Trump's Peace: The Abraham Accords And The Reshaping Of The Middle East by Barak Ravid

Author:Barak Ravid [Ravid, Barak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barak Ravid - Independent Publishing
Published: 2023-05-10T22:00:00+00:00

Four Days in June

Benjamin Netanyahu had no warning just how much the last week of June 2020 would affect his political situation. One of the things on his agenda that week was an application to the Knesset Finance Committee for tax refunds worth hundreds of thousands of shekels for expenses relating to his private home in the affluent town of Caesarea, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Israelis had lost their jobs in the wake of the pandemic. Coalition whip and Netanyahu ally Miki Zohar will go down in the history books of ill-advised political quotes for his claim in the committee hearings that the multi-millionaire prime minister was the victim of people attempting to “financially cripple” him. That Friday afternoon, police officers arrested Brigadier General (Res.) Amir Haskel at a small protest in front of the prime minister’s house. Haskel’s arrest sparked an unprecedented wave of protests against Netanyahu that lasted for nine months. At their peak, 30 thousand people protested outside the prime minister’s official residence and thousands more took to bridges and intersections across the country.

This was the environment into which White House Envoy Avi Berkowitz stepped on June 27 for his meeting with Netanyahu. This visit was the toughest assignment of Berkowitz’s three-and-a-half-year tenure in the White House. The 32-year-old’s mission was to deliver a message to the US president’s closest ally that the prime minister would be very unhappy to receive. The four days that followed in late June represented the lowest point of the relationship between Netanyahu and Trump’s White House, but they would also make the biggest impact. Unlike his long-standing personal bond with Jared Kushner and his close relationships with David Friedman and Special Representative Jason Greenblatt, Netanyahu’s relationship with Berkowitz was tepid. One of the prime minister’s senior advisors told me that there was a poor chemistry between the two from the get-go. The deep cracks in the trust between Netanyahu and the White House in the wake of the events of January 28 were also still evident. Berkowitz found Netanyahu bitter and grumbling. The COVID-19 restrictions made the meeting even more difficult, with Netanyahu sitting at his desk behind a plastic see-through screen. It started off tense and deteriorated from there. “Stop leaking to Barak Ravid,” Netanyahu rebuked Berkowitz right away. “What you just said is very offensive. I’ve done a lot for Israel,” Berkowitz responded. Friedman intervened and attempted to placate Netanyahu, hinting to him that Berkowitz was the man holding the keys to his ambitions. One of Netanyahu’s advisors who was present in the meeting with Berkowitz that Saturday evening told me that he had never seen Netanyahu so angry and behaving so undiplomatically. “It was really embarrassing,” he recalled.

A former senior White House official pointed out that Berkowitz’s primary goal for the visit was to reach a balanced agreement that would not look like a straightforward land-grab⁠—something that could later be put before Kushner for his approval. Friedman, who recognized that Kushner would not endorse

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