The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 311. Does Israel have the Right to Exist？｜ PM-Elect Benjamin Netanyahu

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00:00:57.420 Hello everybody watching and listening.

00:01:11.400 I have, I'm always excited to talk to the guests that I'm talking to, which is why I bring them on the podcast to begin with.

00:01:19.360 But today, we have something that I think is unique.

00:01:23.100 I'm going to be speaking with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was recently re-elected as Prime Minister of Israel.

00:01:30.660 This is a very interesting development as far as I'm concerned.

00:01:34.040 It's the first time I've had the opportunity to speak with someone who is a sitting head of state, or soon will be.

00:01:39.600 And I think the reason that that's relevant and worthy of note is because it's one of the markers for the development of a new kind of political dialogue.

00:01:51.240 We're in a situation now where it's possible to sit with a political leader and have a genuine conversation for a long period of time, we'll go at least 90 minutes, unscripted, so that there's no soundbite quality or editing to it.

00:02:10.240 You just get the unvarnished words of someone who's in a position to make decisions that affect all of us.

00:02:21.800 And so, I'm very excited about this.

00:02:24.180 I'll read the bio and then we'll go on to the interview.

00:02:28.680 Benjamin Netanyahu, as I said, was recently re-elected as Prime Minister of Israel.

00:02:34.220 Having previously served in the office from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021.

00:02:42.980 From 1967 to 1972, he served as a soldier and commander in Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit of the Israel Defense Forces.

00:02:54.380 A graduate of MIT, he served as Israel's ambassador to the UN from 84 to 88,

00:03:00.040 before being elected to the Israeli parliament as a member of the Likud party in 1988.

00:03:06.960 He has published five previous books on terrorism and Israel's quest for peace and security.

00:03:13.840 He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Sarah.

00:03:16.620 In his newest book, Bibi, My Story, the newly re-elected Prime Minister,

00:03:21.840 tells the story of his family, his people, his path to leadership,

00:03:26.280 and his unceasing commitment to defending his country and securing its future.

00:03:32.040 Hello, Prime Minister Netanyahu.

00:03:34.040 Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me tonight.

00:03:37.320 I've been reading your book, your new book, Bibi, My Story.

00:03:40.700 And it weaves an interesting personal tale, familial tale, and political-cultural tale all together.

00:03:50.180 And there is one particular element of it I wanted to begin discussing with you that's, I think, of broad interest.

00:03:58.720 One of the things I realized when I was reading was just how ignorant I am in some fundamental sense

00:04:04.160 about the history of the development of the Jewish state of Israel.

00:04:08.200 And I know that there is tremendous constant noise about issues as fundamental as Israel's right to exist, even.

00:04:18.780 And you start by talking about, in your book, you embark on explaining that, at least in some part,

00:04:27.020 by talking about Herzl and his terror that anti-Semitism, that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe

00:04:34.680 was going to cause a catastrophe, which was obviously a justified terror.

00:04:38.200 Would you be kind enough to walk me and my viewers and listeners through your rationale for the moral justification for Israel,

00:04:48.320 the political justification as well?

00:04:49.820 And I'm going to do what I can to my limited ability, let's say, to push back.

00:04:55.180 I've heard the arguments of often young people who are more prone to give credence and sympathy,

00:05:05.320 say, to the Palestinian viewpoint.

00:05:07.080 And I'd like to rectify my ignorance and maybe help my viewers and listeners do the same thing.

00:05:12.500 So would it be useful to start with Herzl?

00:05:15.340 Well, I'd actually, I'd start.

00:05:17.700 Herzl was what I call our modern Moses. 0.98

00:05:20.040 Moses, but I'd actually start with the original Moses.

00:05:23.720 The Jewish people have lived in the land of Israel, what is now the state of Israel,

00:05:29.840 have lived here and have been attached to this place for about 3,500 years, three and a half millennia.

00:05:38.580 Now, for the first two millennia, roughly, of that time,

00:05:41.480 we were living in what is described in a text commonly known as the Bible.

00:05:47.700 So the Bible describes how the Jewish people lived on this land,

00:05:51.400 were attached to this land, fought off conquerors,

00:05:54.200 sometimes were conquered, but stayed on their land.

00:05:56.360 And that continued for a very long time until roughly the 6th, 7th century, actually,

00:06:04.180 after the birth of Christ, okay?

00:06:07.420 Roughly for 2,000 years.

00:06:08.860 We were conquered by the Romans, we were conquered by the Byzantines. 0.72

00:06:13.120 They did a lot of bad things to us, but they didn't really exile us,

00:06:17.780 contrary to what people think, okay?

00:06:19.920 The loss of our land actually occurred when the Arab conquests took place in the 7th century.

00:06:28.000 The Arabs burst out from Arabia, and they did something that no other conquered,

00:06:32.400 not the Romans, not the Byzantines, not the Greeks before them, 0.68

00:06:35.280 not Alexander the Great, nobody did before.

00:06:37.740 They actually started taking over the land of the Jewish farmer.

00:06:42.920 They brought in military colonies that took over the land. 0.89

00:06:46.160 And gradually, over the next two centuries, the Jews became a minority in our land.

00:06:51.720 So it is under the Arab conquest that the Jews lost their homeland.

00:06:56.720 The Arabs were the colonials. 1.00

00:06:58.440 The Jews were the natives dispossessed.

00:07:00.660 Well, that happens in history.

00:07:01.840 The Jews were dispossessed.

00:07:03.660 We were flung to the far corners of the earth, suffered unimaginable suffering because we had no homeland.

00:07:11.800 But we didn't disappear, and we never gave up the dream of coming back to our ancestral homeland.

00:07:18.000 So generation after generation, the Jews could be in Warsaw, they could be in Yemen, they could be in China. 0.60

00:07:26.180 And they said, next year in Jerusalem, we'll come back next year in Jerusalem.

00:07:30.100 Well, that was made possible because the Arabs who had conquered the land basically left it barren. 0.99

00:07:37.180 They never made it their own.

00:07:38.860 It was a barren land.

00:07:40.020 It really had, practically, it was an empty land.

00:07:42.940 And in the 19th century, the idea of coming back next year in Jerusalem became a reality.

00:07:48.820 By the way, in part because of Christian Zionist support for the idea of the great return.

00:07:54.160 The Jews came back in the 19th century to the land of Israel.

00:07:58.100 The result of this return was that we started building farms, factories, places of employment.

00:08:03.900 But Arabs from nearby countries started emigrating, and they now became, they called themselves Palestinians.

00:08:10.640 They reconstructed history and said, we've been here for centuries.

00:08:13.880 No, they haven't.

00:08:14.860 They weren't there at all, and they didn't have a national consciousness.

00:08:17.760 We came back, made it our land, and we said, okay, we now will live together.

00:08:22.440 We decided to establish a state in 1948.

00:08:25.920 That's 75 years ago.

00:08:28.200 And we said, everybody can live here.

00:08:30.880 The Arabs said, there can't be a Jewish state.

00:08:32.620 You have no right to be here.

00:08:34.160 It's our land.

00:08:35.060 It's not your land.

00:08:36.220 It's been our land for 3,500 years.

00:08:38.820 If you took over somebody's apartment, knocked them out, dispossessed them, and they never gave up the claim.

00:08:46.520 They said, it's our claim.

00:08:47.560 And you left this barren dump, okay? 0.99

00:08:50.180 And the families, the progeny of the people you kicked out, came back, rebuilt the house.

00:08:59.040 You cannot come back and tell them, you don't belong here.

00:09:01.900 We're going to kick you out, especially since you're latecomers who've come to live in part of the house, which is what the so-called Palestinians are, okay? 1.00

00:09:10.500 We say to them, you can live here.

00:09:12.040 We can live here.

00:09:12.740 But it's our land.

00:09:13.740 But it's our land.

00:09:14.680 It's our state.

00:09:15.720 And the reason this conflict continues is because the Palestinians, who represent the colonial powers, the Arab conquest of the Middle East and beyond, they're saying, you have no right for a Jewish state.

00:09:30.300 Well, we do.

00:09:31.200 If any people has any right to a state, if any people never gave up their dreams of returning to their ancestral home, if any people rebuilt their home from nothing, from barren, wasted land, it's the Jewish people. 0.97

00:09:44.360 To tell them, you have suffered more than anyone else.

00:09:48.320 You have never lost your dream of coming back and rebuilding your national life in your ancestral homeland.

00:09:54.740 You have no right to be there.

00:09:56.260 But the Arabs who are trying to destroy you, they have that right. 1.00

00:09:59.840 That is a complete perversion of history and also a complete perversion of justice. 0.89

00:10:04.620 The Jews belong to this land.

00:10:06.660 This land belongs to the Jews. 0.98

00:10:07.980 The Palestinians are free to live here next to us, among us, but they're not free to demand the dissolution of the Jewish state.

00:10:15.560 That is not justice.

00:10:16.880 That is injustice.

00:10:18.420 That's the shortest lecture I can give you about Jewish history.

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00:11:58.080 So you, so why do you think the claim that the Palestinians were somehow there in Israel first and have been displaced in a colonial occupation, let's say, by the Jews,

00:12:19.560 why do you think that idea has gained such cachet, not least in the West?

00:12:25.140 Because of ignorance? I mean, what do you mean they were here first?

00:12:28.960 You know, you're familiar with the story of Jesus, right?

00:12:32.680 Jesus was a Jewish rabbi living here 2,000 years ago.

00:12:36.940 He was a rabbi from the Galilee, okay?

00:12:39.020 He came to Jerusalem.

00:12:40.080 He turned the money tables of the, the tables of the money changers on the Temple Mount.

00:12:45.440 Where did that happen?

00:12:46.520 Did it happen in Tibet?

00:12:47.900 It happened here.

00:12:48.880 Jerusalem was our capital.

00:12:50.140 King David made it our capital 3,000 years ago. 0.97

00:12:52.920 So the Jews are here to try to, to say that they weren't here and that the Palestinians were here thousands of years ago is ridiculous.

00:13:01.140 Anybody, you know, anybody who can, you can actually Google this and, and find out how absurd this thing is.

00:13:07.560 So as far as reinventing ancient history, that is, that is unpardonable because anybody can find out and understand that the Jews were here for thousands of years,

00:13:17.640 the Palestinians weren't here. 0.90

00:13:18.780 As far as modern times are concerned, what the Palestinians have said is, oh, and I write this in my book and I show it because it's so comical. 1.00

00:13:29.180 What, what they say is we were here, Palestine was a verdant land in the 19th century, teaming with, you know, with the Palestinians until the Jews came in, took it over and threw it out.

00:13:42.260 Okay, well, that's what Arafat effectively said in his infamous speech in the United Nations, blaming Zionism, equating Zionism with racism.

00:13:53.500 Well, there's only one problem with that.

00:13:54.980 He said that the Jewish invasion of this verdant Palestinian homeland happened in 1881.

00:14:01.720 Okay, the problem with that is that 12 years before, a famous visitor, among hundreds of visitors, named Mark Twain, visited the Holy Land.

00:14:12.280 And he describes a totally different picture.

00:14:15.840 He describes Palestine, I'm quoting him, is a vast wasteland. 1.00

00:14:20.100 He said, only imagination can grace this barren land with the pomp of circumstance and life.

00:14:26.680 It's just, he said, we travel for a whole day, we didn't see, in the Galilee, we didn't see a human being, one single human being.

00:14:34.840 He said, Jerusalem sits in sackcloth and ashes.

00:14:38.220 And as he was saying that, it's the Jewish return that began, the Jewish return that began building the land.

00:14:44.100 Well, perhaps one could argue, it's obvious that Mark Twain was not in the service of the Jewish state because it didn't exist.

00:14:52.580 He wasn't in the service of the Jewish lobby because there wasn't any Jewish lobby.

00:14:56.140 He was just reporting what was there.

00:14:58.480 Could there possibly have been a tremendous influx of Palestinians between 1869 and 1881, the year that Arafat says the Jewish invasion began and destroyed the Palestinian paradise?

00:15:14.080 Well, alas, no.

00:15:15.520 Because in the year 1881, another famous visitor visits Israel, and he writes, visits this land.

00:15:22.840 And he writes also his memoirs, okay?

00:15:25.080 His name was Arthur Penran Stanley.

00:15:27.580 He was a very famous, very famous courtier of Queen Victoria's court, okay?

00:15:33.840 And he came here on a special visit.

00:15:35.820 And he says, I look south and I look north.

00:15:38.840 He says, I'm in Judea.

00:15:40.060 And I see nothing.

00:15:41.420 He says, a barren expanse.

00:15:43.060 And they both express, both Twain and Arthur Penran Stanley say the same thing.

00:15:48.400 When, when, oh, when will the Jews come back and bring this land to life? 1.00

00:15:53.520 And the answer is, right then.

00:15:55.580 We came back, brought it back to life.

00:15:57.920 There were Arabs living here, but it was, as I say, a barren wasteland. 1.00

00:16:01.880 But Arabs began to immigrate naturally because we created a rise in the standard of living that attracted Arabs from neighboring states.

00:16:10.600 Those Arabs are now those, the descendants of those Arabs who migrated as a result of the Jewish return. 1.00

00:16:17.360 Many of them now are considered Palestinians.

00:16:20.540 So what I'm saying, and I'm saying this to you, Jordan, and to your audience, there has been a complete fabrication of history.

00:16:28.160 It's the biggest lie of the big lies that have permeated the 20th century and the 21st century,

00:16:34.700 is to say that the Arabs were here before.

00:16:37.040 That is, the Palestinians were here before the Jews when we were here for thousands of years.

00:16:41.100 That we are the colonials when, in fact, it was the Arabs who were the colonials who dispossessed the original natives, and that is the Jews. 0.89

00:16:48.540 That we came back to this land that was laid barren by the Arab conquest, brought it back to life, 1.00

00:16:55.320 and allowed Arab immigration, what we call now Palestinian immigration, to come back in.

00:16:59.860 And now they say to us, in unimaginable chutzpah, you know, they say, you don't belong here.

00:17:06.640 They recreate ancient history.

00:17:08.340 They recreate modern history.

00:17:09.620 And this is a lot of hokum. 0.98

00:17:12.600 It's ridiculous. 0.98

00:17:13.740 It's absurd. 0.84

00:17:14.900 Well, some of it also seems to be, I would say, technically speaking, something like a time frame problem.

00:17:23.520 I mean, you said the Arabs came in in the 7th century, and that's a long time ago.

00:17:28.620 And so from the 7th century to now, you might think of that as being a time frame long enough to allow for a valid claim of sovereignty ownership.

00:17:39.620 But the Jews rejoinder is, well, we have a much older claim than that, one that spans 3,500 years.

00:17:46.940 And the problem I have with that conceptually, and then I'll get to some other issues that are relevant to this,

00:17:51.720 is that it's not exactly obvious what time frame of analysis should be primary.

00:17:59.900 You have a very important point.

00:18:00.660 And I don't really know how to solve that.

00:18:02.140 I do.

00:18:02.660 I do.

00:18:03.160 And I'll answer your question.

00:18:04.220 It's a valid question.

00:18:05.020 If the Arabs, having conquered the land in the 7th century and dispossessed the Jews over the next two centuries, 0.96

00:18:13.080 the Jewish farmers kicked them out and so on, if they establish a viable state, a viable national identity there and so on, you're right. 1.00

00:18:21.480 You know, these things happen in history.

00:18:23.660 You're supplanted by another people. 0.97

00:18:25.380 Fine.

00:18:25.960 But that's not what happened.

00:18:27.680 The Arab conquerors themselves were replaced by other—first of all, they did nothing with the land. 0.99

00:18:32.240 It's just barren. 0.76

00:18:33.080 They actually built one town, one town.

00:18:34.800 It's called Ramleh. 0.96

00:18:35.640 That's it.

00:18:36.680 You know, hundreds and hundreds of Jewish biblical sites and hundreds and thousands of—hundreds of new sites that we built.

00:18:45.020 The Arabs built one place, one town called Ramleh.

00:18:47.980 That's it.

00:18:48.660 So they did nothing with the land.

00:18:50.620 Then they were replaced by other conquerors.

00:18:53.200 Other conquerors came in.

00:18:54.240 The Mamluks, the Ottomans, ultimately the British, a series of conquerors. 0.99

00:18:59.980 In other words, they took over the land, lost the land, and did nothing with the land.

00:19:05.000 So if they had done what you say, if they had created, if that house that we were expelled from was taken over by another people, another family,

00:19:14.160 they built a family there, they had children, grandchildren, they extended the porch, they built a parking garage and so on, it's gone.

00:19:21.560 What can you do?

00:19:22.140 You still have the ability to demand reclamations, compensation, and so on.

00:19:28.420 But, you know, tough luck.

00:19:30.080 That happens in history.

00:19:31.120 But that's not what happened.

00:19:33.100 Once the Jews were conquered by the Arabs, the Arabs did nothing with it, lost the land to others. 0.59

00:19:38.020 Now we come back and bring it back to life, 13 centuries later, and perform this miracle, and they fabricate a history where we were there all the time.

00:19:49.200 It was a verdant homeland.

00:19:50.740 It was built up.

00:19:51.720 It was nothing of the kind.

00:19:53.260 It was desert.

00:19:54.640 It was nothing.

00:19:55.460 Now, it's not merely Mark Twain and Arthur Penran Stanley who say that.

00:19:59.620 Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of travelogues over the centuries of famous French poets, of Swiss travelers, of German theologians, everybody, of poets, writers, travelers, who describe exactly the same thing.

00:20:16.060 There was nothing there.

00:20:17.980 There was no Palestinian state.

00:20:19.400 There were no Palestinians.

00:20:20.460 They didn't even, the Arabs even didn't call themselves that.

00:20:23.200 They were calling themselves parts of southern Syria, whatever.

00:20:26.940 There was no national consciousness.

00:20:28.780 There was nothing to form the consciousness about.

00:20:31.060 In the 20th century, the Arab world and the Palestinians and their supporters in the West, among the intellectual elites, basically erased history and recreated a fake history, a fake history that deracinates the Jewish roots that are unparalleled.

00:20:48.780 There is no other story in the history of nations where people fought for so long for their land, for thousands of years, 2,000 years, were dispossessed from it, came back to it, did not kick out an existing population with a national consciousness, rebuilt the land, and now are being told you have no connections to it.

00:21:10.180 You were, you know, you're the colonials.

00:21:12.640 No, we're not.

00:21:13.100 Now, we're not, we're not just to, just to, just to give this, yeah, just to give us a fine point, because this is so crucial, what we're discussing. 0.88

00:21:22.760 And I discuss it at considerable length in my book, because people are so ignorant of history.

00:21:27.840 We are not the Belgians in the Congo.

00:21:31.160 We're not the Dutch in Indonesia.

00:21:33.920 Okay?

00:21:34.800 We're not the British in South Africa. 0.79

00:21:38.320 We had been there all the time.

00:21:40.720 We had been in the Congo.

00:21:42.140 We had been, if you will, the equivalent in Indonesia.

00:21:45.640 We were kicked out of the Congo, and nothing happened in the Congo.

00:21:49.320 Nothing.

00:21:50.060 No other people there.

00:21:51.000 No development.

00:21:51.860 Nothing.

00:21:52.740 Okay?

00:21:53.180 Now we come back to our land, build it up, enable immigration from, of Arabs, who are now called Palestinians, from neighboring lands, and they tell us, oh, you don't belong here. 1.00

00:22:04.800 You dispossessed us.

00:22:05.760 This is essentially what Arab propaganda and Palestinian propaganda has done, and what I labored not only in the present book, my own history, maybe my story, but in a previous book, A Place Among the Nations, to debunk.

00:22:18.540 And you know what?

00:22:19.500 The interesting thing is this, you know, so far.

00:22:22.000 It's quite amazing.

00:22:24.020 No fact that I put forward in any of these books has ever been challenged.

00:22:31.920 Nothing.

00:22:32.320 Not one.

00:22:33.320 Not one.

00:22:33.740 Usually, you know, when people, A Place Among the Nations, my previous book, answering much of the questions that you ask, usually polemical books are challenged.

00:22:46.200 You know, the critics, and in my case, critics from the left, they'd find, you know, some straggler, some factoid that is wrong, some formulation that is unfortunate, and so on.

00:22:56.700 Okay?

