"All the Jews Are Sick of You": The Book That Reveals What Happened on the Phone Call That Got Netanyahu to Sign the Gaza Deal
On Tuesday, June 23, 2026, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, two of the New York Times' most respected political journalists, published a book called Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. It is an account of the first year of Donald Trump's second term in office, researched with the kind of insider access that requires sources at the highest levels of the White House and its allied institutions to speak candidly about events they participated in or witnessed directly. Within 24 hours of its publication, one passage had travelled across every major news platform in the English-speaking world, been condemned by the Israeli government, confirmed in key elements by Trump himself, denied in others, and generated a level of debate about what an American president can say to a foreign ally — and whether saying it is evidence of rupture or of an unusually functional kind of leverage — that no other single passage in any recent political book has produced in so short a time.
The passage describes a phone call in late September 2025. The caller was Benjamin Netanyahu. The people who took the call were President Donald Trump, his son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, and his Special Envoy for Middle East affairs Steve Witkoff. The subject was the 20-point peace plan that Kushner and Witkoff had spent weeks developing in the wake of an Israeli airstrike in Doha, Qatar, that had targeted Hamas leadership — a strike that had detonated the delicate diplomatic relationships sustaining the Gaza ceasefire negotiations with the force of a grenade thrown into a carefully constructed house of cards.
Haberman and Swan's account of what Trump said on that call is as direct as the prose of any political insider account published in the past decade, and it warrants quotation not as gossip but as a primary source for one of the most consequential diplomatic sequences of the Trump second term. According to the authors, Trump began yelling at Netanyahu as soon as the call was connected. "You can't back out of this. I'm the best friend Israel ever had. Everybody hates you, and I've stood by you. This is a great deal for Israel." He told Netanyahu that the Gaza war had "gone on for too fing long" and that Netanyahu had to "fing go along with this." And then came the line that produced the book's dominant headline: "Everybody's sick of you, Bibi. All the Jews are sick of you. Even the two Jews on this call are sick of you."
The two Jews on the call were Kushner, his son-in-law, and Witkoff, his special envoy. Both are Jewish. Both had, by the time of the September call, spent months in the most exhausting and politically exposed diplomatic posture available to unofficial American negotiators — functioning as intermediaries between the Trump White House, the Israeli government, the Qatari government hosting Hamas political leadership, the Egyptian government managing border corridor access, and the broader Gulf state actors whose participation in any Gaza reconstruction framework was indispensable. Both had, according to the book, been furious at Netanyahu's government in the wake of the Doha airstrike. Kushner reportedly told an associate at the time, "I'm f**king out. The Israelis are crazy." Neither of them, when Trump told Netanyahu they too were sick of him, contradicted the characterisation.
The Doha airstrike that set the September call's context requires specific explanation because it is the immediate provocation whose consequences the book traces through the weeks that followed. On September 9, 2025, the Israeli Defence Forces conducted an airstrike targeting a gathering of Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar. The airstrike came one day after Kushner and Witkoff had met at Witkoff's Miami home with Ron Dermer, Netanyahu's top adviser and one of his most trusted diplomatic operatives, to discuss post-war governance arrangements for Gaza. "Dermer lied to us," Kushner and Witkoff told White House officials after the strikes. Qatar, which had been hosting Hamas political leadership as part of its role as a diplomatic intermediary accepted by all parties, reacted to being the site of an Israeli military strike with the outrage that any host nation would reserve for a military action on its territory by a third party. The Qataris initially decided they no longer wanted to help Israel. Kushner felt the same. His reported "I'm f**king out" represents the nadir of American confidence in the Israeli government's diplomatic reliability at that moment.
What Kushner did instead of withdrawing was recognise that the Doha strike, catastrophic as it was for the existing negotiating architecture, had also created an opening. Netanyahu had embarrassed Qatar. Qatar had leverage over Hamas. If Qatar could be persuaded to convert its anger at Israel into leverage in the negotiations rather than withdrawal from them, the momentum toward a deal could actually increase rather than collapse. Kushner's subsequent meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York with Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar's prime minister, presented him with two options: use Qatar's anger to further isolate Israel, which would be "understandable," or use the moment as leverage to press Hamas toward an agreement. Qatar chose the latter. Kushner drafted what became Trump's 20-point peace plan in the weeks that followed.
