ASPEN, Colo. — Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro argued on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum last week that without new leadership in Israel — meaning a defeat for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s elections — he does not know how Israel can repair its reputation in the United States.

“I don’t see a path to repairing Israel’s deteriorating standing in the United States on both sides of the aisle without a change of leadership in Israel,” Shapiro told Jewish Insider in an interview, a sentiment he repeated during a panel on Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship at the conference.

Shapiro said that a “wise Israeli government” would pay attention to its “deteriorating standing in the United States” and that the “Israeli public might want to bear that in mind too as they prepare to go to the polls in October.”

Asked whether he thinks some in the U.S. are pinning broader criticisms of Israel on Netanyahu personally, Shapiro emphasized that there’s “a lot of history and a lot of emotion and a lot of associations with the prime minister,” who is “very present in our media, in our politics.”

Netanyahu, he said, is associated with many of the biggest flashpoints in U.S.-Israel relations including opposition to former President Barack Obama and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the wars in Gaza and Iran and the rise of his far-right Cabinet ministers.

“Probably a very healthy thing for the U.S.-Israel relationship would be if 95% of Americans do not know the name of the Israeli prime minister, and that’s a possible outcome out of this election,” Shapiro said. “That doesn’t guarantee it fixes everything by any stretch. There’s work to do, but that’s a different starting point.”

Israel, he continued, won’t be able to placate all of the critics of its continued efforts to defend itself, but he said there are other steps it can take to improve attitudes in the U.S., including cracking down on “the Jewish terror wave against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank,” providing withheld funds to the Palestinian Authority, stopping settlement expansion and moving more assertively to implement the U.S.-led 20-point peace plan for Gaza.

Speaking to JI shortly after more than 100 House Democrats voted to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel, Shapiro said that, while there’s “legitimate ground for concern and for criticism” of Israel’s operations in Gaza, cutting off all $3.3 billion wholesale is not “a very thoughtful way” to address concerns about civilian harm. He also emphasized the responsibility Hamas bears for intentionally endangering Palestinian civilians.

“We have an ongoing U.S. interest in ensuring Israel can defend itself from a lot of very dangerous enemies who are also our enemies,” Shapiro said. “There are much more thoughtful and much more careful and nuanced ways of trying to get at the real problem, which is ensuring that U.S. equipment — which Israel may need, and which we’ve made some commitment to, to defend themselves where they legitimately have a need to do so — is not used in a way that produces unacceptable civilian casualties.”

He said the current debate, at its heart, touches on the fundamental question of whether the U.S.-Israel relationship continues to serve American interests, which he strongly believes it does.

“If we were to see a real deterioration and distancing of the U.S. and Israel, for the long term, we’d find that our own interests and our own ability to defend our own influence and our own ability to defend our interests in the Middle East would be significantly compromised,” Shapiro said. 

He said that severing the U.S.-Israel relationship would embolden Iran and its proxies — which are also enemies of America — to undermine the regional defense architecture that the U.S. has spent years building, leading U.S. allies to pull away from the Washington and hedge with Iran.

Shapiro said during the panel that those calling for a total dismantling from the U.S.-Israel relationship should be asked to address that policy’s second-order effects on U.S. interests and American influence in the region.

While Shapiro acknowledged that polling has shown that many in the U.S. have a negative impression of Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza, he does not necessarily believe that means that most Americans want to see the U.S.-Israel relationship severed entirely.

Shapiro argued to JI that there’s a “broad middle” of the Democratic Party, on both sides of the Israel aid vote, that continues to support Israel’s right to exist and has reasonable conversations about the future of the party. On the extremes, however, there are some, including prominent leaders, who do not believe Israel has a right to exist, which Shapiro called strategically wrong, morally wrong and a political mistake.

“I think we’ll end up losing in the swing areas and swing districts and states if we marry ourselves to that most extreme attitude on this issue,” Shapiro, who served under former President Barack Obama, said, emphasizing that extreme anti-Israel candidates have so far only succeeded in deep-blue districts.

Shapiro predicted that the U.S. looks to be on the path toward ending assistance to Israel, whether that be immediately or over time, depending on negotiations between the two sides over the next memorandum of understanding.

“If there’s going to be an MOU, that should [include] some sort of review process or some sort of consultation process to ensure that [U.S.] standards are met, as well as the regular enforcement of U.S. law and U.S. requirements,” Shapiro said.

He predicted that ending U.S. aid to Israel would also lead to an end to the U.S.’ financial support for the Egyptian and Jordanian militaries — other top recipients of U.S. military financing — which could lead those countries to look elsewhere for military weapons, including U.S. adversaries.

Shapiro was critical of the Trump administration’s approach to the war in Iran — in contrast with his support for the strikes in 2025 on Iran’s nuclear program — describing the administration as stuck in a spiral of repeated threats without a focused or sustained strategy. 

He said that the U.S. could plausibly have claimed victory in the first few weeks of the war, but missed the opportunity to do so, and “all the leverage swung over” to Iran once it closed the Strait of Hormuz.

“I knew that to end it would require a very weak deal, and I supported a very weak deal to end a very dumb war. I just didn’t expect the MOU to be as weak as it was,” Shapiro said. “It was absurdly so. It gave away massive sanctions relief even before beginning discussions on the nuclear program. It left Iran with the clear impression that they did have permanent authority to control the strait.”

He said there is no clear end strategy for the conflict now, adding that he generally agrees with the basic strategy laid out at the Security Forum by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — to “let the Iranians stew in the juice of the sanctions.”

On the panel, Shapiro also argued that Vice President JD Vance’s comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast blaming an Israeli influence campaign for undermining the MOU with Iran leaned into antisemitic tropes.

“It was frankly an attempt to cast blame on somebody else for the really unsuccessful MOU following an unsuccessful war and trying to blame it on a third party — who was a party to the war, but not really to the negotiation on the MOU,” Shapiro said. “I really think that was uncalled for.”