A furious Donald Trump has realised Benjamin Netanyahu’s relentless wars, brutal military campaign, and decades of fearmongering over Iran have left Israel in danger of being despised across much of the world.
Nobody serious calls Benjamin Netanyahu a statesman anymore. The word Donald Trump apparently used — privately, in a furious phone call that threatens to strip away every last pretence of the special relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv — is considerably more accurate. Unhinged. Dangerous. Out of control.
Trump reportedly told the Israeli prime minister he was 'f****** crazy' as he demanded he stand down planned strikes on Lebanon. He accused Netanyahu of being ungrateful, of facing prison without American protection, of dragging both Israel and the US into a hatred they would struggle to crawl out from. For once in his life, he was not wrong.
The horrors of October 7 were real and indefensible. The slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas was barbaric, and those responsible deserved to be hunted down and brought to justice. But Netanyahu has used that trauma not simply to defend Israel, but to unleash a campaign of destruction whose scale and brutality have repulsed huge parts of the world and left many asking where self-defence ended and vengeance began.
The world is not turning against Jewish people. Let that be absolutely clear. Antisemitism is a poison, and those who spread it deserve nothing but contempt and, if suitable, prosecution. But there is a profound and growing revulsion aimed squarely at Netanyahu's Israel — its government, its military machine, its blood-soaked campaign. It is not prejudice. It is judgment. And it is entirely deserved.
You want to understand just how far Israel has fallen? Look at Itamar Ben Gvir. Last month, the national security minister posted a video of himself taunting rows of bound and kneeling activists seized from a Gaza-bound flotilla delivering much-needed aid. He sneered at them. He treated bound civilians like props in his own sick theatre. Condemnation came from foreign governments, human rights organisations and the Knesset opposition. But the detail that cuts deepest is this — it also came from his own right-wing allies in government, who distanced themselves from the spectacle and criticised the damage he had done to Israel's already shattered reputation. When your own side finds you repulsive, you have gone somewhere very dark indeed.
The IDF has flattened entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. International agencies have issued desperate warnings about famine, the deliberate targeting of hospitals, summary executions and widespread torture. War crimes accusations have come not from fringe voices but from the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. Netanyahu's response has been to dismiss it all as antisemitism, wrap himself tighter in the flag of Israel, and send in more troops.
Now consider what his four-decade story has actually cost the world. Since 1992, Netanyahu has been telling anyone who would listen that Iran was on the verge of a nuclear bomb. Weeks away, he said then. Fast forward to 2026, and the message has remained unchanged — the horizon forever approaching, but the deadline forever reset. But now, in Trump, the boy who cried wolf finally got his war. And the world is paying a catastrophic price.
The conflict has triggered the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Oil prices are more than 50 per cent higher than at the start of the year. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has echoed the 1970s energy crisis — supply shortages, soaring inflation and the real threat of stagflation and recession. Families across Britain are paying more to heat their homes, fill their cars and feed their children. This is the direct consequence of a war that was neither necessary, nor properly thought through, nor honestly sold.
And then there are politicians like Lindsey Graham. If Netanyahu is the architect of this catastrophe, the Republican is one of the fixers who helped drag America into it. Reports reveal the South Carolina senator travelled to Israel multiple times, met with Mossad intelligence and personally coached Netanyahu on how to lobby Trump into military action. Netanyahu then presented the president with intelligence that persuaded Trump to act. Graham has since declared, without a flicker of shame, that the war — costing around £650 million a day — is the best money ever spent. Tell that to the unemployed or pensioner in America, choosing between heating and eating.
Trump was vain enough to fall for it. He became the only American president reckless enough to follow Netanyahu's demands all the way to Middle East catastrophe. Now he is on the phone, calling him crazy. The realisation has arrived, as it always does with Trump, about three months too late.
Netanyahu will be in the dock of history long after he leaves office. The world — not just the Arab world, but Europe, Latin America and growing parts of America itself — has grown weary of watching a government hide its brutality behind the memory of the Holocaust. Israel deserves better leaders. The Palestinian people deserve to survive. And the rest of us deserve a world in which one nation's fanatical prime minister, who spent 35 years talking about a bomb that never came, can no longer drag the entire planet towards the abyss.
