Trump says Netanyahu ‘never wanted peace’ between the Israelis and Palestinians

Nearly a year and a half after his administration helped broker a series of recognition agreements between Israel and several Arab states, former president Donald Trump says ex-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was never truly interested in bringing a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During a recent interview with Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, Mr Trump said of his erstwhile ally: “I don’t think Bibi ever wanted to make peace.”

Mr Trump described Mr Netanyahu’s approach to the peace process as having “just tapped us along” despite efforts by Trump administration officials such as Jared Kushner to jump-start negotiations for what Mr Trump called “the mother of all deals” during his 2016 campaign.

Mr Netanyahu, who first came to power in a 1996 snap election which then-interim prime minister Shimon Peres called for following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, became an outspoken opponent of the peace process first laid out in the Oslo Accords, the 1993 agreement by which Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation recognised each other’s legitimacy and laid out a series of steps to establish Palestinian self-government in the occupied territories.

During his second term as Israel’s head of government, Mr Netanyahu would accept invitations to US-backed negotiation sessions meant to restart the peace process, but such sessions never bore any lasting fruit in part because of Mr Netanyahu’s reluctance to end construction of Israeli-backed settlements in territories which critics said were positioned to make the establishment of a future Palestinian state impossible.

Mr Trump told Ravid that he initially believed Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas would be a far more willing negotiator than Mr Netanyahu after a “great” first meeting between him and Mr Abbas.

“I thought he was terrific,”  Mr Trump said. “He was almost like a father. Couldn’t have been nicer. I thought he wanted to make a deal more than Netanyahu.”

But when Mr Trump broached the subject with his Israeli counterpart, he said Mr Netanyahu wavered rather than take the opportunity to negotiate with Mr Abbas.

“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,” the ex-president recalled, suggesting to Ravid that Mr Netanyahu’s reluctance was driven by domestic political considerations.