Benjamin Netanyahu has been the subject of photo opportunities with various politicians, including Cory Booker. [1]
Kiriakou’s 1989 psychological profile; ‘please bomb Iran’
During his 1989 CIA application interviews, John Kiriakou was given a folder of clippings on Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s UN ambassador, and asked to write a one-page psychological analysis; he concluded Netanyahu would probably become prime minister one day — and he did.[2][3][4] Kiriakou calls him “brilliant” and “dangerous,” a player who runs rings around every other Israeli figure, and says that from the Reagan era every Israeli prime minister asked American presidents to bomb Iran.[5][6]
The Milchan visa and October 7 as a political gift (SaltCube)
John Kiriakou says Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied Secretary of State John Kerry three times to restore the revoked U.S. visa of Israeli spy Arnon Milchan — one of Netanyahu’s corruption charges — and that FBI documents place Netanyahu personally in the smuggling of U.S. nuclear secrets.[7][8] He calls Netanyahu arguably the most unpopular yet longest-serving figure in Israeli history, for whom the October 7 attack was a “God-sent gift” that keeps him in power and out of prison.[9][10]
Kiriakou has given the same assessment elsewhere with a specific number: as of a mid-2024 interview, Netanyahu was, he said, the most unpopular major political figure in Israel, with a 22% approval rating even before October 7, and faced fraud, criminal, and corruption charges predating the attack.[11] He has said he believes the Israeli government under Netanyahu was hoping for an attack like October 7, because it would provide the perceived legal authority to destroy the whole of Gaza, not merely Hamas.[12] Kiriakou has gone on to characterize the resulting Israeli campaign as genocide — a term, he says, he does not use lightly — while affirming that Israel has a right to exist.[13]
During a Netanyahu visit to Washington, Rome ceasefire talks between Israel, Hamas, the United States, Egypt, and Qatar broke up after the Egyptian delegation complained the Israeli delegation had no authority to agree to anything.[14] Kiriakou says National Security Council spokesman John Kirby stated that Netanyahu “didn’t even pretend to support a ceasefire” during that visit.[15]
Kiriakou also traces a longer pattern of dispossession to Netanyahu’s tenure: across his seven terms as prime minister, he says, Israel has seized more Palestinian land, destroyed more farms, burned more olive trees, and confiscated more water sources every year.[16] Kiriakou says pro-settlement groups have gone as far as holding “real estate seminars” at synagogues in New York, New Jersey, and California, advertising the sale of Palestinian land in Gaza that the Israeli government plans to redevelop as settlements — citing Jared Kushner’s comments about Gaza “beachfront property” as evidence the redevelopment was the plan rather than an accident.[17]
‘He killed the two-state solution’ (The Inquiry)
John Kiriakou says Benjamin Netanyahu “very proudly said that he killed the two-state solution,” leaving no chance of a real peace while Israel bombs Palestinian negotiating teams abroad. He adds that Trump, Biden, Obama and Bush all simply accept that Netanyahu “is going to run American foreign policy.”[18][19]
Repeated requests to bomb Iran
Kiriakou says Netanyahu has repeatedly begged the United States to attack Iran going back to the George W. Bush administration, saying the U.S. came very close to attacking Iran in the final weeks of that administration and that Netanyahu “has dedicated his life to dragging the United States into a war with Iran.”[20][21] He says every single time Netanyahu came to Washington going back to the early 1990s — including when he was Israel’s ambassador to the UN, before he was ever prime minister — he urged whichever president was in office to bomb Iran, and that every president said no until Trump agreed.[22][23][24] He has since said the U.S. ultimately went to war with Iran because of Israel: Iran, in his assessment, posed no threat to the United States, and Israel had been pushing for the U.S. to bomb it since the 1980s, with every Israeli prime minister making the same request regardless of who was U.S. president.[25] He notes that two National Intelligence Estimates, representing all 18 members of the U.S. intelligence community, found Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program, and that Ayatollah Khamenei had issued a 2003 fatwa declaring nuclear weapons a sin.[26] Kiriakou has acknowledged he was wrong to have told Joe Rogan in October 2025 that he thought Trump would make peace with Iran in pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize; he says Trump has since stated publicly that he no longer cares about peace since he did not receive the prize.[27] Kiriakou says Netanyahu convinced Trump that the Iranian government was a “house of cards” that would collapse as soon as hostilities began, and that — in a break from past practice — the U.S. intelligence community did not even attempt to manufacture public consent for the resulting war.[28] He has separately noted that CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba about a week before one such interview, which Kiriakou interprets not as back-channel diplomacy but as a warning of coming regime-change action, comparing it to sending the CIA director to warn Muammar Gaddafi before Libya’s overthrow.[29]
Kiriakou also recounts that Barack Obama recently stated Netanyahu asked him to bomb Iran and threatened that if the U.S. refused, Israel would use nuclear weapons — a bluff Obama called by telling him to go ahead, after which Netanyahu backed down.[30] Kiriakou says he believes a peaceful transition of power in Iran serves U.S. interests, while chaos and death serve Israel’s interests, and that he believes Netanyahu is hoping for an Iranian civil war — modeled, in his view, on what Israel achieved in Libya: chaos, civil war, and as many Iranian deaths as possible.[31][32] He describes this chaos-focused strategy as a short-term view: Israel believes that keeping the region in a state of chaos prevents its neighbors from developing nuclear weapons, temporarily protecting Israel, rather than pursuing lasting security.[33] During the strikes on Iran, Kiriakou reported that Netanyahu characteristically left the country — as he says Netanyahu always does whenever Israel plans a bombing campaign — with most reports placing him in Germany, and one report suggesting Cyprus.[34]