'When Trump said: F**k Bibi, it wasn't a slip of the tongue'

05/16/23 • 46 min

When journalist Barak Ravid’s book "Trump's Peace: the Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East" was published in Hebrew in 2021, two words in his text made international headlines.

Bitter about the Israeli Prime Minister’s eagerness to congratulate President Joe Biden on his win, Trump said of Benjamin Netanyahu in their 90-minute interview for the book: "Fuck him," making a point of declaring "I haven’t spoken to him since."

In a conversation with Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Ravid reports that two full years later, Trump and Netanyahu still haven’t exchanged a word.

On the occasion of the publication of his book in English - with new chapters updating the state of the Abraham Accords under the Biden administration, Ravid offers a look behind the scenes of his two lengthy interviews with Trump and how eager he was to express his unhappiness with Netanyahu’s behavior.

When Trump used the F-word, "It was at the end of a 20-minute monologue about all the bad things he thought about Netanyahu," Ravid shared, saying the interview revealed to him that the Trump-Netanyahu bromance "was like watching a show for four years. And then you realize that everything you saw was just BS, because the reality between those two was completely different."

Also on this week’s podcast, Haaretz English Editor in Chief Esther Solomon and correspondent Simon Waldman in Istanbul assess the political situation in Turkey after the election results leading to a second-round face-off for the presidency between incumbent Tayyip Erdogan and opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. According to Waldman, the first round outcome is “the worst-case scenario” for the opposition.

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When journalist Barak Ravid’s book "Trump's Peace: the Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East" was published in Hebrew in 2021, two words in his text made international headlines.

In a conversation with Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Ravid reports that two full years later, Trump and Netanyahu still haven’t exchanged a word.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

Israel braces for Islamic Jihad response after Assassinations: What happens next?

After Israel assassinated three senior members of Islamic Jihad and killed at least ten civilians in airstrikes on the Gaza Strip in the wee hours of Tuesday morning in a military operation, the country tensely braced for expected retaliation.

Haaretz national security analyst Amos Harel joined Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer on Tuesday to assess what has been dubbed Operation Shield and Arrow. On the podcast, they discuss Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political motives for greenlighting the assassinations.

The operation, Harel says, “is mostly a result of Israeli domestic considerations. Last week, after the death of jailed Islamic Jihad terrorists in an Israeli jail after a long hunger strike, Islamic Jihad reacted by launching more than 100 rockets and mortar bombs towards Israeli towns and villages around the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu hesitated, receiving a lot of criticism from both the opposition and the protest movement, and from within his government. So I don't think he had much choice.”

Harel addresses the many questions Israelis were asking themselves Tuesday: should Israel batten down the hatches for a major extended military conflict with both Islamic Jihad and with Hamas in Gaza? What are the chances the conflict could extend to the West Bank and Israel’s northern border? How aggressively will the Biden White House move to lower the flames and could the tense relationship between Washington and Jerusalem affect the US reaction to this crisis?

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Next Episode

'Secular Israelis Are Mad as Hell and They're Not Going to Take It Anymore'

As the protest movement against the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul moved into its 20th week, there has been a clear shift in its focus.

From battles over the billions of shekels in government budget expenditures on ultra-Orthodox schools that don’t offer basic education, to turf wars over a yeshiva in downtown Tel Aviv and an indoor playground open on Shabbat, to a firestorm around a television talk show host calling ultra-Orthodox Israelis “bloodsuckers.” These days, the public discourse is all about the secular-Orthodox divide.

Uri Keidar, CEO of Israel Hofsheet ("Be Free Israel") and Haaretz correspondent Judy Maltz join host Allison Kaplan Sommer on Haaretz Weekly to discuss the growing rift, how it relates to the wider struggle against the judicial coup, and the increasing frustration in the secular public.

"I think we are starting to see the majority wake up," says Keidar, who believes that this majority is "over and done with" an ultra-Orthodox political agenda which "are not up to speed with the fact that we live in the 21st century."

"A lot of angry, secular people are saying: enough is enough. We're sick and tired of sending our kids to the army, while ultra-Orthodox kids don't have to go, we're sick and tired of paying more and more taxes for things that we not only don't believe in, but that we are vehemently opposed to. And this is it. We're not going to put up with it anymore," observes Maltz.

"A year ago, if somebody secular in Israel spoke out against the ultra-Orthodox sector, they would have been called anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew - and that would have shut them up. Today, it's not shutting them up."

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