Why Every US President Ends Up Cursing Netanyahu
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- Donald Trump told Netanyahu he had "no fucking judgment" after a June 14 strike on Beirut threatened a US-Iran agreement to end the war between the two countries.
- Bill Clinton, after his first meeting with Netanyahu in the summer of 1996, asked aides "Who the fuck does he think he is?" after Netanyahu lectured him on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
- Barack Obama-era staffers privately called Netanyahu "chickenshit" and "a liar," and in a 2011 hot-mic moment French president Nicolas Sarkozy told Obama Netanyahu was "a liar," to which Obama replied he had to "deal with him every day."
- Netanyahu actively mobilized US pro-Israel constituencies against Democratic presidents — speaking to a thousand Christian right members the night before a 1998 Clinton meeting and rallying opposition to Obama's Iran nuclear deal — exploiting the structural leverage that domestic lobbies give Israel.
- Joe Biden reportedly called Netanyahu a "fucking liar" over his conduct of the Gaza conflict following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, continuing the pattern with Democratic presidents.
- Netanyahu's strategic alignment with the Republican right has turned US support for Israel into a partisan issue, and critics warned he was risking the eventual loss of support among the American left — a warning now materializing as support for Israel has collapsed across the political spectrum.
- The current clash with Trump is more serious than previous ones because Netanyahu persuaded a US president to join an "unwinnable war" that harmed the American economy and global standing, leaving Israel with "potentially nowhere to turn," per the author.
Why it matters: Netanyahu's long-running strategy of weaponizing US domestic lobbies to resist presidential pressure is the structural source of the pattern, but it has now collided with two new realities: Israeli military operations have cost bipartisan US public support, and the war Netanyahu drew Trump into has damaged the American economy. Future Israeli leaders may inherit a relationship where the leverage Netanyahu enjoyed no longer works — and where future presidents, Republican or Democratic, face less political cost in distancing from Israel.
