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Iran, Abraham Accords and Bibi’s trial: What Trump said in his historic Knesset speech
As the last of the Israeli hostages were released from Gaza, President Donald Trump addressed the country’s parliament — and was given a hero’s welcome.
Trump’s speech to the Knesset on Monday offered effusive praise for the state of Israel, warm — but not unguarded — praise for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and an outline for a vision of a future in which Israel is a full partner of every other nation in the region. And in typical Trump fashion, it was delivered with a mixture of bravado and unpredictable asides, some of which cut at the heart of several tensions in the Middle East.
Here are the big takeaways from Trump’s speech to the Knesset.
Thousands gather at Hostage Square to celebrate the return of the hostages, October 13, 2025. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
‘You’ve won’
With the hostages released, Trump made clear that, in his view, the era of Israeli military action in Gaza is over.
“Israel, with our help, has won all that they can by force of arms,” he said. “You’ve won. I mean, you’ve won. Now it’s time to translate these victories against terrorists on the battlefield into the ultimate prize of peace and prosperity for the entire Middle East.”
Speaking of the hostages later, the president reflected on meeting with their families and the spirit he saw igniting them.
“Over the past two years, I’ve met many of the families of the Israelis taken hostage and those that were taken hostage, unbelievable. I’ve looked into their eyes. I’ve seen the worst nightmares of their suffering, but I’ve also seen something else, the beautiful love of the people,” he said. “It’s that love that’s defeated the enemies of civilization, built this incredible country and this unbelievable economy and forged one of the great democracies of the world.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presents U.S. President Donald Trump with a mezuzah in the shape of a B-2 bomber at the White House, July 7, 2025. (Screenshot from GPO footage)
‘You could be a little bit nicer, Bibi’
Amid reports that Trump had been frustrated by Netanyahu’s pace in negotiations to end the war in Gaza, the president had broadcast total alignment with Jerusalem. He had Netanyahu by his side at the White House last week when he announced that Israel had agreed to a ceasefire proposal that would be presented to Hamas, which later signed on. He invited Netanyahu into his motorcade on his way from Ben Gurion airport to the parliament building on Monday.
And he began his speech by praising Netanyahu — but not as effusively as he might have.
“I want to express my gratitude to a man of exceptional courage and patriotism whose partnership did so much to make this momentous day possible. You know what I’m talking about. There’s only one prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,” Trump said. “He is not easy. I want to tell you he’s not the easiest guy to deal with, but that’s what makes him great.”
Later, as he praised opposition leader Yair Lapid as a “very nice guy,” Trump reacted to the reaction he perceived in Netanyahu and offered a rebuke.
“Now you can be a little bit nicer, Bibi, because you’re not at war anymore, Bibi, you did it.”
Bibi’s trial
Even while alluding to his frustrations with Netanyahu, Trump still took a moment to stump for him in the prime minister’s still-ongoing trial for political corruption. Turning to Israeli President Isaac Herzog at one point, Trump made a highly unusual show of intervening in the case, calling on him to use his pardon powers to settle the matter.
“Hey, I have an idea. Mr. President, why don’t you give him a pardon?” Trump said, to hoots and applause. “Give him the pardon. Come on.”
As chants of “Bibi!” could be heard, Trump continued, “It’s not in the speech, as you probably know, but I happen to like this gentleman right over here. And it just seems to make so much sense. You know, whether we like it or not, this has been one of the greatest wartime presidents.”
Trump then made specific reference to some of the bribery charges against Netanyahu, one of the cases that a large movement of Israeli protesters — including many hostage families — had cited as a reason why the prime minister should cede power.
“And cigars and champagne, who the hell cares about that?”
The U.S.-Israel relationship
As the war dragged on, segments of both the left and right in American politics have begun to question U.S. support for Israel. Trump vocally reaffirmed the bond.
“Israel will always remain a vital ally of the United States of America,” he said. “Israelis share our values, field one of the world’s most powerful militaries. You really do.” He added, “I’m proud to be the best friend that Israel has ever had.”
