Mitchell Plitnick
Mondoweiss / August 23, 2026
Netanyahu’s campaign billboard lumps Zohran Mamdani with Iran and Hezbollah as an “enemy”, an admission that he’s losing America, and that no successor will fix Israel’s underlying apartheid problem.
Two months before Israel’s election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s best hope continues to lie in the fact that, while his presumed coalition is very far from being able to cobble together a majority government, the opposition is not there yet either. He’s playing for a stalemate. In the hope that an opportunity to strengthen his side of the equation will appear, as it has in the past.
Netanyahu’s primary campaign appeal is his experience and his image as the strongman who can bring security to Israel. But that case has been weakened dramatically, and not only by the devastating attack of October 7, 2023.
Israel’s enormous military, like that of the United States, has proven quite expert at killing and destruction but it has not been effective in achieving strategic aims or in making the Israeli population feel more secure.
Netanyahu has borne the brunt of that failure, although it is a flaw that lies in broader Israeli thinking, and enjoys strong representation in the minds of Netanyahu’s opposition figures, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and others.
Netanyahu makes his case with fearmongering and that does contrast to some extent with his opponents, who often talk of how they will improve Israel’s image in the world, increase alliances, open up more business opportunities and such. It’s fantastical, given that none of them offer any substantive change in policy toward the Palestinians, but no more so than Netanyahu’s brand of fearmongering.
One recent example that has drawn a lot of attention is the Likud’s campaign to frighten Israelis over the “dire consequences” that would ensue if the opposition wins.
‘The Enemies’ Billboard Campaign
Likud has put billboards around Israel saying “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t help them succeed.” The words frame headshots of Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan, Hezbollah Leader Naim Qassem…and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The four men are Israel’s greatest enemies in Netanyahu’s telling. It isn’t at all surprising that Erdogan would be on their next to two people with whom Israel is right now at war. It’s a little more surprising that Mamdani was included.
Netanyahu is sending several messages by including Mamdani in that image. Obviously, he is meant to stand for the “anti-Israel” or even “antisemitic” bent of the Democratic party and progressives in general in the United States.
But more than that, it is Mamdani’s image that is meant to communicate that Israel is “on its own.” It says that “the Muslims” are everywhere, working against all the world’s Jews. Netanyahu is telling his voters that Israel must always act for itself, without regard for others and their opinions, because eventually they will all turn on the “Jewish state.”
It’s a bogus and racist argument, of course, one meant to elide the fact that Israel is, and always will be, dependent on the hated European Union for trade and the “unreliable” United States for its military and political hegemony and impunity. But that’s not how Netanyahu wants to portray the world.
His problem, however, is that he is undermining a key aspect of his own appeal: his ability to deliver America.
By including Mamdani on the billboard, Netanyahu is admitting he is losing the United States, a fact which people may not need to be told, but one which it is hardly in Netanyahu’s interest to remind them about.
Likud has now grouped the rising wave of progressive Democrats in with the demonized faces of Iran, Hezbollah, and the next “great enemy,” Türkiye. That’s an admission that, for the first time in decades, there is a real force in the United States that stands in the way of Israeli ambitions.
Elections won’t change Israel’s image
Israelis are thus faced with a choice. One option is to continue trying to fortify themselves into a modern-day Sparta, as Netanyahu once suggested, while counting on far-right forces in the U.S. to pursue increasingly unpopular legislative strategies to codify American financial and military support for Israel.
The other is to try to rehabilitate Israel’s image, distance itself from figures like Netanyahu, Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and activists like settler leader Daniella Weiss, and try to recapture the centrist and liberal support that was once Israel’s lifeblood.
Neither strategy is likely to be effective.
While it is entirely possible that Israel’s American supporters will be able to ram through provisions to further entangle the American and Israeli military machines and give Israel unprecedented partnership in American intelligence, both of those efforts have met significant resistance in Congress. They are not certain to pass, as they would have been in past years, and, even if they do, they are likely to be targeted by future Congresses, elected on popular opposition to such dangerous provisions, opposition which is growing among voters on both the left and the right in the U.S.
It will be a laborious and difficult political process to undo the tangled web of interdependency of the American and Israeli military-industrial complexes, but the political will to do so is building quickly, and Israel has kindly provided Americans with the incentive to do so with the disastrous war of choice on Iran.
But can that political momentum be blunted by swapping out Netanyahu for a new prime minister who would work to rebuild the illusion of Israel as a democracy which respects things like human rights and international law? After all, until only a few years ago, only those of us in the U.S. who chose to look directly at Israel and really investigate knew what a sham that image was.
It won’t be possible. Merely shifting away from Netanyahu won’t make the difference Israel would need.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy; he is the co-author of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
