As with many and varied issues, so the question of which US presidential candidate is “best for Israel” has many and varied answers: First, it depends on whom you ask — Israeli Jews or American Jews; second, which Jewish Israelis and which Jewish Americans; third, whether one asks during a presidential election campaign or the day after the winner walks into the White House. Public opinion polls indicate that a candidate favored by most members of the largest Jewish community, outside Israel, does not necessarily enjoy the same popularity among the Israeli Jewish public. Thus, for example, the incumbent, President Barack Obama, garnered the support of more than two-thirds of American Jewish voters in his two election campaigns. On the other hand, were it up to Israelis, a black man whose middle name is Hussein would only have been allowed into the White House on a guided tour.

This gap is largely the result of the different agendas of these two communities. Jewish Americans (or American Jews, if you will), like other minorities, tend traditionally to support Democratic candidates, who espouse liberal, pluralistic values. For these Jewish voters, the candidate’s attitude toward Israel lags behind other issues that engage middle- and upper-middle-class Americans: the economy, welfare, education, abortion, school prayer, and so on. On the other hand, when Israelis ask whether a candidate or a presidential candidate is “good for the Jews,” they mean for Israeli Jews. Obama’s party affiliation did not increase or detract from his popularity among Israelis. For most Israelis — that majority that supports the right-wing, pro-settler government — a “good president” is one who does not challenge the current Israeli regime. At the other end of the political spectrum, on the left, one can find many who yearn for a US president who would force Israel to shut down the settlement enterprise and withdraw from the territories.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unmoved by the abundance of promises made by US presidential candidates and by the flattery they shower on him. The sweet talk that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton laid on Netanyahu and Israel in a Nov. 4 article she penned in the Jewish-American weekly The Forward did not turn her into Jerusalem’s darling. The prime minister’s office still remembers Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s April 2010 rebuke of Netanyahu, saying that he had to prove his sincere commitment to moving the peace process forward, that the government’s decision to ease restrictions on the movement of Palestinians was not enough, that Israel must show consideration for the humanitarian needs of the residents of the Gaza Strip and that it had to stop construction in settlements. It will also not forget the interview Clinton gave CNN in July 2014 in which she said that her greatest complaint against Israel was the government’s settlement policy.

Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, famously said, “What matters is not what the gentiles say, but what the Jews do.” To borrow from him, Netanyahu doesn’t care what the gentiles say or what Jews the likes of Democratic contender Bernie Sanders say. In an interview last month with Rolling Stone, Sanders dared to condemn Israel’s excessive use of force in Gaza, as he described it, in the 2014 Operation Protective Edge. The prime minister cares what the next president does. Netanyahu survived all of Obama’s speeches and Secretary of State John Kerry’s reprimands. While they talked, he built another neighborhood in the West Bank. The only president who did not just talk but also used economic pressure — threatening to withhold US loan guarantees to fund the absorption of immigrants from the former Soviet Union — was George H.W. Bush, a Republican. Netanyahu was deputy foreign minister when in 1991 Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir rejected Bush’s demand that Israel freeze settlement construction 1991. Israel failed to get the guarantees, and the Likud lost the 1992 elections.

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