President Donald Trump’s tumultuous relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu erupted into a telephonic shouting match last fall over the Israeli leader’s reluctance to accept a U.S.-brokered ceasefire in his war against Hamas.
According to the new book Regime Change, the insider look at Trump’s return to power by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner believed Netanyahu would get cold feet and attempt to back out of a 20-point peace plan they had devised in the wake of an Israeli airstrike on a Hamas leader in Doha, Qatar.
The two amateur peace negotiators listened in when Netanyahu called Trump on September 27, thinking the Israeli leader would blow things up.
Instead, they heard Trump unleash a foul-mouthed tirade at Netanyahu, browbeating him to “f**king go along with this” because the war had “gone on for too f**king long.”
“Everybody’s sick of you, Bibi. All the Jews are sick of you,” he said.
He added that “even the two Jews on this call” — Kushner and Witkoff — were similarly “sick of” the Israeli leader as well and described himself as “the best friend Israel ever had” while urging him to accept the agreement Kushner had drafted.
“Everybody hates you, and I’ve stood by you,” he reportedly continued before adding that the proposed agreement was a “great deal for Israel” and warning that Netanyahu’s failure to go along would result in “a divorce” between the two longtime allies.
Netanyahu would later go on to accept the agreement laid out by Kushner and Witkoff — and apologize for the airstrike on Qatar 18 days earlier.
Despite the tensions between the U.S. and Israeli leaders, Netanyahu would go on to successfully convince Trump to join Israel in starting a war with Iran just months later, upending the global economy after Tehran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
