Joe Biden asked Benjamin Netanyahu to stop putting him on during their Thursday phone after the Israeli prime minister told him Tel Aviv was preparing to send a delegation to resume talks with Hamas a day after Wednesday’s assassination of the Palestinian side's chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh.
“Stop bullsh*tting me,” Biden said, according to Israel’s Channel 12 News. “Don’t take the president for granted,” Biden reportedly added at the end of their conversation.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office did not comment on the report, except to say that Netanyahu “does not intervene in American politics and will work with whoever is elected president, and expects Americans to also not intervene in Israeli politics.”
Other accounts of Thursday’s call also painted a picture of a Biden grumpy and annoyed with Netanyahu. According to the New York Times, the president told the Israeli leader the Haniyah killing was “poorly timed,” with Washington seeking an “endgame” to a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release. Axios said Biden communicated to Netanyahu that he should not expect the US to keep bailing Israel out if it continues to escalate tensions in the region.
Biden isn’t the first recent US president to express frustration with Netanyahu. In late 2021, about a year after the Israeli leader rushed to congratulate Biden for his highly contested 2020 election victory, former President Donald Trump told Axios that the main reason his dream of an “ultimate deal” between Israel and Palestine never materialized was because Netanyahu didn’t want it.
“My whole life is deals. I’m like one big deal. That’s all I do, so I understand it. And after meeting with Bibi for three minutes, I stopped Bibi in the middle of a sentence, I said, ‘Bibi, you don’t want to make a deal. Do you?’ And he said, ‘Well, uh, uh uh’ – and the fact is, I don’t think Bibi ever wanted to make a deal,” Trump said at the time.