By late September, the plan was ready. The mechanism for getting Netanyahu to accept it was the phone call. Kushner and Witkoff expected, based on Netanyahu's prior behaviour during the negotiations, that he would find ways to delay, to add conditions, to express concerns that functioned as procedural exits from a commitment he was reluctant to make. They stayed on the phone expecting to manage that scenario. What they got instead was Trump making the management unnecessary by the force of the tirade itself.
Netanyahu's response to Trump's verbal assault on the call, as described by the book, was that of a man caught off guard by its intensity. "Who gave you the wrong impression I was calling to get out of the deal?" he reportedly asked. "I don't know why you're yelling at me," he complained, sounding, in Haberman and Swan's account, injured. The response is politically and psychologically interesting: Netanyahu, a leader who has spent decades managing the most adversarial political environment in any democracy and who has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to absorb criticism without conceding the substantive point, responded to Trump's yelling not with counter-argument or threat but with a protestation of innocence. He did not defend his reluctance to commit. He denied that any reluctance existed. Whether that reflects genuine surprise at the temperature of Trump's displeasure, or a tactical decision to present himself as the aggrieved party, is not something the book's sourcing can resolve.
Netanyahu agreed to the deal. He and Trump announced it together at a joint press conference two days later, presenting the kind of aligned public front that both men's domestic political situations required — Trump able to claim a diplomatic victory, Netanyahu able to claim that American backing remained solid. Trump said publicly that Netanyahu would have his full backing to continue the war if Hamas did not agree to the deal. On October 8, just over a week after the press conference, the deal was finalised. The 20 living hostages who remained in Gaza were released soon after.
In the months between that October 2025 deal and June 2026, the Trump-Netanyahu relationship accumulated additional chapters of friction and interdependence that the book describes and that had already been partially reported. The June 2026 Iran war — launched on February 28 when the US and Israel conducted coordinated strikes on Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure — brought the two countries into the most direct military alignment of their relationship since the 1991 Gulf War. And yet within weeks of that alliance's most dramatic operational expression, the relationship was fraying again over Lebanon. On June 2, 2026, Axios reported, citing two US officials and a third source briefed on the call, that Trump had called Netanyahu in an expletive-laden tirade over Israeli escalations in Lebanon that were threatening to derail the Iran peace process that Trump had by that point committed his diplomatic capital to completing. "You're f****** crazy," Trump reportedly told Netanyahu. "You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this." Another source told Axios that Trump was "pissed" and at one point yelled "What the f-ck are you doing?"
Trump confirmed the substance of those reports when asked by conservative podcaster Miranda Devine on her programme Pod Force One. "I did," he said when asked whether he had called Netanyahu crazy. "I wouldn't say angry. I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon." He added: "Bibi we got to stop this. We got to stop it."
The book's release six weeks after the Lebanon call adds the September 2025 Gaza episode to a now-established pattern of Trump-Netanyahu communications that is, in its texture and its vocabulary, unlike any prior American-Israeli diplomatic relationship on record. Previous American presidents have been frustrated with Netanyahu. George W. Bush was frustrated with his settlement expansion. Barack Obama's relationship with Netanyahu was one of the most thoroughly documented cases of mutual antipathy between a US president and an Israeli prime minister in the alliance's history. But the mode of expressing that frustration is categorically different between those presidents and Trump. Obama conveyed his displeasure through policy leverage, diplomatic distancing, and the kind of institutional friction that Washington and Jerusalem both understood as the language of alliance management. Trump conveys his displeasure by yelling on a phone call that the man on the other end of the line should know that "all the Jews are sick of you."
The reaction to the book's revelations has divided along predictable lines while also generating some less predictable assessments. The Israeli government, through its spokesman David Mencer, said it had no comment on books and foreign media reports. Netanyahu's Likud party allies and their American supporters emphasised the counter-narrative visible in the same account: Netanyahu did agree to the deal, Trump did maintain his commitment to Israel's security, and the overall US-Israel relationship under Trump has been more militarily supportive — the Iran war being the most dramatic expression — than under any predecessor. Some analysts who cover the relationship noted that what the September call described is, at one level, a case study in effective diplomatic coercion: Trump wanted Netanyahu to sign, Netanyahu was reluctant to sign, Trump yelled at him using every available instrument of moral and political pressure, and Netanyahu signed. The outcome, on that interpretation, is not evidence of a relationship in crisis. It is evidence of a president who was willing to use tactics that conventional diplomatic protocol forbids but that proved effective.
The more complex reading — and the one that the book's title, Regime Change, gestures toward in its largest ambition — is that what the September call illustrates is not just a diplomatic method but a theory of presidential power in which the ordinary constraints of institutional relationship management, diplomatic protocol, and the symbolic dignity of sovereign-to-sovereign communication are treated as obstacles to effectiveness rather than as the architecture within which effectiveness must be demonstrated. "All the Jews are sick of you" is not a sentence that any prior American president would have said to any prior Israeli prime minister. It is not a sentence that the State Department's protocol guidance anticipates as a tool of allied relations. Whether it worked — whether the deal it preceded was worth the means by which it was secured — is a question whose answer depends partly on what one thinks the deal was worth, and that answer is itself contested. The twenty living hostages who were released when the deal was finalised had families whose verdict on the question is not complicated at all.
Netanyahu apologised to Trump for the Doha airstrike 18 days after it occurred, according to the book. The apology came in a context where he had already agreed to the deal, agreed to announce it publicly with Trump, and agreed to let the deal proceed toward its finalisation in October. The apology for Doha — for the strike that Kushner said had made Dermer a liar, that had enraged Qatar, that had nearly collapsed the entire negotiating architecture — came after the consequences of the strike had been managed by Kushner's conversion of its damage into leverage. Netanyahu apologised for the thing that had, in the end, helped produce the outcome. The diplomatic dynamics of that sequence are, like most things in the Gaza negotiations, considerably more complicated than any headline can contain.
The book is on sale now. The call happened nine months ago. The hostages are home. The Iran war and its ceasefire framework have fundamentally altered the regional landscape on which the Gaza deal and the Lebanon confrontations were playing out. And the relationship between the two men — the one who yells and the one who says "I don't know why you're yelling at me" and then signs — is, by all available evidence, still operative.
Sources
- Yahoo News — Trump Chided Israel's Netanyahu That 'All the Jews Are Sick of You': New Book — https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-chided-israel-netanyahu-jews-180008032.html
- Jewish Insider — Trump Told Netanyahu 'All the Jews Are Sick of You,' Days Before Gaza Deal, New Book Reveals — https://jewishinsider.com/2026/06/trump-netanyahu-book-maggie-haberman-jonathan-swan/
- Haaretz — 'The Jews Are Sick of You': Trump Berated Netanyahu During Gaza Deal Talks, New Book Says — https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-06-24/ty-article/trump-berated-netanyahu-during-gaza-deal-talks-new-book-says/0000019e-f639-d58e-afbf-f67b58420000
- The Jewish Chronicle — 'All the Jews Are Sick of You': Details of Explosive Trump-Netanyahu Call Revealed — https://www.thejc.com/news/israel/jews-sick-of-you-trump-netanyahu-call-g6j08ttk
- Mediaite — New Explosive Book Details Trump Telling Netanyahu: 'The Jews Are Sick of You' — https://www.mediaite.com/politics/new-explosive-book-details-trump-telling-netanyahu-the-jews-are-sick-of-you/
- Free Republic — Trump's Astounding Remark to Netanyahu During Expletive-Laden Shouting Match Over Hamas Peace Deal — https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4385329/posts
- Time Magazine — Trump Says It's Time 'One Way or Another' for Iran to Make a Deal and Insists Talks Have Been Ongoing — https://time.com/article/2026/06/02/trump-netanyahu-crazy-lebanon-hezbollah-ceasefire-iran-us-peace-deal/
- NPR — Trump Confirms Calling Netanyahu 'Crazy,' Says They Still Get Along — https://www.npr.org/2026/06/03/g-s1-125631/trump-confirms-calling-netanyahu-crazy-says-they-still-get-along/
- Israel Political News — 'The Jews Are Sick of You': Trump Berated Netanyahu During Gaza Deal Talks — https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-06-24/ty-article/trump-berated-netanyahu-during-gaza-deal-talks-new-book-says/0000019e-f639-d58e-afbf-f67b58420000