And so Netanyahu has essentially thrown his lot in with the Republicans. His open hostility to Obama has infuriated Democrats. When he spoke to Congress this month — an invitation he accepted from the speaker of the House, John Boehner, without informing the White House — several Democratic members refused to attend. Significantly, the boycotting congressmen included members of the Congressional Black Caucus, an indication about the feelings of the party’s base.

This realignment by Netanyahu is a drastic shift. Even as U.S. foreign policy has grown increasingly partisan, support for Israel has generally been a rare point of agreement between Republicans and Democrats, and successive Israeli governments and their allies in Aipac have generally made a priority of keeping it that way. For instance, before returning to Israel in 2013 and entering politics there, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren reached out to progressive synagogues and think tanks for their help in improving the relationship between Israel and the Democratic Party’s ascendant base.

But Oren was replaced by Ron Dermer, a Miami Beach native and Netanyahu’s closest confidant, who, before becoming an Israeli citizen, worked for the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Widely credited with organizing Mitt Romney’s election-season trip to Israel in 2012, Dermer is viewed by Democrats and the White House as part of the Republican opposition.

I met with Dermer last year, during a visit to Israel’s heavily guarded embassy in Washington. In a compound decorated with reproductions of ancient mosaics, Dermer waved his bodyguard out of his office and called for a cappuccino. He spoke so incessantly over the next two hours that the foam sank before he could take a sip. “The challenge now is that people see a strong Israel,” Dermer told me. “But people don’t understand something the prime minister often says — that Israel can go from great strength to great vulnerability very fast.”

Like Abrams, Dermer wasn’t worried about liberal Jews. He argued that “a lot of the fissures” in the American Jewish community would seal up the moment Israel came under attack. But when I asked him about the broader liberal antipathy toward Israel on college campuses and among Democratic voters, he said: “Israel is a symptom of a problem, but it’s not actually the problem that’s on campuses. It’s not an anti-Israel thing. It’s a problem of moral relativism. And we are low hanging fruit.”

“I think the progressive case for Israel is an easy case to make,” he went on. “We’re the only country that’s had a chief justice of the Supreme Court, a speaker of the Knesset and a prime minister who were women. You have gay rights in Israel. You have a gay-pride parade in Tel Aviv, and gays all around the region are strung up in public squares. And then you have respect for minority rights in Israel.”

To make that case, Dermer said: “I’m going to go into every arena. You have to correct the misperceptions. When I see someone who is on the progressive side of the aisle and they are concerned and say, Well Israel is doing A, and Israel is doing B, I want to engage them, and I want to explain, and I want to put it in context for them. I’m not willing to give up.”