He also referenced the U.S. citizens who were abducted in Gaza in what he noted was “the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust,” painting American and Israeli grief over Oct. 7 as one and the same.
“The United States of America grieved alongside you, and we mourn for our own citizens who were so viciously taken that day,” he said. “And to all the families whose lives were forever changed by the atrocities of that day, and all of the people of Israel, please know that America joins you in those two everlasting vows: Never forget, and never again.”
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sign the Abraham Accords at a White House ceremony, Sept. 15, 2020. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
What’s next for the ‘Avraham Accords’
At various points during his speech, Trump turned to his first administration’s signature foreign-policy accomplishment: the normalization agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab states, known as the Abraham Accords. On Monday he pronounced it the Hebrew way, “Avraham.”
“I like calling it the Avraham Accords. Avraham. It’s so cool. It’s so much nicer, you know? The Abraham versus the Avraham,” he said.
In the wake of what he said would be a concentrated rebuilding effort in Gaza, Trump also urged Israel and several Arab and Muslim nations to add to these accords. “Now we’re going to forge a future that is worthy of our heritage. We’re going to build a legacy that all the people of this region can be proud of,” he said.
“So instead of building fortresses to keep enemies at bay, the nations of this region should be building infrastructure to weave your commerce closer together, because you’ve got to compete with a big world out there in commerce. Now it’s a different kind of competition. Instead of making weapons and missiles, the wealth of this region should flow to schools and medicine, industry. And frankly, the new hot thing, artificial intelligence.”
Toward the end of his speech, Trump provided a list of countries and their capitals he said he would like to see forge stronger relations with Israel and each other. Some of them already have diplomatic ties to the country.
“New bonds of friendship, cooperation and commerce will join Tel Aviv to Dubai, Haifa to Beirut, Jerusalem to Damascus, and from Israel to Egypt, from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, from India to Pakistan, from Indonesia to Iraq, from Syria to Bahrain, Turkey to Jordan, the United Arab Emirates to Oman and Armenia to Azerbaijan,” he said.
How such an ambitious realignment would play on the larger diplomatic stage, as many countries remain furious at Israel for its handling of the Gaza war, remains to be seen. The president of Indonesia, one Muslim-majority nation long in discussions to join the accords, scuttled a planned historic visit to Israel Monday over reported concerns of pushback at home, though he attended the day’s summit between Israel and Hamas held in Egypt.
Iranian newly-elected President Masoud Pezeshkian, right, meets Head of the Palestinian Hamas group’s political bureau Ismail Haniyeh, left in Tehran, Iran on July 30, 2024. (Iranian Presidency / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
‘Make a deal’ with Iran
Amid talks of normalization, Trump paid special attention to the elephant in the room by urging the Knesset to use their momentum to “make a deal” with Iran, which both the United States and Israel had bombed at various times during the Israel-Gaza war.
“And even to Iran, whose regime has inflicted so much death on the Middle East, the hand of friendship and cooperation is open,” he said. I’m telling you, they want to make a deal.”
“Neither the United States nor Israel bear the people of Iran any hostility,” Trump continued. “We merely want to live in peace. We don’t want any looming threats over our heads.”
The moment stood out, as both the United States and Israel have had fraught relationships with Iran for nearly half a century. Netanyahu spoke to Congress in an effort to unravel a nuclear deal with Iran during the Obama administration; that deal wound up going through, only to be scuttled by Trump in his first term in office. Trump himself acknowledged this with some dark humor.
“As president I terminated the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and ultimately I terminated Iran’s nuclear program with things called B-2 bombers,” he said. Yet, Trump pressed on, now a new deal should be reached, one predicated on Israel’s strengths.
He added, “A lot of Iranians in the United States are good people, smart, hardworking people. They don’t want to see what’s happened to their country. The story of fierce Israeli resolve and triumph since Oct. 7 should be proof to the entire world that those who seek to destroy this nation are doomed to bitter failure. The State of Israel is strong and it will live and thrive forever.”
Bibi’s demand for weapons
Trump was open about one aspect of U.S. support for Israel that had received particular scrutiny and protest during the war: the transfer of weapons for Israel to use in Gaza.
