White House aides, left-leaning journalists, former American officials, and even some former Israeli officials have condemned Netanyahu as an ineffective leader lacking strategic vision. Yet he has stayed in office longer than any prime minister since David Ben-Gurion, successfully accomplished a reconciliation with Turkey, fostered diplomatic relations with countries from Japan to Guinea—and even with nearby Sunni Arab states—and kept Israel out of the Syrian civil war and the Syrian civil war out of Israel. Lazar Berman makes the case for the prime minister’s strategic genius:

During the recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, a few left-wing members of Congress not only condemned the Jewish state, but repeated libelous claims about “attacks” on al-Aqsa mosque. Worse still, their rhetoric seemed to imply, in classic anti-Semitic fashion, that Israel is not just a particularly problematic country, but one somehow at the root of all the world’s other problems. Seth Mandel writes: