In February 2026, as Israel and the U.S. launched joint attacks on Iran, a quote attributed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resurfaced online in which he allegedly once stated, "America is a golden calf and we will suck it dry, chop it up, and sell it piece by piece until there is nothing left but the world's biggest welfare state that we will create and control... This is what we do to countries that we hate. We destroy them very slowly."
The alleged quote has circulated since at least 2017 on both X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit. Some versions of the claim alleged Netanyahu made the comments in 1990.
(X user @Ryanmatta)
We found no evidence Netanyahu made the remarks in 1990 or at any other time. The quote appeared to have originated in 2015 in an article published by a questionable website.
Netanyahu did not become prime minister until 1996, six years after he supposedly made the remarks shared online. This is the full quote attributed to Netanyahu as it has appeared in other social media posts:
If we get caught they will just replace us with persons of the same cloth. So it does not matter what you do, America is a golden calf and we will suck it dry, chop it up, and sell it off piece by piece until there is nothing left but the world's biggest welfare state that we will create and control. Why? Because it is the will of God, and America is big enough to take the hit so we can do it again and again and again. This is what we do to countries that we hate. We destroy them very slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves.
This text accompanies the quote in memes such as the one above:
Some posts citeed "Gordon Duff, Veterans Today" as its source. Veterans Today is a website we have previously found to publish antisemitic, pro-Nazi, and Holocaust-denying material. Vice called Veterans Today "conspiracy-oriented."
Duff, the senior editor and director of Veterans Today, stated in a 2012 interview that, "About 30% of what's written on Veterans Today, is patently false. About 40% of what I write, is at least purposely, partially false, because if I didn't write false information I wouldn't be alive."
Veterans Today has a disclaimer that reads as follows:
(Image via Veterans Today)
The article itself claims that Netanyahu is the "Operational Head of the Khazarian Mafia" (an antisemitic trope) and that the statement was recorded while he was meeting at Fink's Bar in Jerusalem, a real bar that closed in 2005. Although the article claims that the quote was pulled from the transcript of a recording, no such recording has never been presented as evidence.
(Veterans Today)
In sum, although Veterans Today claimed this quote was "100% fully authenticated," we found no corroborating evidence to support this claim, nor indeed any evidence that the quote even existed prior to the 2015 article in which it was published. Additionally, Veterans Today has a reputation for spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories.