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Aug. 14, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:10:42
Benjamin Netanyahu | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 130
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We're one-tenth of one percent of the world's population.
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.
And that, there's more than a rationalist triumph here.
It's the triumph of the spirit.
I'll tell you what it is.
It's a triumph of faith.
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.
The Prime Minister's whole life has been, in some way or another, centered on and in service to the State of Israel.
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.
He's currently in the running for Israel's upcoming election.
Back in the 1990s, during his first term, the Prime Minister was foundational in tearing away at the roots of Israel's socialism.
From there, his ongoing strategies resulted in fundamentally remaking the country, particularly on economic freedom and military strength.
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.
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.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
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Prime Minister, thanks so much for joining the show.
What an honor.
Welcome.
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.
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.
And so a lot of people don't really understand the fundamental basis of the Jewish state.
Is it the Holocaust?
Is it Jewish history?
How do all these parts tie in?
No, it's first of all Jewish history.
We came here, the Jewish people came here with Abraham.
Remember Abraham from the Bible?
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob?
Well, they came here about 3,500 years ago.
And this has been our land, the one we've been attached to for 3,500 years.
Jerusalem, our capital, 3,000 years.
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.
People think we were kicked out by the Romans.
No, they destroyed Jerusalem, but we still hung around.
But around between the 7th and 9th century in the Arab conquest, depleted from our land.
We lost our land.
A lot of people lost their lands.
It can happen.
But we didn't give up on the dream of coming back to our land and reconstituting our national life.
Okay?
And so we constantly said next year in Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem, we wanted to come back.
We did come back.
Dripping first and then much more greater numbers in the 19th century.
And in the 20th century, we reformed the state of Israel.
So we are, we defeat the laws of history.
The laws of history say you can't come back from expulsion, dispersion, exiles, massacre.
You can't.
Well, we did.
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.
I don't know if the Middle East will change.
It is changing.
We can talk about it.
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.
I think that's the story of Israel.
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.
In India, and in Asia, and in Africa, and in Latin America, they understand that Israel gives hope to humanity.
It says, you can do it.
That sounds like a yes we can.
So your family history in the state of Israel is amazing.
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.
You were telling me before the show that he actually had a meeting with President Eisenhower.
Yes, he did.
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.
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.
So he was a, not bad for a 23 year old, he was a Prussian.
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.
So he wanted to persuade the The world, that there is a need to do, to make the Jewish state.
He went to... Zobudinsky was the founder of my movement.
He was 60 years old.
He was in London.
And he was agitating to persuade Britain to recognize the Jewish state, which they refused to do.
They closed the gates of this country.
They wouldn't allow Jewish immigration.
They were against the Arabs.
My father went to Zobudinsky in London.
He said, you have the right idea, but you're in the wrong place.
And he said, why?
He said, because you should be in America.
He said, why America?
He said, because America will be the rising power in the world.
There may be a world conflict.
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.
Well, they went to America.
Trubodinsky died, and my father continued alone during the interwar, during the war years, agitating for Zionism.
He was all of 32.
And he began, that's in 1942, he decided to do something that no Jewish leader did before.
He went to the Republicans.
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.
He didn't want to antagonize the British, he thought that The British wanted to cater to the Arabs.
He simply would not do it.
He was a great leader, but for the Jewish people, that wasn't good.
So, not being able to persuade the Democrats, he went to the Republicans.
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.
Well, Roosevelt didn't like it.
But three months later, he had no choice.
The Democratic National Convention adopted a similar platform.
So, in many ways, my father was the progenitor of the bipartisan American support for Israel.
But, of course, he didn't just work on public opinion, but he worked also on the generals and on the politicians.
And he went from one to the other.
Claire Booth Luce, the wife of of the publisher of Time Magazine, who was a congresswoman, brilliant woman, she opened doors for him.
And so he was taken first to the lowest official in the State Department.
His name was Lloyd Henderson.
He was responsible for the Middle East.
And they started bringing him up.
They brought him to Dean Atchison, who was the acting Secretary of State, and eventually they brought him to Eisenhower.
After the war, he was the Commander of the Army.
Okay?
And they heard from him something that they never heard before.
Never heard before.
And Eisenhower asked him, why should we support you?
He said, because the war has ended.
The Soviet Union is going to walk into the Middle East.
The Arab countries are not only not going to be an obstacle, they'll cooperate with them.
And we, in the Jewish state of Israel, will be the bastion of the West.
Bastion of Western interests and Western values in the heart of the Middle East to block the Soviet takeover of the Middle East.
And Eisenhower looked at him, Eisenhower was very, my father describes him as a Sort of very open-minded, very logical.
American patriot.
So he asked him, how are you going to be the bastion?
You're only 600,000.
And my father said to him, General, you've just seen in two world wars how we Jews fight for others.
Can you imagine how strong we'll be when we fight for ourselves?
Well, Eisenhower was very much for him.
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.
The Brits nixed that, but it tells you his perspective.
You work on public opinion, and you work on the officials.
Public opinion, you appeal to justice.
Officials, you appeal to interest.
And the two merge.
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.
I've only visited the State of Israel four times over the course of my life.
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.
The growth here is just extraordinary.
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.
In Israel, you can see a lot of that.
But of course, the high tech and the other things that are happening here are mesmerizing.
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.
But you know that innovation doesn't do it by itself.
That is science, technology, Education?
Do not produce wealth by themselves.
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.
Didn't help, okay?
To do that, you have to have free markets.
Technology without free markets doesn't take you anywhere.
It just makes people migrate to countries with free markets.
Free markets and technology can Explode, which is what you're saying here.
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.
And the only way you can ensure its future would be to have it powerful.
What does powerful mean?
The first thing you have to do is to have an army.
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.
Well, what do you need for an army?
Well, you need tanks.
That's been replaced by drones.
You need airplanes, F-35s.
You need submarines.
You need military intelligence.
It's very expensive.
All these things have one thing in common.
They're very expensive.
How are you going to pay for that?
Well, the regular thinking was, that's easy.
You tax the people, you get the money.
Right.
I, no, that's wrong.
The only way you pay for that is with a robust economy.
And the only economies that work are free market economies.
That was my idea.
And the idea was that with that, with a free market economy, you can then build a very powerful military and military intelligence.
And now you create both civilian technology, military technology, and you become now Something that people are interested in.
You don't go and beg for countries to come and help you.
They come to you.
To help them.
And that creates a third apex of the triangle, which is the diplomatic flowering, flourishing of Israel.
So my idea was, fix the economy, get a strong military, and get a strong diplomatic position.
That will get you peace.
Strength gets you peace, not weakness.
Well, that's easier said than done.
First of all, it's not so easy said.
People didn't believe it.
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.
It's still worth it.
In other words, they believe that peace produces strength.
I believe that strength produces peace, especially in our part of the world.
If you're not strong, you disappear.
You're devoured.
So, I had to affect a free market revolution here.
That's really what I did, both as Prime Minister and as Finance Minister.
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.
I want to ask you about that in just one second.
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So, let's talk about how you effectuate an economic revolution in a country that's had no history of this.
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.
How do you do that, especially in a coalition system where there are so many people who want their piece of the pie?
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.
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.
But by the mid 60s, it was already congealing into a bad thing with bureaucracy, taxes, unions, all the things that stunt growth.
And I always believed that.
And I thought, well, how do I change it?
To change it, first of all, you have to believe it and understand it.
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.
So I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do.
People didn't associate with me because I was the ambassador to the UN.
I say this, by the way, in my memoirs, I describe this transformation, but I grew up With a free market view.
I grew up with a skepticism about socialism.
I grew up with an appreciation from my father about the value of individual initiative and enterprise.
So the problem is that the country was here and I was there.
How do you get it from here to there?
Well, it was a crisis.
On that one, the Clintonites were right.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Well, I began that actually in 96 when I came in.
And the first thing that I did was I liberalized the currency, foreign exchange currency.
You know what that... Israel, you couldn't take out more than a few thousand dollars.
You'd have to get approval from the central bank.
A guy wanted to get a newsweek.
Remember there was a magazine called Newsweek?
Well, they asked for a subscription.
You had to pay it in dollars.
He had to go to the central bank, get clearance.
For dollars for a Newsweek subscription.
Crazy.
There was a black market street here that was used for black marketeering and funds and so on.
And I decided to break it.
When I got elected, first time in 96, I said, we're going to open up the currency markets.
They said, Prime Minister, are you crazy?
Do you know what happened?
In Mexico, the peso collapsed, a mountain of money moved out.
I said, well, Yeah, but I believe in this.
So, I did it.
And you know what happened?
Is a mountain of money did move.
But didn't move out, it moved in.
Because money, trade, investments, they go to the free markets, not to the closed markets.
That was the first instance.
