Washington, June 17: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Donald Trump last year that he was the “greatest friend Israel ever had in the White House”.
Now, as Trump tries to finalise a deal to end the war with Iran, he’s unloading on Netanyahu with rhetoric that no other American leader has dared to use publicly.
He claimed credit for Israel’s existence — “without me, there would be no Israel” — and cursed his judgment in interviews. He even described him as “crazy”.
Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister spans four US presidents, and he’s frustrated all of them at one point or another. But none has voiced that as openly as Trump, who started the conflict in tandem with Netanyahu.
The tension comes as Trump criticises recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon, which threatened to jeopardise negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Trump has been pushing for a deal as he faces political blowback at home, where the war is unpopular and has driven up gasoline prices.
“If Netanyahu gets in between something Trump really wants, and that’s out of this war, he’s prepared to use the leverage that he has,” said Aaron David Miller, who served as an adviser on Middle East issues to Democratic and Republican administrations over two decades.
An agreement is scheduled to be signed on Friday in Geneva. Speaking on Tuesday at the annual G7 summit in France, Trump said he told Netanyahu that he’s been unhappy with his recent moves.
“Without the US, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel because no other President was willing to do what I did,” Trump said. “I have had a great relationship with Bibi. Now Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon.”
There has long been a bipartisan consensus around supporting Israel in Washington, but that has frayed in recent years.
Liberals have been increasingly outraged by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, especially during the war in Gaza, and conservatives have questioned the importance of longstanding American support for Israel. There are concerns about antisemitism on the left and the right.
Trump’s latest comments drew swift criticism from left-leaning groups.
“He is framing Israel’s mere existence as contingent on him,” said Halie Soifer, who leads the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “It’s deeply offensive to the vast majority of Jews who care about Israel’s future.”
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris often disagreed with Netanyahu during the war in Gaza, and sometimes they criticised him publicly. But they were more circumspect to avoid facing accusations of being anti-Israel.
Conservative, pro-Israel groups were divided on the seriousness of Trump’s public condemnation of Netanyahu.
Republican Jewish Coalition President Matt Brooks described Trump’s criticism as little more than the inevitable disagreement among family members.
Brooks dismissed that any muted criticism of Trump’s comments from his party represented a political mixed message because Trump has been reliably supportive of Israel as president.
“If Biden or Harris said something critical, it came from the position of someone who was hostile toward or didn’t have the same level of support for Israel that President Trump has,” Brooks said.
He noted the first Trump administration’s role in moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the return of Israeli hostages from Gaza during the president’s second term, among other acts.
Biden had criticised Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza, though Trump’s criticism of Netanyahu comes with a “tremendous reservoir of goodwill on this issue that neither Biden nor Harris ever had”.
Conservative, pro-Israel advocate Mort Klein said Trump should have kept the comments private, especially in light of his public praise over the years of authoritarian leaders in Turkey, North Korea and China.
Klein, president of Zionist Organization of America, said he worried that Trump was making the comments in public to appeal to Israel critics “because he sees that Americans have become more hostile toward Israel than they’ve ever been”.
“That worries me,” Klein said.
