Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Season 12 Episode 24
Aired on September 28, 2025
Main segment: Benjamin Netanyahu
Other segments: 2025 Donald Trump speech at the United Nations, Indictment of James Comey
John Oliver discusses Benjamin Netanyahu’s grip on power in Israel, why he’s allied with some of the most extreme voices in his country today, and finally, a summary of one iconic meltdown we think TikTok is gonna wanna revisit.
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JOHN: Our main story tonight concerns forced monkey labor on coconut plantations. It is real, by the way. Monkeys are apparently captured and raised to harvest coconuts. You’re probably thinking, “Oh fuck, this is going to ruin coconuts for me, isn’t it? I’m never going to be able to enjoy them again without the mental image of a chained-up monkey forced to work long hours in the Thai sun for pay that is, I’m guessing, well below time-monkey minimum wage.”
Well, I’ve got some good news. We’re not actually talking about blood coconuts tonight. That was just a decoy so you’d be less bummed out when I revealed our real topic: Israel. Oh yes. Oh, suddenly, suddenly forced monkey labor sounds pretty good to you, doesn’t it? “Oh please, John, tell me about the sad monkeys. Is one named Bobo? Is he already dead?” No. Sorry. You had your chance. We’re doing Israel.
Israel is a country that I’m guessing you’re already aware of, but in case you need a primer on its exact size and location, here is someone with a helpful visual:
[Donald Trump] It’s a small country in terms of land. I take—see this pen, this wonderful pen—my desk is the Middle East and this pen, the top of the pen, that’s Israel. That’s not good, right? You know, that’s a pretty big difference. I use that as analogy. It’s pretty accurate actually.
JOHN: So that’s objectively very funny from him. Calling the pen wonderful, holding it up vertically (the only wrong way to hold it if you are comparing it to a country on a horizontal map), then taking credit for that analogy as if it weren’t definitely how an exhausted aide just taught reporters the size of Israel minutes before.
Specifically, we’re going to talk about Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi if you’re nasty, otherwise known as the original source material for Mr. Potato Head. Netanyahu has been in power on and off since 1996, to the point that he’s actually Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. And for decades, he’s portrayed himself as the only person capable of keeping Israel safe—sometimes making that argument through fun campaign ads, like this one where a couple are getting ready to go out wondering where their babysitter is, when this happens:
[Husband] Wow! Mr. Prime Minister! … What an honor! But what are you doing here?
[Benjamin Netanyahu] You ordered a babysitter? You got a Bibi-sitter! Where are the children?
[Wife] But, you’re the Prime Minister. You’re going to take care of our children?!
[Benjamin Netanyahu] This election, you choose who will care for our children. This election Likud is the only choice!
JOHN: Yeah, I mean, I guess the name Bibi does kind of sound like the word “baby,” but it is a bit of a stretch. Though, to be fair, it’s not the worst use of a nickname in a political campaign, because that would be when Richard Nixon was the subject of campaign buttons that said, “My pick is Dick.” Which would actually be a great prop for a gender reveal party. “Come in, guess how many diapers, then grab a button that says ‘My pick is Dick,’ or ‘I got twat?’” Bad news: the losing team has to listen to the mother-in-law tell her birth story.
Netanyahu’s argument to voters has always been that he’s a big, strong guy who won’t let Israel get pushed around. And even some of his most ardent supporters describe him as a belligerent piece of shit—here are some explaining their support for him ahead of an election in the ’90s:
Only Bibi. He’s the number one politician in the country. Bibi Netanyahu. He has a mouth that can wrap the whole country around his finger.
We need a prime minister to stand up to the world, not a sucker. Someone who knows how to lie, too. We need a prime minister who’s an asshole son of a bitch.
JOHN: Wow, that is pretty damning. What kind of person are you when even your biggest fans are going, “This guy’s a fucking nightmare. It’s a yes from me.” Also, stop interviewing that guy while he’s still driving. No one wants a news alert that says, “12-car pileup on the highway. We were first on the scene ’cause we kind of caused it.”
And in recent years, Netanyahu’s pushed that whole notion of a strong offense to the absolute limits. Just this year, he’s continued to preside over the longest and deadliest war in Israel’s history. He starved Gaza, bombed Iran, and carried out air strikes in Qatar, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. It seems like someone gave him a “rise and grind” coffee mug and he took it sociopathically literally.
But it is worth knowing Netanyahu and his coalition are not currently that popular in Israel. Polls continue to show his coalition would lose the next election were it to be held today. And many of his fellow politicians don’t seem big fans either, with Bibi’s former ambassador to the US saying he’s unable to distinguish between personal and political interests, and even this minister in his government calling him at one point a danger to the state of Israel. Which is pretty direct from a political ally.
In this country, the most damning thing Republicans have been brave enough to say publicly about Trump was Mitch McConnell suggesting we’re living through a time with certain similarities to the ’30s. And if you’re thinking, wait, did he mean that thing or just that ankle hemlines are coming back in fashion? The answer is neither. He was apparently referring to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which is definitely where all our heads went when he dropped the 1930s reference.
But despite all that, Netanyahu always seems to find a way to hang on to power. He’s been unseated as prime minister twice, only to come back each time. The point is, years from now, when people tell the story of Israel’s brutality in Gaza, they’ll need to talk about the history of Israel’s founding mission, the complex politics of the Middle East, America’s choice to give more military aid to Israel than any other country in history, and a thousand other things. But they’ll also need to tell the story of one Benjamin Netanyahu, a man so singularly focused on remaining in power, he’s allied with the most extreme voices in his country.
So given that, tonight, let’s talk about Netanyahu. And let’s start with some background.
He grew up with a father who was a well-known proponent of an uncompromising form of Zionism called Revisionist Zionism, which focused on the need for a military force strong enough to compel the Arabs to accept a Jewish state on their native land. Bibi actually spent some formative years in the US, attending high school in Philadelphia.
In his mid-20s, his brother Yoni [Yonatan], a commander in the IDF, was killed while rescuing more than 100 Israelis who’d been taken hostage after a plane hijacking. He was hailed as a national hero. Following that, Bibi, who was still living in the US and going by Ben Nitai, began to get more attention, and he got pretty good at arguing Israel’s case. Here he is on a Boston-area TV show:
[Interviewer] Mr. Nitai, is the issue of self-determination the core of the conflict in the Middle East?
[Netanyahu] No, I don’t believe it is. The real core of the conflict is the unfortunate Arab refusal to accept the state of Israel.
JOHN: Yeah, that was a young Netanyahu defending Israel on Boston TV. That program, by the way, Talk and Sacks with Chip and Chowder. Over the years, the show’s held some surprisingly nuanced debates on issues like the Middle East conflict, as well as exactly how many penises Derek Jeter could fit in his mouth.
Now, after returning to Israel, Netanyahu got into international diplomacy, becoming ambassador to the UN, and ultimately moved into politics as chair of the right-wing Likud party, where he made his name campaigning against the historic Oslo Accords. They famously laid out a framework for Israel negotiating peace with the Palestinians. And Netanyahu in particular railed against the prime minister who signed those accords on Israel’s behalf, Yitzhak Rabin.
Bibi went scorched earth, even speaking at an infamous rally where the crowd burned images of Rabin in a Nazi uniform and chanted for his death. Just a month later, Rabin was assassinated by a far-right extremist. And many blamed Netanyahu for stoking the anger that led to that assassination, including Rabin’s widow.
[Interviewer] To what extent do you blame Mr. Netanyahu and the Likud for what has happened?
[Leah Rabin] I do, I do blame them. The rally in Kikar Zion in Jerusalem that showed him in the uniform of a Nazi. So Mr. Bibi Netanyahu—now we can say from here to eternity that he didn’t support it and didn’t agree with it, but he was there and he didn’t stop it.
JOHN: Right. Now, Netanyahu denies inciting political violence. And in his defense, it’s not like he was filmed leading a mock funeral procession before Rabin’s death with a coffin labeled “Rabin kills Zionism” in Hebrew. Except, of course, he was very much filmed doing exactly that. There is Netanyahu right in front of one of the bluntest and most unfortunate metaphors imaginable. Honestly, the only way that could get any more on the nose is if he’d held a sign reading “plausible deniability” and burned that, too.
Now, in the wake of Rabin’s assassination, many thought Netanyahu was politically finished. But the next year, a series of Hamas suicide bombings seemed to turn the public mood toward his case that pursuing peace was pointless. And Netanyahu was elected prime minister for the first time in 1996. It’s a position that he has served in on and off for 17 of the last 30 years.
And a key claim he’s repeatedly made is boasting that he can bring the US along with whatever he does. Here he is in 2001, during a period out of power, talking to settlers in the West Bank and explaining that if back in charge, he’d be able to aggressively support them and convince America to back him:
[Netanyahu] The world won’t say anything. The world will say that we are protecting.
[Settler] Aren’t you afraid of the world, Bibi?
[Netanyahu] Especially today with America. I know what America is. America is something that can be easily pushed. Pushed to the right direction.
JOHN: Wow. “America can be easily pushed.” Even if that is true, it’s insulting to hear out loud. If I heard someone on my staff say, “I know how to get John to do exactly what you want. He’s so horny for horses. Just show him this picture and he’ll forget the next three things you say,” I’d be one, furious, two, intensely curious to see that picture. And I can’t remember what the third thing is. Just show me that fucking photo right now!
And to be fair, Bibi has had a lot of success in pushing America, particularly with Republican presidents and especially with Donald Trump. In fact, it was during Trump’s first term that Netanyahu celebrated what he considered his greatest foreign policy triumph, the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations with several Arab states, most notably the UAE and Bahrain.
It was a plan supported by Jared Kushner, who Trump, of course, put in charge of fixing the Middle East during his first term, even though he always looks like he just got his haircut while sitting in a plastic race car chair.
The thing about the Abraham Accords was they got those other nations to abandon the long-standing condition among many Arab countries that relations with Israel could only come after the establishment of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s thinking was if you can just get enough Arab nations to do that, you could basically freeze the Palestinians out. He’s been trying to get Saudi Arabia to sign on next, but it’s worth knowing many observers have warned that these accords were always just going to end up further marginalizing Palestinians.
[Ronen Bergman, Investigative journalist] He said, we are going to have peace with Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians should not have a veto on that.
[Netanyahu] I’ve long sought to make peace with the Palestinians, but I also believed that we must not give the Palestinians a veto over new peace treaties with Arab states.
[Bergman] Which is in a different language from my point of view: the Palestinians can fuck off. Sorry, excuse my French.
JOHN: I’m sorry, but I will not excuse your French. The only person allowed to say fuck while discussing diplomatic complexities on TV is me. Because if I lose that, I’m little more than a streamer explaining the news so that a dead-eyed 14-year-old can swipe past me without noting that unlike most streamers, I’m in a very expensive room.
But second, yeah, of course it was a “fuck you” to the Palestinians. That shouldn’t be surprising. Everything Netanyahu does has that as a side effect. If he could pour a bowl of cereal in a way that makes conditions in Gaza meaningfully worse, he would do that. And don’t think that he doesn’t have Israel’s top geopolitical cereal scientists working on how to make that dream come true.
But obviously, while many focus on Netanyahu’s foreign policy, he’s also a domestic leader. And at home, his time in office has increasingly been defined by attempts to cling to power, even as he’s faced allegations of corruption, including charges of bribery and fraud in three separate cases.
And while he denies those charges, to run through them very quickly: the first accuses him of accepting nearly $300,000 in gifts, including cigars and champagne, from prominent businessmen. And I will say it is not a great look that one of those businessmen has testified that Bibi and his wife used code words for the gifts, with cigars being called “leaves” and champagne being called “roses,” which is just inherently suspicious. People only use code words for illicit activities—as anyone who’s ever been disappointed by a Craigslist ad offering to “go skiing with Tina Turner” has discovered. Wait, hold on. That means cocaine and meth. Oh no, I was looking for a different kind of great time.
The two other cases both accuse him of quid pro quo involving major news platforms—this newspaper and the website Walla. In that case, prosecutors say he granted regulatory favors to the owner of Walla in exchange for positive coverage of himself and his wife. And just listen to Walla’s former editor-in-chief explain how particular Netanyahu could be:
Netanyahu wanted positive coverage so that anyone who visits Walla frequently would think he’s the King David of Israel, that he’s the wonderful leader leading Israel. He wanted his wife to be pleased, that she’d look good in photographs. How many photos were there? How were the photos? Did they have the right angle? We felt like a restaurant serving only one person. He arrives and he wants that meat and this salad and gets whatever he wants. So we used code words like parsley was the request for more photos. “Add lots of parsley to the dish coming out.”
JOHN: It’s true. Apparently, lots of parsley meant more photos, which is kind of brilliant because no one would ever say “add more parsley” about their actual food. Parsley tastes like nothing. It’s like Shrek trimmed his pubes while standing directly over your soup. It’s fine, Shrek. It’s fine. It’s fine. I’ll just eat around it. It’s fine.
Netanyahu is supposed to finish testifying this year, but has tried to drag out the process to the point that it could still take years to reach a verdict. And crucially, if convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison for the bribery charge and up to three for fraud and breach of trust, which is a lot for a guy pushing 76 and who’s allegedly spent years mainlining free cigars and champagne.
And he is not the only one in his family who enjoys a lavish lifestyle. Take Bibi’s third and current wife, Sara. She’s been called Israel’s Marie Antoinette, and has famously been accused of abusive behavior towards her household staff, which she both denies and has twice paid out damages for.
Bibi and Sara have also been accused of misspending taxpayer money—from $1,700 on scented candles to $127,000 to have a plane fitted with a double bed to attend the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. And to be fair, scented candles and the sight of Thatcher’s corpse… they needed that bed on rock-hard even thinking about it.
Now, in 2019, Sara even accepted a plea bargain to settle accusations she spent $100,000 in public funds to order meals from celebrity chefs. And I cannot think of a single celebrity chef I would spend that much on, except… yeah. What’s his face. The one who’s yelling all the time. No, not him. Yes, that’s the one. That is the one.
When those charges first arose, Sara tried to get out in front of them by giving a reality host a tour of their official residence to try and show off their modest lifestyle. And she seemed delighted to have him joke about the squalor they were forced to live in.
[Interviewer] I think that this door has been painted a thousand times.
[Sara Netanyahu] It’s been painted a lot.
[Interviewer] What is this?
[Sara Netanyahu] A lamp just broke and it was glued.
[Interviewer] What is this? I’m sorry. Like, what is this? Wow. I’m in shock that this is your kitchen. It looks like the kitchen of a boarding school in Romania in 1954. What’s this here in the back? This here is the closet. I think Anne Frank is hiding here in the back.
JOHN: Wow. Unless there is a second Anne Frank that I’m unaware of, that is a rough reference to “eight people live here in terror of an organized system of ethnic extermination because these cabinets are ratchet.” And while Sara is giggling and smiling there, she has a temper.
In 2002, she was recorded saying: “Bibi is bigger than this country. Why should he even bother? We’ll move abroad and the whole country can burn”.
And while I don’t need to show you this next clip, I do want to, because back in 2009, a newspaper gossip column published an item about Sara attending a charity event, but didn’t mention her professional credentials. It’s a slight that she then discussed with one of her aides on a call that, it turns out, was recorded. And it is a lot.
[Sara Netanyahu] We must help the refugees from Darfur. I’m doing it! As a professional, as an edu-cated woman! A psy-cho-log-ist! B.A! M.A.! That’s it!
[Aide] But it says in the first sentence you are a psychologist.
[Netanyahu] No. Is he [the editor] getting a call from you reprimanding him?
[reading from article] “The Prime Minister’s wife obligated to public service?” Why? The Prime Minister’s wife does public service every day! In her professional capacity!
JOHN: Oh my god, that is just an iconic meltdown. If that happened today, we’d have been buried under eight solid months of TikToks using the sound “Psy-cho-log-ist! B.A! M.A.!” That should be put on the diva Mount Rushmore of lashing out alongside Reese Witherspoon’s “You’re about to find out who I am,” Will Smith’s slap, and Christian Bale’s “Oh, good for you.” And I don’t say that lightly.
Now, the drumbeat of scandals surrounding Netanyahu and his reactions to them led more centrist parties in Israel to decide they wouldn’t form a coalition with him, forcing him to drift to the right. So when he returned as prime minister in 2022, it was by relying heavily on two constituencies even further to the right than he is: the ultra-orthodox religious parties and the far-right ultranationalists.