But the real opportunity I got to change the economy was in 2003 when I became finance minister.
I lost the elections, came back to politics after a wonderful three years.
It was great.
There are suggestions that you were put in the finance ministry specifically to fail.
Yes, I was.
But so what?
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.
Israel is in the deepest economic crisis in decades.
And he offers me The finance ministry.
And I'm the potential heir.
And they said, Prime Minister, take any ministry.
Do not take the finance ministry because you won't be Prime Minister.
To which I answered, well, why do I want to be Prime Minister?
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.
So at least one of my principal goals I can achieve.
And if I won't be prime minister, so what?
I'll achieve one of the goals that I can.
So I went into the finance ministry, found a huge crisis, huge.
I mean, enormous deficits, enormous unemployment, enormous, and everything was bad.
Okay.
And I thought, well, how am I going to, how am I going to take them from here to there?
Okay.
Israel didn't have a culture of lemonade stands.
It had a culture of the army.
Everybody went into the army.
So when I thought of presenting my economic plan to the public, I said, well, let's take an image from the army.
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.
And he said, all right, now we're going to take a race, but it's a special kind of race.
So you, Netanyahu, points to me.
Look to the guy on your right, put him on your shoulders.
And the next guy, put the guy to his right on his shoulders and so on.
And then he blew the whistle.
I had a guy about my size.
I was heavy.
I could barely take a few steps.
The guy next to me was the smallest guy in the company.
He had the biggest gun on his shoulders and he collapsed.
And the third guy was a big guy with a relatively small guy on his shoulders.
He took off like a rocket and won the race.
And I said to the Israeli public, All global economies are pairs of a public sector sitting on the shoulders of a private sector.
In our case, the public sector got too fat and we're about to collapse like that little guy next to me.
So we have to put the fat man, it was called fat man, thin man, taxi cab drivers talked about it.
It's like the butt of jokes.
It was funny that the, we have to put the fat man, the public sector on a strict diet.
We have to give oxygen to the guy at the bottom, and we have to remove the obstacle in his way.
What is oxygen?
I said, oxygen, well, it's many things, but the first three are lower taxes, lower taxes, lower taxes.
Because that's what makes people run the race, okay?
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.
And you have the lower taxes below.
The guy begins to run, hits a ditch, crosses the ditch, hits a wall, crosses the wall, hits a fence.
These are called barriers to competition.
And it could be many things.
It could be over-regulation.
It could be hidden monopolies, open monopolies.
So I proceeded to adopt about 60, 70 major reforms.
Simultaneously.
Okay?
To change that.
And we went from 1% contraction of the GDP to plus 5% growth in a year.
And it stayed that way for a good decade.
That's the foundation of everything that you're seeing, this explosive growth that you see now.
It was hard.
I lost politically.
My advisors were right.
I didn't have a chance to become prime minister.
I went down in my votes, but eventually the people appreciated what I did.
And Israel is a changed country.
There are more.
You had a meeting here.
Thousands of people came.
Are they free marketeers?
Yeah.
Well, 20 years ago, they weren't.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously, the Arab countries would benefit from Israel's technology, the explosion of innovation and enterprise, free enterprise that you see here.
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.
Everything is done here and they could partake of it, but that wouldn't be enough.
The reason they came is because they were afraid of Iran.
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.
I went against the, what the so-called JCPOA, the nuclear agreement with Iran.
That got their attention in a big way.
And we began to have secret meetings.
I think I'm the only Israeli, you know, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have visited the Gulf.
And I'm the only one who didn't see it in daytime.
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.
Because if Iran gets nuclear weapons, you know, it's not merely aimed at our destruction, it's aimed at their destruction.
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.
So, but America didn't see it that way.
I saw it that way.
They saw it that way.
And they relied on us to do it.
So, that began the process of thawing out relations with him in a big way.
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.
It's part and parcel of this rapprochement, this joining of interests that happened between Israel and the Gulf states.
Now, when Trump was elected in 2016, remember, I was in Congress speaking against Obama's nuclear deal in 2015.
Now, Trump gets elected president.
So I came to him and I said, you know, we have four peace treaties waiting to be picked like that.
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?
You know, I remember that Roosevelt had brought Ibn Saud to an American destroyer during World War II.
I said, bring an aircraft carrier and invite me.
And the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Bahrain, and we can get, of course, Egypt and Jordan, for a summit.
And the summit should be to deal with Iran.
But that would produce, I said, four peace treaties.
