Congressman Brad Sherman has been a friend to Israel for a long time, and nothing about his comments on X/Twitter regarding the recent CNN poll changes this.
Sherman recently told Israeli voters that they need to keep in mind how Israel is perceived in the US when they vote this coming October. He made references to settler violence and to the CNN poll showing a decline of 65% in the US approval rating of Israel as a country.
Something is happening right now where so many other people, friends and non-friends alike, feel entitled to tell us what the upcoming Israeli elections should be about and what Israelis ought to be thinking, and I think that attitude is worth talking through honestly.
The congressman is worried about Israel’s image. He is worried about what the CNN polling numbers mean for the continuance of US military aid and the weapons access Israel gains, and the diplomatic support that Israel has long relied on, all coming from the US.
U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) speaks to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on U.S. President Donald Trump’s State Department budget request for the Department of State, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025. (credit: Elizabeth Franz/Reuters)
He is worried that the plummeting approval rating means that this will stop, and therefore Israel must vote to change its image for US approval ratings to rise.
Those are real concerns, and they come from a place of genuine care. The bottom line is this: the Jewish people have a track record going back over three thousand years of doing what’s right no matter what the surrounding world thinks of us at any given moment.
People come and go. Even our closest friends, the ones we love so much and are so deeply thankful for, will tell us to do this or to do that. Sometimes we listen, and sometimes we take it seriously, because friendship matters. At the end of the day, Israelis have to be the ones who decide what to vote for in the upcoming Israeli elections.
If you catch the conversations happening among many Israelis right now, a lot of people are talking about how Israel needs to be more militarily self-sufficient and build more of its own weapons, because we cannot be in a position where we’re held hostage by anyone, including our closest ally.
This became evident to all when, in 2024, president Joe Biden withheld arms from Israel during a time when Israel faced active conflict on multiple fronts.
It has happened before as well. Many times. It happened in 1953 with the Jordan Water Dispute, in 1956 with the Suez Crisis, and in 1980-1981, revolving around tensions with Lebanon.
It happened in the 1980’s when the US pressured Israel to cancel the Lavi project. It happened again in the 1990s when president George HW Bush withheld Housing Loan guarantees to pressure prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to pause construction in Judea and Samaria.
Staying true to what’s right
While Sherman’s concerns are legitimate, it isn’t something that scares Israelis all that much. The lesson Israel is finally learning is that when you depend on someone else to provide you with the financial and military aid you need to defend yourself, that dependence can be used against you, no matter how close the friendship is.
Sherman points to the polling and says young Americans are shifting, the Democratic Party is shifting, even people on the Right are shifting, and the implication is that this is somehow on Israel to fix. I think Sherman is wrong in his analysis.
It isn’t on Israel to fix; it is on America.
If you really want to define what antisemitism is, more than anything, it’s the idea that whatever the Jewish people do is somehow the cause of why people hate us. We know that’s a false narrative. History has shown us that time and again.
Cleaning up our image and placating people around the world has never made the hatred go away, because the hatred was never really about our image to begin with.
What we learned a long time ago, and what every generation of Jews has had to relearn, is that what we fear more than being disliked is being dead. As Israel’s elections get closer, we’re going to keep hearing from our friends about what we need to do and how we need to think, and most of it will come from a good place.
However, the safety and security of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel has to be first and foremost in the minds of the people casting those ballots, because without a strong and secure Israel there is no safety for a Jew anywhere in the world.
Both Israel and the Jewish people can continue to make the world a much better place, but we have to do what is right and what God commanded us to do. We do that by staying true to what’s right and looking out for each other first and foremost, not by voting according to what will play well on a poll in another country.
The writer is the International CEO of Aish, a global Jewish educational movement. He formerly served as eastern director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where he oversaw the Museum of Tolerance in New York City.