“We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly,” he said. Deeming himself “all about stopping wars,” Trump said he “hated” some of the weapons the United States makes “because the level of power is so enormous, so dangerous, so bad.”
Yet, Trump said, the United States gave Israel all the weapons it needed. He even ribbed Netanyahu’s desire for military supplies.
“I mean, Bibi would call me so many times: ‘Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?’ Some of them I never heard of, Bibi. And I made them,” Trump said. “But you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously use them very well, but so many that Israel became strong and powerful, which ultimately led to peace. That’s what led to peace.”
Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson is recognized during a special plenum session in honor of U.S. President Donald Trump at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, on October 13, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Miriam Adelson
Trump gave a special shout-out to one of his wealthiest and most stalwart pro-Israel donors in the United States, Miriam Adelson — widow to casino magnate Sheldon. While praising her, he also suggested she “loves” Israel more than the United States — flirting with the kind of “dual loyalty” trope that mainstream Jewish organizations have tended to condemn in the past.
The Adelsons, he said with an unusual degree of candor for a president referencing a top financial backer, had been a large influence on his Israel policy.
“I kept my promise and officially recognized the capital of Israel and moved the American embassy to Jerusalem,” Trump said, to applause. “Isn’t that right, Miriam?” He then urged Adelson to “stand up” for recognition.
During his first term, Trump told the Knesset, “Miriam and Sheldon, they would come into the office… I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else. Look at her sitting there so innocently. She’s got $60 billion in the bank… But she loves Israel. And they would come in, and her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved them.”
Trump described his relationship with the Adelsons as one where they would needle him to drop by the White House. “He’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you?’ I’d say, ‘Sheldon, I’m the president of the United States. It doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in,” the president said. “But they were very responsible for so much.”
“I’m going to get in trouble for this,” Trump said. “But I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean Israel.”
People walk with bags of humanitarian aid they received at a distribution centre run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), as they cross the so-called “Netzarim corridor” in the central Gaza Strip, on August 22, 2025. The United Nations officially declared a famine in Gaza on August 22, the first time it has done so in the Middle East, with experts warning 500,000 people face “catastrophic” hunger. UN agencies have long been warning of the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, particularly as Israel steps up its offensive against Hamas. (Eyad Baba / AFP)
The word on Gaza, and ‘the Board of Peace’
When Trump’s remarks touched on what should come next for Gaza, he painted his vision as one of international cooperation and prosperity, should the Palestinians want it.
Says several “very wealthy” Arab and Muslim nations have committed “to support a safe gilding of Gaza and beyond,” Trump added, “The total focus of Gazans must be on restoring the fundamentals of stability, safety, dignity and economic development so they can finally have the better life that their children really do deserve after all these decades of horror. I intend to be a partner in this effort.”
The “day after” plan for Gaza was one of the major sticking points of the negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the latter of which has not committed to relinquishing control of the territory despite Trump and Israel’s demands. Some members of Israel’s far-right governing coalition, meanwhile, have urged for the expulsion of all Palestinians and for Israel to control or resettle the strip.
In the past, Trump has promoted the idea of the United States, or his personal business interests, taking Gaza for itself and turning it into a resort. His tone was more measured in the Knesset, saying his plan for rebuilding Gaza involved a “board of peace” that would be “unbelievably popular.”
“Is that a beautiful name? Like a board, of peace,” he said. “The only bad thing, from my standpoint: every single nation involved has asked me to be the chair. And I’ll tell you, I’m very busy. I didn’t count on that.”
Trump framed Gaza’s future as one up to Palestinians.
“The choice for Palestinians could not be more clear,” he said. “This is their chance to turn forever from the path of terror and violence, it’s been extreme, to exile the wicked forces of hate that are in their midst. And I think that’s going to happen.”
Jared and Ivanka
How much does Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, love Israel? “He loves it so much that my daughter converted,” the president said.
Trump continued to riff on Ivanka’s conversion for a while. “I didn’t know this was going to happen,” he said. “And she is so happy, and they are so happy, at least, I think they’re happy. If they’re not, we have a big story, right?”
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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