The Ben Shapiro Show - Benjamin Netanyahu | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 130

00:00:00.000 We're one-tenth of one percent of the world's population.

00:00:05.000 The countries above us are a billion people, hundreds of millions of people, and we're nine million people, and we rank eighth in the world.

00:00:14.000 And that, there's more than a rationalist triumph here.

00:00:20.000 It's the triumph of the spirit.

00:00:22.000 I'll tell you what it is.

00:00:23.000 It's a triumph of faith.

00:00:26.000 Former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, is the first Prime Minister to be born in Israel after the country's declaration of independence, a still relatively recent re-establishment of the country 74 years ago.

00:00:37.000 The Prime Minister's whole life has been, in some way or another, centered on and in service to the State of Israel.

00:00:42.000 From mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Force, to serving five terms as Prime Minister, more than any other Israeli Prime Minister, and Netanyahu has shown no signs that he is done yet.

00:00:51.000 He's currently in the running for Israel's upcoming election.

00:00:54.000 Back in the 1990s, during his first term, the Prime Minister was foundational in tearing away at the roots of Israel's socialism.

00:01:00.000 From there, his ongoing strategies resulted in fundamentally remaking the country, particularly on economic freedom and military strength.

00:01:07.000 In our episode, Benjamin Netanyahu explains how that happened and what it looks like to continue keeping peace well on the edge of disaster and destruction at all times.

00:01:15.000 Plus, Prime Minister Netanyahu tells us how he's managed his relationship with the United States over the years, especially with our presidents, the profundity of the Jewish people's perseverance, and what Benjamin Netanyahu has on the agenda if indeed he becomes prime minister again.

00:01:27.000 Hey, hey, and welcome.

00:01:39.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

00:01:41.000 This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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00:01:46.000 Join them at expressvpn.com slash Ben.

00:01:48.000 Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

00:01:52.000 The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.

00:01:56.000 Go over to dailywire.com slash Sunday.

00:01:58.000 You can click that link in the episode description.

00:02:00.000 Use code Ben for 25% off You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.

00:02:06.000 Prime Minister, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:02:08.000 What an honor.

00:02:09.000 I wanted to start by asking you a question that I think a lot of Americans, you know, don't know much about, and that is sort of the roots of Zionism.

00:02:09.000 Welcome.

00:02:16.000 So when people see you, they see, frankly, the Jewish state, because the simple fact of the matter is you're the longest serving prime minister in the history of the state of Israel for the most years.

00:02:24.000 And so a lot of people don't really understand the fundamental basis of the Jewish state.

00:02:27.000 Is it the Holocaust? 0.89

00:02:28.000 Is it Jewish history?

00:02:29.000 How do all these parts tie in?

00:02:31.000 No, it's first of all Jewish history.

00:02:33.000 We came here, the Jewish people came here with Abraham.

00:02:37.000 Remember Abraham from the Bible?

00:02:39.000 Abraham, Isaac, Jacob?

00:02:40.000 Well, they came here about 3,500 years ago.

00:02:43.000 And this has been our land, the one we've been attached to for 3,500 years.

00:02:48.000 Jerusalem, our capital, 3,000 years.

00:02:50.000 So we basically survived here, thrived here, struggled here for about 2,000 years of these 3,500 years, and then we were kicked out.

00:03:00.000 People think we were kicked out by the Romans.

00:03:02.000 No, they destroyed Jerusalem, but we still hung around. 0.66

00:03:06.000 But around between the 7th and 9th century in the Arab conquest, depleted from our land.

00:03:11.000 We lost our land.

00:03:12.000 A lot of people lost their lands.

00:03:13.000 It can happen.

00:03:14.000 But we didn't give up on the dream of coming back to our land and reconstituting our national life.

00:03:19.000 Okay?

00:03:20.000 And so we constantly said next year in Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem, we wanted to come back.

00:03:25.000 We did come back.

00:03:26.000 Dripping first and then much more greater numbers in the 19th century.

00:03:32.000 And in the 20th century, we reformed the state of Israel.

00:03:35.000 So we are, we defeat the laws of history.

00:03:38.000 The laws of history say you can't come back from expulsion, dispersion, exiles, massacre.

00:03:44.000 You can't.

00:03:44.000 Well, we did.

00:03:45.000 And we came back and reconstituted this extraordinary state that not only serves the Jewish people, but also its non-Jewish citizens who have the best standard of living and the only ones who enjoy any civil rights, equal rights, in a very broad radius in the Middle East.

00:04:02.000 I don't know if the Middle East will change.

00:04:04.000 It is changing.

00:04:04.000 We can talk about it.

00:04:06.000 But the state of Israel, I would say, is like a parable that people can overcome The worst odds in history and could fashion a future of brilliance and hope against the overwhelming odds.

00:04:20.000 I think that's the story of Israel.

00:04:21.000 It gives hope to millions, maybe not to a small branch in the college campuses of the United States, but millions, hundreds of millions, I would say even billions of people.

00:04:36.000 In India, and in Asia, and in Africa, and in Latin America, they understand that Israel gives hope to humanity.

00:04:43.000 It says, you can do it.

00:04:45.000 That sounds like a yes we can.

00:04:49.000 So your family history in the state of Israel is amazing.

00:04:52.000 It goes back several generations at this point, and it really starts with your father, who is deeply involved in the Zionist movement and who actually spoke with a lot of very prominent figures in the United States throughout the 1950s.

00:05:05.000 You were telling me before the show that he actually had a meeting with President Eisenhower.

00:05:09.000 Yes, he did.

00:05:10.000 But before that, I'll tell you that my father, at the age of 23, in 1933, Wrote that the Holocaust, that's the word he used, the Holocaust, will threaten not only the survival of the Jewish people, but the peace of the world everywhere.

00:05:23.000 That if rampant anti-semitism that the Nazis were promoting in 1933, the month that Hitler rose, if that is not opposed it will sweep and engulf the entire world.

00:05:34.000 So he was a, not bad for a 23 year old, he was a Prussian.

00:05:38.000 He He thought that we would be imperiled if we don't have a state to stop, to get the Jews out from Europe, the Jewish people from Europe, they would be destroyed by Nazism.

00:05:54.000 So he wanted to persuade the The world, that there is a need to do, to make the Jewish state.

00:06:02.000 He went to... Zobudinsky was the founder of my movement.

00:06:05.000 He was 60 years old.

00:06:06.000 He was in London.

00:06:08.000 And he was agitating to persuade Britain to recognize the Jewish state, which they refused to do.

00:06:16.000 They closed the gates of this country.

00:06:18.000 They wouldn't allow Jewish immigration.

00:06:20.000 They were against the Arabs. 0.69

00:06:22.000 My father went to Zobudinsky in London.

00:06:23.000 He said, you have the right idea, but you're in the wrong place.

00:06:28.000 And he said, why?

00:06:29.000 He said, because you should be in America.

00:06:31.000 He said, why America?

00:06:32.000 He said, because America will be the rising power in the world.

00:06:36.000 There may be a world conflict.

00:06:38.000 America will emerge as the great power, and America can make Britain do what Britain doesn't want to do, that is, recognize a Jewish state. 0.92

00:06:45.000 Well, they went to America. 0.53

00:06:47.000 Trubodinsky died, and my father continued alone during the interwar, during the war years, agitating for Zionism.

00:06:53.000 He was all of 32.

00:06:56.000 And he began, that's in 1942, he decided to do something that no Jewish leader did before.

00:07:04.000 He went to the Republicans.

00:07:06.000 And he went to Senator Taft, who was a very great senator, because Roosevelt would not hear of a Jewish state, he was absolutely opposed to it.

00:07:14.000 He didn't want to antagonize the British, he thought that The British wanted to cater to the Arabs.

00:07:19.000 He simply would not do it.

00:07:20.000 He was a great leader, but for the Jewish people, that wasn't good. 0.59

00:07:26.000 So, not being able to persuade the Democrats, he went to the Republicans.

00:07:30.000 And he said to Senator Taft to advocate to put in the Republican National Convention on the platform, support for unrestricted Jewish immigration in a Jewish state.

00:07:42.000 Well, Roosevelt didn't like it.

00:07:44.000 But three months later, he had no choice.

00:07:46.000 The Democratic National Convention adopted a similar platform.

00:07:49.000 So, in many ways, my father was the progenitor of the bipartisan American support for Israel.

00:07:56.000 But, of course, he didn't just work on public opinion, but he worked also on the generals and on the politicians.

00:08:05.000 And he went from one to the other.

00:08:07.000 Claire Booth Luce, the wife of of the publisher of Time Magazine, who was a congresswoman, brilliant woman, she opened doors for him.

00:08:16.000 And so he was taken first to the lowest official in the State Department.

00:08:20.000 His name was Lloyd Henderson.

00:08:21.000 He was responsible for the Middle East. 0.99

00:08:23.000 And they started bringing him up.

