Trump: Israel ‘let us down’
President Donald Trump Wednesday surprised Republicans with sharp words for Israel’s government, appearing to question its sincerity in eliminating Islamic threats.
While affirming support for Israel in the wake of the October 7th massacre, Trump revealed he had “a bad experience with Israel” in 2020 when the Netanyahu government withdrew its participation in the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force responsible for attacks on Americans, was reportedly planning strikes on US military sites across the Middle East. On January 3rd, 2020, he was killed by Hellfire missiles that US drones over Baghdad fired.
“It was us and Israel, working as a group,” Trump told an audience at his Mar-a-Lago club last week. “And we knew where he was, we knew how he was coming in, we knew the plane, we knew everything. We worked on it for weeks — for months, actually.”
“We had everything all set to go,” he added. “And the night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack. . . . And I said, ‘What does this mean? We’re working on it with them, why?’
“‘They didn’t tell us why, sir, but they’re not doing it.’ This was a day before. I said, ‘I don’t like that, that’s not good.’ I looked at one of my generals who is fantastic, a warrior . . . and I said to him, ‘General, what do you want to do?’
“‘Sir, we can do whatever you’d like to do, sir. We could finish it ourselves, sir, if you’d like.’ I said, ‘Well, do we need [the Israelis]?’ And he said, ‘Not at all, sir.’ I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
“But I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down,” Trump continued. “That was a very terrible thing, I will say that. And so when I see sometimes the intelligence . . . or you talk about some of the things that went wrong this past week, they’ve got to straighten it out.”
Trump was referring to the breach in Israel’s security apparatus which allowed the attack. Security analysts are baffled by how the attackers were able to cross Israel’s heavily fortified border unimpeded and why it took Israel’s highly trained security forces over six hours to respond to calls for help. As we go to press no official investigations have been launched and IDF officials have said “now is not the time” to investigate what went wrong.
But Israel has its own grievance against Trump, who abruptly withdrew US forces from Syria in 2019 and left Kurdish forces to grapple with ISIS on their own. The move was widely viewed as a betrayal of the Kurds after three years of fighting alongside them. Israel, however, viewed the withdrawal as ceding the field to Iran, however indeliberately.
