I’m sorry @BillAckman, but I couldn’t disagree more with what you’ve written. It isn’t only naive, but it’s a dangerous precedent to set and puts the blame on two ministers while removing the actual cause of the fall in American support. Reputational damage with people who already call us genocidal for existing is not the priority. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich only entered government in late 2022. They were not in power during the Second Intifada, 1967, 1973, or 1948. The wars, the rocket fire, the suicide bombings, and the explicit calls for Israel’s destruction all predate them by decades. Blaming them for the loss of American support is rewriting the timeline. US support has never been automatic either. America placed an arms embargo on Israel in 1948 during a war started by the Arabs. In 1973 the Nixon administration delayed resupply until Israel was already under severe pressure. Obama’s relationship with Israel was strained for years. Current hostility is louder, but it’s not new, and it isn’t primarily the result of two ministers who have been in office for less than four years. What has changed is the scale and organization of the anti-Israel campaign. Pro-Palestinian networks, campus groups, and a growing set of anti-Israel podcasts with tens of millions of listeners who push a version of history that erases Hamas’s charter, the October 7 atrocities, push holocaust denial, and decades of rejectionism. That propaganda environment, not Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, is what has shifted large numbers of Americans. What’s hurt Israel more than anything is social media where lies and blood libels and revisionist history is manufactured and spread while the truth is heavily suppressed, including and especially on this platform. The legacy media being anti-Israel is nothing new. But the massive explosion and exploitation of social media pretending to be more truthful is new, and it is infinitely more dangerous and damaging. Treating the two ministers as the cause whitewashes the actual drivers. We’re fighting groups that raped, burned, beheaded, and kidnapped on October 7 and still say they intend to do it again until we’re gone. Soft approaches like Oslo, the Gaza withdrawal, and endless ceasefires didn’t produce peace. They produced larger attacks. Survival comes first. And when faced with the most extreme evil and barbarism in human history, you have to have strength to counter it, not liberal weakness and meaninglessness diplomacy with groups that aren’t there to negotiate, but murder.