According to Barak Ravid, author of the new book “Trump's Peace: The Abraham Accords And The Reshaping The Middle East,” there is a lengthy backstory behind Trump’s angry comments about Netanyahu.
“I wasn’t surprised at the narrative because I was already quite familiar with the narrative from talking to Trump’s aides over the several weeks before,” Ravid tells Israel National News “Sometimes it’s not the lyrics but the music. I think that the music was very strong and Trump was really angry. The fact that he used the F-word that was the surprising thing.”
The cause of the rift is complex and goes back to the beginning of 2020. Ravid cites a “set of disagreements” between Trump and Netanyahu and a feeling that Netanyahu was “using [the Trump administration] like an all you can eat buffet in Vegas. You’re just putting more and more stuff on your plate.”
While Trump was giving all these things to Netanyahu, he was hoping to get things in return, such as hoping that when the time came, Netanyahu would be serious about getting a peace deal with the PA, Ravid explains. But that didn’t’ happen.
Moves that Trump made that greatly helped Netanyahu – for instance the Golan Heights recognition, which Trump says helped Netanyahu in elections – were felt by Trump not to be reciprocated.
“Trump was hoping when the time comes and he’s running in the elections, he would get at least some kind of public support from Netanyahu to mobilize his base,” Ravid says.
On the other hand, Trump was clear several times during the interview with Ravid that his feeling about Netanyahu did not mean he doesn’t still love Israel. And he “wanted to make sure that the message doesn’t come across as if [he’s saying] that the entire country doesn’t want peace.”
The relationship between Trump and Netanyahu began to sour, according to the author, when Trump announced his “Deal of the Century” peace plan. He thought that with his peace plan release on January 28, 2020 that he expected Netanyahu to reach out to the PA and to take the plan and help Trump mobilize the international community to implement it.
However, “Netanyahu, Trump realizes, came to the ceremony in order to get the green light for annexation, and Trump and his team realize on that day that Netanyahu turned Trump into a ‘potted plant.’ And that he was only interested in a ‘land grab,’ that’s what they said.”
Trump noticed during Netanyahu’s speech that he was talking about annexation.
“You could see him giving a look to Jared Kushner who was sitting in the front row, ‘What is this guy talking about?’”
He says that Trump was very upset after Netanyahu’s White House speech.
“He was very angry and as the day continued with Netanyahu announcing that he would bring a resolution to the cabinet [five days later] to annex all the settlements in the West Bank, Trump said, ‘How did this happen, we never talked about this.’”
Kushner told US Ambassador David Friedman in a “dressing down” that there would be no annexation resolution and that he would have to cross over to the Blair House where Netanyahu was staying to deliver this “very bad news” to Netanyahu.
“That night, Netanyahu said in his speech that the ‘Deal of the Century’ is the ‘opportunity of the century.’ But at the end of the night it became the embarrassment of the century for Netanyahu,” Ravid says. “It caused the biggest crisis in the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu since Trump assumed office.”
Ravid heard from members of both inner circles that this was the lowest point in the relationship.
Though they went ahead to carry out the Abraham Accords, Ravid explains that the normalization with Arab nations “wasn’t really planned.”
At one point, White House envoy Avi Berkowitz was dispatched to speak with Netanyahu about Trump’s peace plan. He told him that “next you have to give the [PA] something, and Netanyahu at that point said that he considered going it alone without a green light from Trump and unilaterally annex parts of the West Bank. And Berkowitz tells him if you do that Trump will tweet against you, and you will turn your biggest friend into your biggest enemy.”
Netanyahu after these meetings still considered a unilateral annexation, according to Ravid.
On July 1, there is this “huge crisis that is about to blow up.”
So the Crown Prince of the UAE and the UAE Washington ambassador “come to the rescue with a ‘ladder’ to the White House and Netanyahu to avert the crisis with no annexation for normalizing relations with Israel.”
According to Ravid, “Netanyahu was skeptical at the beginning.” He still tried to get out of the deal a day before it was signed due to electoral pressures.
But Ambassador David Friedman called him and said: “It’s happening. You have no choice.”
Trump also felt Netanyahu was not helping with the Iran situation. However, it may have been a misunderstanding between the two leaders, comments Ravid.
“In the killing of [Iranian General[ Qasem Soleimani, Trump felt that Israel should have been more active in the killing of Soleimani and Netanyahu didn’t want to,” he says.
Ravid has heard people claim that statement is true and has heard from others that it is not true. “But in Trump’s mind, Netanyahu wanted to fight Iran to the last American soldier. That was Trump’s state of mind.”
“This was why he was so angry with Netanyahu starting from January 2020,” Ravid says. “The congratulations to Biden which came in November was already done on a very wide basis of bad blood between them.”