Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked on the Patrick Bet-David podcast on Tuesday if Hamas's October 7 massacre would have happened under a Trump presidency, to which the Israeli leader responded, "probably not."
He added that if US President Donald Trump had been in the White House, he thinks "Iran would have been more careful. It's hard to tell with these maniacs. Would Iran have completely controlled their proxy? Maybe."
Netanyahu also described how former US president Joe Biden and his administration threatened to impose an arms embargo on Israel, and warned him not to enter Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu: 'Israel will fight with its fingernails if it has to'
Netanyahu noted to Bet-David that he informed, despite the possibility of an arms embargo, that "Israel will do what it has to do," regarding the entry into Rafah. He then told then-secretary of state Antony Blinken, when he came to Israel, regarding the embargo, that "Israel will fight with its fingernails if we have to." He then compared the scenario of leaving Hamas battalions in place in Rafah to an imaginary scenario where the Allied forces would have left Nazi battalions active in Berlin.
Despite this, Netanyahu praised Biden for immediately supporting Israel after the massacre had occurred, but said he began to take a different course "as the war continued to progress and the vilification of Israel continued to pile up in the media."
At the beginning of the interview, Netanyahu also praised Trump for placing sanctions on International Criminal Court officials that he described as corrupt.
"That's what I like about him, he just cuts to the chase."
Trump has previously said that the October 7 massacre wouldn't have happened if he were president.
Speaking on Jewish history of the last century
Netanyahu then continued to say in the interview that, "One of the tragedies of the Jewish people that in the first half of the 20th century, America was not the global dominant power, and the the worst tragedy in the history of mankind, World War II, took place, and the worst tragedy in the history of my people, the Holocaust, took place.
"But in the second half of the 20th century, America emerged as the dominant power, and Israel came into being. Our history has changed. We are no longer massacred with impunity."
Also on the podcast, Netanyahu said that he personally recognizes the Armenian Genocide as a genocide, informing the host that the Knesset recently passed a bill recognizing the massacre as genocide.