Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Patrick Bet-David podcast that October 7 “probably” would not have happened if Donald Trump had been president, adding that Iran would have been more careful.
Even if he believes this, it is unprovable and counterfactual, and saying it out loud is strategically reckless at a moment when Israel needs every ally it can get. We gain nothing by alienating mainstream Democrats while a Republican administration happens to be in power today. We need bipartisan support tomorrow, too.
There is no forensic way to demonstrate what Hamas would or would not have done under any other US president.
What the comment does, however, is drag Israel deeper into America’s domestic cage match. It flatters one side while needlessly taunting the other, and it invites Democrats to make Israel a partisan litmus test. That may score applause in a friendly media venue, but it does not serve Israel’s war aims or our long-term strategic interests.
We have been here before. In 2015, Netanyahu’s address to Congress against the Iran deal, arranged with Republican leadership, triggered a visible Democratic backlash and did lasting damage to Israel’s standing among many Democrats in Washington. The point is not to relitigate that episode. It is to remember the cost of turning Israel into a prop in US partisan theater.
The hard truth is that bipartisan support is not a slogan. It is a real strategic asset that has repeatedly paid off for Israel. A Democratic administration signed the largest-ever 10-year security memorandum of understanding with Israel in 2016.
A Democratic president also moved carrier groups and other assets into the region after October 7, and even Netanyahu himself has acknowledged former President Joe Biden’s immediate backing in the early days. Those facts should be banked, not dismissed, because they prove why cultivating both parties matters.
The US-Israel alliance
Meanwhile, public opinion trends in the US should alarm anyone who cares about Israel’s long game. The partisan gap on Israel has widened dramatically in recent years.
Pew has documented a generational and partisan divide, and Gallup has reported that Democratic sympathies have tilted more toward Palestinians than toward Israelis since 2023. You do not repair that by goading Democrats with partisan conjecture. You repair it by showing them why Israel’s security and values align with theirs.
Netanyahu also repeated his claim that the Biden administration threatened an arms embargo and warned against entering Rafah. Whether one agrees with those decisions or not, publicly recasting them now as a domestic US political attack line advances nothing.
It invites Democrats to see Israel through the prism of their own intraparty fights, instead of through the lens of shared strategic interests. Israel’s prime minister should keep the focus on the Iranian threat, the hostages, and the path to end the war responsibly, not on scoring partisan points on Washington talk shows.
There is, of course, a Republican administration in office. Israel should work closely with it. But Democrats still control significant centers of power in Congress, in statehouses, and in cities, and they may again hold the White House sooner than we think. Israel also needs the engagement of liberal American Jews and other Democratic constituencies who fight for security aid, defend campus and community safety, and counter boycott efforts.
Burning those bridges for a punchy line on a podcast is the definition of shortsighted.
The job of an Israeli prime minister is not to guess which American president would have deterred which terror mastermind. It is to safeguard the US-Israel alliance across administrations. That means speaking to all Americans, thanking both parties for support when it comes, avoiding gratuitous swipes at past leaders, and resisting the temptation to treat US politics like an Israeli primary.
The most effective message right now is simple and nonpartisan: Israel is defending itself against Iran and its proxies, it values American support from both sides of the aisle, and it will remain a reliable ally to any US administration committed to regional stability and democratic values.
Even if Netanyahu thinks he is right about what might have happened, there is no way to prove it. There is, however, a very clear way to lose ground with a party Israel cannot afford to estrange. In a season when we need every friend, the prime minister should stop importing Israel into America’s partisan wars and start rebuilding the broad coalition that has sustained us for decades.