Benjamin Netanyahu built his political brand on one irreplaceable asset: he was the man who guaranteed the US-Israel relationship. Trump's pre-election endorsement cemented that narrative. Then the midterm results arrived, and the asset became a liability. JD Vance's own post-mortem flagged the Iran war and the Israel relationship as contributing factors to the Republican rout. Netanyahu's unique selling proposition — that his personal ties to Washington protect Israel — now cuts the other way. The political math in Israel reflects the damage. Netanyahu's right-wing bloc holds 53 seats, eight short of the 61 needed to govern. The opposition bloc under former army chief Gadi Eisenkot has 48 seats, with the two Arab-led parties — Ra'am and the Joint List — holding 19 seats and backing Eisenkot for prime minister. The opposition has flatly rejected a unity government with Netanyahu, leaving him without a visible path to a majority. A quieter defection may matter more than the headline numbers. United Torah Judaism, Netanyahu's longtime ultra-Orthodox coalition partner, declined for the first time since 2009 to recommend him or anyone else to form a government. That is not a protest vote — it is institutional repositioning by a party that has read the room. President Isaac Herzog has yet to nominate a candidate to form a government, and the longer he waits, the more Netanyahu's bloc erodes. The opposition has moved to weaponize the US angle directly. Yair Lapid stressed his own congressional relationships and reframed the problem: American voters are not anti-Israel per se, but anti-Netanyahu and anti-extremist ministers. Avigdor Lieberman went further, alleging that Trump's election-day announcement ending US military aid was the price of his endorsement — putting a dollar figure on it at $3.8 billion annually. Whether or not that transactional framing is accurate, it has entered Israeli political discourse as accepted fact. The fiscal consequences are real regardless of who forms the next government. With US military aid — worth $3.8 billion per year — potentially ending, Israel's defence budget, already 7 percent of GDP, will have to absorb the gap domestically. Security analyst Ahron Bregman was blunt: you cannot be a rogue state and expect subsidies to continue. That budget pressure will be felt by Israeli households directly. But replacing Netanyahu may not solve the underlying problem. Pollster Shibley Telhami, citing an April Pew Research Center poll, noted that American public attitudes toward Israel itself are nearly as negative as attitudes toward Netanyahu personally. The University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll found that most Americans would not change their view of Israel even under a new government. Any Israeli prime minister will be swimming against the current. Netanyahu's response has been characteristically divisive: attempting to delegitimize the Arab-led parties by claiming they stole the elections, aiming to deny the opposition the Arab partnership it needs to govern. It is the same playbook — segment the electorate, inflame tribal lines — now deployed to survive a crisis of his own making. The question is whether Israel's institutional guardrails, starting with Herzog's nomination decision, hold against it.
