Netanyahu regales court with story of John Kerry’s invitation to visit Afghanistan
In a colorful anecdote during his testimony, PM relates how he stood up to US pressure to cede security control of the West Bank to American-trained Palestinian forces
Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter
The testimony given by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in court on Tuesday in his criminal trial inevitably dealt with some of the more convoluted details of his dealings with business tycoons and media moguls, which are the focus of the criminal allegations against the premier.
But Netanyahu also took pains to illustrate what he sought to project as his tireless service to the State of Israel, in particular his self-professed ability to stand up to external pressure, particularly from the US, and to the media zeitgeist in Israel.
One especially colorful anecdote with which the prime minister regaled the court involved the US president, his secretary of state and a secret invitation to visit far-off Afghanistan.
After serving up a soft-ball question, defense attorney Amit Hadad asked the premier to detail the manifold matters of state that he has dealt with during his time in office. In response, Netanyahu noted that the advent of the Obama administration in the US posed a particular challenge to his policies.
He detailed how Obama had sought to embrace the Muslim world, citing what he described as the president’s “speech of appeasement” in Cairo in 2009, and that the US leader saw Iran not as a threat but as a country where there was an opening for relations.
The prime minister went on to detail what he described as Obama’s less-than-warm approach to Israel, mentioning specifically the president’s demand of “not one brick” in settlement construction as he tried to formulate a way forward in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“There was a demand for a total freeze in settlement construction. There was massive pressure,” recounted Netanyahu in court.
“There were also internal pressures [inside Israel] to encourage this from the press and other sources,” he continued, adding that he was forced to agree to a ten-month settlement freeze and that Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, came to the region “with all kinds of plans.”
Amongst those was a program for the US to train Palestinian security forces to combat terrorist organizations in order to allay Israel’s security concerns over a withdrawal of its forces from the West Bank.
“We were told we can leave the territories [the West Bank] because the Americans are training the Palestinians,” Netanyahu told the court.
“John Kerry also offered that I go on a secret visit to Afghanistan to see how the Americans are doing the same thing for local Afghan forces,” the prime minister continued.
But Netanyahu said he told Kerry that the whole scheme was a bad idea.
“I said, John, I want to tell you something — the moment you leave Afghanistan, the forces you are training will collapse under the [pressure] of the Islamists,” Netanyahu told the court.
“We cannot afford that here,” he said he told the US secretary of state.
The US spent tens of billions of dollars training Afghan forces. In mid-2021, when the US was withdrawing its troops, however, the Taliban began a major offensive and had returned to power by late summer.
Netanyahu said that his attitude toward Kerry generated “awful coverage” in the press, and that the Obama administration’s attitude to Israel had been one of the great challenges he had to deal with while serving as premier.
