Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address the United Nations General Assembly in a few hours so we still don’t know what he will say. Still, it is safe to assume that the speech will probably include some of his favorite topics such as Iran, Hamas, Gaza, antisemitism, and Western hypocrisy. We can also estimate that many delegates will not be in attendance or will performatively leave the room once he takes the stage and starts speaking. While the American mission to the UN will remain seated, we do know that the president Donald Trump will not meet Netanyahu while he is in New York.

There is a striking irony in Netanyahu’s relationship with the United States: few Israeli politicians have understood America as intimately as he once did, yet few seem so poorly equipped or willing to understand the America that exists today. While Israel has been experiencing an unprecedented reputational damage in the United States (and the world), this is, to a large extent, a Netanyahu problem.

While other elements in Netanyahu’s coalition have attracted major criticism in the US, including Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, Netanyahu has become the face and voice of Israel, and not in a good way. A poll recently conducted for the Jewish Electorate Institute found that nearly 90% of American Jews identified as pro-Israel but more than 60% of respondents said they had a negative view of Netanyahu.

Hardly any Israeli politicians have spent as much time in the United States. Netanyahu moved to the Philadelphia area as a teenager when his father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, took an academic position at Dropsie College. Benjamin Netanyahu went to high school in Pennsylvania, studied at MIT and Harvard, worked at the Boston Consulting Group, and later served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. He speaks fluent American English, knows the language of Washington politics, and has spent decades navigating the American political establishment. Ultimately, these experiences molded his character and helped secure his first election as Prime Minister in 1996.

He prides himself on being “Mr. America,” constantly asserting that no other Israeli politician understands the United States and its people as deeply as he does. In a recent interview for Channel 14 (the Israeli equivalent of Fox News), Netanyahu bragged that he was able to get Trump to attack Iran because he has “the ability to influence the United States, with an intimate knowledge of all its leaders, both those who support us, and those who don’t support us, with the ability to navigate in this field.” Yet there is a striking paradox at the heart of Netanyahu’s flattering self-portrait: the longer he has remained a central figure in Israeli politics, the more his understanding........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)