, you are inviting a future of permanent crisis with your most important ally.

Because Americans did not just have elections. They had a rebellion — a rebellion against indecency, a rebellion against impunity, a rebellion against the corruption of President Donald Trump, the very man Netanyahu called “the greatest friend the state of Israel has ever had in the White House.”

So Israel was a loser, too, in our elections — twice. First, because in the eyes of many Americans, your country is now seen as being in league with this odious man we’ve just repudiated, and second, because this odious man was true to form: To save himself at the eleventh hour, he sold you down the river. He tried to beat the appeal of Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed by abruptly promising to end $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel by “the end of the year.”

Yes, the greatest friend Israel ever had promised to end all military aid in a few months — while you are in the middle of a multifront war that Netanyahu has deliberately kept multifront in order to sap your strength to oppose him. Trump did this because he smelled that his friendship with you had become a liability with many young Republican voters.

That Trump thought such a cynical move would win him quick and dirty favor with his base is just one signal of what is coming for you if you don’t change course. If you have any doubt, just read what his vice president, JD Vance, said the morning after the elections: support for Israel is one of the four reasons that Republicans lost. Attention: Vance, who sold his soul to Trump to become vice president, would sell you out for a quick headline. In fact, he just did.

Some of us have been trying to warn you about this for years — that making Israel a wedge issue in U.S. politics by aligning yourself with right-wing Republicans and evangelical Christians and abandoning Democrats and liberal Jews would haunt you one day. It would disguise the wider loss of support for an Israel trying to annex the West Bank.

But the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which long ago gave its soul away to Netanyahu, disguised the erosion of support for Israel in America, a generation of weak American Jewish leaders disguised it from you, and Bibi and his former longtime ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, disguised it from you.

Well, it can be disguised no longer. Two-thirds of Democrats in a February Gallup poll sympathized more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Among Republicans ages 18-49, 57% in a Pew Research Center survey from March held an unfavorable view of Israel.

Four years ago, the morning after Netanyahu’s Jewish supremacist coalition was elected, I wrote a column warning my fellow Americans what was coming under this headline: “The Israel We Knew Is Gone.’’

Four years later, I am here with a different warning — for Israelis: The America you knew is gone.

There is now little tolerance here for an Israeli government that, with one hand — understandably — asked us for weapons to resist a murderous Hamas invasion and Hezbollah and Iranian rockets designed for the sole purpose of wiping Israel off the map but then, with the other hand, has used the same weapons to try to wipe Palestinians off the map in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

There is little tolerance here anymore for an Israeli government that asks us for billions of dollars a year to make the Middle East safe for a Jewish democracy and then diverts billions of those dollars since 1967 to try to make the West Bank safe for Jewish messianism.

As the Bible teaches, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

A powerful American majority just sent that message to Trump: The season for your duplicity, your corruption and your lazy, do-no-homework leadership is over. This was our season for choosing, and Americans chose country over party, decency over ideology, competence over sycophancy.

That is no less your own choice today: The opposition parties in Israel must not miss this chance to get rid of Netanyahu and tell the whole world, “We are not Bibi” — the way we just told the whole world, “We are not Trump” — and then chart a new course.

You need to rally around the very decent centrist retired general Gadi Eisenkot’s leadership. You need to bring the very decent Mansour Abbas’ Israeli Arab party into the governing coalition — as you did once before. And yes, you need to form a minority government backed by a safety net from other Arab lawmakers to get this new coalition across the finish line and into power.

Let Netanyahu scream that you are creating a government that is dependent on non-Zionist Israeli Arabs. It’s time for the Israeli political center to confront Bibi’s racism head-on. Don’t just tell him that he has been relying forever on non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox parties; do something more.

Tell him, and tell the world, the truth that every Israeli knows: that 25% of Israeli doctors and 27% of Israeli nurses and 49% of Israeli pharmacists today are Israeli Arabs.

Tell them the truth that those Israeli Arab doctors, nurses and pharmacists helped to treat thousands of Israeli soldiers gravely wounded in Gaza and Lebanon — saved their lives and saved their limbs — even though many of these Israeli Arab medical workers had relatives in Gaza whose homes were being destroyed and whose lives were being taken by those soldiers.

Tell them the truth that those Israeli Arab doctors, nurses and pharmacists every week help save the lives of Israeli soldiers wounded defending radical settlers trying to evict Palestinians from the West Bank. And they do it without first asking about the political views of their wounded patients.

Tell them the truth that this Israeli Arab community has been 100 times more loyal to the state of Israel than the ultra-Orthodox fanatics, who over decades have milked billions of shekels in subsidies from the state for their schools, which don’t teach modern subjects, and who refuse to serve in the Israeli army to defend their fellow Jews.

Tell them the truth that Israel today is staring at a threat far, far greater than Iran. Netanyahu has put Israel on a track to losing the United States of America as an ally.

Finally, tell them the truth that only Israeli Arabs today can save the Jewish state — can save Israel as a Jewish-led democracy. Millions of Republicans in America had the courage to say: Only by voting for a Democrat can I save American democracy today.

How about you? Are you telling me that for decades you trusted Israeli Arab doctors to save your lives in emergency wards — without asking them to pass a loyalty test first — and now you are going to demand they pass a loyalty test before you let them vote to save your country in a national emergency?

If the tables were turned and the only way Bibi could save his political life was to rely on Arab votes, he’d do it in a heartbeat — and you all know it, because he reportedly tried it before.

Today’s Israel has only one chance to make a second impression. Forming a coalition made up of center-left and center-right Israeli Jewish and Arab parties is the necessary first step for Israel to get the new governing coalition in the United States to give Israel a second look.

So let me end where I began. We are not your grandfather’s America anymore — and blessedly, we are not Donald Trump’s America anymore, either.

A great moment happened in my country last Tuesday. Americans told Trump and Vance that they did not want another day of their incessant message to hate thy neighbor. Instead they heeded Abraham Lincoln’s admonition: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

Americans chose to rediscover our better angels over self-destruction. I hope you do the same.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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