Israel’s President Benjamin Netanyahu, once considered to be a political ally of Donald Trump’s, has come out swinging against the former US president in a new interview that touched on Mr Trump’s meeting with disgraced rapper Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
The comments were made during an interview with journalist Piers Morgan, due to air in the coming days on the streaming service Fox Nation. Excerpts were released on Monday by Fox News.
Speaking with Morgan, Mr Netanyahu said that Mr Trump “should be rebuked and condemned” for his meeting with Fuentes, who regularly rants about the Jewish people and is known for his denial of the Holocaust.
"I thought it was horrible. I think it’s a big mistake. It’s wrong from every point of view. [Antisemitism] should not be countenanced, it should not be accepted, it should be rebuked and condemned and that’s what I do. And I don’t care where it comes from, or from whom," said Mr Netanyahu.
It was a strong statement that showed how far-reaching the effects of that fall meeting with Fuentes and West have been; Mr Trump was widely criticised by both Democrats and Republicans back in November when the dinner was first revealed.
The dinner itself arose as a result of West’s vanity campaign for president in 2024, a sequel to his bizarre bid for attention in 2020 which resulted in the onetime megastar winning only a handful of votes and the rapper mostly failing to get on the ballot.
West linked up with another disgraced right-winger, Milo Yiannopoulos, last year as he began his second “presidential campaign”. That hiring almost immediately ended in abject disaster, with Yiannopoulos engineering the Trump-West meeting at Mar-a-Lago and letting Fuentes tag along. Yiannopoulos ended his work as West’s “campaign manager” shortly thereafter.
Intentional or not, the meetup between Mr Trump and Fuentes only added to the growing criticism of the former president’s relationship with Jewish Americans and the concept of anti-Semtism. The ex-president has also made a number of statements appearing to question the loyalty of Jewish Democrats over the issue of their support for Israel, drawing the same allegations of anti-Semitism which were amplified by the November Mar-a-Lago meeting.
Mr Netanyahu, meanwhile, faces protests at home and abroad over legislation he is pursuing to weaken Israel’s Supreme Court, an issue that he revealed in the same interview with Morgan has now drawn criticism from President Joe Biden.
Speaking about a recent call with the US president, Mr Netanyahu said that Mr Biden “raised [concerns about the integrity of Israel’s democracy] and I assured him what I assured you: That Israel was, is and will remain a democracy.”