00:08:26.000 They brought him to Dean Atchison, who was the acting Secretary of State, and eventually they brought him to Eisenhower.

00:08:31.000 After the war, he was the Commander of the Army.

00:08:35.000 Okay?

00:08:36.000 And they heard from him something that they never heard before.

00:08:39.000 Never heard before.

00:08:40.000 And Eisenhower asked him, why should we support you?

00:08:43.000 He said, because the war has ended.

00:08:45.000 The Soviet Union is going to walk into the Middle East. 0.94

00:08:48.000 The Arab countries are not only not going to be an obstacle, they'll cooperate with them.

00:08:52.000 And we, in the Jewish state of Israel, will be the bastion of the West.

00:08:56.000 Bastion of Western interests and Western values in the heart of the Middle East to block the Soviet takeover of the Middle East. 0.54

00:09:05.000 And Eisenhower looked at him, Eisenhower was very, my father describes him as a Sort of very open-minded, very logical.

00:09:14.000 American patriot.

00:09:16.000 So he asked him, how are you going to be the bastion?

00:09:22.000 You're only 600,000.

00:09:23.000 And my father said to him, General, you've just seen in two world wars how we Jews fight for others.

00:09:31.000 Can you imagine how strong we'll be when we fight for ourselves?

00:09:35.000 Well, Eisenhower was very much for him. 0.87

00:09:37.000 I'm impressed by that because he got the whole general staff for a second meeting with my father, and he wanted to have a third meeting with a British envoy to persuade Britain to change their attitudes.

00:09:47.000 The Brits nixed that, but it tells you his perspective.

00:09:51.000 You work on public opinion, and you work on the officials.

00:09:54.000 Public opinion, you appeal to justice.

00:09:56.000 Officials, you appeal to interest.

00:09:58.000 And the two merge.

00:10:00.000 Well, obviously you've taken up a lot of those lessons in your own career, so you can see the transition and the transformation of the State of Israel.

00:10:05.000 I've only visited the State of Israel four times over the course of my life.

00:10:08.000 I visited first in 2000, it was during the Second Intifada, and then I visited when I got married in 2008, and I visited three years ago and now, and you can see the massive transformations that have happened over the course of that time period, in large part thanks to the fact that you, as the Finance Minister and then as the Prime Minister, made such economic decisions in the State of Israel.

00:10:28.000 The growth here is just extraordinary.

00:10:30.000 Well, the first thing I look at when I land in any country, and I can tell you immediately what their GDP per capita is, I look at the roads, I look at the cranes.

00:10:39.000 In Israel, you can see a lot of that.

00:10:40.000 But of course, the high tech and the other things that are happening here are mesmerizing.

00:10:46.000 I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but the two most robust centers of innovation in the world today are Miami No offense to Silicon Valley, it's great, but it's Miami and it's Tel Aviv.

00:10:58.000 But you know that innovation doesn't do it by itself.

00:11:01.000 That is science, technology, Education?

00:11:07.000 Do not produce wealth by themselves.

00:11:11.000 Because if that were the case, then the Soviet Union would have been, you know, the most wealthy country in the world because they had fantastic scientists, mathematicians, physicists, metallurgists.

00:11:22.000 Didn't help, okay?

00:11:24.000 To do that, you have to have free markets.

00:11:27.000 Technology without free markets doesn't take you anywhere.

00:11:29.000 It just makes people migrate to countries with free markets.

00:11:33.000 Free markets and technology can Explode, which is what you're saying here.

00:11:39.000 My mission was to, if my father's generation was to ensure the creation of the Jewish state, my generation's responsibility, as I saw it, was to ensure its future.

00:11:54.000 And the only way you can ensure its future would be to have it powerful.

00:11:59.000 What does powerful mean?

00:12:01.000 The first thing you have to do is to have an army.

00:12:05.000 The ability to defend yourself, which is what the Jewish people lacked when they didn't have a state and they were butchered without end. 1.00

00:12:12.000 Well, what do you need for an army?

00:12:14.000 Well, you need tanks.

00:12:16.000 That's been replaced by drones.

00:12:19.000 You need airplanes, F-35s.

00:12:23.000 You need military intelligence.

00:12:23.000 You need submarines.

00:12:26.000 It's very expensive.

00:12:28.000 All these things have one thing in common.

00:12:29.000 They're very expensive.

00:12:31.000 How are you going to pay for that?

00:12:33.000 Well, the regular thinking was, that's easy.

00:12:35.000 You tax the people, you get the money.

00:12:37.000 Right.

00:12:38.000 I, no, that's wrong.

00:12:41.000 The only way you pay for that is with a robust economy.

00:12:43.000 And the only economies that work are free market economies.

00:12:47.000 That was my idea.

00:12:49.000 And the idea was that with that, with a free market economy, you can then build a very powerful military and military intelligence.

00:12:57.000 And now you create both civilian technology, military technology, and you become now Something that people are interested in.

00:13:05.000 You don't go and beg for countries to come and help you.

00:13:08.000 They come to you.

00:13:10.000 To help them.

00:13:11.000 And that creates a third apex of the triangle, which is the diplomatic flowering, flourishing of Israel.

00:13:19.000 So my idea was, fix the economy, get a strong military, and get a strong diplomatic position.

00:13:26.000 That will get you peace.

00:13:28.000 Strength gets you peace, not weakness.

00:13:30.000 Well, that's easier said than done.

00:13:32.000 First of all, it's not so easy said.

00:13:35.000 People didn't believe it.

00:13:37.000 They basically believe, well, we'll solve our problem if we make peace, and if we need to make peace, we have to make concessions that will make us weak.

00:13:46.000 It's still worth it.

00:13:47.000 In other words, they believe that peace produces strength.

00:13:50.000 I believe that strength produces peace, especially in our part of the world.

00:13:54.000 If you're not strong, you disappear.

00:13:56.000 You're devoured.

00:13:58.000 So, I had to affect a free market revolution here.

00:14:00.000 That's really what I did, both as Prime Minister and as Finance Minister.

00:14:04.000 So, in a second, I want to ask you exactly how you affected that revolution, because the origins of the State of Israel, at least at its foundation, was a socialist state, and it still has a lot of carryover from that period to now, a lot of the holdups in the regulatory sphere.

00:14:17.000 I want to ask you about that in just one second.

00:14:19.000 First, we need to talk about life insurance.

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00:15:31.000 So, let's talk about how you effectuate an economic revolution in a country that's had no history of this.

00:15:35.000 So, you were telling me that the origins of the Zionist movement were actually pretty capitalist in nature, but the history that we're taught when I was in Jewish day school is that the foundation of the state was, it would seem, it was essentially communism, and that eventually what you were able to effectuate is this free market transformation that's allowed for innovation and investment.

00:15:55.000 How do you do that, especially in a coalition system where there are so many people who want their piece of the pie?

00:15:59.000 Well, you're right that the founder of Mond and Zionism, Herzl, was a free marketeer, but with his death in 1904, the Zionist movement was gradually overtaken by people with socialist views, and Israel became a semi-socialist, if not a fully socialist country, and had to wean it.

00:16:18.000 Maybe, you know, in the beginning, to build roads, to do the infrastructure, I don't think so, but you could argue that you could have the state do it.

00:16:26.000 But by the mid 60s, it was already congealing into a bad thing with bureaucracy, taxes, unions, all the things that stunt growth.

00:16:39.000 And I always believed that.

00:16:40.000 And I thought, well, how do I change it?

00:16:43.000 To change it, first of all, you have to believe it and understand it.

00:16:47.000 And I had an economics, a secret economics education because I went to the business school at MIT and then at the Boston Consulting Group.

00:16:55.000 So I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do.

00:16:59.000 People didn't associate with me because I was the ambassador to the UN.

00:17:02.000 I say this, by the way, in my memoirs, I describe this transformation, but I grew up With a free market view.

00:17:11.000 I grew up with a skepticism about socialism.

00:17:15.000 I grew up with an appreciation from my father about the value of individual initiative and enterprise.

00:17:23.000 So the problem is that the country was here and I was there.

00:17:26.000 How do you get it from here to there?

00:17:28.000 Well, it was a crisis.

00:17:31.000 On that one, the Clintonites were right.

00:17:37.000 Never let a good crisis go to waste.

00:17:39.000 Well, I began that actually in 96 when I came in.

00:17:42.000 And the first thing that I did was I liberalized the currency, foreign exchange currency.

00:17:46.000 You know what that... Israel, you couldn't take out more than a few thousand dollars.

00:17:50.000 You'd have to get approval from the central bank.

00:17:54.000 A guy wanted to get a newsweek.

00:17:56.000 Remember there was a magazine called Newsweek?

00:17:59.000 Well, they asked for a subscription.

00:18:00.000 You had to pay it in dollars.

00:18:01.000 He had to go to the central bank, get clearance.

00:18:04.000 For dollars for a Newsweek subscription.

00:18:07.000 There was a black market street here that was used for black marketeering and funds and so on.