00:22:57.160 Nothing.

00:22:58.160 Nobody ever challenged it.

00:22:59.720 It got, in those days, rave reviews from the New York Times, from great writers like Conor Cruz O'Brien and Paul Johnson and others.

00:23:08.100 These are great writers, and it wasn't challenged.

00:23:11.540 Okay?

00:23:11.940 My current book has not been challenged on historical facts.

00:23:15.740 Nothing.

00:23:16.040 People can argue about my opinions, but they don't argue about my facts.

00:23:19.140 I'm very, try to be very rigorous about the facts.

00:23:22.340 This whole attack on the Jewish people's right to live in their, in the Jewish homeland, the attempt to erase the Bible and to erase the history after the Bible and to recreate, create a modern fantasy that doesn't exist, based on the Palestinians who want to destroy us, who support terrorism, who are anti-democratic, who are anti, or basically neo-colonials, because they're really the colonials. 0.91

00:23:49.820 That is, that is something that I think has, it's not merely folly.

00:23:57.380 It has something fundamentally wrong morally because it is both untrue and unjust.

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00:25:14.800 Okay, so the claim so far, if I'm going to, say, lean in the direction of your argument,

00:25:23.500 without leaning too far and too obviously, I would say something like this and tell me if I've got it right.

00:25:30.600 Like, there's a host of competing claims to the territory that now constitutes Israel.

00:25:38.380 And you could have some debate about, perhaps technically, about which of those claims should reign supreme.

00:25:45.060 The additional case that you make, however, is that the Israelis, the Jews, have done a tremendous amount of work in improving this territory.

00:25:56.800 And I know there's a principle of ownership in Western common law, in English common law.

00:26:02.040 And I'm not a lawyer, so I may muck this up to some degree, but I understand the principle.

00:26:07.680 If you own territory, a vast swath of land, and you're doing nothing to it, and someone comes and squats on it and spends a lot of time improving it,

00:26:16.700 at some point they actually develop a valid legal claim to the property itself.

00:26:21.460 And so there seems to be something intrinsic to our notion of valid ownership that if you're going to occupy a territory,

00:26:28.940 you actually have to do something with it that's productive.

00:26:32.420 And so that's at least part of the claim you're making at the moment,

00:26:35.980 to buttress the notion that the Jewish people have a valid claim to the present territory.

00:26:41.300 There were a lot of movement back and forth, but the Jews have actually taken the land and made something of it. 0.99

00:26:47.620 Well, I'm saying something else, though.

00:26:48.880 I'm saying that they held the land for 2,000 years, were kicked out.

00:26:52.580 The Arabs came and conquered it and immediately lost it to others and did nothing with it. 0.84

00:26:57.500 The others did nothing with it.

00:26:58.940 So it was basically, they took over my apartment, okay, a long time ago.

00:27:04.560 The guys who took over, who basically kicked me out, were kicked out themselves.

00:27:09.200 The apartment was left barren.

00:27:11.380 And many decades, in this case, centuries later, I come back to this barren mess, okay, this ruin,

00:27:18.000 and I build it up, back, and I not only improve it, I not only make my ownership based on improvement,

00:27:23.840 but that nobody else did anything with it.

00:27:25.900 There was no someone else.

00:27:27.960 There practically were no tenants there.

00:27:29.980 That's my argument.

00:27:31.080 Right.

00:27:31.360 And you're also making the case that when the Jews came to Israel,

00:27:36.380 they were doing what they could to coexist with the people who were there,

00:27:40.740 with a sparse number of people who were there,

00:27:42.420 but also to set up a state that would invite other people who weren't Jewish to live there as well.

00:27:48.200 So it wasn't an oppressive regime in any sense of the word.

00:27:53.620 We know what happened.

00:27:54.600 We know that when 75 years ago, when the state of Israel was declared,

00:28:01.400 you didn't have a single Arab refugee.

00:28:03.660 I mean, the Arabs say now that their enmity to Israel and the reason they went to war with Israel

00:28:09.600 was because of the Arab refugee.

00:28:11.760 But there wasn't a single Arab refugee or Palestinian refugee when Israel was established.

00:28:17.560 In fact, the refugees are the result of Arab aggression and not its cause. 1.00

00:28:23.600 And in fact, the Arab onslaught, five Arab armies that attacked the tiny Jewish state in its inception,

00:28:31.620 the tiny, these five Arab armies created two refugee problems.

00:28:37.520 One, the Palestinian refugees who fled before the advancing armies being promised that they could come back in a few days

00:28:44.520 because the Jews would be annihilated, driven to the sea.

00:28:47.380 That didn't work out, thank God.

00:28:49.200 But in those five Arab states, there lived many Jews.

00:28:53.620 Those Jews were summarily kicked out after our war of independence.

00:28:57.740 So the Arab onslaught on Israel, on Israel's inception, produced two refugee problems.

00:29:04.420 One, Palestinian refugees, Arab refugees, we call them Palestinians.

00:29:08.660 And the second is Jewish refugees. 0.59

00:29:10.820 Now Israel, with less than 1% of the total land mass of the Arab states,

00:29:15.880 takes in the same number of refugees, Jewish refugees, as you had Palestinian refugees.

00:29:21.360 You don't see them here.

00:29:22.720 They're integrated into our society, into our government, into business, into everything.

00:29:26.440 We solved, without a cortocopia of Arab oil, we solved our refugee problem caused by the Arab onslaught on Israel. 0.99

00:29:34.360 The Palestinian refugee problem is kept alive by the Arabs that have 100 times more land, infinite oil resources. 1.00

00:29:42.300 They keep it alive as a battering ram to produce exactly the propaganda that you say.

00:29:46.580 So basically what the technique of Arab propaganda has been, and I describe it to some extent in my biography too,

00:29:54.520 because you have to understand it, you have to see it to believe it,

00:29:57.580 is to turn the results of Arab aggression against Israel into its cause.

00:30:02.660 They first did that with the refugees when Israel was established.

00:30:05.540 They then didn't accept Israel's right to exist, even though we were a tiny country.

00:30:10.600 They tried to attack us again 19 years later and destroy us.

00:30:14.020 That's called the six-day wars.

00:30:15.700 In six days we pushed back the Arab countries and took over our ancestral lands of Judea and Samaria. 1.00

00:30:22.100 And again, what the Arabs did is exactly the same thing. 0.97

00:30:24.420 They said that our occupation, our so-called occupation of the heartland of the Jewish people, Judea and Samaria,

00:30:31.700 that produced the war.

00:30:33.300 No, that didn't produce the war.

00:30:35.040 It was the result of their attempt, their second attempt, to annihilate us. 0.91

00:30:39.160 So this technique of reversing causality, that is accusing Israel, basically turning the results of Arab aggression into its cause, 0.60

00:30:48.340 is again one of these ways of creating the delegitimization of Israel.

00:30:52.640 The reason we have not had peace with the Palestinians is not because of the Arab refugees. 0.95

00:30:58.540 There weren't any when they attacked us.

00:31:00.640 The reason is not the territories.

00:31:02.560 We didn't control these territories.

00:31:04.880 They were in Arab hands before the Six-Day War.

00:31:07.660 All of these things are a result of the Arab aggression. 0.95

00:31:10.360 And what is the cause of the Arab aggression? 0.66

00:31:13.460 It's the persistent Arab refusal to accept a Jewish state in any boundary in our ancestral homeland.

00:31:20.980 And if you remove that, you get peace.

00:31:23.140 Now, how do we know that we get peace?

00:31:25.700 Because this persistent Arab refusal has dissipated.

00:31:30.480 It's dissipated over time.

00:31:32.500 As the strength of Israel, as I describe in my book, as Israel becomes not merely a fact, but a fact, a permanent fact of the Middle East,

00:31:40.400 so they know they can't get rid of it.

00:31:41.720 So Arab countries begin to make peace with us.

00:31:45.520 And I had the privilege, which I describe again in my book, of forging four Arab peace agreements, four peace agreements with Arab states,

00:31:54.220 because that barrier, that obstacle of refusing to accept a Jewish state in any boundary has disappeared.

00:32:01.480 Where does it persist?

00:32:03.400 In the Palestinians, who are 1% to 2% of the entire Arab world wagging the, you know, it's the tail wagging the dog. 0.97

00:32:09.600 Or they tried until recently.

00:32:11.320 They were quite successful wagging the dog.

00:32:13.400 They, Palestinians, cling on to the fantasy of eliminating Israel, denying us our historical and present rights to live anywhere in this land, 1.00

00:32:22.620 refusing to any kind of practical compromise, refusing to accept the declaration of Israel and the UN, the partition resolution.

00:32:30.720 We did.

00:32:31.220 They refused.

00:32:32.120 Refusing any kind of realistic negotiation for peace.

00:32:35.480 What has happened, and here's what happened, Jordan.

00:32:39.080 For the last quarter of a century, after the initial peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan,

00:32:44.840 for 25 years we had no peace treaties with any Arab country.

00:32:49.160 Because the elites, the foreign policy elites and the experts and the intellectuals explained,

00:32:55.380 you cannot make peace with the rest of the Arab world unless you make peace first with the Palestinians. 1.00

00:33:01.500 There's a problem there.

00:33:02.960 Right, right.

00:33:03.660 Well, you can't because the Palestinians are not interested in peace with Israel. 0.59

00:33:07.160 They're interested in the peace without Israel. 0.97

00:33:09.080 They're not interested in a state next to Israel. 0.62

00:33:11.520 They're interested in a state instead of Israel.

00:33:14.280 So if you wait for the Palestinians, you'll wait another quarter of a century, another half century, another century. 1.00

00:33:18.860 You're not going to get anywhere.

00:33:19.800 I had to break that logjam, and I describe how I did that in my book.

00:33:24.640 I had to go around the Palestinians, go to the United Arab Emirates, go to Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and make peace with them. 0.99

00:33:35.140 Why did they change their attitude towards Israel?

00:33:38.500 They changed it because of the result, the growth of Israeli power. 0.66

00:33:42.340 As Israel became more powerful technologically, we made a free market revolution that released the genius in our people.

00:33:52.200 Israel became the innovation nation.

00:33:54.520 You can't do that if you're paying 75% marginal tax rate, right?

