How Netanyahu Lost America

In 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu was the marketing director of a Jerusalem-based furniture maker when Israel’s ambassador in Washington decided that the 32-year-old had been pitching the wrong product. Instead of selling cupboards to Israelis, he should have been selling Israel to Americans. The ambassador, who met Netanyahu at a conference a few years earlier, brought him to Washington as his deputy. Almost instantly, Netanyahu became the face of Israel on American television—a fixture on Nightline and Larry King Live, pugnacious, eloquent in unaccented English acquired as a boy in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

For the next four decades, through nearly every office he held, Netanyahu’s portfolio never changed: He was the guardian of Israel’s standing in America, a task he never delegated, since he believed that nobody understood it better than he did. And it is a task at which Netanyahu, as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has failed abjectly.