When the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ordered a strike on the Lebanese capital of Beirut on June 14, Donald Trump was not amused. Fearing that the attack threatened an agreement with Iran on ending the war between the two countries, the US president lashed out. Netanyahu, he said, has “no fucking judgment”.
He was not the first US president to be moved to curse words by the Israeli leader.
When Bill Clinton first met Netanyahu in the summer of 1996, Netanyahu lectured him about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Clinton emerged from the meeting exasperated. “Who the fuck does he think he is?” Clinton asked his aides. “Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
And then there were his relations with Barack Obama, which were bad from the beginning – and got worse when Obama tried to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. During a hot mic incident in 2011, before the deal was even an issue, French leader Nicholas Sarkozy told Obama that Netanyahu was “a liar”. Obama replied: “You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.”
The journalist Jeffrey Goldberg kept a running list of the insults that he had heard Obama staffers direct at Netanyahu in private. One of them was “chickenshit”.
Why has Netanyahu exasperated so many US presidents and their aides? One reason is that he has been extremely singleminded in advancing what he sees as the interests of his country.
But the same goes for a lot of other global leaders, too. As a result, it can be tempting to explain the tension by looking at Netanyahu’s personality – and there may be some validity to these explanations.
But more broadly, it is the unique nature of US-Israeli relations – and the place that the country has in American domestic politics – which explains why Netanyahu has stressed so many presidents out.
One of the reasons the Israeli leader so frustrates American presidents is that they cannot just ignore him or cut his country off from US support. There are a number of large pro-Israel constituencies in the United States – and modern presidents have always felt pressure to please them.
Furthermore, Netanyahu has been more than happy to mobilise domestic US pro-Israel groups against American presidents when he has felt the need.
When Netanyahu visited Washington, DC in 1998 to face pressure from Clinton to relinquish territory in the West Bank, he spent the night before giving a speech to a thousand members of the pro-Israeli Christian right, a group vocally opposed to Clinton. He also met with prominent Republicans. “I know where you were last night,” Clinton reportedly remarked wryly the next day.
Netanyahu was also particularly active in rallying opposition to the Obama administration, especially its nuclear deal with Iran.
Olivier Douliery/Pool via CNP
Whenever Obama tried to pressure the Israeli leader to take a step like building fewer settlements in the West Bank, opposition would erupt at home – stoked by Netanyahu. Figuring that the political pain wasn’t worth it – especially given Netanyahu seemed intractable anyway – Obama eventually decided to back off.
More recently, as casualties mounted in Gaza during Israel’s assault on the territory following the Hamas attacks of October 7 2023, Joe Biden is reported to have called Netanyahu a “fucking liar” over his conduct of the conflict.
It’s no coincidence that many of Netanyahu’s clashes have been with Democratic presidents. This is not only because they have tended to be more willing to question Israel, but also because he himself seems to have decided to make a strategic choice to align himself with the conservative right in recent years.
Critics of Netanyahu’s strategy have warned that by turning support for Israel into an increasingly partisan political issue in the US, Netanyahu was risking the eventual loss of support for Israel among the American left.
At a minimum, his alignment with the Republican Party has made him reliant on the continued goodwill of that party and its presidents. But it is now a Republican president, Donald Trump, telling him he has “no fucking judgment”. So what went wrong, and what does this mean?
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Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have different war aims – can the Iran peace deal survive?
Unwinnable war
Over the past year, Netanyahu pushed too hard for too much. He has long dreamed of persuading an American president to join him in attacking Iran. But he doesn’t seem to have considered how a failed or inconclusive war would affect American views of Israel – including on the right.
From Trump’s perspective, it now looks like Netanyahu manoeuvred him into a costly and unwinnable war. Even worse, Netanyahu doesn’t seem to accept what seems to Trump to be self-evident – that the most important thing is to end the war as soon as possible and get the global economy humming again.
In other words, Netanyahu now finds himself in a similar dynamic with Trump as with Democratic presidents in the past. Their interests diverge, Netanyahu won’t stop playing games – and the president is really annoyed about it.
But the context is different this time around, and so the consequences are more serious. Support for Israel has collapsed in the US. Netanyahu has persuaded the Trump administration to join a war which was done great harm to the American economy and its global standing. The support of both the right and the left seems to be in doubt, leaving Israel with potentially nowhere to turn.
When future Israeli leaders consider what is left of the bilateral relationship, they may well agree with Trump about their former leader’s judgment – and reach for a few curse words of their own.