00:33:57.940 So we cut tax rates, put in basically a capitalist economy, and Israel exploded. 0.91

00:34:03.160 But it also became very powerful militarily because we could now afford to fund the combination of economic power through free markets and military and intelligence power that combined to give us diplomatic power.

00:34:18.280 And with that, Arab leaders in the area began to see Israel not as their enemy, but as their indispensable ally against a force that was threatening both Israel and them.

00:34:30.880 And that's Iran, Iran's aggression. 0.99

00:34:33.160 And secondly, they saw the innovation nation that is Israel as a fount of tremendous technology that could better the lives of their people.

00:34:42.600 And therefore, we made these historic peace agreements in record time because now we were no longer bound by the Palestinian straitjacket that you're familiar with in Toronto and New Zealand and so on.

00:34:55.540 The Arab world is not there. 1.00

00:34:57.580 Some of it is.

00:34:58.940 But a lot of it is changing.

00:35:00.260 And so my idea is, how do you solve the Palestinian problem? 0.79

00:35:04.640 Anytime they want to truly sit down and negotiate, be my guest.

00:35:08.580 I'll be happy to do that.

00:35:09.520 And I've tried that in the past.

00:35:11.100 But in reality, I took a different track.

00:35:14.480 Instead of saying, first we'll solve the problem with the Palestinians, then we'll solve the problem with the Arab world, I actually reversed it.

00:35:21.040 I said, let's go to the Arab world and let's get peace with the Arab world and then circle back to the Palestinians. 0.99

00:35:28.300 If they're ready to come before, fine.

00:35:30.260 But if not, let's get peace with 99% and then try to make peace with the 1% as opposed to let's try the implacable 1% and wait until we get to the other 99%. 0.97

00:35:41.560 That's a complete reversal of concept.

00:35:44.200 It's still being challenged.

00:35:45.660 You'll see some of the old guard still say, no, no, we have to go to the Palestinians before we go to the Arab world and we'll never get peace.

00:35:53.480 So I want to divide this into two tracks now.

00:35:58.500 I want to, first of all, investigate some of the history behind the willingness of other states to support the Jewish claim to a homeland in the Middle East.

00:36:12.880 Because I think that's quite interesting.

00:36:14.480 And then I want to speak more about the Abraham Accords, which you discussed.

00:36:17.720 So one of the things that fascinated me, well, historically, but also in your book, is your discussion of the Balfour Declaration.

00:36:27.460 And so that's obviously before the utter catastrophe of the Holocaust and the catastrophes the Jewish people ran into in the middle of the 20th century.

00:36:37.380 By already, by the time of the Balfour Declaration, there was some sense, at least in Great Britain, that the claim that Herzl had put forward, for example, that the Jews and the world would benefit from a Jewish homeland in the Middle East had some validity.

00:36:53.320 So why do you think that developed?

00:36:56.060 And then how do you think it extended?

00:36:58.060 Because you got bipartisan support for the notion of a Jewish homeland from the Americans by 1944.

00:37:05.160 And then, of course, there was the UN 1947 Declaration.

00:37:07.960 So it's not as if the Jews imposed this vision on the Middle East by themselves.

00:37:14.520 There was support all over the world.

00:37:15.840 And so could you walk us through how that support developed and why you think it developed?

00:37:21.480 Yeah, it developed because certainly in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, there was the propaganda that I've described rewriting the history had not taken root.

00:37:34.960 And most educated people knew the history of the Bible, the history of the Jewish people, their dispossession, what they thought were the horrors that the Jews suffered in their exile and dispersion, which was nothing compared to what was going to come later in the Holocaust.

00:37:50.320 But that was enough for them.

00:37:51.920 And they basically knew that the land was practically empty and that, I mean, there were people there, but it was practically empty.

00:37:58.660 And it made sense that both from a biblical prognostication for those who had a religious orientation and also a humanist view, that this evil of history, this injustice of history would be corrected.

00:38:13.960 That this long-suffering people, the Jews who contributed so much to civilization and to history and to morality, the idea of morality.

00:38:24.660 It's the Ten Commandments, you know, that became the code, the moral code of the world and so many other things.

00:38:30.560 The birth of Christianity, many of the ideas, many of the ideas, the moral ideas that we have originated on these hills where I'm sitting in right now, this tiny, you know, dusty edge of Asia, where this tribe, strange tribe, lived here and talked about, you know, man's, the fact that people should not remain slaves, that there should be a law that applies to all of them.

00:38:53.340 That kings are not divine, that kings are subject to moral authority and censure and all sorts of other crazy ideas like that.

00:39:01.620 It's all originated here.

00:39:04.780 And so the educated leaders that met in World War I after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, they had to decide, you know, who gets what.

00:39:17.820 And they came upon the idea of self-determination, that is, that people should have, you know, the ability to govern their nations, obviously with civic rights for other peoples living in their midst.

00:39:28.860 And they concluded, knowing the history that I just described, that is so unknown today on college campuses and among so-called intellectuals or anything but that, that the Jews deserved this right to rebuild their national life and their ancestral homeland.

00:39:47.000 And, and, and, and that's how it developed.

00:39:51.080 But the first one to actually bring it forward, you mentioned in the beginning of your comments, was Theodor Herzl.

00:39:57.560 Theodor Herzl was a giant of history.

00:40:01.080 He, he was a journalist.

00:40:02.520 He was a Jewish journalist in the late 19th century.

00:40:06.920 He was born in, in Hungary but worked for a very prestigious paper in Vienna.

00:40:13.080 When he was dispatched to Paris as a correspondent, he saw the, the, the infamous Dreyfus trial where a Jewish officer in the French army was falsely accused, as it later turned out, of espionage and betrayal and was sentenced to Devil's Island and other horrible things.

00:40:33.440 And he said this, if this can happen, if this can happen, if this can happen to the Jews in the apex of Western civilization, then it could happen anywhere.

00:40:46.260 And he predicted that within a few decades, the fires of anti-Semitism would consume the Jews of Europe, that they would be slaughtered.

00:40:55.040 He actually saw that.

00:40:56.040 He wrote these things in 1900, roughly, and before, and of course the Holocaust came less than half a century later.

00:41:04.940 And he said there's only one solution for this.

00:41:07.640 The solution is to have the Jews, the solution is not going to be to integrate the Jews in societies because that's not going to work. 1.00

00:41:17.560 The solution would not be to eliminate nationalism through communism and other cosmopolitan internationalism.

00:41:27.000 Right, right.

00:41:27.300 That's not going to work either.

00:41:28.760 And in fact, he was right because so much of anti-Semitism came from Stalinism and so on.

00:41:33.400 Okay?

00:41:34.100 It's not merely Nazism, it's Stalinism too.

00:41:36.440 So either thing, it's not going to work.

00:41:39.060 He said there's only one solution.

00:41:40.920 The Jews should have a nation of their own, that is a country of their own. 0.98

00:41:44.320 And he sought to persuade first the German Kaiser and after that the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul to give the Jews a state of their own, and he didn't succeed.

00:41:58.400 He died after eight years, that's it, eight years.

00:42:01.420 But in these eight years, he launched this movement that turned the dream of ages, you know, century after century, next year in Jerusalem.

00:42:09.400 He turned it from a prayer, from a dream, into a practical plan.

00:42:13.520 My grandfather, Nathan, Nathan Milakovsky Netanyahu, he was enthralled by Herzl.

00:42:22.040 He became a tremendous speaker at the age of 20.

00:42:26.980 Thousands of people crowded to hear him throughout Europe, Eastern Europe, Poland.

00:42:32.440 There were records, press records, how people fought each other.

00:42:36.040 They broke windows, they fought physically to hear this young man speak about the Jewish, about Herzl's vision, coming back to the Jewish homeland.

00:42:46.520 Well, Herzl died.

00:42:47.540 He died too early.

00:42:48.920 And his followers continued the dream, even though he was dead.

00:42:53.460 My grandfather was one of them.

00:42:55.660 My father was one of them.

00:42:56.940 But they didn't succeed.

00:42:58.260 So now we fast forward.

00:43:01.780 In 1917, they succeed partly because the British Empire, which now, after the defeat of the Ottomans, controlled what is now the land of Israel, decided to give the Jews a homeland.

00:43:16.540 They didn't say it's state yet, but they said a homeland.

00:43:19.280 It was clear it was a corridor to a state.

00:43:22.000 This was met by fervid Arab opposition, by many of the Arabs who had immigrated to Israel, to what is now the land of Israel.

00:43:30.560 They said, stop, you can't come anymore.

00:43:32.800 They decided we're just going to oppose any Jewish land.

00:43:36.600 And the British backed down.

00:43:38.540 They backed down from the so-called promise they gave.

00:43:41.140 It's called the Balfour Declaration, where they promised a Jewish homeland.

00:43:44.120 They backed off.

00:43:44.960 And now the Jews are stuck. 0.88

00:43:49.360 They're in Europe. 0.65

00:43:49.940 They can't migrate because Jewish immigration was effectively blocked by the British, who betrayed their promises to the Jewish people.

00:43:58.580 And now Hitlerism rises. 0.92

00:44:02.640 1933, Hitler rises to power. 0.91

00:44:05.280 My father, who later became a great historian of the Jewish people, is all of 23 years old.

00:44:11.420 And here's what he writes with the rise of Hitler.

00:44:14.960 He says, Hitlerism will annihilate all the Jews of Europe and its racial anti-Semitism that would consume every last Jew. 0.65

00:44:27.260 And the only way we can fight it is to persuade the civilized world that it is not only the Jews who will be annihilated or threatened. 0.96

00:44:37.560 It's their civilization, it's their civilization, too.

00:44:40.380 This young Ben-Seo Netanyahu, 23 years old, writes in 1933, if more people had heeded what he wrote,

00:44:49.780 then perhaps we would have avoided a tremendous catastrophe that occurred to my people,

00:44:55.000 but also to the 60 million who lost their lives in World War II.

00:44:58.820 Well, they didn't.

00:44:59.580 Now, my father saw this coming, and a few years later, he went to the United States in World War II,

00:45:08.720 and he sought to recruit American public opinions.

00:45:14.180 A young man in his early 30s, he's trying to recruit American public opinion to recognize that it's not merely for the sake of justice,

00:45:24.080 doing justice with the Jews who are being incinerated in Europe. 0.51

00:45:27.880 It's for American interest and Western interest to have a strong Jewish state, a strong Jewish state.