I said there are other countries.
I was thinking of Morocco.
I was thinking of Sudan.
I was already thinking of that.
And I didn't get very far.
I think the president at the time was consumed with the idea of bartering an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The art of the deal.
And as hard as I tried, I tried to explain, look, they don't want peace.
They don't want a state next to Israel.
They want a state instead of Israel.
So we can waste a lot of time trying to get that.
Or we can have these peace treaties like that.
Well, it took about three years.
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.
But I think we could have already had peace with Saudi Arabia.
And if I'm reelected now, I'm going to have peace with Saudi Arabia.
They trust me.
They trust me to give the bulwark against Iran.
And if we have peace with Saudi Arabia, effectively the Arab-Israeli conflict is over.
Yes, we don't have Yemen.
Yes, we don't have Iraq, Syria.
That's not important.
So my idea was that everybody said you have to have peace with the Palestinians to get peace with the Arab world.
And my idea was the exact opposite.
You go to the Arab world, leave the Palestinians to the end.
They'll come around.
Uh, but don't let that, uh, you know, don't let the tail wag the body.
So in a second, I want to ask you about that potential piece with Saudi Arabia and, and what that would look like.
Cause they clearly are interested in, in making nor in normalizing relations with the state of Israel.
I mean, there wouldn't be peace with the UAE and Bahrain if, if Saudi Arabia hadn't signed off on it.
You don't know how right you are.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So let's talk about the possibility of a more durable peace, the title of one of your books, with Saudi Arabia.
So the Saudis obviously have a strong interest in making peace with Israel.
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.
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.
And that there'll be normalization of relations.
What are the contours of a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia look like?
First, a correction.
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.
That didn't quite materialize yet, but that was the actual deal that we worked out.
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.
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.
Nuclear program.
And we did many things.
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.
And they brought it back.
Have you seen Argo, this film Argo?
Remember?
This is Argo on steroids.
You know, they took it out.
The Iranians are chasing them.
They're moving to the next place.
You know, the glass almost fell.
They almost fell.
They almost fell.
You know, they, uh, and we got out and they brought half a ton of documentation.
And we could prove to the world, Iran at 2003.
You know what the mission was in these files?
Bring five atomic bombs, Hiroshima style bombs in 2003.
That's 20 years ago.
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.
The only thing that will stop them is a credible military threat.
Coupled with crippling sanctions, but crippling sanctions are not enough.
Credible military threat, and if the threat doesn't work, if they're not deterred, then you have to act.
The Arab countries, the Arab leaders, trust me to do that.
They do not trust the current government.
That's the foundation of the peace.
They're not going to make peace unless they believe that.
Uh, and then everything else follows, and I think, uh, I think there are many other things, but that's the most important one.
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.
I mean, the Obama administration was obviously so antipathetic toward you personally, but also toward the state of Israel more generally.
Uh, you know, that must have been a very difficult relationship to navigate.
Well, it wasn't the easiest.
But we did.
And again, you do that from a position of strength.
You do that by appealing to... America's not a closed country.
America's not.
You can't appeal to Chinese public opinion because you can't.
There's no way to do it.
But you can appeal to the American people.
You can talk to them.
You can say that what is bad for us is also bad for you.
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.
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.
It's called North Korea.
North Korea develops nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Half of Asia is quaking in fear.
Everybody's threatened.
Japan is threatened.
And it's just a question of time.
And I don't think it's a lot of time.
They've already reached it.
They can reach Los Angeles.
They can reach... That changes the world.
Now, North Korea is 5% of Iran.
5% of Iran's GDP.
So if Iran with its ideology, with its death to America ideology, you know, America is the great Satan, we're the small Satan.
I often, you know, poke fun at my European friends.
I said, you're a middle-sized Satan.
Not worth it.
You know, you can be small, you can be big, but you don't want to be a middle-sized Satan.
But that's what they talk about, death to America.
You don't want that government.
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.
I couldn't get through.
I couldn't get through, but I could get through to the American people.
I can get through to their representatives in Congress.
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.
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.
It doesn't make any difference if it's Democrats or Republicans, it's still the indispensable ally for us.
And to go and challenge the American president, It's not something I would likely do.
I did it because I thought that my country's very existence was in peril.
That I had to challenge.
That if I didn't speak out, I would never forgive myself.
And what am I here for?
What, to sit on a chair?
To earn money?
I mean, it's a joke.
You go there because this is my mission, to protect the future of Israel.
And so I went there.
And it was...
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.
And that obviously changed when the administration changed, and I was very happy that that change took place under the Trump administration.
So, looking at Iran and sort of the long-term future for Iran, what do you see as the optimistic possibility for Iran?
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.
at Israeli cities, they're funding Hamas, obviously.
So what do you see as a long-term solution for Iran?
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.
No, it's the opposite.
It's Iran without the nuclear agreement.
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.
And that's under the agreement.
You agree to it.
That's what the agreement says.
And you give them megabucks to boot.
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.
Okay, Iran with a nuclear agreement A rich country gets hundreds of billions of dollars because of this agreement.
It breaks out of its international isolation.
And it's a country that doesn't really fear any military action from the United States.
That's what it means.
That's what the nuclear agreement means.
It just gives them immunity and prosperity while they're developing a bomb, a nuclear arsenal in two years.
So you shouldn't sign this agreement.
Uh, in order to stop it, you have to have the willingness to act militarily against Iran's nuclear program and nuclear installations.
That's what I have.
And I did it.
It's not something that I, you know, there are more things to do.
Do we have the capacity to do it?
The answer is yes, we do.
Do we have the will to do it?
I have the will to do it.
My colleagues have the will to do it with me.
And I think this is the big test.
We have to stop Iran.
By the way, if you have that capacity, you won't have to use it in all likelihood.
But if you don't have the will, it's meaningless.
So I think that's... Now the question is, alright, but how does Iran change?
Will Iran change?
Well, these regimes, like Iran or North Korea and so on, basically they kill their opponents.
You know, they govern by killing people, you know?
The reason the Shah fell is because he wasn't willing to kill thousands of people.
It's not only Jimmy Carter and all the stuff that you read, it's because he wasn't willing to kill.
What these guys discovered is that if you kill, nobody cares.
Nobody intervenes, you know?
You can see that in many places, okay?
So, and they're willing to kill.
They kill maybe a thousand, two thousand people a year, and that's enough to get the point.
How will it change internally?
They control information, they control the killing machines.
You could possibly decontrol the information.
I think that's important.
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.
That begins to challenge them.
But, you know, there are many other things that I could talk about.
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.
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Okay, so let's talk about some of the other threats.
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.
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.
We'll get to that in a little while, I'm sure.
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.
And the easiest way to see that is the demographic trends in the state of Israel.
Tel Aviv, which is a very secular city, the reproduction rate here is 2.3.
The reproduction rate in Judea and Samaria is 4.6.
The reproduction rate in Haifa is 2.4.
You're looking at... The reproduction rate in Europe is minus one.
That's exactly right.
So, I mean, this is the only Western country, literally the only one, that has a reproduction rate above replacement averages.
And that is the strength of the state of Israel.
At the same time, that might be because it does face existential threat on all borders.
And so you're forced into a certain level of social solidarity.
So what do you think of that?
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?
Well, whether we require it or not, we're getting it.
We can test what will happen.
You know, I'd like to be tested in a country that is not threatened from day one with its survival, with its existence.
So, yes, I think it's our history, too.
It's our bond to this land.
It's the fact that a third of our people were incinerated just a few decades ago.
I think that creates the wars of Israel.
You know, people have children as a reaffirmation of their hope.
And we're no longer living in a situation where you have, you know, labor-intensive economies.
You have to have 10 kids in order to earn a living.
It's the opposite.
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.
But in Israel, you're prosperous and you have a lot of kids, and that strengthens our economy even more.
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.
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.
And I think that that's where it's going to continue.
I don't think it's a short-term thing.
There is a pulsating life force here.
How do we manage the various, the solidarity?
Well, the first thing is have free markets, because free markets give you two things.
They give you economic growth.
They allow the realization of personal potential, but they also give you the money.
They give you the money on a smaller tax rate.
I have to argue this with you.
I said, you know, we're going to lower tax rates and we're going to have bigger revenues.
And they said, no, that can't be.
I said, haven't you heard of the Laffer curve?
And they said, Laffer?
Who's this Laffer?
No, there are non-Jewish economists.
There is one or two, you know, non-Jewish economists.
Arthur Laffer.
If you're a high rate of taxation and you lower tax rates, you're going to get more tax revenues.
That's easily demonstrable.
And we're at a very high tax rate.
When you do that, you also fill up the government coffers.
On the one hand, you promote business, initiative, enterprise, employment.
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.
So there's no conflict between social welfare and free markets.
They're absolutely complementary.
And in fact, I would say that social welfare depends on free markets.
And that's what we installed here.
We changed the thing and that creates a measure of solidarity.
It doesn't allow the bifurcation of society that happens in so many other places where you don't have free markets.
That's when society is really bifurcated.
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.
This is one of the things that people in Northern Israel particularly are significantly worried about.
Israel has Iron Dome, but the question is it's extraordinarily expensive to operate Iron Dome.
Every one of those anti-missile missiles essentially is very expensive.
Hezbollah has extraordinary numbers of rockets.
So what exactly is the plan for Hezbollah, broadly speaking?
Well, I'm not going to ask you to lay out a military.
Not on the first date.
And not public.
But I can say this.
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.
The ceiling is moved, boom, a rocket comes out, you know.
And he said, well, God, how do you sleep at night?
And I said to him, Donald, I sleep at night by making sure they don't sleep at night.
That's basically it.
It's both defense but also offense.
And I really wouldn't get into that.
But apparently they think They're concerned with that because they're very careful.
And of course, we will surprise them.
Surprise is a key element in war, which I hope we don't have to fight.
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.
What can be done with Hamas?
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.
So what happens with a radicalized... Well, and also you'd have to take over because there's no one else to take over.
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.
So I think what you do periodically is you restore deterrence powerfully.
We just did that a year ago, right before I left office.
We destroyed, they built aerial capacity.
We destroyed it.
They built a naval capacity.
We destroyed it.
They built a tunnel system to penetrate Israel.
We built an underground wall.
With sensors.
Not one tunnel crossed.
They built a tunnel network to hide under all of Gaza, defensive tunnels.
First time in history we penetrated that and bombed it.
You know, from the time of the Babylonians, people have been digging tunnels both for attacks and for defense.
And no one really was able to identify it and hit it from the outside without sending people inside.
And we did.
So we sent them back a good, good, good distance and, you know, it keeps the peace.
But you're not going to get the ultimate peace as long as you have militant Islamists there who are committed to our destruction.
Okay, that's just not going to happen.
So you have to create a wise policy.
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.
That's basically the division.
You have to make a division.
The Emirates want to have peace with you.
The Bahrainis want to have peace with you.
I believe the Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia wants to have peace with us.
We've already made peace with Egypt and Jordan.
Make peace with those who don't want to destroy you and roll back those who do.
Hamas wants to destroy us.
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.
So that's why we can't make peace with them.
We can't make peace with them because they don't want an Israel.
They want a peace without Israel.
You divide your policies based on what can realistically be achieved.
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.
If you're strong, you have at least a state of non-belligerence with the people, with the movements like Hamas.
And if you're strong, you can make peace with those who are willing to make peace.
And that's what we've done.
That's what the Abraham Accords are.
It's a change.
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.
I mean, it's crazy.
But that was the regular view.
It's changed.
You know, this country is different from what you saw 20 years ago.
It's different.
The skyline in Tel Aviv is different.
You've got free markets, free marketeers all over the place.
You've got... You've got... This is something that's really going to shock you.
Okay?
We have, they just published in one of these business magazines, the greatest concentration of billionaires per capita in the world.
Number one is Hong Kong.
I suspect that's going to change.
And number two is Israel.
20 years ago, that wasn't the case.
But since then, you had this multiplication of high-tech entrepreneurs and so on.
And the other thing is people will tell you, you know, Critics on the left, they'll say, oh yeah, but inequality went up.
You know, it's the rich got richer, the poor got poorer.
No, actually it's the opposite.
Because we changed the welfare laws here and so on and people went to work, the poor got richer.
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.
So Israel became a very rich country and a more egalitarian country.
Without curtailing competition, without curtailing the enterprise.
It's the opposite.
Free markets and social welfare go together with the right policies.
That was my policy.
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.
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.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I was only, I was only, I think, 11, 10, 11 when the Oslo Accords were signed.
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.
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.
Ramallah is essentially within the eyeline of Jerusalem.
Is there any plausible long-term, mid-term solution?
Sure.
That's actually developed in the plan that we discussed with President Trump, and I think it's a realistic one.
It basically says this, okay?
Palestinians in the Palestinian areas can govern themselves.
They can have their parliament, their representatives, Executive can have their flag and they can have their national anthem.
But there are certain sovereign powers they can't have.
The rule is simple.
They can have all the powers to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten us.
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?
That's it, okay?
It's a tiny country.
Okay, tiny area.
So, west of the Jordan River, Which is the boundary line.
And to the Mediterranean, where we were both sandwiched in.
Israel, and Israel alone, controls security.
We control the airspace.
We control the ground security.
Underground security, in case they want to do tunnels and electromagnetic space, you name it.
Israel alone.
Well, I said that over the years.
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.
And so my friends, including some who run the United States, said to me, but maybe that's not a sovereign country.
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.
It won't last more than five minutes anyway.
We're not going to die for an illusory opinion.
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.
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.
John Kerry brought General Allen, John Allen, to show me a plan how this can be done.
I was sitting there with our then Defense Minister, and they explained it, and we were skeptical, naturally.
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.
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.
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.
And we're not going to take that risk.
We're not going to withdraw our military from Judea and Samaria and have the Islamists, the Iranians, Hamas take over.
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.
By the way, not only for us.
It's for them.
Because the Hamas would overtake the Palestinian Authority in two seconds, which is what happened when we left Gaza.
We're not going to do that again.
It's not a perfect piece, but it's the most, the best thing that you could have.
So I want to ask you about another threat that Israel faces.
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.
That was Israeli Arabs being radicalized enough to actually riot in Lod during the last crisis with Hamas.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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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.
So during this last coalition government, which lasted approximately a year, I was frankly shocked that it lasted that long.
The big kind of pitch to the world is that there was an Arab party that was part of the coalition, the Ram party.
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.
And the coalition government fell based on that.
There's been a lot of talk for a long time in the West about the treatment of Arabs inside of Israel.
The fact is that, obviously, an Arab party did sit in, there are several Arab parties, actually, in Knesset.
There was one that was a member of the coalition.
The radicalization of the Israeli Arab population is of increasing concern.
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.
What can be done to fight this?
I mean, listen, I'm a relative stranger to Israel.
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.
If I'm walking around in Mamilla, there are many Israeli-Arabs who are walking around unmolested.
If I were to walk with my family, wearing my yarmulke, down to the Damascus Gate, it would be a serious security problem.
So how exactly is that gap bridgeable?
Well, first of all, correction.
The Iran party, you say, was against the An item that you mentioned.
The Iran party is the Muslim Brotherhood party.
They have a governing council, a Shura council, that is of the Muslim Brotherhood, okay?
And the Muslim Brotherhood supports Hamas and many other radicals.
And there are no countries in the Middle East with the exception of Turkey and Qatar.
All the Arab countries ban the Muslim Brotherhood.
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.
They're against Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
That's their professed ideology.
Sometimes they deliver it in a soft-spoken manner, but that's it.
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.
It's insane.
I mean, this was such a violation, not only of campaign promises, but of just common sense.
You can't do that.
And that obviously raised expectations of the more radical wing in the Israeli Arab population.
And that expressed itself in these, in many manifestations that you're talking about.
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.
Okay, the medievalists wanna take you back to militant Islam to really a dark period in the history of the world.
And the modernists want to be incorporated in the modern state of Israel to partake of the extraordinary success that you see around you.
And they have doctors, they have nurses, they have pharmacologists, they have high-tech entrepreneurs.
They want to be there.
The other guys want to take them back, okay, and dissolve the state of Israel or destroy it.
And we have to make sure that the modernists win out over the medievalists.
My government, you'd be surprised to know, gave an enormous amount of money.
Wasn't doing it for votes, I did it because I believe in this, in helping the right side in this battle.
Enormous amount of money, about 30, 25 billion dollars, billion shekels, okay?
But I gave it not to NGOs, Hamas NGOs.
I invested in roads, in infrastructure, in education, in the Arab communities.
And I'm a good guy, right?
By the way, you'd be surprised, I received about 10% of the Arab vote.
Okay.
Actually, today in the recent polls I received, the Likud under me receives more Arab votes than all the Jewish parties together.
Okay.
Why?
Because many of them want to be a part of this modernization and this success story.
And I think if you ask me, what is the answer to that?
I think, yeah, beefing up security against the radicals and against the, you know, against lawbreakers is important.
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.
And that's the program that I began and the program that, God willing, I'll continue when I get in.
It's a big battle, but it's the same battle you see in the Middle East.
It's Iran and in Iraq and in Syria and in Yemen, as opposed to what is happening in the Gulf.
Look at what happened in the Gulf.
Look at what happened there.
I mean, it's a fantastic example of enterprise and initiative.
It just changed the whole way people think about the Arab world.
The Arab world has to go there and not to Yemen, okay?
And Israeli Arabs have to go to Here to what you see around you and not to Yemen.
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.
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.
Or in multiple parties across Europe.
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.
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.
With equal rights to everyone, non-Jews.
The only thing that, you know what the nation-state, the Jewish state means?
That any Jew can come to Israel.
Automatically.
That's really the main thing that it means.
Why?
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.
Humanity, as we say today, okay?
All right?
So, you know, if you're a Jew and you don't have a place to go, you can come to Israel.
That's what the nation-state means.
Inside, everyone's the same.
Everyone is the same.
There are no differences.
Equal under the law.
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.
And when people condemned Israel as an apartheid state, what are you talking about?
If you're a Christian, Or you're a homosexual?
Or you're a woman?
In the Arab societies, in the Palestinian areas, you live in medieval times.
You know, in Hamas, people go to support Hamas.
Hamas executes people who deviate from the strict rule that they impose, including the Quranic rule.
What are you talking about?
Israel is the beacon of democracy.
Attacked, defending itself, maintaining a democracy inside, the rule of law.
Equality?
Are these people mad in the answers?
Yeah, they're quite mad.
They're quite mad.
It's so obvious.
And you know who understands that best?
The Arabs.
The Arabs understand it.
The Arabs around Israel.
You know, I have fan clubs in the Emirates and in Saudi Arabia.
Well, that's interesting because they understand it too.
They want a better life.
It is fascinating how Israel has become sort of the point of contention here.
There's no other state on earth where people actually have a conversation about whether it ought to exist or not.
Israel seems to be the only one.
And in terms of sort of what people will accuse Israel of ethnic solidarity, despite the fact that, again, Jews are quite diverse.
You have Ethiopian Jews, you have Moroccan Jews like my wife.
Some apartheid.
I brought tens of thousands of I personally brought tens of thousands of black Jews from Ethiopia to Israel.
I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous.
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.
You talk about nationalism, which by itself is not negative and quite positive.
It helps build, you know, communities.
It's like, are families bad?
Are families bad?
You think families are bad?
Why?
You have, hey, come on, you're preferring your children to other children.
That's bad.
Okay.
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.
Or, unfortunately, because human nature is not uniform, they're bad people and they're bad nations.
Well, you have to fight the bad and promote the good, right?
That conception of how we organize the world is very different than the progressive left.
And I think in many ways they hate Israel because they hate America.
All right?
Now, if you hate America, you're gonna hate Israel.
If you love America, you're gonna like Israel.
And you know who believes that?
The Islamists.
I mean, what does Iran say?
It says, when they attack Israel, they say, we are you, we are you.
That means Americans.
Israelis are Americans and Americans are Israelis.
In a broad way, they're right.
These are the values of freedom, of democracy, of individual choice, of pluralism.
These ideas are things that are completely anathema to them.
They want this regimented medieval world.
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.
I want to ask you about that.
Jews in attacking anything that's not only Israelis but also anything that's Western.
It's crazy.
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.
I want to ask you about that.
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.
If you want to hear the Prime Minister's answers.
Global economic crisis.
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.
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.
Among the dinosaurs.
And you can weave out of conflict, extricate yourself from economic crisis very quickly.
In 2003, when we had the aftermath of the dot-com collapse, I made this huge program that I talked to you about.
Fat Man, Thin Man, these 80 or more reforms that got Israel first out and produced this spectacular group.
Then in 2008, 9, when I came in, we had the subprime global crisis.
And you know what I did there?
Actually the opposite.
Because our banks were conservative and we weren't at risk.
And I decided to, instead of bailing out companies left and right, I said, well, I'd be bailing out failed companies.
Why should I do that?
So I went on a much more modest way and gave loan guarantees, very measured.
So if you're a failing company, you didn't get the benefit and didn't get the incentive to continue to fail.
And we got out of that one first in the world.
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.
But it was an economic crisis.
There we had very cheap credit.
So I gave a lot of companies that didn't fail, that were just hit by COVID, lifted them out.
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.
And I'm keeping that for my election.
I'll tell you.
Well, that is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
You should check out his brand new memoir.
BB is not out yet, but when it is, it's going to be a must-buy.
Prime Minister, it's an honor to sit with you.
Thank you.
Good to talk to you.
I'm Matt.
I'll see you next time.
Bye.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Mathis Weber.
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