(JNS.org) Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday that Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia encouraged the U.S. to “bomb Iran” before the 2015 nuclear deal was brokered by the Obama administration and other world powers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “genuinely agitating toward action” before the deal was finalized, said Kerry during the Ignatius Forum in Washington, D.C. Kerry also stated that during his tenure as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Saudi King Abdullah, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Netanyahu all pushed for military action against Iran.

“Each of them said to me, you have to bomb Iran, it’s the only thing they are going to understand,” said Kerry.

Kerry also criticized President Donald Trump for his calls to fix the nuclear deal, stating that Trump had “polluted the water” by questioning the agreement, and that Trump’s criticism of the accord was “a blatant over-simplistic political appeal to the American Jewish community.”