00:45:36.860 And finally, you know, he makes his way up the ladder because one official hears him, brings him to another,

00:45:43.340 because he argued something that no Jew had argued before, no Zionist leader argued before.

00:45:48.160 They all argued the moral case, which we've been discussing at some length in this program.

00:45:54.640 But my father, he didn't abandon the moral case.

00:45:58.760 He argued it with great passion.

00:46:00.740 But he turned, when he talked to statesmen, as he taught me,

00:46:04.200 when you talk to public opinion, you talk about justice.

00:46:07.680 And you have to argue the justice of your cause.

00:46:10.980 Those who are unjust do the same, so you may as well do it,

00:46:13.780 to protect yourself against the people who lie, the people who cheat,

00:46:17.940 or present themselves as moralists while they blow up babies deliberately, okay?

00:46:22.620 Speak of human rights while they trample human rights.

00:46:25.120 You have to argue justice and speak the truth.

00:46:28.040 But when you speak to statesmen, as my father told me,

00:46:31.600 you have to tell them you have to speak of interest.

00:46:35.420 That is what my father did.

00:46:36.940 And at the end of World War II...

00:46:38.460 Well, that seems to be what you did with the Abraham Accords. 0.59

00:46:40.860 Exactly right.

00:46:41.360 I realized that also by allowing or by facilitating Israel's development

00:46:45.680 into an economic powerhouse, you also made the country,

00:46:49.860 you helped build the country into something that could be practically allied with

00:46:54.560 as well as, let's say, making them simultaneous moral case.

00:46:57.500 Well, exactly.

00:46:58.200 And that's really, you hit exactly on the vision

00:47:01.500 because my purpose in life,

00:47:05.340 inherited from my grandfather and from my father

00:47:07.600 and my fallen brother, my brother who fell while leading the most celebrated rescue mission in modern times,

00:47:16.620 the historic rescue of Entebbe, where he died.

00:47:21.100 I described that moment when I learned about it in some detail

00:47:25.300 and also what happened there, which is not fully known.

00:47:28.620 But I inherited from them a life of purpose.

00:47:33.720 And the purpose was to assure the prosperity, security, and permanence of the Jewish state

00:47:39.960 insofar as you can offer anything permanent in our world.

00:47:43.060 And to do that, I realized that Israel had to be not only to fend off the false claims

00:47:48.640 that tried to deny its legitimacy as a state and our historic rights and our ancient homeland,

00:47:55.280 but quite separate or complementing that is to make Israel very powerful 0.90

00:48:01.840 because history is very unkind.

00:48:04.740 And productive.

00:48:05.500 And productive.

00:48:06.420 Not just powerful, right?

00:48:07.700 Because the other advantage you had with the Abraham Accords 0.99

00:48:10.860 was that you could present Israel as a compelling partner in economic development

00:48:15.580 to Arab states that were actually hungry for a pathway forward

00:48:18.980 out of their unidimensional dependence on oil wealth, for example.

00:48:21.920 Exactly right.

00:48:23.140 When I say powerful, I don't mean militarily powerful.

00:48:26.360 And that's exactly what I point out in the book.

00:48:29.400 And I said, normally, if you ask Israelis before that, what is powerful? 0.94

00:48:33.940 Well, powerful means having a strong army.

00:48:37.520 I concluded very early on, having served in the army,

00:48:40.980 I served in a special unit, an elite unit,

00:48:44.720 and I described my brushes with death in clandestine missions

00:48:48.860 and far into enemy, beyond the lines of enemy lines

00:48:53.160 and many firefights that I was in.

00:48:56.020 And one, I nearly drowned in the Suez Canal.

00:48:58.640 And one, I was shot while rescuing,

00:49:01.600 while taking part in a rescue of ostriches in a hijacked plane and so on.

00:49:07.740 So I had intimacy with the military, obviously,

00:49:10.320 because I also served for five years in the special unit as a soldier and officer.

00:49:16.500 And it's quite a big adventure story, as you must have read.

00:49:19.440 But I understood early on that to have military power,

00:49:25.980 you have to pay for all these things.

00:49:28.580 You have to pay for F-35 aircrafts.

00:49:31.000 You have to pay for submarines, for tanks, for drones, for cyber,

00:49:35.380 for intelligence.

00:49:36.320 It's all very expensive.

00:49:37.100 How are you going to pay for it?

00:49:38.740 Oh, well, in Israel, semi-socialist Israel that I grew up in,

00:49:42.460 it's very obvious.

00:49:43.540 You tax the rich.

00:49:44.880 Well, the problem with that is you don't have enough rich people

00:49:47.980 and they're all going to leave to other places with lower taxes.

00:49:51.180 So I figure that the way you can actually enable Israel to be strong militarily

00:49:56.840 is you have to make it strong economically.

00:49:59.500 But to make it strong economically,

00:50:01.160 you have to completely overhaul Israel's economic system from semi-socialism

00:50:06.740 to free market capitalism.

00:50:09.120 And I entered public life, essentially, with that view.

00:50:14.160 And I became first prime minister, then finance minister, and again prime minister.

00:50:18.680 And I led a free market revolution that turned Israel from basically a supplicant 0.96

00:50:27.040 to one of the most advanced economies on earth.

00:50:32.020 Just to give you an example, when I was first elected prime minister,

00:50:38.560 Israel was well behind all the Western European economies,

00:50:42.540 certainly the United States and Canada, in terms of per capita income.

00:50:46.500 Well, as a result of the changes that I put forward and I described in the book,

00:50:51.420 Israel became, in per capita income, wealthier than Japan, France, Britain, Germany.

00:51:02.000 It's actually outstripped them all.

00:51:04.000 And the power, my vision was that the fusion of free markets and technology,

00:51:10.200 which we invest in all the time in our military,

00:51:13.140 that produces this tremendous efflorescence, economic efflorescence.

00:51:18.380 And that gives you the power combination.

00:51:21.420 The power combination is not merely the military, which you can now afford.

00:51:25.840 It's the civilian technology, which you now develop.

00:51:29.840 And so Arab states could see, well, Israel is a strong country.

00:51:33.180 And with enough resolute leadership, it will oppose Iran that threatens both of us. 1.00

00:51:39.260 But Israel also produces fantastic desalinization. 0.94

00:51:44.060 Israel produces tremendous developments in energy, tremendous digital developments,

00:51:48.980 tremendous developments in health, and so on.

00:51:51.820 We were the first to leave COVID because of our databases that we developed for the population and so on.

00:51:57.460 We were the first to exit COVID and rebuild our economy very quickly.

00:52:04.140 So the combination of civilian technology and military and intelligence capability

00:52:09.280 produced this desire on the part of the Arabs to make peace with us.

00:52:13.460 And, you know, the attitudes, those ingrained attitudes, anti-Israeli attitudes that are still rife in the Arab world,

00:52:20.680 begin to change because here's what happened.

00:52:22.600 Because I could make these peace treaties with the Gulf states,

00:52:27.460 hundreds of thousands of Israelis now fly over the skies of Saudi Arabia,

00:52:32.840 land in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Bahrain,

00:52:36.180 and Arabs there embrace the Israelis who are coming there,

00:52:41.980 and Arabs and Jews are dancing in the streets.

00:52:44.660 Now they're making joint ventures together.

00:52:47.340 You know, they have economic interests,

00:52:50.020 but also the views, the cartoonish absurdities of Arab propaganda are dissipated with this human contact.

00:53:01.460 So the new kind of peace that we have,

00:53:03.640 a peace based on power and interest,

00:53:06.240 is actually changing the previous assumptions about Israel in many parts of the Arab world.

00:53:11.840 But my goal, and I say this openly,

00:53:16.280 my goal, if as I hope I'll form a government very soon,

00:53:20.860 is to continue the expansion of the circle of peace to the rest of the Arab world.

00:53:26.800 But I don't think it's going to be actually a quantum leap again,

00:53:30.740 a quantum leap again,

00:53:32.000 because there is a country there that is a close neighbor

00:53:34.800 that is extraordinarily important,

00:53:38.640 and that's Saudi Arabia.

00:53:40.240 And if I can achieve a Saudi-Israeli peace,

00:53:44.200 we will be well on the route of ending the Arab-Israeli conflict,

00:53:48.140 and we'll be left with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

00:53:50.960 But it will be a lot more manageable,

00:53:53.040 and we will have changed history.

00:53:55.180 The idea is peace through strength.

00:53:57.800 It's an old idea.

00:53:58.720 I didn't invent it.

00:54:00.040 But the strength that I'm talking about

00:54:01.980 is the combination of economic, military, and diplomatic strength.

00:54:07.140 I call it the three pillars of peace.

00:54:10.300 Could you walk us through what you did on the economic front?

00:54:15.200 I have two questions there.

00:54:16.440 What did you do on the economic front

00:54:17.980 to move Israel from a relatively far-left-leaning socialist state

00:54:23.260 to a free market economy?

00:54:24.600 So I'd like to know the details.

00:54:26.060 And second, why do you think that,

00:54:29.800 given the radical success of your free market maneuvers,

00:54:33.700 that the more socialist vision was so attractive

00:54:37.580 to Israelis for such a long period of time?

00:54:40.760 So let's start with the first one.

00:54:42.540 Tell us what you did on the economic front

00:54:44.780 to allow for the emergence of this Silicon Valley-like miracle in Israel

00:54:49.540 that's unfolded over the last, what, about 15 years, something like that?

00:54:53.440 20 years, yes.

00:54:54.260 Exactly 20 years.

00:54:54.980 20 years.

00:54:56.260 What did I, well, the first thing I did was,

00:54:58.320 if I could borrow a phrase from the Clintonites,

00:55:00.800 never let a good crisis go to waste.

00:55:02.920 We had a tremendous economic crisis

00:55:04.720 when I took over as finance minister in 2003.

00:55:12.820 Horrible things.

00:55:14.400 And the country was still along semi-socialist lines.

00:55:19.160 And I decided, and most people thought it was because of the collapse of the dot-com markets,

00:55:26.040 if you remember that, which it was, but it was a tiny factor of it.

00:55:29.320 It wasn't a really important one.

00:55:31.000 Or they thought it was because we had terrorist attacks, which was also part of it.

00:55:35.780 But I thought it was a structural problem.

00:55:37.500 Why were we, before the dot-com collapse, before this or that explosion of terrorism,

00:55:42.720 why were we a gifted people, a people with a pretty good educational system?

00:55:49.600 How come we were trailing all the countries of Western Europe?

00:55:54.280 And the idea was, well, education is enough.

00:55:56.660 If we have good education, we'll get well.

00:55:58.760 That's hogwash.

00:55:59.500 I mean, the Soviet Union had tremendous education.

00:56:02.840 And they had tremendous mathematicians, tremendous physicists, tremendous metallurgists.

00:56:07.420 They were dirt poor.

00:56:09.160 And yet, when any one of these people was put on a plane

00:56:11.620 and someone managed to smuggle himself to Palo Alto,

00:56:15.840 they were producing wealth within days because you had a free market there.

00:56:20.020 So technology by itself doesn't produce wealth.

00:56:24.940 Free markets and technology, free markets do produce wealth.

00:56:28.380 But free markets with technology produce unbelievable, unbelievable spurts of growth and wealth.

00:56:35.460 And that was my vision for Israel.

00:56:37.380 I had this crisis now.

00:56:39.340 And I said, in a crisis, I could do imponderable things.

00:56:43.380 I could do things which were never accepted.

00:56:45.780 So what I did was, you know, I spent, first of all, I was told by my advisors,

00:56:54.060 having been prime minister before and now being a prime minister in Sharon's government,

00:56:58.380 they said, who was in his 70s, they said, look, if you want to be prime minister again,

00:57:03.520 whatever you do, don't take on the finance ministry because you'll have to cut budgets,

00:57:08.680 you'll have to do horrible things, and you'll never be prime minister again.

00:57:12.340 And I said, well, what do I want to be prime minister for?

00:57:15.960 It's to put off, push back the Iranian threat, including their quest for nuclear weapons, 1.00

00:57:21.440 and to liberate the Israeli marketplace, so the Israeli economy.

00:57:27.140 So if I achieve at least one of those goals, that's a pretty good thing.

00:57:31.040 They said, okay, but remember, you'll never be prime minister again.

00:57:33.780 This is 20 years ago, okay.

00:57:35.800 I became prime minister, finance minister.

00:57:38.000 He used the crisis.

00:57:39.220 After three weeks of working 20-hour days, I put forward my vision to Israel, which answers your question.

00:57:45.280 I said, I fell back on a vision because people were living exactly as you say in semi-socialist Israel.

00:57:52.740 They were awash with false economics, basically saying divide the pie, divide the pie, don't increase the pie, okay.

00:58:01.780 That was basically what they all grew up with, and unless you get mugged by reality, it's very hard to change it.

00:58:07.420 But we were being mugged by economic reality again and again and again, and we didn't change it.

00:58:12.060 Now comes my opportunity.

00:58:14.580 Three weeks into my being, taking up the finance ministry, I give a press conference.

00:58:21.540 And I fell back on my first day in the military, in basic training.

00:58:28.600 It's a long line.

00:58:30.380 The company's put in a long line on a big square, and the commander points to me, and he says,

00:58:37.620 you, Netanyahu, look to your right.

00:58:39.800 Put the man on your right on your shoulder.

00:58:41.320 I did.

00:58:42.220 He then looks at the next guy, puts the guy on his right, on his shoulder, and so on.

00:58:47.160 Well, I had a pretty big guy on my shoulders because the commander blows the whistle.

00:58:52.880 Barely took a few steps together.

00:58:54.720 This is a race.

00:58:55.480 It's called the elephant race. 0.97

00:58:56.900 The guy at the bottom is the elephant.

00:58:58.240 The guy at the top rides the elephant.

00:59:00.400 The next guy was the smallest guy in the platoon, in the company, and he had the biggest guy on his shoulder.

00:59:07.360 He collapsed on the spot.

00:59:08.620 The third guy was a big guy, and he had a relatively small guy, and he shot off like a rocket and took the race.

00:59:13.960 And I said to the Israeli public, all national economies are pairs of a private sector, of a public sector, sitting on the shoulders of a private sector.

00:59:24.960 The private sector is the one that produces the wealth, or most of it, okay?

00:59:28.560 The added value in the economy.

00:59:30.700 And in our case, the public sector became too big, and we were about to collapse.

00:59:36.120 We were about to collapse like the guy next to me.

00:59:38.300 So here's what we're going to do. 0.99

00:59:40.100 We're going to put the fat man. 0.87

00:59:41.680 This became known as the fat man, thin man example.

00:59:46.000 And taxi cab drivers and comics spoke about it.

00:59:48.920 It actually went into the Israeli cycle.

00:59:50.820 If you ask people now in Israel, fat man, thin man, they know what I'm talking about.

00:59:55.060 The fat man at the top, okay, we're going to put on a strict diet.

00:59:58.700 Very hard to do politically.

01:00:00.740 You're going to cut government budgets, okay?

01:00:03.460 And the thin man at the bottom, we're going to put a lot of lungs, a lot of oxygen in his lungs.

01:00:09.640 And what is oxygen?

01:00:11.380 Well, many things.

01:00:13.100 But number one, number two, and number three is low taxes, low taxes, low taxes.

01:00:17.420 Because that's why people risk, you know, that's why they work.

01:00:21.240 Because they don't want to pay it to the fat man at the top.

01:00:23.980 They want to have it themselves.

01:00:25.720 And once we have that, we have to, the guy can race forward, right?

01:00:30.460 Run forward and take the race compared to other economies.

01:00:33.520 Well, not true.

01:00:34.500 Because as he begins to run, he hits a ditch.

01:00:37.660 And then he hits a wall.

01:00:38.840 And then he hits a fence.

01:00:40.140 And these are called barriers to competition.

01:00:42.120 We have to deregulate the excessive regulation that semi-socialist Israel had. 0.99

01:00:47.800 And still has to some extent.

01:00:49.080 But we've done a lot there.

01:00:51.060 So it's three things. 0.85

01:00:52.580 Compress the fat man.

01:00:53.680 Plan lower taxes and do other things to make business very attractive and easy.

01:00:59.600 And remove barriers to competition.

01:01:02.500 And frankly, that's what I did.

01:01:03.820 I don't describe the 80 or so major reforms that we did.

01:01:08.000 But I did them in a crisis.

01:01:10.320 And the reason I could get away with it in a crisis is because, you know, things are so bad.

01:01:16.340 They were so bad that they'll let you do it.

01:01:18.220 But I paid heavily.

01:01:19.460 And I almost disappeared from politics.

01:01:21.260 When I later ran for, you know, as the leader of Likud, my party compressed to 10% of the Knesset.

01:01:31.980 That's it.

01:01:32.640 Right now, we're the biggest party.

01:01:34.460 But I was merely destroyed.

01:01:36.860 So my advisors who told me, don't take the finance ministry, weren't that wrong.

01:01:40.720 I was declared dead.

01:01:43.280 Having survived several brushes with death as a commando soldier, I now survived a brush with death politically.

01:01:53.200 So I was eulogized.

01:01:54.600 People said Netanyahu did great things in the economy, but he's dead.

01:01:58.920 He's down to 12 seats out of 120 in our parliament.

01:02:03.320 It's finished.

01:02:04.200 Thank you for what you did.

01:02:05.500 Go away.

01:02:06.420 Okay.

01:02:06.700 I recovered from that.

01:02:09.660 And I was re-elected.

01:02:10.620 So why did you pay the price?

01:02:13.160 Like, what was it about your reforms that made that price inevitable?

01:02:19.280 Because part, first of all, the most important part is that in order to put the fat man, the public sector, on a diet, I had to cut back Israel's lavish welfare system, which encouraged people to live on the dole and not to go out and work. 0.77

01:02:37.860 Okay?

01:02:38.840 So when I cut child allowances, which in Israel were extraordinary, they'd go up with each successive child.

01:02:45.940 So, you know, by the time you got to the sixth child, you know, and you had, like the Bedouins in the Negev, they had 60 children for multiple wives. 0.97

01:02:55.380 They could drive the BMW Jeep as their second car in the sands of the Negev. 0.50

01:02:59.680 I mean, and this was leading to demographic and economic collapse, okay?

01:03:04.640 And the same thing was happening in other sectors, the ultra-Orthodox community and so on.

01:03:09.620 They didn't work.

01:03:10.740 They just had a lot of children, which the others, you know, the public, the private sector had to pay for.

01:03:16.580 And when you cut that, well, Jordan, I can tell you, you don't become very popular, okay?

01:03:21.980 It's not cutting government.

01:03:23.880 Well, there's a lot of short-term pain there, eh?

01:03:25.820 There's short-term immediate pain that's concrete for a lot of people when you cut.

01:03:30.180 And if the benefits only kick in in the medium to long term, then you have a, well, then you have obviously a problem of emotion.

01:03:37.080 Well, I'd like it to—

01:03:38.220 The cost is up front and the benefits later.

01:03:40.200 You're absolutely right.

01:03:41.300 And you have to be prepared for that.

01:03:43.460 That's what leaders do.

01:03:44.480 If you want to lead, you have to have a purpose.

01:03:46.920 And your purpose has to be beyond yourself.

01:03:48.640 And you have to be ready to shed political blood, your own.

01:03:52.660 You have to be ready.

01:03:53.400 Otherwise, you can't lead.

01:03:54.760 Otherwise, it's meaningless.

01:03:55.480 You're always looking at the polls.

01:03:56.840 You're always looking.

01:03:57.660 Do you have a vision of what to do?

01:03:58.900 I had a clear vision.

01:04:00.160 And I wanted to make Israel a power among the nations.

01:04:03.140 And the things—and I paid for it.

01:04:04.740 And I nearly died politically.

01:04:06.380 In fact, I was eulogized twice because you've got to realize that I checked—you know, somebody showed me the statistics the other day.

01:04:14.800 So I'm the longest-serving prime minister of Israel, 15 years.

01:04:19.660 And in a year, if I, as I anticipated, will form a government in a few days.

01:04:24.940 In a year's time, I would be the longest-serving leader of a democratic country in the last half century.

01:04:30.940 But I'm already beating the odds in a different way because a lot of people came back once from political death.

01:04:40.360 That's happened.

01:04:41.200 Winston Churchill is an example.

01:04:44.720 Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.

01:04:47.260 The late Yitzhak Rabin was another example.

01:04:49.600 And you can find them in other places.

01:04:51.580 Not that often, but you can find them.

01:04:53.900 But the last time somebody came back twice to do a comeback twice was 75 years ago, three-quarters of a century ago.

01:05:02.500 And the reason that's happened is because you're quite right.

01:05:06.040 If you're able to survive political death, then people appreciate what it is you did for the country and for them.

01:05:15.940 Even though, you know, you could be swept by tremendous hostile press, as is the case in Israel, but you can overcome that.

01:05:22.560 And in Israel's case, in my case, in the story of my life as I describe it, it was to bring into effect this vision of Israel, of a powerful state that has this tremendously creative economy, along with a powerful military, opening the door to peace with its neighbors,

01:05:50.120 and also fighting what is a global threat.

01:05:54.460 Iran, with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach Canada and the United States and anywhere, is a threat to all of humanity. 1.00

01:06:04.560 And by protecting Israel, by fending them off, I, of course, protect Israel, but I think we protect the larger international community. 0.82

01:06:11.160 People appreciate that.

01:06:12.200 That's why I'm sitting with you a few days before I expect to go back into office, because we can have this free-ranging conversation now.

01:06:21.040 I can talk about my book, which I unabashedly am trying to plug in this conversation, and I urge you to read it for two reasons.

01:06:28.600 One, as you say, to understand the better, the history of the Jewish state, the Jewish national movement, Zionism, that led it, the reality of the Middle East and how it's changing, by the way, for the better, the threat of Iran, all of these things.

01:06:44.860 And my contacts with the success of American presidents were very different from one another, and I've had to deal with quite a few of them, and it's an interesting story.

01:06:53.620 But I think beyond that, I think it's to live a life of purpose.

01:06:58.800 Okay, well, you had to be guided by and have faith in principles that were outside of short-term advantage in order to do what you did, and that's the story that you lay out in your book, and that seems to be in accordance with the facts on the ground.

01:07:12.980 When you, in your political experience, no doubt you've dealt with political leaders who have a vision and who are abiding by principles, and then you have dealt with political leaders who don't.

01:07:26.740 And one of the questions I have for you as a consequence is, what is it that you think that the leaders who aren't guided by principle and vision, what is it that they're pursuing?

01:07:38.360 And in your experience, is that more common on the political front than guidance by vision and principle?

01:07:46.540 In general, yes, it's more common, and that's why people don't have high respect for politicians.

01:07:52.020 They speak of principle, but they're usually interested in personal power.

01:07:56.460 For me, power by itself is meaningless.

01:08:01.240 Power for what?

01:08:02.360 I mean, I can make a living, a better living outside.

01:08:04.460 Well, that's what I'm asking.

01:08:05.680 Well, that's exactly what I'm asking.

01:08:07.240 I don't really understand, I don't understand the drive for power, so to speak, or authority or influence outside of the realm of guiding principle.

01:08:16.700 Because if it's just a shallow hedonism, let's say, or a desire for a claim, I would think also there's easier and more productive ways of pursuing that.

01:08:27.860 I certainly agree with you.

01:08:29.420 But you're right, because Israeli politics isn't exactly a walk in the woods, I mean, or a rose garden.

01:08:37.440 It's very cruel.

01:08:38.560 And my family and myself are subjected to incredible calumny and slanders and lies.

01:08:44.180 It's horrible.

01:08:44.740 So unless you have an overriding purpose, there's no point.

01:08:50.160 To come back twice from political death, to have been eulogized, usually unfavorably, you don't come back for the perks of power, which are absurd anyway.

01:09:02.520 I mean, anybody who can learn a living will do better than what heads of state get in the Western world.

01:09:08.060 You know, they're forced into a dracoat.

01:09:11.080 It's nothing.

01:09:11.920 I mean, believe me, you get better accommodations when you're in the private sector.

01:09:17.500 So that's not the reason.

01:09:18.800 For me, as I said, I've lived a life of purpose to revamp, to assure Israel's permanence.

01:09:25.980 My father and my grandfather worked very hard, labored very hard, to assure that the Jewish people would come back, would have a state.

01:09:34.680 And I worked very hard to assure that they'd keep a state and that that state would become a power among the nations.

01:09:41.160 By the way, the University of Pennsylvania has this annual poll in which they asked 17,000 opinion leaders in, I think, 20 countries to rank the powers of the world.

01:09:51.780 And in the decade that I led Israel, between 2010 to 2020, Israel was consistently ranked, consistently ranked, as the eighth power in the world.

01:10:03.200 Now, you've got to understand, we're one-tenth of one percent of the population of the world.

01:10:09.500 You know, we're going to reach 10 million soon.

01:10:11.580 Ahead of us, our country is with a billion people, hundreds of millions of people, tens of millions of people.

01:10:17.860 And below is the same.

01:10:19.520 But we stand out, this tiny, tiny country.

01:10:22.060 And the reason that's so is because I put this vision that is my purpose in life into being, but the jury is still out.

01:10:31.360 It's not that you can sit on your laurels.

01:10:33.180 I can't say, oh, well, and I'm coming back in.

01:10:35.440 I've done it.

01:10:36.140 I wrote my biography or my autobiography.

01:10:38.780 That's it.

01:10:39.320 No.

01:10:40.060 You have to constantly work at it.

01:10:41.720 You have to constantly increase, increase the economic power, increase the innovation, increase the circle of peace, expand it, and block those who would trample us.

01:10:52.800 And, you know, it's not automatic.

01:10:54.800 It's not obvious that history will be kind to the good.

01:10:58.460 It's not true.

01:10:59.340 History has been kind to the bad.

01:11:01.220 History has been kind to the worst people.

01:11:02.720 I mean, Genghis Khan ruled a good chunk of the world for over a century and created horrible, you know, terrible horrors.

01:11:11.980 The Roman Empire, you could judge it this way or that way, but they ruled through the force of arms and subjugation for hundreds of centuries, okay?

01:11:19.640 The history, you know, Martin Luther King said the arc of history bends towards justice.

01:11:24.920 Maybe so.

01:11:26.160 But that arc is very brittle, and it could be broken by the most, the darkest forces.

01:11:30.780 And there's lots of variability.

01:11:32.720 Lots of variability.

01:11:33.820 And right now, the darkest force in our immediate vicinity is this horrible regime in Tehran, in Iran, that everybody can see its horrors, what it's doing to those incredibly brave men, incredibly brave women who are dying on the streets there.

01:11:47.720 And that, if I say that the arc of history will bend towards catastrophe, if these ayatollahs, these thugs, these theological thugs would have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to every part of the earth. 1.00

01:12:03.120 So I've made it my life's mission, so far successful, to prevent them from having that.

01:12:08.080 But it's an ongoing thing.

01:12:09.340 The jury is still out.

01:12:10.920 There are many things.

01:12:11.840 It's not guaranteed.

01:12:13.220 Right, right.

01:12:13.720 Well, part of the reason you were able to offer something attractive to the Arab countries with whom you signed a peace accord was because you had something to offer, as you mentioned before, in relationship to Iran.

01:12:24.460 And so let's talk about the Abraham Accords a bit more.

01:12:26.800 Now, you're going to be moving back into office in the upcoming weeks, in all likelihood, and you indicated your continuing interest, for obvious reasons, in expanding the Abraham Accords.

01:12:37.500 And you mentioned Saudi Arabia.

01:12:40.180 Can you explain a little bit about your vision of the most likely pathway forward on the Abraham Accord front?

01:12:48.220 Are the Saudis next to sign, so to speak? 0.60

01:12:52.500 Is that beckoning on the horizon?

01:12:54.100 I can't speak for them, but the Saudis are tremendously important.

01:12:58.520 I think it should be understood it's not just another country that would be added to the roster of peace.

01:13:04.300 This is by far the most significant and influential Arab country, although there are some remarkable examples of achievement in the United Arab Emirates and other places in the Arab world.

01:13:19.060 But the Saudis undoubtedly are in a category of their own.

01:13:24.060 And yes, I would like to have peace with them, certainly begin with normalization.

01:13:28.180 But you have to, the answer is, will they be there?

01:13:31.420 First of all, where are they?

01:13:32.760 This is an interesting question.

01:13:33.880 There's no way that we would have been able to achieve the peace accords, the normalization accords with the Emirates and Bahrain without tacit Saudi approval.

01:13:45.280 There's also no way that we could fly above the skies of Saudi Arabia without Saudi approval.

01:13:53.880 There's no way that I could speak the other day, as I did, when the election results were known, with my Saudi friend, Muhammad Saud.

01:14:03.640 He's the, I call it the Likud branch manager.

01:14:07.660 He speaks on Saudi internet, okay?

01:14:10.460 And he congratulates me.

01:14:11.880 And he says, Bibi, we're for you.

01:14:13.960 He speaks Hebrew, by the way.

01:14:15.200 We're for you.

01:14:15.960 He visited Israel.

01:14:17.020 There's no way that this is done without approval.

01:14:22.780 Why did this change take place?

01:14:24.860 And that could be an indication of where we go from here.

01:14:27.620 The quantum leap in our relations with the Gulf states took place in 2015 when President Obama, when the United, or rather a joint session of Congress invited me to speak before it on the impending nuclear deal that President Obama was going to sign with Iran.

01:14:54.640 Now, even though I knew that I couldn't reverse it, I couldn't get two-thirds majority in the Congress to resist it, I thought I could get a majority to oppose it, and I did, consisting not only of Republicans, but quite a few Democrats.

01:15:09.080 But I knew I couldn't get two-thirds.

01:15:10.780 I can't get two-thirds in our parliament.

01:15:13.340 I certainly couldn't get it in the American Congress.

01:15:15.460 But I went to speak there.

01:15:17.220 And I spoke, by the way, Jordan, I described this speech.

01:15:20.860 I never prepared for a speech like this in my life.

01:15:22.960 And I prepared my speeches right up to the podium.

01:15:26.260 I changed them on the podium.

01:15:27.820 You know, I'm a stickler for the precise words.

01:15:31.300 So, well, I came into, just as an aside, I came to Washington.