And they are extreme, because his inner circle now includes people like Itamar Ben-Gvir, a man once labeled the David Duke of Israel — a nickname I’m pretty sure would make the actual David Duke’s head explode. It’s like calling someone the JK Rowling of trans people. How does that work exactly? Netanyahu has made Ben-Gvir national security minister, and he is a hardline believer in the settler movement, which, as we’ve discussed on the show before, aims to establish enough settlements in the occupied West Bank to essentially annex the territory, despite most of the world and international law recognizing those settlements as illegal.
Ben-Gvir’s history of extremism goes way back. On his first date with his future wife, they visited the grave of an extremist settler who in 1994 gunned down 29 Muslim worshippers, which doesn’t just reflect badly on him — it reflects badly on his wife, too. Because that should have raised a lot of questions, none of them being, “Do you want to go on a second date?”
And here’s Ben-Gvir shortly before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, bragging about having gotten close enough to Rabin’s car to steal his hood ornament:
[Interviewer] You managed to remove the emblem from Rabin’s car.
[Ben-Gvir] An emblem is a symbol. And this symbol shows that just like we can get to Rabin’s car, we can get to Rabin.
JOHN: That is chilling. And for what it’s worth, I’m not even sure Rabin would have got that message, because when he noticed his hood ornament was gone, I’m guessing he thought, “Oh shit, someone stole the little Cadillac thing from my hood,” and not, “Uh-oh, I shouldn’t have signed the Oslo Accords. I better unsign it before they come back for my hubcaps.”
Since then, Ben-Gvir has been convicted on at least eight charges, including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. In fact, as recently as three years ago, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with him or even be seen with him in photographs, once saying he was not fit to be a member of his government. But now, of course, he very much is.
Then there’s Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s finance minister. Smotrich once called himself a proud homophobe and helped organize an anti-gay “Beast Parade.” As if the phrase “Beast Parade” didn’t already sound like the most out-and-proud thing on earth. It sounds like a brand of poppers that’s been recalled. It sounds like a Fire Island party where the only dress code is edible. It sounds like a bar in WeHo where a lost tourist from Iowa just woke up to the rest of his life.
Smotrich is a willful provocateur, often saying things like this on the floor of the Knesset:
[Bezalel Smotrich] Thank you, chairman. My fellow members of Knesset, I want to stand here and say unequivocally: there is no such thing as the Palestinian people. Period. There is none. There was none. Period.
JOHN: Yeah, pretty offensive. And while he’s clearly saying that to get a reaction there, the phrase “there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people” also sounds like something that Smotrich says to help himself climax.
This man is an unapologetic extremist. He suggested that the starvation of Gaza’s civilians — a war crime — may be just and moral. And he’s led the calls for the West Bank to be annexed. And that is just two of the, to use a polite term, absolute nightmares central to Netanyahu’s coalition, with another key constituency being the ultra-orthodox.
Now, one of that group’s biggest concerns is preserving a religious exemption that allows them to skip the mandatory military service required of most young Israelis. That exemption is understandably pretty unpopular in Israel, with resentment only growing as the war in Gaza has dragged on. But Netanyahu has shown himself to be committed to delivering for his extremist partners.
And a big flashpoint came in early 2023 when he moved against Israel’s judiciary, specifically its Supreme Court. That is something that the far-right wanted for a bunch of reasons. The ultra-orthodox were furious that the court had ruled against their military exemption, and the settlements crowd saw it as an obstacle to expansion in the West Bank. So Netanyahu — who, remember, was facing corruption charges, so had his own reasons to undermine the court — pushed for a judicial reform bill that would substantially reduce its oversight of government.
And that move did not go down well with much of the Israeli public:
All day protesters gathered in Jerusalem and other Israeli cities. They say it’s not just that the proposed legislation would reduce judicial checks and balances on the government, but it would also rob Israel of its identity as a democracy.
Maybe the most surreal protest was by Navy SEALs — reservist frogmen — who, like other members of the Israeli military, believed that the government’s plans were undemocratic.
JOHN: Yeah. People were so mad they protested underwater. And you know things are getting bad when the protests start to stretch all the way to Bikini fucking Bottom.
And that was where things stood for Netanyahu in early 2023. But then of course in October things changed tragically, when Hamas launched the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, 48 of whom are still held in Gaza today, with around 20 believed to still be alive.
