Key Takeaways:
- Global surveys link widespread distrust of Netanyahu to equally strong unfavorable views of Israel itself, showing the two attitudes travel together.
- Hostile Western media portrayals of Israeli leaders have stayed strikingly consistent across decades, applying the same extreme imagery to both right-wing hawks and left-wing peacemakers.
- The “it’s only Bibi” claim therefore fails, as the underlying pattern of accusation long predates Netanyahu and attaches to whoever holds the office rather than to specific policies or parties.
Scroll through almost any argument about Israel online, and sooner or later the same reassuring sentence appears: “I don’t have a problem with Israel. My problem is with Netanyahu.”
It arrives as a kind of peace offering, the reasonable person’s way of drawing a line. Not the country, not the people. Just the man at the top and the things he does.
There is real feeling underneath that, and real data too. In the spring of 2026 the Pew Research Center surveyed nearly 45,000 people across 36 countries and found that majorities in most of them had little or no confidence in Benjamin Netanyahu. Distrust of this one Israeli leader is now a genuinely global fact, and so the reassurance seems to write itself. If almost the whole world has soured on this particular prime minister, surely the quarrel is only with the prime minister. But the very same survey found something quieter, and far less quoted. A median of 67 percent held an unfavorable view not of Netanyahu but of Israel itself. The feeling about the man and the feeling about the country, it turns out, travel together.
I have watched versions of the “it’s only Bibi” line for most of my adult life. I heard them long before the current prime minister first took office, and I heard them when other Israelis, holding wholly different politics, sat in the same chair. That is the fact I want to put on the table. The hostility we are told is a reaction to one leader is older than his career. It is older than his party. And a recurring strand of Western media portrayal has been strikingly indifferent to what any given Israeli leader actually believed or did.
Let me be clear about what I am and am not arguing. I am not claiming that every critic of Israel is a bigot, or that Israeli politicians are above criticism. They are not. No government is. Israel is a democracy, and its leaders are argued over, voted out, protested against, and mocked more savagely by their own citizens than by almost anyone abroad. That is how it should be. Criticism of a policy is not my subject. My subject is narrower and, I think, more revealing: the way one persistent strand of Western and mainstream commentary has drawn Israel’s leaders, across decades and across the deepest divide in Israeli politics, and what the sameness of that picture tells us.
The Prize
In January 2003, the British newspaper the Independent published a cartoon by Dave Brown. It showed the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, naked in the rubble of a Palestinian home, biting the head off a baby, a helicopter behind him trailing the words “Vote Sharon.” The caption put a line in Sharon’s mouth: “What’s wrong…. You never seen a politician kissing babies before?”
The image did not invent its horror. It borrowed it. For centuries, Christian Europe accused Jews of murdering gentile children and using their blood in secret rites. The charge has a name: the blood libel. It emptied Jewish streets into massacres from Norwich to Damascus. Winston Pickett of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research put the point plainly at the time: “You don’t put Jews eating babies.” The Board of Deputies of British Jews complained. So did the Israeli embassy.
Here is the part that should stop you. Ten months later, in November 2003, that cartoon was named Cartoon of the Year by Britain’s Political Cartoon Society. It did not slip out and quietly embarrass its author. It was celebrated, chosen from the whole year’s field by professional peers who presumably thought of themselves as liberal and anti-racist.
Now perform a test. Try to picture a cartoon of any other elected Western leader drawn devouring an infant in a bombed-out house, and then handed a national prize. You cannot. The image would be unthinkable for anyone else. For a Jewish leader it was not merely thinkable. It was award-winning.
And here the usual reply arrives. Sharon was Likud, a soldier and a hawk, the figure his critics bind to Sabra and Shatila and to the settlements. The cartoon, we are told, answered his politics and not his Jewishness. Whether that reply holds is not a question about Sharon’s record, and I am not here to defend it or to prosecute it. It is a question about the picture. And Israel gives us an almost laboratory-clean way to test it.
Two Parties, One Picture
For most of its history, Israeli politics has swung between two camps that cannot stand each other. On one side, Likud and the right: Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Netanyahu. On the other, Labor and the left: Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. These are not shades of one opinion. They fought each other bitterly: over Oslo, over the settlements, over the wars in Lebanon, over the very meaning of the state. And Israeli voters have thrown one camp out and the other in, again and again, for half a century.
So here is the question that ought to settle the “it’s only the hardliners” defense: When Israelis voted the right out and the left in, did the picture change? When the government supposedly generating all the negative imagery was replaced by its political opposite, did the imagery follow it out of office?
It did not. And you can watch it fail to.
Start with the range. Israel has never had one kind of leader. Golda Meir was prime minister at the start of the 1970s, a Labor figure of the socialist left, governing before Likud existed as a party at all. The people who have held the job since span almost the whole of political possibility. If the picture drawn of them abroad were really a response to their politics, it would shift as widely as they do.
Then the wheel turned. In 1977 Menachem Begin brought Likud to power for the first time, and in 1982 he took Israel into Lebanon. The war brought a surge of the ugliest analogy in the whole repertoire. Israel was Nazi Germany. Beirut was the Warsaw ghetto. Begin, who had lost most of his own family in the Shoah, watched himself and his people recast as the authors of a second one. The politics had moved right, and the picture had darkened to match. So far the “it tracks their conduct” story holds together.
Then the wheel turned again, and this is where the story breaks.