00:18:07.000 Crazy.

00:18:18.000 And I decided to break it.

00:18:19.000 When I got elected, first time in 96, I said, we're going to open up the currency markets.

00:18:24.000 They said, Prime Minister, are you crazy?

00:18:27.000 Do you know what happened? 0.85

00:18:28.000 In Mexico, the peso collapsed, a mountain of money moved out.

00:18:32.000 I said, well, Yeah, but I believe in this.

00:18:35.000 So, I did it.

00:18:36.000 And you know what happened?

00:18:38.000 Is a mountain of money did move.

00:18:40.000 But didn't move out, it moved in.

00:18:42.000 Because money, trade, investments, they go to the free markets, not to the closed markets.

00:18:48.000 That was the first instance.

00:18:50.000 But the real opportunity I got to change the economy was in 2003 when I became finance minister.

00:18:57.000 I lost the elections, came back to politics after a wonderful three years.

00:19:02.000 It was great.

00:19:04.000 There are suggestions that you were put in the finance ministry specifically to fail.

00:19:07.000 Yes, I was.

00:19:08.000 But so what?

00:19:10.000 And they told me, and I describe this in my book, my advisors, many of them said to me, you know, Sharon was the prime minister.

00:19:18.000 Israel is in the deepest economic crisis in decades.

00:19:21.000 And he offers me The finance ministry.

00:19:25.000 And I'm the potential heir.

00:19:28.000 And they said, Prime Minister, take any ministry.

00:19:31.000 Do not take the finance ministry because you won't be Prime Minister.

00:19:36.000 To which I answered, well, why do I want to be Prime Minister?

00:19:39.000 I want to be Prime Minister to affect my vision, which means a very strong free market economy, and to stop Iran, which is something else, the other great thing, and to achieve peace, a real peace, peace based on strength. 0.82

00:19:54.000 So at least one of my principal goals I can achieve.

00:19:58.000 And if I won't be prime minister, so what?

00:19:59.000 I'll achieve one of the goals that I can.

00:20:02.000 So I went into the finance ministry, found a huge crisis, huge.

00:20:07.000 I mean, enormous deficits, enormous unemployment, enormous, and everything was bad.

00:20:14.000 And I thought, well, how am I going to, how am I going to take them from here to there?

00:20:14.000 Okay.

00:20:18.000 Okay.

00:20:19.000 Israel didn't have a culture of lemonade stands.

00:20:24.000 It had a culture of the army.

00:20:26.000 Everybody went into the army.

00:20:27.000 So when I thought of presenting my economic plan to the public, I said, well, let's take an image from the army.

00:20:35.000 Now, on the first day that I came to basic training in the paratroops in 1967, the company commander put us in a big line.

00:20:44.000 And he said, all right, now we're going to take a race, but it's a special kind of race.

00:20:48.000 So you, Netanyahu, points to me.

00:20:50.000 Look to the guy on your right, put him on your shoulders.

00:20:53.000 And the next guy, put the guy to his right on his shoulders and so on.

00:20:57.000 And then he blew the whistle.

00:20:58.000 I had a guy about my size.

00:21:00.000 I was heavy.

00:21:01.000 I could barely take a few steps.

00:21:03.000 The guy next to me was the smallest guy in the company.

00:21:06.000 He had the biggest gun on his shoulders and he collapsed.

00:21:09.000 And the third guy was a big guy with a relatively small guy on his shoulders.

00:21:12.000 He took off like a rocket and won the race.

00:21:15.000 And I said to the Israeli public, All global economies are pairs of a public sector sitting on the shoulders of a private sector.

00:21:25.000 In our case, the public sector got too fat and we're about to collapse like that little guy next to me.

00:21:32.000 So we have to put the fat man, it was called fat man, thin man, taxi cab drivers talked about it.

00:21:38.000 It's like the butt of jokes. 0.59

00:21:39.000 It was funny that the, we have to put the fat man, the public sector on a strict diet.

00:21:44.000 We have to give oxygen to the guy at the bottom, and we have to remove the obstacle in his way.

00:21:51.000 What is oxygen?

00:21:52.000 I said, oxygen, well, it's many things, but the first three are lower taxes, lower taxes, lower taxes.

00:21:58.000 Because that's what makes people run the race, okay?

00:22:02.000 But even if you had a trimmed down public sector, which is very hard to do politically, because you're cutting public spending, it's very hard.

00:22:10.000 And you have the lower taxes below.

00:22:12.000 The guy begins to run, hits a ditch, crosses the ditch, hits a wall, crosses the wall, hits a fence.

00:22:18.000 These are called barriers to competition.

00:22:20.000 And it could be many things.

00:22:21.000 It could be over-regulation.

00:22:22.000 It could be hidden monopolies, open monopolies.

00:22:25.000 So I proceeded to adopt about 60, 70 major reforms.

00:22:31.000 Simultaneously.

00:22:32.000 Okay?

00:22:33.000 To change that.

00:22:35.000 And we went from 1% contraction of the GDP to plus 5% growth in a year.

00:22:43.000 And it stayed that way for a good decade.

00:22:45.000 That's the foundation of everything that you're seeing, this explosive growth that you see now.

00:22:50.000 It was hard.

00:22:51.000 I lost politically.

00:22:53.000 My advisors were right.

00:22:56.000 I didn't have a chance to become prime minister.

00:22:58.000 I went down in my votes, but eventually the people appreciated what I did.

00:23:03.000 And Israel is a changed country.

00:23:04.000 There are more.

00:23:05.000 You had a meeting here.

00:23:08.000 Thousands of people came.

00:23:09.000 Are they free marketeers?

00:23:11.000 Yeah.

00:23:11.000 Well, 20 years ago, they weren't.

00:23:14.000 Well, when you talk about the transformation and how it all starts with the economic strength of the state of Israel, you can see that also in the Abraham Accords, obviously, because it's the economic might of the state of Israel combined with its military might that leads all of these Sunni Arab nations to realize that there's common interest.

00:23:27.000 You mentioned that diplomacy is common interest and not necessarily, you know, seeing eye to eye on every matter. It's more about where the commonality lies.

00:23:36.000 And you're obviously the architect of the Abraham Accords, one of the architects of the Abraham Accords along with the peace partners. That's the biggest shift in Israeli foreign policy since at least the peace with Egypt. So maybe you can explain how that came about. Well, you're right that it had two driving things.

00:23:54.000 Obviously, the Arab countries would benefit from Israel's technology, the explosion of innovation and enterprise, free enterprise that you see here.

00:24:02.000 But it's good, you know, for water, it's good for desalination, it's good for the whole digital world, it's good for medicine, it's good for everything.

00:24:11.000 Everything is done here and they could partake of it, but that wouldn't be enough.

00:24:15.000 The reason they came is because they were afraid of Iran. 0.52

00:24:21.000 And when I went to the Congress in 2015 before a joint session of Congress, a joint meeting of Congress, that I spoke there and challenged President Obama's espousal of the Dangerous deal that would effectively pave Iran's way to a nuclear arsenal with gold.

00:24:43.000 I went against the, what the so-called JCPOA, the nuclear agreement with Iran.

00:24:48.000 That got their attention in a big way.

00:24:51.000 And we began to have secret meetings.

00:24:54.000 I think I'm the only Israeli, you know, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have visited the Gulf.

00:25:00.000 And I'm the only one who didn't see it in daytime.

00:25:04.000 So we had these meetings and they knew they could rely on me, on my government that I led, that we would do everything in our power to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons. 0.73

00:25:16.000 Because if Iran gets nuclear weapons, you know, it's not merely aimed at our destruction, it's aimed at their destruction. 0.97

00:25:23.000 It's aimed at you, the United States, because they're developing ICBMs that could reach any city in the United States and it's not a good idea to have these You know, Islamic fundamentalist fanatics, this thugocracy, you know, have these nuclear weapons and the ability to threaten American cities. 0.98

00:25:42.000 So, but America didn't see it that way. 1.00

00:25:45.000 I saw it that way.

00:25:46.000 They saw it that way.

00:25:48.000 And they relied on us to do it.

00:25:50.000 So, that began the process of thawing out relations with him in a big way.

00:25:55.000 Not yet formal, but I asked, for example, just to, before the Abraham Accords, I got the Saudis to allow overflights, Israel over Saudi airspace, well before the Abraham Accords.

00:26:09.000 It's part and parcel of this rapprochement, this joining of interests that happened between Israel and the Gulf states.

00:26:18.000 Now, when Trump was elected in 2016, remember, I was in Congress speaking against Obama's nuclear deal in 2015.

00:26:27.000 Now, Trump gets elected president.

00:26:31.000 So I came to him and I said, you know, we have four peace treaties waiting to be picked like that.

00:26:39.000 And I suggested to him, and I described this in my book, I said, why don't you bring an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea?

00:26:48.000 You know, I remember that Roosevelt had brought Ibn Saud to an American destroyer during World War II.

00:26:54.000 I said, bring an aircraft carrier and invite me.

00:26:58.000 And the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Bahrain, and we can get, of course, Egypt and Jordan, for a summit.

00:27:06.000 And the summit should be to deal with Iran. 0.77

00:27:08.000 But that would produce, I said, four peace treaties.

00:27:11.000 I said there are other countries.

00:27:12.000 I was thinking of Morocco.

00:27:13.000 I was thinking of Sudan.

00:27:14.000 I was already thinking of that.

00:27:16.000 And I didn't get very far.

00:27:19.000 I think the president at the time was consumed with the idea of bartering an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

00:27:26.000 The art of the deal.

00:27:28.000 And as hard as I tried, I tried to explain, look, they don't want peace.

00:27:33.000 They don't want a state next to Israel. 0.92

00:27:35.000 They want a state instead of Israel.

00:27:37.000 So we can waste a lot of time trying to get that.

00:27:41.000 Or we can have these peace treaties like that.

00:27:43.000 Well, it took about three years.

00:27:45.000 For that realization to sink in, and I'm glad it did because the help of the American administration and Trump was essential for that.

00:27:54.000 But I think we could have already had peace with Saudi Arabia.

00:27:57.000 And if I'm reelected now, I'm going to have peace with Saudi Arabia. 0.99

00:28:01.000 They trust me.

00:28:02.000 They trust me to give the bulwark against Iran. 1.00

00:28:06.000 And if we have peace with Saudi Arabia, effectively the Arab-Israeli conflict is over.

00:28:11.000 Yes, we don't have Yemen.

00:28:12.000 Yes, we don't have Iraq, Syria.

00:28:14.000 That's not important.

00:28:15.000 So my idea was that everybody said you have to have peace with the Palestinians to get peace with the Arab world.

00:28:22.000 And my idea was the exact opposite.

00:28:24.000 You go to the Arab world, leave the Palestinians to the end. 1.00

00:28:27.000 They'll come around.

00:28:29.000 Uh, but don't let that, uh, you know, don't let the tail wag the body. 1.00

00:28:35.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about that potential piece with Saudi Arabia and, and what that would look like.

00:28:40.000 Cause they clearly are interested in, in making nor in normalizing relations with the state of Israel.

00:28:46.000 I mean, there wouldn't be peace with the UAE and Bahrain if, if Saudi Arabia hadn't signed off on it.

00:28:49.000 You don't know how right you are.

00:28:50.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:28:52.000 First, let's talk about sleep quality.

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00:30:02.000 So let's talk about the possibility of a more durable peace, the title of one of your books, with Saudi Arabia.

00:30:08.000 So the Saudis obviously have a strong interest in making peace with Israel.

00:30:13.000 They're having to navigate a gauntlet that a lot of the Sunni Arab states have to navigate with regard to, for example, the Palestinians.

00:30:20.000 So the Abraham Accords essentially says that there will be no annexation of territory for a short period of time or whatever that period of time is, sort of unspecified.

00:30:28.000 And that there'll be normalization of relations.

00:30:30.000 What are the contours of a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia look like?

00:30:34.000 First, a correction.

00:30:35.000 under the deal that we worked out with Trump, we would actually, the minute we agreed to the Trump peace plan, we would be able to apply Israeli law or annex your language 30%, the critical 30% of Judea Samaria, regardless of whether the Palestinians agreed or not.

00:30:59.000 That didn't quite materialize yet, but that was the actual deal that we worked out.

00:31:04.000 Now you ask a question about what would require, what would be required to make peace with Saudi Arabia, strong Israeli government that faces Iran, that is not just saying, you know, lip service that were there against the agreement, because 80% of the public here is against the agreement.

00:31:24.000 But really to fight it out, go to the UN, go to Congress, go in every possible form and then of course do the things against Iran's nuclear program.

00:31:34.000 Nuclear program.

00:31:35.000 And we did many things.

00:31:36.000 I can't talk about it, but I can say that We sent, I sent the Mossad into the heart of Tehran to pluck the secret atomic archive that Iran had. 0.97

00:31:49.000 And they brought it back.

00:31:50.000 Have you seen Argo, this film Argo?

00:31:52.000 Remember?

00:31:53.000 This is Argo on steroids.

00:31:55.000 You know, they took it out.

00:31:56.000 The Iranians are chasing them. 1.00

00:31:57.000 They're moving to the next place.

00:31:59.000 You know, the glass almost fell.

00:32:01.000 They almost fell.

00:32:02.000 They almost fell.

00:32:03.000 You know, they, uh, and we got out and they brought half a ton of documentation.

00:32:09.000 And we could prove to the world, Iran at 2003.

00:32:12.000 You know what the mission was in these files?

00:32:16.000 Bring five atomic bombs, Hiroshima style bombs in 2003. 0.96

00:32:21.000 That's 20 years ago.

00:32:22.000 So Iran, uh, you know, everybody understands that Iran is going to do it and they'll do it with an agreement without an agreement. 0.85

00:32:30.000 The only thing that will stop them is a credible military threat.

00:32:35.000 Coupled with crippling sanctions, but crippling sanctions are not enough.

00:32:38.000 Credible military threat, and if the threat doesn't work, if they're not deterred, then you have to act.

00:32:44.000 The Arab countries, the Arab leaders, trust me to do that.

00:32:49.000 They do not trust the current government.

00:32:51.000 That's the foundation of the peace.

00:32:52.000 They're not going to make peace unless they believe that.

00:32:55.000 Uh, and then everything else follows, and I think, uh, I think there are many other things, but that's the most important one.

00:33:00.000 I mean, ironically, it seems as though the Obama administration's sort of full-scale embrace of the Iran deal led to the Abraham Accords in a way, because, you know, by essentially mobilizing on behalf of the enemies of Israel as well as the Saudi Arab states, it forced everybody into this coalition against Iran.

00:33:16.000 I mean, the Obama administration was obviously so antipathetic toward you personally, but also toward the state of Israel more generally.

00:33:21.000 Uh, you know, that must have been a very difficult relationship to navigate.

00:33:25.000 Well, it wasn't the easiest.

00:33:29.000 But we did.

00:33:30.000 And again, you do that from a position of strength.

00:33:32.000 You do that by appealing to... America's not a closed country.

00:33:35.000 America's not. 0.66

00:33:38.000 You can't appeal to Chinese public opinion because you can't. 0.99

00:33:42.000 There's no way to do it.

00:33:43.000 But you can appeal to the American people.

00:33:46.000 You can say that what is bad for us is also bad for you.

00:33:46.000 You can talk to them.

00:33:50.000 Because if Iran gets nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them to any place in America, that is a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. 0.95

00:34:03.000 You can see What I'm talking about, there is a small country that has 5% GDP, maybe 10% of Israel, even though its population is much bigger.

00:34:13.000 It's called North Korea.

00:34:14.000 North Korea develops nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

00:34:17.000 Half of Asia is quaking in fear.

00:34:20.000 Japan is threatened.

00:34:20.000 Everybody's threatened.

00:34:21.000 And it's just a question of time.

00:34:24.000 And I don't think it's a lot of time.

00:34:25.000 They've already reached it.

00:34:26.000 They can reach Los Angeles.

00:34:27.000 They can reach... That changes the world.

00:34:30.000 Now, North Korea is 5% of Iran.

00:34:36.000 5% of Iran's GDP. 0.63

00:34:38.000 So if Iran with its ideology, with its death to America ideology, you know, America is the great Satan, we're the small Satan. 0.68

00:34:47.000 I often, you know, poke fun at my European friends. 0.97

00:34:51.000 I said, you're a middle-sized Satan. 0.99

00:34:53.000 Not worth it. 0.98

00:34:54.000 You know, you can be small, you can be big, but you don't want to be a middle-sized Satan.

00:34:58.000 But that's what they talk about, death to America.

00:35:00.000 You don't want that government.

00:35:02.000 That regime, these thugs in Tehran to have the means to have mass death in which they can threaten the entire world and America, to which they're absolutely committed to, you know, to fight.

00:35:17.000 I couldn't get through.

00:35:20.000 I couldn't get through, but I could get through to the American people. 0.77

00:35:22.000 I can get through to their representatives in Congress.

00:35:25.000 And, you know, it's not something that, and again, I write about this, it's not something that I did Like that, haphazardly or, you know, with a sleight of hand.

00:35:34.000 To go into the lion's den, into the American Congress, to go there and challenge a sitting president is a very difficult decision because America is still the indispensable ally.

00:35:48.000 It doesn't make any difference if it's Democrats or Republicans, it's still the indispensable ally for us.

00:35:54.000 And to go and challenge the American president, It's not something I would likely do.

00:35:59.000 I did it because I thought that my country's very existence was in peril.

00:36:03.000 That I had to challenge.

00:36:05.000 That if I didn't speak out, I would never forgive myself.

00:36:07.000 And what am I here for?