And look, no one would say Netanyahu personally caused October 7th, but he has definitely ensured that what’s come after has caused exponentially more suffering than might otherwise have been the case. As we’ve discussed before, for years he deliberately allowed Qatar to funnel money into Gaza, literally sending suitcases full of money there in the back seats of cars. And he did this to try and keep Hamas in power, as it meant that he didn’t have to deal with their more moderate rival, the Palestinian Authority.
It was a massive gamble, and it is one that Israeli journalists still talk about today in utter disbelief:
[Amos Harel, Haaretz] This money was spent on digging tunnels and buying rockets and producing weapons now killing Israelis, while Netanyahu was telling us that he was our great protector. He was actually contributing — not directly — to building Hamas and making it a regional power.
JOHN: It’s true: Netanyahu was secretly helping beef up the very organization that he claimed to be protecting Israelis against. And he was open about his thinking here. He once told a prominent Israeli journalist that a strong Hamas was actually a good thing, as it meant a divided Palestinian government, which would lessen the pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.
And sure, if something’s a threat, why not make it more dangerous? It’s like the classic advice: if you’re ever threatened by a bear, give the bear a gun as part of a long-term strategy to make negotiation with that bear less diplomatically feasible. What is the worst that could happen?
But that’s not the only way in which Netanyahu underestimated Hamas’s threat. He also reportedly blew off a warning from Israel’s internal security chief that the country faced a challenge at its doorstep with Hamas, which Netanyahu dismissed, arguing that Hamas had been deterred. And that is a statement that has frankly aged worse than when Ellen had shirts that said “Be kind to one another,” or when Eric Adams gave Sean Combs the key to New York City in 2023, or when Colbert’s show released this interview on YouTube and titled it “Armie Hammer ate NYC Street Meat and lives to eat another day.”
And now Israel is embroiled in a war which, according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, scores of experts, and an independent commission at the UN, constitutes a genocide. In fact, last year the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and others, charging them with war crimes. But of course, his supporters didn’t quite see it that way:
This doesn’t really have any validity. Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Force are doing their very, very best for the state of Israel. Um, and I’m sorry that the Hague and the International Court cannot appreciate that.
JOHN: Okay. A pretty good sign that you’re not in the right is if you find yourself saying, “I’m sorry that the Hague and the International Court cannot appreciate that,” no matter what comes before it. If you’d said, “The Roses is a witty exploration of the trials of modern marriage, and I’m sorry the Hague and the International Court cannot appreciate that,” it would be fair to wonder what the fuck was in that movie!
And responses like that are especially wild once you learn the extent to which Netanyahu has been personally responsible for keeping this war going. Reporting has found that at key stages, his decisions extended the fighting in Gaza longer than even Israel’s military leadership deemed necessary.
For instance, just this March, he broke a ceasefire and blamed Hamas’s refusal to release more hostages before negotiations could proceed, even though that was not part of the ceasefire agreement. In reality, it was actually Netanyahu caving to far-right ministers like Smotrich, who had threatened:
If, God forbid, the war is not resumed, I will bring the government down.
Even now, Netanyahu’s forged ahead with a ground offensive to take Gaza City over the objections of his own military leaders and in defiance of global condemnation.
Now, as for Smotrich, he’s openly talking about the annexation of Gaza. Just listen to him outline those plans at a conference last week in the grossest possible terms:
[Smotrich] There’s a business plan set by the most professional people there is, and it is on President Trump’s table, about how this thing turns into a real estate bonanza. I’m not kidding. It pays off. I have started negotiations with the Americans. I say this not jokingly now, because I also demand: we paid a lot of money for this war. So, we need to divide how we make a percentage on the land marketing later in Gaza. And now, no kidding, we’ve done the demolition phase, which is always the first phase of urban renewal. Now, we need to build.
JOHN: Holy shit. He’s referring to mass murder and displacement as urban renewal. That is stretching a euphemism to breaking point. It’s basically like calling the Trail of Tears “high-speed mass transit.” That is not remotely what that was!
And again, it is impossible to overstate the death and suffering Netanyahu’s decisions have caused: to the over 65,000 Palestinians who are dead, the thousands of children who are amputees, and the thousands more who are starving, but also to the Israeli hostages who’ve either died or are still being held because of his refusal to prioritize their safety and freedom. It is all truly horrifying.
