The Trump Ultimatum: Time to End Netanyahu’s Reign in America
"You’re f***ing crazy. …Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this."
That’s what President Donald Trump said to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu this week, just after Israel had committed the latest in a seemingly endless series of outrageous acts of aggression – this time in Lebanon.
And this wasn’t just some made-up clickbait report. Axios – to whom Trump has spoken directly on plenty of occasions – reported it first. Then Mark Levin – one of the most powerful Netanyahu surrogates in the U.S. – denounced whoever “leaked” the conversation between Trump and Netanyahu. That’s right, he didn’t deny Trump had said those things. He instead complained that what Trump said to Netanyahu had reached the public.
Hours later, the Wall Street Journal confirmed and expanded on the Axios report. And finally, late last night, Trump himself confirmed it in an interview with podcaster Miranda Devine.
And why shouldn’t he? By now, Trump’s exasperation with Netanyahu, and his read on the public’s growing resentment of Israel, isn’t even controversial. In fact, advocates for the many victims of Israel’s campaigns of bloodshed in Gaza and now Lebanon could be forgiven for saying Trump’s outburst this week is far too little, far too late.
But I’d take a slightly different approach: It’s never too late for a leader like Trump to do the right thing. What’s more, this is a president who campaigned on keeping the U.S. out of the thoughtless military entanglements that have become synonymous with the Bushes and Clintons and Romneys he defeated in 2016 and 2024. He’s also a president who has said more than once that he wants his primary legacy to be that of a peacemaker – a president who ended wars instead of starting them.
But if Trump wants to make good on that ambition – a far nobler one than most politicians ever want to be remembered for – he needs to do better than an outburst, and expressing exasperation with Israel is not enough. Instead, Trump should put that anger into the form of justice: a real, hard policy toward a rogue state that is close to sealing his legacy for him … and making it the opposite of what he set out to achieve. Otherwise, he will be remembered not as a peacemaker, but a warmonger. A Bush. A Clinton.
The Trump Ultimatum?
The news of Trump’s phone call with Netanyahu this week reminded me of the story of another phone call – this one between President Ronald Reagan and Israeli Prime Minister Mecachem Begin.
The year was 1982. Israeli forces had laid siege to West Beirut in Lebanon – threatening the lives of civilians and shocking the world.
But then, Reagan picked up the phone.
As I wrote last year, “Reagan told Begin that the bombardment of civilians had become intolerable. In his own diary, Reagan wrote that he used the word ‘holocaust’ during the call—not lightly, but deliberately—to confront the prime minister with the gravity of what was happening. He warned that if the attacks did not stop, the United States would reconsider its support. …Within twenty minutes, Begin called him back. The bombing stopped.”
That is the kind of moral leadership Trump is in a position to show. In a sense, in fact, I would say Trump is in a position to outdo Reagan’s gambit.
Here’s why.
The moral emergency Netanyahu represents is far graver than the one Reagan ended in 1982.
After all, why does “everybody hate” Netanyahu by now, as Trump put it to his face? Because the world has watched for nearly three years as countless thousands of women and children were murdered by Netanyahu’s war machine in Gaza. The spectacle of horror has been widely dubbed the world’s “first livestreamed genocide.”
But here’s the thing: it never ended.
Instead, despite a weak and often almost meaningless ceasefire agreement, Israel continues to kill in Gaza – and also to expand its presence, corral survivors, and torture and make examples of prisoners.
In addition, Israel’s abuses have become bolder and more explictly aimed at ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, where even the indigenous Christians of the Holy Land – Americans’ coreligionists – face the real possibility of being driven out to make way for an expansionist secular Zionist settler movement.
And finally, in Lebanon, Netanyahu’s henchman Defense Minister Israel Katz has explicitly stated that the Israeli military is expanding Israel’s presence indefinitely deep into the neighboring state, and plans to conduct there yet another campaign of violence along the “model” of what was done in Gaza.
How will Trump be remembered?
Netanyahu has already taken to the airwaves to downplay Trump’s indignation and belittle the President’s condemnation of Israel’s aggressions. Netanyahu wants to assure everyone that he and Trump are “great friends,” and that Monday’s call was just a little spat between members of the same “family.”
But Trump was right, and he should know that the American people know he was.
Which leaves him to answer just one question – a question that can only be answered with action: Will Trump be remembered as the best friend of this global pariah? Is this a president who, like so many others in the dynasties of power that he defeated on behalf of the American people in two elections, will stand aside and comply when foreign actors pull the U.S. into complicity with wars and genocides?
Or will Trump, like Reagan, make the right call?
