Netanyahu to Republican Jews: My controversial 2015 speech in Congress led to Abraham Accords
Netanyahu’s 2015 speech helped bring about a rupture between the once and future Israeli prime minister and Democrats

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks via video link to guests attending the Republican Jewish Coalition annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas, Nov. 19, 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
LAS VEGAS (JTA) — Benjamin Netanyahu’s acceptance of a Republican invitation to speak to Congress in 2015 to decry the Obama administration’s Iran policy notoriously helped bring about a rupture between the once and future Israeli prime minister and Democrats.
Now Netanyahu says the decision helped cement secret ties with Arab countries that led five years later to the Abraham Accords, the 2020 agreements brokered by the Trump administration that normalized ties between Israel and four Arab countries
“We got phone calls in real time from Gulf States, who were saying we cannot believe what your prime minister is doing, and he’s facing, admittedly, a great leader, the most powerful man in the world, the American president, but if he’s willing to do that, we’d like to cement the ties a lot further, and that led to the secret meetings. between myself in 2015 and Gulf leaders,” Netanyahu said Saturday. “That led to the laying the foundations for the Abraham Accords.”
Netanyahu was speaking about the benefits of one speech seemed designed to inflame partisan tensions in the United States during another talk to a partisan U.S. audience, addressing the annual Republican Jewish Coalition conference. His speech, delivered via video from Israel, made him the first Israeli prime minister, elected or otherwise, to address a partisan Jewish group in the United States.
Netanyahu said he could not describe the contacts from the Gulf States further. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special advisor, wrote in his book that Netanyahu came close to derailing the deals multiple times.
Netanyahu relayed his story to the RJC conference after the group’s chairman, Norm Coleman, asked him why he agreed to accept the invitation to speak in Congress knowing that the decision was not coordinated with the White House.
The Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2015, John Boehner, who invited Netanyahu, broke protocol by keeping the invitation secret until the last minute from the White House and from Democrats in Congress. Netanyahu and his ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, agreed to keep the secret until Boehner issued the formal invitation.
Keeping Boehner’s secret led to a perception among Democrats that Netanyahu was playing partisan politics and was a major factor in Democratic disaffection with Netanyahu, from which he has never fully recovered. The Israeli government that ended Netanyahu’s 12-year stint in office last year, led by Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid, had as a central platform repairing ties with Democrats. Netanyahu was reelected in Nov. 1 elections and will soon form a government.
Netanyahu told the RJC it was a difficult decision. “I can assure you that wasn’t a simple decision to go to the joint session of Congress and challenge the the policy of a sitting president, whom I respected but I disagree with,” he said. He said the Iran nuclear deal President Barack Obama was negotiating endangered Israel. The deal cleared Congress despite Netanyahu’s speech.
“I made that decision because I believe that … this agreement endangered the very existence of the State of Israel,” he said.
Netanyahu said he was relieved when Obama’s successor, Trump, pulled the United States out of the deal in 2018. “I was tremendously fortunate to have finally an American administration under President Trump who agreed with this policy,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu said in the talk that he was close to President Joe Biden, saying that they had “an easy relationship, a friendship” dating back to 1982 when Netanyahu was deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington and Biden was a senator from Delaware. He also praised Obama for setting U.S. defense assistance at $3.8 billion a year.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
Culture Trump wants to honor Hannah Arendt in a ‘Garden of American Heroes.’ Is this a joke?
- 2
Fast Forward The invitation said, ‘No Jews.’ The response from campus officials, at least, was real.
- 3
Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
- 4
Fast Forward Columbia staff receive texts asking if they’re Jewish, as government hunts antisemitic harassment on campus
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Trump nominee Ed Martin, who praised a Nazi sympathizer, also compared Biden to Hitler
-
Opinion RFK Jr. and Trump are talking about an ‘autism registry’ — this sounds disturbingly familiar
-
Fast Forward Heavy police presence blocks anti-Israel protest in Brooklyn from reaching Jewish neighborhood
-
Yiddish קאָקני־ייִדיש“: אַ פּאָדקאַסט, אַ לשון און אַ שטײגער לעבן‘Cockney Yiddish’: A podcast, a language and a way of life
צװײ לאָנדאָנער היסטאָריקערינס לעבן אױף דאָס ייִדישע „איסט ענד“ אין אונדזער פֿאַנטאַזיע
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.