Democratic candidates are scrambling to distance themselves from Israel and its controversial leader; earlier this month, 40 of the 47 Democratic senators voted against a military aid package for the country. And hostility toward Israel is spilling over into hostility toward Jews. Liberal influencers, activists, podcasters, and even politicians are invoking age-old anti-Semitic tropes with frightening regularity.Yet what is for American Jews the worst of times is, from Netanyahu’s perspective, the best of times.

His more than a decade of meddling in American politics on behalf of Republican candidates and key GOP constituencies has, over the past few weeks, paid remarkable dividends. In the skies over Iran, Israeli and American pilots flew side by side. For a prime minister who has long viewed Iran as an existential threat, this was a historic achievement.

In putting all his chips on President Trump, though, Netanyahu has exacerbated the deep and growing divide between Israel and the Democratic Party.This growing distance could create a problem for Israel if a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, but it creates a far more immediate problem for American Jews.[Read: Netanyahu’s very useful war]Diaspora Jews have, for much of the past century, found a home within both the Democratic Party and also progressive social, cultural, and institutional spaces. But since October 7, 2023, that sense of belonging has been shattered. American Jews are under attack from liberal and progressive activists who are stridently anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and in some cases anti-Semitic.In pursuing Israel’s interests at the expense of American Jews, Netanyahu has put the world’s largest community of diaspora Jews in a terrible bind, caught between support for Israel and its liberal allies.And, it seems, he couldn’t care less.American Jews and Israeli leaders have long portrayed their relationship in warm, even intimate terms.

“Jews in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora share a common bond and destiny; they are responsible for one another. These bonds must never weaken, but always strengthen,” Shimon Peres, Israel’s then-president, said in a 2011 message to the Jewish communities in the diaspora. But reality has not always aligned with these platitudes about mutual respect.Although American Jews were a crucial source of funds for the Zionist project, both before and after Israel’s creation, the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, believed—and said publicly—that the American Jewish community would not have endured but for Israel.

“If this great historic miracle had not taken place in our time and the State of Israel had not risen,” he said in 1958, “the great majority of the Jews of the United States would have been left without any bond to Judaism.” Like many Israelis at the time, Ben-Gurion believed that there was no future in the diaspora for American Jews and that they’d be better off moving to Israel, though he later relented to demands from Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee, not to interfere so directly in American Jewish life.For much of Israel’s early history, American Jewish leaders were more involved in supporting Israel or weighing in on questions related to Jewish identity than they were in security-related issues. That changed most dramatically in the 1990s with the signing of the Oslo Accords, in 1993.

Hawkish American Jews opposed the deal and lobbied Congress to place conditions on aid to the newly created Palestinian Authority. Their efforts were supported by Netanyahu, in what was at the time an unprecedented effort to politicize the American Jewish community.The moves so angered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that he said in 1995 that matters “of war and peace” would be “decided by the Israelis alone,” and suggested that American Jews should restrict themselves to focusing on issues such as emigration to Israel and helping the country absorb new immigrants.These hiccups notwithstanding, Israel’s leaders have generally viewed American Jews in instrumental terms—a reservoir of steadfast political support to ensure that Israel’s relationship with its most important ally would not falter, but not much more.But under Netanyahu, Israel’s relationship with American Jews has been far more fraught and tenuous.

Although he grew up outside of Philadelphia, speaks fluent English without the heavy accent of many Israelis, and has long boasted of his connections to the United States, Netanyahu has shown little love for the American Jewish community.Perhaps this should not come as a huge surprise. Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was