And somehow, in the midst of all this, in June, he launched yet another war attacking Iran, claiming they were on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon — something that he’s been claiming for three fucking decades now. And even after a US-brokered ceasefire was supposed to put a stop to the hostilities, Netanyahu continued to antagonize Iran, which finally seemed to wear on Trump’s patience.
[Donald Trump] Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. The biggest load that we’ve seen. I’m not happy with Israel. You know what? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Do you understand that?
JOHN: Yeah, he is pissed there. I guess that shouldn’t be that surprising. It’s one of the six moods Trump displays in public: pissed, bored, asleep, a little horny, a lot horny, blissed out on the energy of a cheering crowd and momentarily oblivious to the crushing void that yawns within him, and of course pissed — formal edition.
Perhaps because of Trump’s irritation, though, not long after that Netanyahu nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize and went on Trump’s favorite news network to say this:
[Benjamin Netanyahu] If anyone deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, it’s President Trump. First of all, he brokered with me the historic Abraham Accords in which Israel made peace with four Arab states. I think that deserves maybe four Nobel prizes for him.
JOHN: Look, I don’t know what is more embarrassing there: how thick he’s laying on the flattery, or how likely it is to work. “You know, I’d give Trump an extra-large Nobel Prize — a super Nobel, if you will. And instead of that dead Swede on the side, it’d have a chick with huge bazongas. That would be more appropriate to Mr. Trump’s greatness”.
Look, it is very clear that Netanyahu is desperate to stay in power and will do whatever it takes — which on a personal level makes sense. If you are facing a potential prison term, you probably want every bit of leverage you can get to avoid that happening. But some Israelis do recognize the dynamic at work here and are understandably furious about it. Just look at this coverage of a protest there last month:
Well, these protesters in the center of Tel Aviv are absolutely furious at their government’s decision to expand its military operations inside the Gaza Strip.
This one says Bibi betrays the fighters. Bibi betrays the soldiers, the fighters. He sends them to die. He sends them to fight. He sends them to commit war crimes. And all for what? For what?
Well, his supporters say it’s to make Israel safer.
Well, no. It’s to make Bibi safe. And they believe that when Bibi’s safe, we’re safe. But I believe the opposite.
JOHN: Yeah, I believe that, too. And the thing is, that’s kind of the problem with electing someone because he’s an asshole son of a bitch. You do wind up being governed by someone who’s an asshole and a son of a bitch.
The point is Netanyahu is not popular in Israel, and he’s increasingly unpopular here too. A new poll found just 21% of Americans have a favorable view of him. Meanwhile, support for Palestinian statehood is currently at 58% in the US. And just recently, a wave of countries, including France, the UK, Canada, and Australia, all officially recognized a Palestinian state. In fact, as this map shows, the US is now one of the few countries — and the only permanent member of the UN Security Council — that doesn’t.
And sure, Netanyahu might claim that he can easily push America back into supporting him, but I don’t know if that’s true this time. I think people have seen a little too much at this point.
And let me be clear: to attribute the atrocities in Gaza to just one man would be naive. It would also ignore that while many Israelis vehemently disagree with choices that Netanyahu has made, there’s also a fair amount of consensus there when it comes to deeper issues like the inevitability of ongoing Israeli occupation in general, and the acceptability of denying self-determination to Palestinians. Those are conversations and issues that are going to take much longer and be much harder to resolve.
But in the short term, Israelis removing this fucking guy from power might at the very least bring a stop to the horrific suffering in Gaza and bring the hostages home.
The next election there is scheduled to occur by next October. Though, if Netanyahu’s coalition ruptures, it could be earlier. But whenever it happens, to anyone in Israel who thinks like that woman — that he is just doing his best to protect the country, or that the ends justify the means, that he is somehow the Bibi-sitter everybody needs — it is worth asking: just who is Netanyahu really looking out for?
Is it the people of Israel who’ve been put at risk by endless war? Or is it the man who spent 17 years as prime minister and seems willing to do whatever it takes to squeeze out a few more?
I would argue that it is the second one, and I for one am looking forward to the day that Netanyahu is politically done, because if and when that day finally comes, it truly will be time to break out — in words that I’m pretty sure Netanyahu would understand — the roses and the fucking leaves.