01:15:36.940 You'll read this in the second part of the book.

01:15:39.660 But I came to Washington to challenge a sitting president.

01:15:44.220 It's a very, very difficult thing to do.

01:15:46.220 And even though, you know, Obama was the quintessential example of a leader who was there not for power itself, but for a purpose.

01:15:58.120 He had an ideology.

01:15:59.800 It's just that his ideology clashed with mine.

01:16:03.160 He believed that, you know, peace will produce power.

01:16:06.160 And I believed that power produces peace.

01:16:08.160 And if you ask me to do a peace treaty that will basically leave me shorn of my power, it won't last for five minutes.

01:16:17.580 So we had a difference of views.

01:16:19.260 But it clashed, literally clashed, with the question of the Iran Accords, which I thought merely paved the way for Iran to become a military nuclear power which will threaten all of us. 0.89

01:16:30.000 So I, not light-headedly, but after considerable deliberation, went to Washington.

01:16:37.780 I arrived in Washington the evening before.

01:16:39.660 I'm going to go over the speech.

01:16:41.220 And I try to practice the speech.

01:16:44.200 And my sinuses are clogged.

01:16:47.360 I have that condition.

01:16:49.160 And I put more and more nose spray.

01:16:50.840 And they're getting clogged.

01:16:51.740 They're both clogged.

01:16:52.680 And I try to practice the speech.

01:16:54.440 And I'm stopped in mid-sentence.

01:16:56.880 Every mid-sentence.

01:16:58.220 And I say to my wife, this is the worst thing that could happen.

01:17:02.020 The most important speech of my life.

01:17:04.440 And I'm stuck because of these horrible nose drops.

01:17:07.180 And I fling them in the air.

01:17:08.200 And they try to give me bowls of steam.

01:17:09.980 They bring a medic.

01:17:10.800 Nothing happens.

01:17:12.240 She says, well, sleep it over.

01:17:13.680 It'll pass by morning.

01:17:15.120 Well, it didn't.

01:17:15.860 And I didn't sleep a wink.

01:17:17.040 I get up in the morning.

01:17:18.300 We make our way towards the Capitol building.

01:17:22.220 And I say, what?

01:17:24.220 What in God's name am I going to do?

01:17:25.980 I mean, I can't deliver a line of the speech.

01:17:29.560 And as we see the steps of the Capitol, lo and behold, like a biblical miracle, the sinuses cleared.

01:17:37.640 The waters recede.

01:17:39.780 And I go in and I give the speech, which was very well received, very well received.

01:17:45.180 And here's what happened.

01:17:47.400 And this is the relationship to Abraham Accords.

01:17:50.600 As I'm giving the speech in a joint session of Congress, my delegation receives calls in real time from these Arab states, some of them.

01:18:02.560 And they say, we can't believe what your prime minister is doing.

01:18:06.040 He's challenging a sitting American president, the most powerful man in the world.

01:18:09.700 So that led to clandestine meetings between me and these Arab leaders.

01:18:15.020 And I won't itemize where.

01:18:17.500 They were in the Gulf.

01:18:18.380 They were in the Red Sea.

01:18:19.380 They were on a yacht.

01:18:20.280 I landed in a helicopter on a yacht, if you can believe it.

01:18:23.640 My security people said, that's too dangerous.

01:18:25.620 I said, skip it.

01:18:26.660 We're doing it.

01:18:27.180 And this led to the Abraham Accords that were later culminated with the help of President Trump.

01:18:34.800 And he had an important role here.

01:18:36.540 And I value and I appreciate that.

01:18:38.340 I'll never, never stop appreciating this because I think it was very important.

01:18:42.880 But it took me a while to persuade him.

01:18:44.720 He got very little credit for that, too, by the way.

01:18:48.140 Well, he got all the credit from me.

01:18:49.580 But it took me three years to persuade him because he was going down the Palestinian rabbit hole. 1.00

01:18:57.280 Ron Durmer, my ambassador to Washington, tried to say the difference between.

01:19:02.220 He said, look, he said, getting a peace treaty with.

01:19:05.200 I'm not a golf player.

01:19:06.520 So he said, getting a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates is a 15-foot putt.

01:19:13.080 Getting peace treaty with Saudi Arabia is a 30-foot putt.

01:19:17.980 Getting a peace treaty with the Palestinians is a 150-foot putt through a brick wall.

01:19:25.220 So it took me about three years to persuade the president what I said to him.

01:19:32.180 And I also describe this in my book.

01:19:33.720 I say in the very first meeting I had with Trump in the White House as president, I said to him,

01:19:39.220 Donald, there are four peace treaties waiting to be plucked.

01:19:43.700 Ripe, you know, plums ready to be plucked off the tree.

01:19:48.420 And I itemized the country.

01:19:50.220 And I suggested that he bring an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea, invite me and these Arab leaders there to discuss Iran's security.

01:19:59.740 I said, that will produce peace treaties right off the bat.

01:20:03.420 And he didn't buy it.

01:20:05.000 He thought I was trying to evade the Palestinian track.

01:20:07.320 And I said, okay, we'll try the Palestinian track. 0.91

01:20:09.080 And we worked on that.

01:20:10.580 And, of course, we produced a template, which I think is very productive.

01:20:14.060 But the Palestinians wouldn't come. 1.00

01:20:16.160 Just as Arafat couldn't make peace any more than he could fly to the moon,

01:20:19.160 the present leadership can't do it because they'd have to give up what is really guiding the Palestinian national movement,

01:20:25.660 which is not to build a state but to destroy one, the Jewish state. 0.88

01:20:29.200 So that didn't go anywhere.

01:20:30.920 And so we tried the other track, the track of peace through strength, the path of peace for peace,

01:20:37.500 the peace for economy, peace for other things.

01:20:39.660 And boom, it exploded.

01:20:40.940 Now, will Saudi Arabia be next?

01:20:43.880 It's up to them, of course.

01:20:45.520 But I think that this will be a worthwhile goal for me, I believe, for the entire world.

01:20:53.820 And I believe for the leaders of Saudi Arabia, it could be a tremendous, tremendous change.

01:20:58.880 So why do you think the Biden administration hasn't jumped on the Saudi Arabia opportunity,

01:21:06.300 especially given that the Biden administration and the Americans in general

01:21:11.180 would have benefited from closer relations with the Saudis given the current state of energy,

01:21:17.380 what would you say, uncertainty that plagues the United States and the rest of the world?

01:21:21.680 I mean, it just seemed to me that that, again, that was low-hanging fruit that was just ready to be plucked

01:21:26.820 because I knew that the Saudis, for example, were on board at least tacitly behind the scenes

01:21:31.740 in relation to the Abraham Accords.

01:21:33.860 And it seems obvious beyond belief that a Saudi-Israel peace accord would be of benefit,

01:21:42.160 obviously, not only to the Saudis and the Israelis, but to everyone in the world,

01:21:45.800 especially given the threat of Iran.

01:21:47.540 So I don't understand why this process has been stalled.

01:21:53.780 And so what are your feelings about that?

01:21:57.100 Well, probably for two reasons.

01:21:59.800 Of course, I'll have an opportunity to speak to President Biden, who's been a longtime friend.

01:22:03.860 Forty years, we've known each other since we were both young men.

01:22:06.860 I came to Washington as a diplomat, a young diplomat, and he came as a young senator.

01:22:11.540 So I definitely intend to take it up with him.

01:22:15.080 I think there are two schools of thought that push back this obvious opportunity that you described.

01:22:23.900 The first is the Palestinian straitjacket that says, and it still lingers among the foreign policy elites.

01:22:31.080 I mean, they've been at it for decades.

01:22:33.500 They can't let it go.

01:22:34.500 They say, well, no, no, you have to.

01:22:36.220 Peace means peace with the Palestinians.

01:22:38.000 Peace in the Middle East is not in the Middle East. 0.95

01:22:40.500 It's peace in the tiny part of the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians.

01:22:43.540 But peace with the entire Arab world, that's not peace. 0.99

01:22:46.420 Peace, or you can't get to it before you get through the 150-foot putt through the iron wall, which means you'll never get to it.

01:22:54.800 Right, right.

01:22:55.420 That's the lingering thing among the foreign policy.

01:22:57.740 And it's maybe changing because the Abraham Accords sort of started shaking people up to see that there are other opportunities, broader opportunities for peace than they ever imagined.

01:23:09.160 The second reason is that for Saudi Arabia, I think, making that transition requires continually habituating Saudi public opinion, but also conforming to the broader Saudi interests.

01:23:28.100 There are two interests that Saudi Arabia has.

01:23:30.020 It wants to modernize Saudi Arabia.

01:23:31.940 There's no question that the current leader, Mohammed bin Salman, wants to modernize Saudi Arabia, propel it to be an advanced country.

01:23:42.680 It doesn't mean democratic country, not in the way that we think, but look at the United Arab Emirates, or look at Singapore, for that matter.

01:23:48.920 They're not exactly European-style, Luxembourg-style democracies, okay?

01:23:54.080 But they have degrees of freedom in the economy and the life of the people that is obviously very different from what you have in Iraq or Syria. 0.50

01:24:02.880 It's a different thing altogether, okay?

01:24:05.600 So I'm sure that they want to go there, that he would want to go there, but for the Saudi leadership to go there, they would have to, I think, be assured that their national interests, and especially their national security interests, are protected.

01:24:21.960 And that requires a certain flexibility on the part of those who want them to take this move.

01:24:31.040 I'm talking about the United States.

01:24:32.960 So it may be that there's a lot more to discuss.

01:24:38.320 I'm loathe to be more specific.

01:24:40.600 I obviously have given this some thought, and I'd like to have a go at it, obviously, very soon, I hope.

01:24:49.280 Hello, everyone.

01:24:52.000 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

01:24:58.660 Thank you.

01:24:59.000 Thank you.

01:24:59.700 Thank you.

01:24:59.860 Thank you.

01:25:05.780 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 05, 2022

311. Does Israel have the Right to Exist？｜ PM-Elect Benjamin Netanyahu

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 05, 2022

311. Does Israel have the Right to Exist？ ｜ PM-Elect Benjamin Netanyahu

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

311. Does Israel have the Right to Exist？｜ PM-Elect Benjamin Netanyahu