Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage and family therapist, lecturer, and author who studied with Dr. David Schnarch, creator of the differentiation-based Crucible Approach, from 1998 until Schnarch's death in 2020. He runs twelve-hour intensives for couples and has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach. He also serves in the IDF reserves and volunteers as a Magen David Adom medic, with ZAKA, and on the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His website is DanielWinston.com.
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." Winston Churchill.
Israelis go to the polls on October 27, and eight days later Americans vote in midterm elections that could hand Congress to a Democratic Party increasingly steered by its most radical wing. The two elections should be read together, because the second will shape the world in which the winner of the first must govern. The question before Israeli voters is not whether Benjamin Netanyahu is beloved or flawless. It is who we want at the helm when the storm already gathering finally breaks.
The numbers are sobering. A Pew Research Center survey this summer found that 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, rising to 74 percent among those aged 18 to 34. The erosion reaches young evangelicals raised on Genesis 12:3 and young Jews raised on Birthright, but it does not stop with the young. It is creeping into (non-Orthodox) synagogues and churches, into small towns and big cities, and into the halls of Congress, among people whose support we once took for granted.
Faced with this, a familiar Chicken Little voice plaintively rises from Israel's center-left and much of the Western commentariat. Israel, they lecture, needs a softer face, a prime minister who apologizes readily, revives the "peace process," and bravely offers gestures in the hope of being liked again.
It is a seductive argument, and it is exactly wrong. A swimmer bleeding in open water does not calm the sharks by being polite. Every drop of blood tells them he is weakening and that their patience is paying off. That is how Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and their sycophantic useful idiot Western enablers read Israeli concessions: each apology and groveling gesture are proof that pressure works, and invite the inevitable next demand.
The movement chanting "from the river to the sea" does not only object to our prime minister's tone and choices. It objects to our existence and will not be soothed or satisfied for more than a fleeting moment with Jewish smiles and gestures.
Netanyahu understands this in his bones and consistently acts with the muscular-mindedness needed to meet it effectively. He sat with President Trump in the White House on July 28 as a partner whose judgment and reliability an American president takes seriously, not as a supplicant. He built the Abraham Accords over the heads of global rejectionists in irrational thrall to Palestinianism, shattering the dogma that Arab normalization must wait for a Palestinian Arab state, and he has deepened ties from New Delhi to Buenos Aires. He stood before Congress in 2015 against the Iran deal over the white-hot fury of the Obama White House, and when the Biden administration withheld important munitions in 2024 to force a stop of a vital operation in Rafah, he went into Rafah anyway.
Friendly leaders respect strength - eventually - because strength is what makes a partner worth having. Enemy leaders fear strength because they know their target is not pliable.
That quality, present in spades in Netanyahu, will matter enormously if Democrats take Congress. The party that once housed Scoop Jackson and Joe Lieberman is being taken over by a radical faction the way a parasite takes over its host. It does not seize power in a single stroke. It moves quietly into the nervous system of the “Big Tent," captures the staff, the activists, and the messaging machinery, and begins to wear the body as its own. The symptoms are already visible, as ninety-two members of Congress recently voted to end US support for Israel's truly justified operations in Lebanon.
A Democratic Congress means hearings, conditions on aid, holds on weapons, and relentless pressure for solid and existential concessions in exchange for signatures - putatively in the name of “Peace," of course.
We know what Israel's left-leaning leaders do under such pressure, because they have done it. Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a state at Camp David in 2000 and received the Second Intifada. Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas even more in 2008, including international control of the Old City, and Abbas walked away without replying. Both men proudly believed themselves to be great statesmen on the threshold of history, and both mistook the world's applause for appreciation and friendship.
In 2021 and 2022, Benny Gantz, then Minister of Defense in the Bennett-Lapid government, hosted Abbas at his home and advanced hundreds of millions of shekels to the Palestinian Authority as "confidence-building measures," and Yair Lapid recommitted Israel to the suicidal two-state delusion at the United Nations. Barely a year later, on October 7, we learned how much confidence had been built.
The two men now asking to replace Netanyahu offer more of the same, wrapped in tougher language. Naftali Bennett signed a pledge on camera in 2021 that he would never hand the country to Lapid, then did exactly that, bringing the Islamist Ra'am into an Israeli coalition for the first time in history. Today he runs on a joint list with the very man he swore he would never empower, while absurdly telling right-wing voters he is one of them even as he is proposing that Areas A and B become a Palestinian Arab "autonomy," which necessarily and inevitably is a state still in its chrysalis.
Gadi Eisenkot has perfected the same maneuver. He calls belief in a two-state solution after October 7 delusional, then fretfully calls building in E1, the one project that would physically foreclose that solution, a mistake because of what it would cost us internationally. He opposed the preemptive strike on Hezbollah on October 11, 2023, derided "total victory" as a slogan, and pressed to put a hostage deal ahead of Rafah, alarmed above all by the friction with Washington.
If the standard for Israeli action is that it must not anger foreign capitals, Israel does not have a foreign policy. It has a temporary permission slip, signed in Brussels, and these tough talking would-be leaders haven’t the faintest clue that they are the bleeding swimmers trying to find that pathetic slip in the shark-infested waters.
In my clinical work, there is a name for this pattern. It is a reflected sense of self, in which positions hold only as long as they are validated and reorganize the moment the room turns. Such a leader can seem to be fearless in a command post or on a debate stage and genuinely pliable when the Americans, the Europeans, and the Saudis lean on him at once - which they surely will. He says the hard sentence and does the soft thing:
Bennett begins with the coalition he wants and manufactures the principles to fit, while Eisenkot begins with the world's approval and works backward. The sharks do not grade candidates on their interviews. They watch what a leader does under pressure.
And what these men would trade away is precisely what keeps us alive. The two-state delusion is sustained not by signed papers but by empty space: building freezes, evacuations, and the steady removal of Jews from our ancient homeland. We ran that experiment in Gaza in 2005, and what grew in the vacuum - as predicted - was Hamastan and, ultimately, October 7. The communities, farms, and hilltops of Judea and Samaria are why Kfar Saba is not Sderot. A signed agreement can be torn up overnight, but a living town of thousands of families cannot be wished away.
None of this places Netanyahu beyond criticism. He has made real mistakes, including leaning far too hard on hilltop settlement efforts, and Israelis are right to demand accountability. But the choice on October 27 is between a leader who holds his ground in a hostile world and alternatives whose instincts, when tested, run toward appeasement or toward wherever the wind is blowing. Nor will we win back Americans, young or old, by groveling, because people are often drawn to righteous conviction and both repelled and galvanized by apology.
The swimmer does not survive by bleeding more politely. He survives by fighting and getting out of the water strong, and Netanyahu knows how to do that.