How Do You Destroy a Country’s Reputation? Just Ask Benjamin Netanyahu

The prevailing conventional wisdom is that Israel is internationally isolated, that there’s growing disdain over its prosecution of the war in and the ruination of Gaza, which has inevitably led to a major humanitarian catastrophe. This is “a diplomatic tsunami,” as the Israeli media is melodramatically portraying it—as if this is a force of nature, rather than a man-made, self-inflicted condition. That is true to a point but an inadequate explanation. This is not your average bad but manageable public relations crisis. This is not a temporary condition or a result of bad hasbara, the self-righteous Hebrew euphemism for “explaining” or advocating, a term that has become a false panacea and a substitute for policy.

In the last week, many of the world’s leading newspapers, among them The New York Times, The Independent, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Libération, all had harrowing front-page photos of starving children in Gaza. In every opinion page and TV studio, there are debates about whether Israel is committing “genocide,” an issue that is already deliberated by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. That Israel may be intentionally starving Gaza and executing war crimes on a regular basis is a given in the international discourse.

That is not “an image problem” or some “hasbara” issue. That is unadulterated value self-destruction. Just look at the polls. A Gallup poll from late July shows Netanyahu’s approval/disapproval at -23 (and -53 among those under the age of 35) in the United States. The poll asked Americans, “Do you approve or disapprove of the military action Israel is taking?” and found a staggering 60 percent disapproval. A Pew poll in April found that 53 percent of U.S. adults express an unfavorable opinion of Israel (up from 42 percent before the Hamas attack in 2023), and a more recent Pew poll, conducted in June, found that in 20 of 24 countries surveyed, over half had an unfavorable view of Israel. Over 57 percent have a negative view of Israel in countries as diverse as Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. In all cases, the figures are higher among younger people.