On Monday, May 22, 2017, Trump was in Tel Aviv, meeting with Netanyahu at the King David Hotel. It was the second stop, after Saudi Arabia, on Trump’s first international trip as president.
Jared Kushner ran out to grab Tillerson. “You’ve got to go in there,” an aide said. “They’re showing the president this video. It’s awful. The president’s just exploding. You’ve got to go in there and calm the president down.”
By this point there was enough distrust between Tillerson and the White House that Tillerson didn’t know whether Kushner was playacting, or even setting him up.
But he went into the Trump-Netanyahu meeting. “Watch this,” Trump said. “This is unbelievable! You’ve got to see this.”
They played the video again for Tillerson. It showed a series of spliced-together comments from Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who was supposed to be Israel’s partner in the peace deal that Kushner was trying to put together.
It sounded like Abbas was ordering the murder of children.
Tillerson believed it was faked or manipulated, taking words and sentences out of context and stringing them together.
“And that’s the guy you want to help?” Netanyahu said. Tillerson studied the video, a crude effort of short snippets that had no context.
After Netanyahu left, Tillerson said to Trump, “Mr. President, you realize that that whole thing was fabricated?” “Well,” Trump said, “it’s not fabricated. They got the guy on tape saying it.”
(...)It was Tillerson’s view that Netanyahu had manufactured the tape to counter any pro-Palestinian sentiments that were surfacing. The next morning Trump met privately with Abbas and his people in Bethlehem and unloaded in a tirade. “Murderer!” Trump said to Abbas. “Liar!” I thought you were this grandfatherly figure that I could trust. “Now, I realize you’re nothing but a murderer. You tricked me!”
(...)Trump eventually ordered the closure of the Palestinian Liberation Organization office in Washington, D.C. in September 2018 and canceled nearly all U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza, as well as $360 million in annual aid previously given to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees