How do you systematically and recklessly devalue a brand? Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister has done it to Israel extravagantly. He has achieved something on a scale unparalleled in the annals of modern democracies: He has devalued a country. It is not just a tarnished image or reputational damages that are reversible but a fundamental case of brand self-destruction.
How does a prosperous democracy, labeled as a “start-up nation,” a hub for innovative, creative, cutting-edge technologies, synonymous with scientific and medical excellence, become an international outcast, a country regarded as rogue and alarmingly on the brink of being a pariah state?
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.
Twenty-five countries, many that Israel considers allies, such as Britain, France, and Canada, signed a joint communiqué demanding that Israel end the war. The same three nations announced last week their intention to recognize a Palestinian state. Yes, it is symbolic and declarative, but there is a critical mass being formed.
How did Israel get here? Again, just ask Netanyahu. You can define the phenomenon as “value self-destruction” or as “brand devaluation”; perhaps “self-injurious behavior.” Or you can simply term it “politicide.” They all essentially mean the same thing: when a leader consciously and callously undermines his own country’s reputation, vitiates its brand, corrodes its qualities, and changes beyond recognition existing positive perceptions of it.
How has he done so? Diligently and methodically. Netanyahu devalued Israel in three intertwined arenas: internally through a constitutional coup; in the international system since the war in Gaza and its offshoots began in late 2023; and, to a large extent, vis-à-vis American Jewry by placing them in irreconcilable dilemmas.
Netanyahu has always been divisive and attracted harsh criticism around the world for his arrogance and reluctance to engage in a political process with the Palestinians; for his constant pontifications on Iran, his frequent meddling in American politics, and his patently confrontational approach to the world. He relished the “me against the world” act. Even his detractors will admit that however objectionable they found his demeanor, it was inside the lines and rules of the game. Then things changed.
This current phase begins with his 2019 indictments from corruption. A combination of Louis XIV syndrome (l’état, c’est moi) and paranoia that a deep-state cabal is out to get him precipitated a unique process in which Netanyahu, believing Israel is a nation of ingrates who fail to acknowledge his greatness, essentially declared war in his own country.
Out of power in 2021–2022, he planned his attack. In January 2023, he instigated a constitutional coup, which he disingenuously and spuriously called a “judicial reform.” Mass demonstrations succeeded in stopping him, but in October 2023, Hamas launched a savage, murderous terror attack on Israel, and Netanyahu never looked back. In the last two and a half years, Netanyahu has waged an all-out offensive on Israeli democracy, weakened its resilient checks and balances, demeaned its vaunted judiciary, derided its highly regarded academia, criticized the “elitist” hi-tech military and intelligence agencies, maligned its civil service, persecuted its sprawling civil society, and mocked its innovative high-tech sector. With an extremist, messianic, and theo-fascist coalition, Netanyahu in effect declared war on the entire Zionist enterprise.
When the world protested, claiming that criticism of how the war in Gaza was fought and the human toll of civilians was legitimate, Netanyahu resorted to his default fortune cookie retorts. The world doesn’t get it, he is in fact saving Western civilization, total victory, we are the victims, or that critics are simply antisemites.
“For a long time, Israel thought that if we throw antisemitism and the Holocaust at them loudly enough, it will all go away,” Daniel Levy, a former peace negotiator and longtime Israel observer, said to The New York Times. “But the zeitgeist is shifting, and the Israeli attempt at outrage works with an ever-smaller cohort.”
In no place is it more ominously reflected than in the changing public opinion in the United States, which looks more like a paradigmatic change than a Polaroid shot of public opinion shaped by bad optics. Netanyahu didn’t just make Israel unpopular in the U.S. He further upended relations with American Jews. Israel increasingly became a divisive rather than a unifying issue. Some are even asking themselves the most contentious and laden of questions: Is it possible that Israel, the state of the Jewish people, part of their identity, their safe haven, is placing them in harm’s way through its policies?
While no democracy has ever experienced such an acute value destruction, there are examples of countries that underwent major image-tarnishing processes. Greece between 2010–2018, with its sovereign debt crisis and the ensuing economic and political turmoil that led to calls to expel it from the European Union. China during the SARS outbreak of 2002–2004 and again during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–2023. Argentina during multiple economic crises and currency devaluations, or Venezuela with its political instability, hyperinflation, and gross mismanagement. Arguably, Donald Trump’s presidency—his violent use of government agencies against immigrants, his disregard for science and expertise, his abdication of alliances, and his erratic tariffs policy—has already cost America in terms of image, credibility, and respectability.
Israel’s current predicament is a direct result of Netanyahu’s brand devaluation. True, Israel’s protracted post-1967 occupation and the absence of a conflict resolution always drew criticism. Yet never was a democracy so precipitously and swiftly relegated from where Israel was to where Netanyahu has brought it to.