What Zelensky Can Learn from Netanyahu

When Bibi collided with Obama in 2011, Rahm Emanuel pounded my chest and barked: ‘Your [expletive] prime minister cannot come into the [expletive] White House and [expletive] lecture the president!’

President Barack Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo)

On May 20, 2011, inside the Oval Office and before the cameras, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lectured President Barack Obama. During a period of almost daily crises in U.S.-Israel relations, the incident was the closest the two countries came to a total breakdown.

I was then Israel’s ambassador to the United States and had a ringside seat at the clash. It left a deep impression on me, underscoring the importance of interpersonal relationships in the shaping of foreign policy. It taught me the degree to which the leader of a small and dependent state can publicly challenge the head of a patron superpower. And it showed me the crucial need to correctly read the geopolitical map—to know what “cards” a country like Israel does and does not hold.

Those lessons proved especially applicable last week in the wake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Oval Office meltdown with President Trump and Vice President Vance. America’s allies are still reeling from it and struggling to understand their place in this new Trumpian world. They, together with most of the media, have faulted Trump and Vance for entrapping and humiliating Zelensky and forcing him to lose his composure. But by repeatedly interrupting and finally lecturing his hosts, the feisty Ukrainian leader supplied a textbook example of how not to handle a foreign leader of formidable pride and breakaway policies—a leader on whom, moreover, the fate of Ukraine critically depends.

To understand how he might get out of this mess, it’s worth going back to the Netanyahu-Obama collision, which took place shortly before AIPAC’s 2011 Policy Conference, a gathering of some 15,000 American supporters of Israel whom Netanyahu was scheduled to address. Before that, he would meet with the president in the White House, presumably to discuss the Arab Spring revolts then convulsing the Middle East.

But as the prime minister was flying to Washington, Obama totally upended America’s decades-old policy of permitting Israelis and Palestinians to determine their own future borders. In a State Department speech, the president yielded to what had long been the Palestinians’ demand, declaring that, “The borders between Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines.”

Landing and learning of what he regarded as Obama’s betrayal, Bibi was livid. Convening with him at the Blair House, several advisers and I literally had to hold him down and soften the public rebuke he intended to deliver to Obama. Rather than direct his criticism at the president, we urged him, aim it at the Palestinians.

Begrudgingly, the prime minister accepted our advice. Yet even the watered-down version of his words managed to sound enraged. “It’s not going to happen,” he insisted, referring to any possible return to the 1967 lines. Punching his knee with each syllable, he harangued the president, “It’s time to tell the Palestinians forthrightly it’s not going to happen.”

Obama, seething, silently nodded, but left it up to his lieutenants to respond. “Is your boss in the habit of lecturing his host in his home?” White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley accosted Bibi’s senior aide Ron Dermer right there in the Oval Office. Phoning me back at Blair House, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon blasted what he called, “the most disrespectful behavior ever displayed in the White House.” Soon-to-be Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whom I encountered at a social event that evening, pounded my chest with the stump of a finger he’d lost in a teenage accident and barked, “Your [expletive] prime minister cannot come into the [expletive] White House and [expletive] lecture the president!”

“Crisis!” screamed from every headline.

Though rattled by this reaction, Bibi never backed down. Instead, Obama did.

Why? Perhaps realizing that he’d gone too far in altering the diplomatic status quo, the president backtracked. “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps,” he told the AIPAC Policy Conference two days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves—Israelis and Palestinians—will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.”

Then again, it’s possible to see Obama’s real payback as his policy: in 2015, four years after the collision in the Oval Office, when he signed the Iranian nuclear deal; or just before the end of his second term, when Obama failed to block the passage of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. No amount of lecturing on the part of Israeli leadership could undo the damage of these decisions.

Fourteen years have passed since the sensational Bibi-Obama showdown. Few remember it today. And yet, just last week, in the same location, another head of an embattled state tried to lecture a popular and headstrong president. The results, though, were radically different.

Zelensky complained about the administration’s policy toward Putin only to have Trump and Vice President Vance dress him down for showing ingratitude to the United States and weakness—“you hold no cards”—to the Russians. Later, rather than retreat, Trump insisted that Zelensky apologize publicly. The Ukrainian president has been left to retweet supportive statements from European leaders and Justin Trudeau. That’s not good news for Ukraine.

Times have changed since 2011, of course, and so have the personalities. Bibi is not Zelensky and Obama is patently not Trump.

Yet, like Bibi then, Zelensky is today dealing with an administration that views his cause as belonging to “the other side.” And the latest Oval Office lecture reminds me of the lessons I learned from the last one—and which Zelensky would do well to heed.

First, know who you’re addressing. For all his popularity, Obama—who sought a reset with Putin the year after he invaded Georgia—never struck Netanyahu as a particularly strong individual. As with Biden later, Obama could say “don’t”—most memorably to Syria regarding its use of poison gas—without imposing consequences once the red line was crossed. Why would America’s allies fear to tread where its enemies walked with impunity? By contrast, when Trump says “don’t,” neither Israel nor Ukraine should dare to try.

For Zelensky, this lesson will prove especially difficult. After all, he was the president who addressed the Knesset in 2022 and alienated all Israelis by comparing Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine to the Holocaust and claiming that Ukrainians defended Jews in World War II. Zelensky similarly antagonized Republicans by campaigning for the Democrats last summer in Pennsylvania. Little wonder that, in addition to its strategic disagreements with him, the White House has scant affection for Zelensky. As a former actor, you’d imagine he’d be better at reading his audience.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are not leaders to be interrupted and told what they should and should not be feeling. President Trump is not a leader to be lectured, especially not in front of the cameras.

Secondly, Zelensky must know his cards. Trump was right: The Ukrainians hold virtually none. They’re low on ammo, steadily losing turf to the Russians, and increasingly hemorrhaging conscripts. Ukrainian troops reportedly have to be forced to deploy to the front. Unlike Bibi who, in 2011, had little to lose by confronting Obama, Zelensky stands to lose all.

Finally and most fundamentally, Zelensky, no less than Netanyahu, must understand the geopolitical landscape on which they act. Today it means grappling with the fact that, like it or not, a new global order is emerging. The mainstays of the old one—NATO, the transatlantic alliance, even the notion of the West as we have traditionally understood it—are no longer certainties. In their place a new world is coming into being—one where the world is divided into spheres of influence and driven far less by Cold War–era idealism than by twenty-first century self-interest. The key powers—America, Russia, China—can negotiate deals that preserve their spheres and advance their interests.

In this new order, a deal in which Ukraine consigns half of its mineral wealth to the United States which, in turn, confines Russia’s conquests to the Crimea and Donbas, makes perfect sense. So, too, does Trump’s decision, announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday, to grant Israel an additional $4 billion in military aid. In Trump’s view, Israel falls squarely within America’s sphere—and the aid is a good investment for America itself.

Netanyahu seems to have rapidly internalized all these lessons. With Trump in the Oval Office, he’ll never hazard lectures. He will, rather, display the deference owed to a singularly supportive president and that Israel’s critical interests require.

As such, Netanyahu supplies a model for the leaders of smaller states who must navigate this treacherous new world. They must consistently convince the president that their country serves America’s best interest. They must be realistic about the cards they hold and their place in the evolving geopolitical landscape. And they must accurately measure the man who now sits in the Oval Office. In his presence, they must know when to say thank you, and when, simply, to shut up.

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This article originally appeared in The Free Press on March 2, 2025.