Prior to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks, retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster — who served as former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser — believed that Israeli leaders were too credulous in building relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin to constrain Iran’s influence in neighboring Syria, he recounts in a new memoir obtained by Jewish Insider.

McMaster conveyed his concerns to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a brief exchange on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, he writes, claiming that Putin was “using a ‘bait and switch’” by dangling a “promise to curtail Iran’s presence and influence in Syria while actually enabling Iran’s proxies on” Israel’s borders.

“Netanyahu smiled and said he had better return to his seat,” McMaster says in his memoir, At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, which will be published on Tuesday.

The Israeli prime minister, he observes, “would not abandon his delusional view of Putin’s intentions until after the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks.”

In the book, a critical look at Trump’s time in office, McMaster, who resigned in March 2018 after a year in the administration, describes his experiences navigating a number of sensitive Middle East policy conversations.

He recalls witnessing a particularly tense meeting in Bethlehem with Mahmoud Abbas, where Trump, during a visit to the region in May 2017, accused the Palestinian Authority leader of “murder” and spoke in a “threatening” tone.

McMaster attributes Trump’s hostility to a film that Netanyahu had screened for him the night before. McMaster writes that after a conversation with Trump, he surmised that the film “had spliced together footage of Abbas to make it appear that he had called for the murder of Israeli children.”

He assumes that Netanyahu “had shown the film not just to undermine Trump’s relationship with” Abbas, he says in the book, “but also to prevent the president from pushing harder for a moratorium on new Israeli West Bank settlements or for a two-state solution.”

McMaster’s telling confirms an account from the journalist Bob Woodward in his 2020 book Rage, which first reported on the allegedly doctored film. The details of the film screening have been disputed by Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, in a separate book.

Elsewhere in the memoir, McMaster notes that until he intervened at the last minute, Trump had been ready to announce he would relocate the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem during his visit to Israel in 2017.

McMaster writes he had learned that Trump was planning to reveal his decision in a speech at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

Hours before the speech, however, McMaster, who accompanied Trump on the trip, asked the former president to reconsider the timing of his announcement so his Cabinet could “develop a plan” for the move “and mitigate any negative consequences,” he writes in the memoir.

Trump was receptive. “Okay, General, you can take it out of the speeches,” he told McMaster, according to the book.

The anecdote, which has not previously been told, provides additional insight into Trump’s mercurial approach to Middle East policy as he mounts a new campaign amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza as well as growing instability across the region.

Trump would ultimately announce his decision to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem months later, in Dec. 2017, despite pushback from top officials such as Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, who had argued in favor of renewing a waiver to further delay the move. The announcement — which broke with several past administrations — won accolades from pro-Israel leaders who had long pushed for the move. 

For his part, McMaster recommended that Trump “explicitly hold out the possibility that a portion of East Jerusalem could become the capital of a future Palestinian state,” he says, but the former president “rejected the idea.”

McMaster also suggests that Netanyahu had no discernible interest in reaching a two-state solution, citing “legitimate concerns” that a deal “would be unviable.” Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, he writes, “revealed that the viability of a two-state solution depended on ensuring that terrorists cannot control territory on Israel’s borders.”

But McMaster reserves his most unvarnished commentary for the former president. “His self-absorption and insecurities encumbered his ability to demonstrate his feelings,” he recalls of Trump’s visit to Yad Vashem seven years ago, “yet I hoped he felt not only the heavy weight of sadness as he descended the central walkway, but also that weight lifting as he ascended toward the light.”

“I wanted him to see Yad Vashem as the most profound argument against those who would have the United States disengage from consequential competitions abroad, such as ‘the long war’ against jihadist terrorists,” McMaster says. “Evil, if not confronted, only grows, inflicting unspeakable harm on humanity.”