00:36:09.000 What, to sit on a chair?

00:36:10.000 To earn money?

00:36:12.000 I mean, it's a joke.

00:36:13.000 You go there because this is my mission, to protect the future of Israel.

00:36:17.000 And so I went there.

00:36:18.000 And it was...

00:36:21.000 You know, it was a tough thing, but it kept the flame of the resistance to the nuclear deal alive, because nobody's going to defend you if you're not willing to defend yourself.

00:36:32.000 And that obviously changed when the administration changed, and I was very happy that that change took place under the Trump administration.

00:36:40.000 So, looking at Iran and sort of the long-term future for Iran, what do you see as the optimistic possibility for Iran?

00:36:45.000 Because obviously the theocrats in charge there have solidified control over the military, they're spreading their tentacles to significant conventional threats to the state of Israel, including Hezbollah, which is armed with 150,000 rockets, far more sophisticated than anything that Hamas has been firing at.

00:36:59.000 at Israeli cities, they're funding Hamas, obviously.

00:37:02.000 So what do you see as a long-term solution for Iran?

00:37:05.000 Because obviously advocates of the JCPOA or a revised JCPOA claim that in the absence of an agreement that essentially Iranian extremism plus nuclear weapons is inevitable.

00:37:15.000 No, it's the opposite.

00:37:17.000 It's Iran without the nuclear agreement. 0.76

00:37:19.000 The nuclear agreement merely says that in two, three years, Iran will have unlimited enrichment capacity of uranium, which means that they can create the nuclear core for a hundred nuclear bombs, a nuclear arsenal.

00:37:33.000 And that's under the agreement.

00:37:35.000 You agree to it.

00:37:36.000 That's what the agreement says.

00:37:37.000 And you give them megabucks to boot. 0.99

00:37:40.000 So Iran without the nuclear agreement is an isolated country, A poor country and a country that could be subject to military attack by the signatories.

00:37:51.000 Okay, Iran with a nuclear agreement A rich country gets hundreds of billions of dollars because of this agreement.

00:38:01.000 It breaks out of its international isolation.

00:38:04.000 And it's a country that doesn't really fear any military action from the United States.

00:38:10.000 That's what it means.

00:38:11.000 That's what the nuclear agreement means.

00:38:13.000 It just gives them immunity and prosperity while they're developing a bomb, a nuclear arsenal in two years.

00:38:18.000 So you shouldn't sign this agreement.

00:38:20.000 Uh, in order to stop it, you have to have the willingness to act militarily against Iran's nuclear program and nuclear installations. 0.85

00:38:29.000 That's what I have.

00:38:31.000 And I did it.

00:38:32.000 It's not something that I, you know, there are more things to do.

00:38:35.000 Do we have the capacity to do it?

00:38:36.000 The answer is yes, we do.

00:38:38.000 Do we have the will to do it?

00:38:41.000 I have the will to do it.

00:38:43.000 My colleagues have the will to do it with me.

00:38:46.000 And I think this is the big test.

00:38:47.000 We have to stop Iran. 1.00

00:38:49.000 By the way, if you have that capacity, you won't have to use it in all likelihood.

00:38:54.000 But if you don't have the will, it's meaningless.

00:38:57.000 So I think that's... Now the question is, alright, but how does Iran change?

00:39:01.000 Will Iran change? 0.76

00:39:03.000 Well, these regimes, like Iran or North Korea and so on, basically they kill their opponents. 0.53

00:39:09.000 You know, they govern by killing people, you know?

00:39:12.000 The reason the Shah fell is because he wasn't willing to kill thousands of people.

00:39:17.000 It's not only Jimmy Carter and all the stuff that you read, it's because he wasn't willing to kill.

00:39:21.000 What these guys discovered is that if you kill, nobody cares.

00:39:25.000 Nobody intervenes, you know?

00:39:26.000 You can see that in many places, okay? 0.86

00:39:29.000 So, and they're willing to kill.

00:39:30.000 They kill maybe a thousand, two thousand people a year, and that's enough to get the point.

00:39:37.000 How will it change internally?

00:39:41.000 They control information, they control the killing machines.

00:39:45.000 You could possibly decontrol the information.

00:39:48.000 I think that's important.

00:39:49.000 With new technologies, with low-flying satellites, with devices that are the size of a matchbook that are distributed elsewhere, you might break their monopoly on information.

00:39:58.000 That begins to challenge them.

00:40:02.000 But, you know, there are many other things that I could talk about.

00:40:07.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about the some of the other threats that I briefly mentioned there to the state of Israel, ranging from the northern border with Hezbollah to the Gaza Strip and the continuing threat that still exists in Judea and Samaria by the PA first.

00:40:21.000 We need to talk about how you upgrade your company.

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00:41:19.000 Okay, so let's talk about some of the other threats.

00:41:21.000 So one of the things that I've talked about, so I spoke in Tel Aviv recently, and I was talking about what Israel could learn from America, what America could learn from Israel.

00:41:28.000 What I said Israel could learn from America was essentially free market economics, many of the things that you've talked about, reducing the regulatory states are enough to call your brother-in-law who went to the techneon to make sure that you can get your passport approved, and revising the way that judiciary is done here because it's very odd by American standards.

00:41:44.000 We'll get to that in a little while, I'm sure.

00:41:47.000 But the thing that I said that America could learn from Israel is that Israel has a certain level of social solidarity between people who disagree on nearly everything else that just doesn't exist in the United States.

00:41:57.000 And the easiest way to see that is the demographic trends in the state of Israel.

00:42:00.000 Tel Aviv, which is a very secular city, the reproduction rate here is 2.3.

00:42:04.000 The reproduction rate in Judea and Samaria is 4.6.

00:42:06.000 The reproduction rate in Haifa is 2.4.

00:42:09.000 You're looking at... The reproduction rate in Europe is minus one.

00:42:13.000 That's exactly right.

00:42:14.000 So, I mean, this is the only Western country, literally the only one, that has a reproduction rate above replacement averages.

00:42:20.000 And that is the strength of the state of Israel.

00:42:22.000 At the same time, that might be because it does face existential threat on all borders.

00:42:27.000 And so you're forced into a certain level of social solidarity.

00:42:30.000 So what do you think of that?

00:42:32.000 And do you think that, you know, Israel almost requires, as the Jewish people historically have, a certain level of outside threat in order to reach social solidarity? 0.83

00:42:39.000 Well, whether we require it or not, we're getting it.

00:42:43.000 We can test what will happen.

00:42:44.000 You know, I'd like to be tested in a country that is not threatened from day one with its survival, with its existence.

00:42:53.000 So, yes, I think it's our history, too.

00:42:56.000 It's our bond to this land.

00:42:58.000 It's the fact that a third of our people were incinerated just a few decades ago.

00:43:05.000 I think that creates the wars of Israel. 0.93

00:43:07.000 You know, people have children as a reaffirmation of their hope.

00:43:12.000 And we're no longer living in a situation where you have, you know, labor-intensive economies.

00:43:16.000 You have to have 10 kids in order to earn a living.

00:43:19.000 It's the opposite.

00:43:20.000 And yet people in Israel, in the prosperous Israel, Israel's sort of beating the equation, because if you're impoverished, you have a lot of kids.

00:43:30.000 But in Israel, you're prosperous and you have a lot of kids, and that strengthens our economy even more.

00:43:35.000 So yes, I think the history, the experience that we have, the life ethos that we have in the Jewish people have come back to life.

00:43:44.000 The Jewish people have come back to life in the State of Israel, so it sort of gives, as I said, hope to, I think, to all people everywhere that you can do this.

00:43:53.000 And I think that that's where it's going to continue.

00:43:57.000 I don't think it's a short-term thing.

00:43:59.000 There is a pulsating life force here.

00:44:03.000 How do we manage the various, the solidarity?

00:44:07.000 Well, the first thing is have free markets, because free markets give you two things.

00:44:12.000 They give you economic growth.

00:44:13.000 They allow the realization of personal potential, but they also give you the money.

00:44:19.000 They give you the money on a smaller tax rate.

00:44:21.000 I have to argue this with you.

00:44:24.000 I said, you know, we're going to lower tax rates and we're going to have bigger revenues.

00:44:28.000 And they said, no, that can't be.

00:44:29.000 I said, haven't you heard of the Laffer curve?

00:44:31.000 And they said, Laffer?

00:44:32.000 Who's this Laffer?

00:44:33.000 No, there are non-Jewish economists.

00:44:35.000 There is one or two, you know, non-Jewish economists.

00:44:38.000 Arthur Laffer.

00:44:40.000 If you're a high rate of taxation and you lower tax rates, you're going to get more tax revenues.

00:44:45.000 That's easily demonstrable.

00:44:47.000 And we're at a very high tax rate.

00:44:51.000 When you do that, you also fill up the government coffers.

00:44:54.000 On the one hand, you promote business, initiative, enterprise, employment.

00:44:59.000 On the other hand, you get the money to help The poor, the needy, especially the handicapped, the old people who can't be in the job market and so on.

00:45:09.000 So there's no conflict between social welfare and free markets.

00:45:13.000 They're absolutely complementary.

00:45:14.000 And in fact, I would say that social welfare depends on free markets.

00:45:18.000 And that's what we installed here.

00:45:19.000 We changed the thing and that creates a measure of solidarity.

00:45:23.000 It doesn't allow the bifurcation of society that happens in so many other places where you don't have free markets.

00:45:29.000 That's when society is really bifurcated.

00:45:32.000 So to return to some of the core threats, Hezbollah is a threat that pretty much everybody in the world media ignores until the occasional time when Hezbollah starts firing thousands of rockets over the border simultaneously.

00:45:42.000 This is one of the things that people in Northern Israel particularly are significantly worried about.

00:45:46.000 Israel has Iron Dome, but the question is it's extraordinarily expensive to operate Iron Dome.

00:45:52.000 Every one of those anti-missile missiles essentially is very expensive.

00:45:55.000 Hezbollah has extraordinary numbers of rockets.

00:45:58.000 So what exactly is the plan for Hezbollah, broadly speaking?

00:46:02.000 Well, I'm not going to ask you to lay out a military.

00:46:06.000 Not on the first date.

00:46:11.000 And not public.

00:46:11.000 But I can say this.

00:46:13.000 I showed President Trump, you know, the map of all these missiles embedded against Israel, embedded in, you know, in civilian neighborhoods and hospitals and so on.

00:46:26.000 The ceiling is moved, boom, a rocket comes out, you know.

00:46:29.000 And he said, well, God, how do you sleep at night?

00:46:33.000 And I said to him, Donald, I sleep at night by making sure they don't sleep at night.

00:46:41.000 That's basically it.

00:46:43.000 It's both defense but also offense.

00:46:47.000 And I really wouldn't get into that.

00:46:49.000 But apparently they think They're concerned with that because they're very careful.

00:46:54.000 And of course, we will surprise them.

00:46:57.000 Surprise is a key element in war, which I hope we don't have to fight.

00:47:02.000 So, speaking of threats on the border, obviously Hamas, the pullout from Gaza, turns out to be, by pretty much every measure, a rather large-scale disaster, considering that Hamas immediately takes over the place and immediately uses it as a base with which to launch attacks into mainland of Israel, like all the way to Jerusalem, some of the last rocket attacks.

00:47:23.000 What can be done with Hamas? 0.96

00:47:24.000 Because the reality is that were Hamas to be toppled, which the Israeli military clearly has the power to do, were that to happen, there's a good chance that ISIS would take over. 0.67

00:47:32.000 So what happens with a radicalized... Well, and also you'd have to take over because there's no one else to take over.

00:47:37.000 So we'd have to manage another 2 million Palestinians and that'll be a drain versus the other fronts that we have, like Iran and Hezbollah and so on. 0.82

00:47:47.000 So I think what you do periodically is you restore deterrence powerfully.

00:47:52.000 We just did that a year ago, right before I left office.

00:47:55.000 We destroyed, they built aerial capacity.

00:47:59.000 We destroyed it.

00:48:00.000 They built a naval capacity.

00:48:01.000 We destroyed it.

00:48:02.000 They built a tunnel system to penetrate Israel. 0.89

00:48:05.000 We built an underground wall.

00:48:08.000 With sensors.

00:48:09.000 Not one tunnel crossed.

00:48:11.000 They built a tunnel network to hide under all of Gaza, defensive tunnels.

00:48:16.000 First time in history we penetrated that and bombed it.

00:48:19.000 You know, from the time of the Babylonians, people have been digging tunnels both for attacks and for defense.

00:48:25.000 And no one really was able to identify it and hit it from the outside without sending people inside.

00:48:31.000 And we did.

00:48:32.000 So we sent them back a good, good, good distance and, you know, it keeps the peace.

00:48:38.000 But you're not going to get the ultimate peace as long as you have militant Islamists there who are committed to our destruction. 1.00

00:48:46.000 Okay, that's just not going to happen.

00:48:47.000 So you have to create a wise policy.

00:48:50.000 And my life has been committed to deterring those who are around us, deterring those who wish to destroy us or rolling the back, and making peace with those who don't.

00:49:02.000 That's basically the division.

00:49:04.000 You have to make a division.

00:49:05.000 The Emirates want to have peace with you.

00:49:07.000 The Bahrainis want to have peace with you.

00:49:09.000 I believe the Saudi Arabia.

00:49:10.000 Saudi Arabia wants to have peace with us.

00:49:11.000 We've already made peace with Egypt and Jordan.

00:49:14.000 Make peace with those who don't want to destroy you and roll back those who do.

00:49:19.000 Hamas wants to destroy us.

00:49:20.000 Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority, the other wing of the Palestinian people, they are They're committed not to destroying Israel with terror, at least not in the first instance, but for the gradual dissolution of the Jewish state. 0.97

00:49:39.000 So that's why we can't make peace with them.

00:49:40.000 We can't make peace with them because they don't want an Israel. 1.00

00:49:42.000 They want a peace without Israel. 0.99

00:49:44.000 You divide your policies based on what can realistically be achieved.

00:49:49.000 And my view is that with those who don't want to destroy it and those who do want to destroy it, You have to be very, very strong.

00:49:58.000 If you're strong, you have at least a state of non-belligerence with the people, with the movements like Hamas.

00:50:07.000 And if you're strong, you can make peace with those who are willing to make peace.

00:50:12.000 And that's what we've done.

00:50:13.000 That's what the Abraham Accords are. 0.98

00:50:14.000 It's a change.

00:50:15.000 It's a complete change of the view that says, no, you have to give the Palestinians who wish to see the end of Israel, give them the hills above Tel Aviv from which they can see the sea into which they want to push us into.

00:50:27.000 I mean, it's crazy.

00:50:29.000 But that was the regular view.

00:50:30.000 It's changed.

00:50:31.000 You know, this country is different from what you saw 20 years ago.

00:50:34.000 It's different.

00:50:35.000 The skyline in Tel Aviv is different.

00:50:37.000 You've got free markets, free marketeers all over the place.

00:50:40.000 You've got... You've got... This is something that's really going to shock you.

00:50:46.000 Okay?

00:50:47.000 We have, they just published in one of these business magazines, the greatest concentration of billionaires per capita in the world.

00:50:57.000 Number one is Hong Kong.

00:50:59.000 I suspect that's going to change.

00:51:01.000 And number two is Israel. 0.51

00:51:03.000 20 years ago, that wasn't the case.

00:51:05.000 But since then, you had this multiplication of high-tech entrepreneurs and so on.

00:51:10.000 And the other thing is people will tell you, you know, Critics on the left, they'll say, oh yeah, but inequality went up.

00:51:18.000 You know, it's the rich got richer, the poor got poorer.

00:51:21.000 No, actually it's the opposite.

00:51:23.000 Because we changed the welfare laws here and so on and people went to work, the poor got richer.

00:51:29.000 And in fact, the inequality in Israel Initially went up as we did our market reforms and then went down, down, down, down, down and set a 20-year low.

00:51:40.000 So Israel became a very rich country and a more egalitarian country.

00:51:45.000 Without curtailing competition, without curtailing the enterprise.

00:51:48.000 It's the opposite.

00:51:50.000 Free markets and social welfare go together with the right policies.

00:51:53.000 That was my policy.

00:51:55.000 So when it comes to the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo Accords, so very early on you were obviously a critic of the Oslo Accords.

00:52:01.000 I think the failure of Oslo has been demonstrated over the course of the last, most of my lifetime, over the course of the last 30 years.

00:52:08.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:52:08.000 I mean, I was only, I was only, I think, 11, 10, 11 when the Oslo Accords were signed.

00:52:13.000 The failure of the Oslo Accords is pretty apparent to everyone given the fact that these so-called peace partners just don't exist and probably never existed and were sort of a figment of the collective imagination of many people on the Israeli left.

00:52:26.000 So, you know, Given that fact, given the fact that the geography of Israel, for people who have never visited, everything in Israel is extraordinarily close together.

00:52:33.000 Ramallah is essentially within the eyeline of Jerusalem.

00:52:36.000 Is there any plausible long-term, mid-term solution?

00:52:40.000 That's actually developed in the plan that we discussed with President Trump, and I think it's a realistic one.

00:52:40.000 Sure.

00:52:48.000 It basically says this, okay?

00:52:50.000 Palestinians in the Palestinian areas can govern themselves.

00:52:53.000 They can have their parliament, their representatives, Executive can have their flag and they can have their national anthem.

00:53:03.000 But there are certain sovereign powers they can't have.

00:53:05.000 The rule is simple.

00:53:06.000 They can have all the powers to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten us.

00:53:11.000 Now, that means that, for example, in the tiny area, and you're right, it's a tiny area, Israel and the Palestinian areas together is the Washington Beltway, more or less, okay? 0.82

00:53:21.000 It's a tiny country.

00:53:21.000 That's it, okay?

00:53:23.000 Okay, tiny area.

00:53:24.000 So, west of the Jordan River, Which is the boundary line.

00:53:30.000 And to the Mediterranean, where we were both sandwiched in.

00:53:33.000 Israel, and Israel alone, controls security.

00:53:37.000 We control the airspace.

00:53:39.000 We control the ground security.

00:53:42.000 Underground security, in case they want to do tunnels and electromagnetic space, you name it.

00:53:46.000 Israel alone.

00:53:47.000 Well, I said that over the years.

00:53:49.000 And I said, when people were talking about the vision for peace, I said, There are certain sovereign powers, the most important one being security, we control.

00:53:58.000 And so my friends, including some who run the United States, said to me, but maybe that's not a sovereign country.

00:54:05.000 I said, maybe so, but that's what is going to be there because we're not going to commit suicide for an op-ed, a favorable op-ed in the New York Times.

00:54:16.000 It won't last more than five minutes anyway.

00:54:18.000 We're not going to die for an illusory opinion.

00:54:22.000 Now, Some of my American colleagues, for example, Secretary of State John Kerry, whom I said this to, said, you know, we can take care of that.

00:54:32.000 We can make sure you can withdraw your security forces from Judea Samaria, the West Bank, as they call it, because we will train the local Palestinian forces to fight the Islamic radicals. 0.97

00:54:51.000 John Kerry brought General Allen, John Allen, to show me a plan how this can be done.

00:55:00.000 I was sitting there with our then Defense Minister, and they explained it, and we were skeptical, naturally.

00:55:07.000 And so John, who's been a close friend, by the way, he said, well, maybe I can prove to you that we can do it.

00:55:14.000 I want to take you on a clandestine visit to Afghanistan, and you will see how we train the Afghan forces to deal with the Taliban.

00:55:23.000 And I said, John, I guarantee you this, the minute you leave Afghanistan, it will take at most days, no more than days, for the Taliban to sweep all these American trained forces that you have.

00:55:39.000 And we're not going to take that risk.

00:55:40.000 We're not going to withdraw our military from Judea and Samaria and have the Islamists, the Iranians, Hamas take over. 1.00

00:55:50.000 So the real piece that we could have is let them have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers to threaten us security first, before anything else stays with us.

00:56:01.000 By the way, not only for us.

00:56:03.000 It's for them.

00:56:04.000 Because the Hamas would overtake the Palestinian Authority in two seconds, which is what happened when we left Gaza. 0.97

00:56:09.000 We're not going to do that again.

00:56:10.000 It's not a perfect piece, but it's the most, the best thing that you could have.

00:56:15.000 So I want to ask you about another threat that Israel faces.

00:56:18.000 This obviously was an issue that kind of missed the radar in a lot of the West, but was a huge issue here in Israel.

00:56:23.000 That was Israeli Arabs being radicalized enough to actually riot in Lod during the last crisis with Hamas.

00:56:28.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

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00:57:39.000 So let's talk about one of the key issues that has cropped up for the domestic Israeli population, all Israelis, and that is the problem of radicalization of the Arab population inside of Israel.

00:57:49.000 So during this last coalition government, which lasted approximately a year, I was frankly shocked that it lasted that long.

00:57:55.000 The big kind of pitch to the world is that there was an Arab party that was part of the coalition, the Ram party.

00:58:00.000 And then, of course, the Ra'am party refused to vote in favor of the continuing application of military rule to Jewish settlements, so-called settlements in the West Bank, places like Efrat that have 30,000 citizens.

00:58:12.000 And the coalition government fell based on that.

00:58:15.000 There's been a lot of talk for a long time in the West about the treatment of Arabs inside of Israel.

00:58:19.000 The fact is that, obviously, an Arab party did sit in, there are several Arab parties, actually, in Knesset.

00:58:24.000 There was one that was a member of the coalition.

00:58:26.000 The radicalization of the Israeli Arab population is of increasing concern.

00:58:30.000 During the last Gaza conflict, one of the biggest problems was this massive riot that happened in Lod, in which there were literally Israeli Arabs walking around attempting to burn synagogues.

00:58:38.000 What can be done to fight this?

00:58:40.000 I mean, listen, I'm a relative stranger to Israel.

00:58:43.000 As I say, I've only visited here four times, but you can sense that there's a massive difference between The Israeli-Arab portions of Jerusalem, for example, and the Jewish areas of Jerusalem.

00:58:52.000 If I'm walking around in Mamilla, there are many Israeli-Arabs who are walking around unmolested. 1.00

00:58:57.000 If I were to walk with my family, wearing my yarmulke, down to the Damascus Gate, it would be a serious security problem.

00:59:03.000 So how exactly is that gap bridgeable?

00:59:05.000 Well, first of all, correction.

00:59:06.000 The Iran party, you say, was against the An item that you mentioned.

00:59:12.000 The Iran party is the Muslim Brotherhood party.

00:59:16.000 They have a governing council, a Shura council, that is of the Muslim Brotherhood, okay?

00:59:21.000 And the Muslim Brotherhood supports Hamas and many other radicals.

00:59:27.000 And there are no countries in the Middle East with the exception of Turkey and Qatar.

00:59:30.000 All the Arab countries ban the Muslim Brotherhood.

00:59:33.000 What happened in the last government in order to eke out a majority The government that promised not to do this, the people who came into power, promised that they wouldn't go with the Muslim Brotherhood, and they promptly violated that promise and brought them into the government, which is unbelievable because they're against the Jewish state. 0.94

00:59:53.000 They're against Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

00:59:57.000 That's their professed ideology.

00:59:58.000 Sometimes they deliver it in a soft-spoken manner, but that's it.

01:00:02.000 They gave him tons of money, 50 billion shekels, an enormous amount of money, some of it going through NGOs that are associated with Hamas.

01:00:09.000 It's insane.

01:00:10.000 I mean, this was such a violation, not only of campaign promises, but of just common sense.

01:00:18.000 You can't do that.

01:00:20.000 And that obviously raised expectations of the more radical wing in the Israeli Arab population.

01:00:28.000 And that expressed itself in these, in many manifestations that you're talking about.

01:00:33.000 But there's no question, there is a race in the Middle East as a whole, and a race inside Israel, between what I call are the modernists and the medievalists.

01:00:42.000 Okay, the medievalists wanna take you back to militant Islam to really a dark period in the history of the world. 0.92

01:00:50.000 And the modernists want to be incorporated in the modern state of Israel to partake of the extraordinary success that you see around you.

01:00:57.000 And they have doctors, they have nurses, they have pharmacologists, they have high-tech entrepreneurs.

01:01:02.000 They want to be there.

01:01:03.000 The other guys want to take them back, okay, and dissolve the state of Israel or destroy it.

01:01:09.000 And we have to make sure that the modernists win out over the medievalists. 0.76

01:01:13.000 My government, you'd be surprised to know, gave an enormous amount of money.

01:01:20.000 Wasn't doing it for votes, I did it because I believe in this, in helping the right side in this battle.

01:01:26.000 Enormous amount of money, about 30, 25 billion dollars, billion shekels, okay?

01:01:31.000 But I gave it not to NGOs, Hamas NGOs.

01:01:34.000 I invested in roads, in infrastructure, in education, in the Arab communities.

01:01:40.000 And I'm a good guy, right?

01:01:42.000 By the way, you'd be surprised, I received about 10% of the Arab vote.

01:01:46.000 Okay.

01:01:46.000 Actually, today in the recent polls I received, the Likud under me receives more Arab votes than all the Jewish parties together.

01:01:53.000 Okay.

01:01:54.000 Why?

01:01:55.000 Because many of them want to be a part of this modernization and this success story.

01:02:00.000 And I think if you ask me, what is the answer to that?

01:02:04.000 I think, yeah, beefing up security against the radicals and against the, you know, against lawbreakers is important.

01:02:10.000 But equally important is you want to You want to move them into help as much as you can to give them enterprise, opportunity, education, law and order that they want in their communities.

01:02:24.000 And that's the program that I began and the program that, God willing, I'll continue when I get in.

01:02:30.000 It's a big battle, but it's the same battle you see in the Middle East.

01:02:33.000 It's Iran and in Iraq and in Syria and in Yemen, as opposed to what is happening in the Gulf. 0.60

01:02:39.000 Look at what happened in the Gulf.

01:02:41.000 Look at what happened there.

01:02:42.000 I mean, it's a fantastic example of enterprise and initiative.

01:02:46.000 It just changed the whole way people think about the Arab world.

01:02:50.000 The Arab world has to go there and not to Yemen, okay? 0.91

01:02:56.000 And Israeli Arabs have to go to Here to what you see around you and not to Yemen. 1.00

01:03:02.000 So I want to ask you some questions about the state of the West more broadly, because obviously Israel is a key player in the West in many ways, the tip of the sphere in a very unfriendly place in the world.

