In recent days, former President Donald Trump has made a sudden public turn on right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he was a close friend while in office, accusing him of chickening out on a mission against Iran during a rally this week.
Now, reported Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng for Rolling Stone, Trump is working behind the scenes to try to get Netanyahu "impeached" from office — and it's all because Trump is still furious that Netanyahu wouldn't back up his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
"In recent days, Trump has had phone calls with various pro-Israel GOP allies and donors who want to know how Trump would handle Israeli-Palestinian matters if reelected, two sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone," said the report. "Trump has relayed a few ideas he has discussed with policy advisers — including cutting off all aid to Palestinians and encouraging other nations to do the same, as well as capturing and extraditing certain Hamas figures. But during these private conversations, Trump has also spent an inordinate amount of time aggressively trashing Netanyahu."
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Israel doesn't actually have a constitutional procedure to "impeach" a prime minister, although prime ministers can lose power at any time if they lose the support of the Knesset, which has in fact happened to Netanyahu previously and led to him losing power for some time.
While Trump publicly is attacking Netanyahu for being incompetent at handling intelligence, said the report, behind closed doors "Trump has made it abundantly clear that his fury at Netanyahu is driven more by preexisting personal animus than by the Israeli leader’s performance in office during the Gaza offensive. The former president has derisively compared the 'very weak' Netanyahu to the majority of American Jewish voters who support Democratic President Joe Biden, and has assailed Netanyahu’s intelligence and alleged corruption. Over the past few days, during these conversations that started as focusing on the horrifying situation in Israel, Trump has — naturally — found ways to quickly pivot to Netanyahu’s ultimate betrayal of failing to back Trump’s post-election lies while congratulating Biden on his victory."
All this is coming at a time when Netanyahu, already facing controversy due to a corruption indictment and an effort to reshape the national judiciary in his favor, is taking heat for the intelligence failures that allowed Hamas to rack up hundreds of casualties and a huge contingent of hostages in their assault last weekend.