The Peace Camp
In the 1990s Labor came back, and with it the peace camp at the very height of its hopes. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres signed the Oslo Accords. There was a handshake on the White House lawn. There was a Nobel Peace Prize, shared out among Rabin, Peres, and Yasser Arafat. If the hostile imagery were truly a reaction to Israeli aggression, this was the moment it should have softened, and perhaps vanished. Here at last were the doves the critics always said they were waiting for.
Look at what was done to them anyway.
Rabin is the harder case, and I will not pretend otherwise. As Labor’s defense minister he directed Israel’s military response to the First Intifada. As prime minister a few years later he signed the Oslo Accords and was hailed as a peacemaker, until a Jewish extremist murdered him for it. His image shifted. But so did his role, and a skeptic can fairly say the coverage was following a real change in what he actually did. That is exactly why Peres, and not Rabin, is the clean test. Peres never swung from soldier to signatory.
Consider Shimon Peres. Here is a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize, who staked his career and finally his premiership on Oslo, who preached to the end of a “new Middle East” of open borders and shared prosperity. If any Israeli politician embodied the dovish, land-for-peace instinct that Israel’s critics insist they are longing to see, it was Peres. And when he died in 2016, this is how one part of the Western left chose to bury him: Britain’s Socialist Worker ran its obituary under the headline “war criminal and confidence trickster”, a man “defined by one event,” the 1996 shelling of a sheltering crowd at the UN compound in Qana. In the United States, Common Dreams published its own farewell: “Israeli War Criminal Whose Victims the West Ignored.” This was not the Arab press, which is a separate argument. It was the Western left, lowering the architect of Oslo into the ground as a butcher. The Nobel laureate and the war criminal were the same man. The dove and the hawk, in this imagination, had identical talons.
This is the tell. When a Nobel peace laureate and the general who marched on Beirut are drawn with the same teeth, the drawing is not answering their conduct. It cannot be. Their conduct was opposite. The voters changed the government. The government changed the policy. The picture did not change with them.
The Press, Not the Fringe
It would be comforting to file all of this under the extremes: the state cartoonists of hostile regimes, the placards at the far margins, the worst of a foreign gutter press. But the examples I have given did not come from the fringe. The baby-eating Sharon ran in a mainstream British broadsheet and won a British prize. Nor was it a one-off for the British press. Another mainstream broadsheet, the Guardian, has published cartoon after cartoon in the same register across two decades, from Ariel Sharon to Netanyahu, a number of them reaching openly for old antisemitic imagery.
Look, too, at the Canadian papers during the First Intifada in 1988: respectable, liberal, metropolitan dailies running the same iconography for weeks on end. The Israeli soldier drawn as the Grim Reaper standing over a Palestinian body. The Star of David remade into a prison. David and Goliath inverted, so that the Jew, of all the figures in that particular story, becomes the giant. These were not obscure outlets. They were the establishment press of a friendly Western democracy, and the government they were reacting to was the Labor-aligned national unity coalition in which both Rabin and Peres served.
I am not claiming this is the whole of Western media, or that it fits every journalist or every title. It does not, and my argument does not need it to. I am pointing to one specific, recurring strand, and to a simple fact about it. It does not switch off when Israel’s government switches sides.
The Costume Changes
I have spent years writing about how Jew-hatred survives. It survives by changing its clothes. In medieval Europe it wore the cassock and spoke the language of the Church: the Jew as Christ-killer, as poisoner of wells, as desecrator of the host, as drinker of children’s blood. In the twentieth century it wore the lab coat and spoke of race and blood and biology. In parts of our own culture it has learned to speak the language a liberal society holds most sacred, the language of human rights and anti-colonialism and anti-racism itself.
The costume changes. The accusation does not.
And the oldest image of all keeps breaking straight back through the newest vocabulary. The Jew drinking blood, drawn now as Netanyahu the vampire in a mainstream Montreal newspaper, as though the intervening centuries had taught the cartoonist’s hand nothing at all.
That is why the “it’s only Bibi” line, however sincerely a person means it, does not survive contact with the record. The accusation was there before this prime minister, and it will be there after him. It did not begin with the Israeli right, and it has never confined itself to one party. It fell on the Nobel laureate as surely as on the hardliner, on the dove and the hawk without distinction. It attaches to whoever happens to be standing where an Israeli leader stands, the way a shadow attaches to whoever is holding the lamp. Since October 7th we have watched this strand swell and spread once more, and once more we are told the whole problem is simply the man at the top.
Why it Matters
I will not presume to tell you what is in your heart. If you say your quarrel is with a policy and not with a people, I take you at your word, and I will happily argue the policy with you for as long as you like. I have changed my own mind inside that argument more than once, and I expect to again.
But I would ask one thing back. When you reach for the reassuring line, that it is not Israel you object to, only the man currently at the top, look hard at the record standing behind that sentence. Look at the general drawn devouring a child, and the Nobel peace laureate buried as a butcher. Look at the man whose family the Shoah murdered, remembered now as its author. Ask, honestly, why one particular picture keeps returning unchanged while everything about its subject, the party, the policy, the person, the very choices they made, changes underneath it.
Because a portrayal that finds the same monster in every face, whatever that face believes and whichever camp it happens to lead, is not really looking at the face at all. It knew what it wanted to see before it looked. It saw it in Begin the hawk. It saw it in Peres the dove, of all people, the man with the Nobel Prize. And it will go on seeing it long after today’s argument about today’s prime minister is spent and forgotten.
It was never about Bibi.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