01:03:12.000 But it seems like the international left is obviously increasingly anti-Israel, not just in America, but sort of generally speaking, whether it's Jeremy Corbyn and formerly the head of the Labour Party in the UK.

01:03:24.000 Or in multiple parties across Europe.

01:03:26.000 It seems as though a lot of the ire against Israel is not directed against Israel per se, it's directed against nationalism more broadly.

01:03:32.000 The idea that there should be a nation as part of a nation-state, which I think underlies a lot of the rage about the fact that Israel passed a nation-state law, recognizing that Israel is a Jewish state, which is what it always said that it was.

01:03:44.000 With equal rights to everyone, non-Jews. 0.99

01:03:46.000 The only thing that, you know what the nation-state, the Jewish state means?

01:03:50.000 That any Jew can come to Israel.

01:03:53.000 Automatically.

01:03:54.000 That's really the main thing that it means.

01:03:56.000 Because for thousands of years, or almost 2,000 years, a little less, we were absolutely stateless and countryless, and we paid the biggest price that any people paid in the history of mankind.

01:03:56.000 Why?

01:04:08.000 Humanity, as we say today, okay?

01:04:10.000 All right?

01:04:11.000 So, you know, if you're a Jew and you don't have a place to go, you can come to Israel.

01:04:16.000 That's what the nation-state means.

01:04:18.000 Inside, everyone's the same.

01:04:20.000 Everyone is the same.

01:04:21.000 There are no differences.

01:04:23.000 Equal under the law.

01:04:24.000 So, when you talk about the Jewish state... And that's the only place, by the way, where Arabs enjoy equality under the law, because the rest are non-democracies. 0.98

01:04:32.000 And when people condemned Israel as an apartheid state, what are you talking about?

01:04:37.000 If you're a Christian, Or you're a homosexual? 0.85

01:04:39.000 Or you're a woman? 1.00

01:04:41.000 In the Arab societies, in the Palestinian areas, you live in medieval times. 0.75

01:04:45.000 You know, in Hamas, people go to support Hamas.

01:04:48.000 Hamas executes people who deviate from the strict rule that they impose, including the Quranic rule.

01:04:55.000 What are you talking about?

01:04:56.000 Israel is the beacon of democracy.

01:04:58.000 Attacked, defending itself, maintaining a democracy inside, the rule of law.

01:05:04.000 Equality?

01:05:06.000 Are these people mad in the answers?

01:05:09.000 Yeah, they're quite mad. 0.72

01:05:10.000 They're quite mad.

01:05:10.000 It's so obvious.

01:05:11.000 And you know who understands that best?

01:05:13.000 The Arabs.

01:05:15.000 The Arabs understand it.

01:05:17.000 The Arabs around Israel. 0.92

01:05:18.000 You know, I have fan clubs in the Emirates and in Saudi Arabia.

01:05:23.000 Well, that's interesting because they understand it too.

01:05:25.000 They want a better life.

01:05:27.000 It is fascinating how Israel has become sort of the point of contention here.

01:05:30.000 There's no other state on earth where people actually have a conversation about whether it ought to exist or not.

01:05:34.000 Israel seems to be the only one.

01:05:35.000 And in terms of sort of what people will accuse Israel of ethnic solidarity, despite the fact that, again, Jews are quite diverse.

01:05:42.000 You have Ethiopian Jews, you have Moroccan Jews like my wife. 0.99

01:05:45.000 Some apartheid.

01:05:46.000 I brought tens of thousands of I personally brought tens of thousands of black Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. 0.97

01:05:52.000 I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.

01:05:54.000 But if you ask me what is the genesis of the progressive left's antipathy to Israel, it's their antipathy to certain Western values that we hold dear.

01:06:07.000 You talk about nationalism, which by itself is not negative and quite positive.

01:06:14.000 It helps build, you know, communities.

01:06:16.000 It's like, are families bad?

01:06:19.000 Are families bad?

01:06:21.000 You think families are bad?

01:06:22.000 Why?

01:06:23.000 You have, hey, come on, you're preferring your children to other children.

01:06:26.000 That's bad.

01:06:27.000 Okay.

01:06:28.000 Well, we know human society is organized around families and the families are organized around nation states and the nation states, like families, can cooperate with one another.

01:06:37.000 Or, unfortunately, because human nature is not uniform, they're bad people and they're bad nations. 0.78

01:06:43.000 Well, you have to fight the bad and promote the good, right?

01:06:46.000 That conception of how we organize the world is very different than the progressive left.

01:06:52.000 And I think in many ways they hate Israel because they hate America.

01:06:56.000 All right?

01:06:58.000 Now, if you hate America, you're gonna hate Israel.

01:07:00.000 If you love America, you're gonna like Israel. 1.00

01:07:02.000 And you know who believes that?

01:07:04.000 The Islamists. 0.97

01:07:05.000 I mean, what does Iran say?

01:07:07.000 It says, when they attack Israel, they say, we are you, we are you.

01:07:11.000 That means Americans.

01:07:13.000 Israelis are Americans and Americans are Israelis.

01:07:16.000 In a broad way, they're right.

01:07:20.000 These are the values of freedom, of democracy, of individual choice, of pluralism.

01:07:27.000 These ideas are things that are completely anathema to them.

01:07:30.000 They want this regimented medieval world.

01:07:33.000 And in a peculiar way, the association So, in a second, I want to ask you a few final questions, particularly about your brand new memoir, which is coming out, which is really exciting.

01:07:42.000 I want to ask you about that.

01:07:43.000 Jews in attacking anything that's not only Israelis but also anything that's Western. 0.95

01:07:48.000 It's crazy.

01:07:49.000 So in a second I want to ask you a few final questions, particularly about your brand new memoir which is coming out which is really exciting.

01:07:55.000 I want to ask you about that.

01:07:56.000 I want to ask you also about what Judaism means in a Jewish state, how much should religion play into the governance and that sort of thing.

01:08:03.000 If you want to hear the Prime Minister's answers.

01:08:04.000 Daily Wire member. Head on over to dailywire.com slash Sunday. You can click that link in the episode description. Use code Ben for 25% off. Hear the rest of our conversation over there.

01:08:04.000 Global economic crisis.

01:08:13.000 Well, before we talk about that, I just want to say that we're in the midst of a global crisis, global economic crisis. And I think that the advantage that we have in Israel, it's a small country, so you can be a nimble mammal.

01:08:29.000 Among the dinosaurs.

01:08:31.000 And you can weave out of conflict, extricate yourself from economic crisis very quickly.

01:08:38.000 In 2003, when we had the aftermath of the dot-com collapse, I made this huge program that I talked to you about.

01:08:45.000 Fat Man, Thin Man, these 80 or more reforms that got Israel first out and produced this spectacular group. 0.84

01:08:54.000 Then in 2008, 9, when I came in, we had the subprime global crisis.

01:09:00.000 And you know what I did there?

01:09:03.000 Actually the opposite.

01:09:05.000 Because our banks were conservative and we weren't at risk.

01:09:11.000 And I decided to, instead of bailing out companies left and right, I said, well, I'd be bailing out failed companies.

01:09:18.000 Why should I do that?

01:09:19.000 So I went on a much more modest way and gave loan guarantees, very measured.

01:09:25.000 So if you're a failing company, you didn't get the benefit and didn't get the incentive to continue to fail.

01:09:29.000 And we got out of that one first in the world.

01:09:31.000 Then in 2020, when we had the COVID crisis, it wasn't only a health crisis, which we also got out first in the world.

01:09:37.000 But it was an economic crisis.

01:09:39.000 There we had very cheap credit.

01:09:40.000 So I gave a lot of companies that didn't fail, that were just hit by COVID, lifted them out.

01:09:47.000 And I think that there is a way to deal with the global inflation problem in a way that Israel uniquely is able to do.

01:09:55.000 And I'm keeping that for my election.

01:09:56.000 I'll tell you.

01:09:58.000 Well, that is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

01:10:01.000 You should check out his brand new memoir.

01:10:02.000 BB is not out yet, but when it is, it's going to be a must-buy.

01:10:05.000 Prime Minister, it's an honor to sit with you.

01:10:06.000 Thank you.

01:10:07.000 Good to talk to you.

01:10:09.000 I'm Matt.

01:10:10.000 I'll see you next time.

01:10:11.000 Bye.

01:10:12.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Mathis Weber.

01:10:20.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boren.

01:10:22.000 Production manager, Brandon McGuire.

01:10:24.000 Associate producer, Savannah Dominguez-Morris.

01:10:26.000 Editing is by Jim Nichol.

01:10:28.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Genta.

01:10:30.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

01:10:32.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe is by Fabiola Cristina.

01:10:35.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:10:37.000 Production coordinator, Jessica Kranz.

01:10:39.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 14, 2022

Benjamin Netanyahu | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 130

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