Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu left Israel for the U.S. on Sunday night amidst a swirl of chaos that was largely his own creation. In the previous weeks he negotiated a compromise on judicial overhaul via his representatives and then backed away at the first hint of dissent within his coalition; intimated that he would not necessarily abide by a potential upcoming Supreme Court decision to strike down the reasonableness law that he passed earlier this summer; and moments before boarding the plane for the West Coast accused the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have peacefully protested his policies for 37 consecutive weeks as being in league with Iran and the PLO. His 64-seat coalition would suffer an approximate 20% drop to between 51 and 53 seats were an election held today, his judicial overhaul proposals are enormously unpopular and have crowded out nearly all other government business, and he is actively being frozen out of Washington and Abu Dhabi, the foreign capitals that he most longs to visit. Whether you agree with his policies and approach or not, by any objective measure Netanyahu has taken a wrong turn in the eyes of most Israelis and has made misstep after misstep.

Yet on the American right, a very different Israeli reality exists. The Wall Street Journal editorial page had a representative missive on Tuesday, breezily postulating that Netanyahu has moved to the middle and is a paragon of compromise. Ignoring everything that Netanyahu has actually done and most of what he’s said in favor of some platitudes he voiced in his public conversation on Monday with Elon Musk, the WSJ editors argued that Netanyahu has evinced “a healthy, democratic impulse,” and ended their paean to Netanyahu’s supposed responsible behavior by noting, “Every escalation by the court makes the job harder, but these days Mr. Netanyahu is looking like the moderate.”

The right-wing narrative in the U.S. since Netanyahu returned to power in late December has been unwaveringly consistent. According to this narrative, Netanyahu is trying to make common-sense changes to the balance between the government and the judiciary, with the latter being an out-of-control institution that wields an irresponsible and illegitimate amount of power. These reforms are nothing more than an effort to make Israel more democratic by bringing it in line with the U.S. system, and Netanyahu’s proposals are supported by the majority of Israelis, who overwhelmingly voted for him. The protestors are radical anarchists who have no respect for the democratic process and are the true threats to democracy, and they are being goaded on by unelected judicial and cultural elites and political opposition leaders who have no interest in any compromise. The chaos inside of Israel, whether it be protests or IDF reservists not showing up or the shekel’s slide, is either not really happening or is being orchestrated as a way to bring down Netanyahu and is not actually connected to anything he has done or proposed. 

Even when it is clear that parts of the original narrative are untenable—such as when Netanyahu himself criticizes the override clause that he originally proposed and that his supporters in the U.S. had now-inconveniently raced to claim was perfectly appropriate—many of the incorrect or inaccurate claims remain. Netanyahu’s mendacious claims that judges appoint themselves and that they exercise a sole veto over the process are still bandied about, despite the fact that it requires a supermajority of seven on the nine-member judicial selection committee to appoint Supreme Court justices and only three of those nine are judges. There is outrage over the Supreme Court holding last week’s hearing considering a challenge to the newly amended Basic Law on the judiciary—compared countless times to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a constitutional amendment—despite the fact that such challenges have been heard by the Supreme Court for years, and despite a process whereby the recent amendment originated as a private-member bill and was then passed in a matter of weeks without even one opposition vote, let alone a supermajority. All sorts of comparisons are made to the U.S. in support of Netanyahu’s judicial package as if our system is the appropriate equivalent for understanding Israel, despite the fact that Israel has no constitution, no federal system, no distinction between the majority that makes up the government and the majority that makes up the Knesset coalition, and has a unicameral legislature that is treated as a single district and thus has no elements of regional or local representation. It is as if the right in the U.S. is discussing a country that exists in a novel or in the abstract as a thought exercise, rather than a real place with real institutions, real people, and real events unfolding.

The deep irony here is that when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli security, the right has argued for decades that the left in the U.S.—and particularly the majority of American Jews, whose views on Israel are left of center—does not understand Israeli realities. Those on the left and center-left are accused of not understanding or downplaying Palestinian intransigence, the motivations of terrorist groups like Hamas, the security risks that Israelis live with every day, and impacts of Israeli withdrawals from territory. There are instances in which those accusations are fair, and in general, Americans writ large (and American Jews) see what they want to see in Israel rather than what is actually evident. Yet today, in the context of what has gone on over the last 10 months, it is the right in the U.S. that either does not understand or is purposely misconstruing where Israelis are and what they are dealing with.

It is one thing to argue for a set of policies, even one that a majority of Israelis would disagree with; that is a privilege due to anyone and everyone. It is wholly another to argue for those policies while at the same time claiming that the widespread opposition to them isn’t real, or that the majority of Israelis who view the government as the radical actor who precipitated the current crisis don’t actually hold that view, or that an effort to remake Israel’s state institutions and web of checks and balances is actually a minor policy and political dispute, or that Israel’s political and judicial system are the same as the American one. These claims strain the bounds of credulity, yet they continue to be made, despite all of the available evidence from Israel and Israelis. The fact that you support Netanyahu does not mean that opposition to him is minimal or shallow, or that he is viewed as a moderate compromiser and champion of democracy. For years, it was the American left that supposedly did not understand Israel or know what was going on there. Today, it is crystal clear that it is the American right that is entirely out of touch with what is unfolding in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.