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Nov. 26, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:57
Fighting For Our Lives | Former PM Naftali Bennett
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I'll tell you a story about a guy called Ben Shimony.
This guy lives in Be'er Sheva.
He was at the party, that big party in Re'im, where there was the big massacre.
He had a car.
He said to a bunch of folks, get in my car, and he evacuated them out to Be'er Sheva.
Saved five lives.
And then he said, well, I'm going back.
And his girlfriend said, you can't.
Don't go back.
Don't go back.
He went back.
Evacuated another five people.
Saved their lives.
Back to Be'er Sheva.
Went back a third time into harm's way.
He didn't owe anything to anyone.
He didn't have to.
He's a citizen.
He's not a soldier.
He's not even a policeman.
On the third time he took a bullet and died.
And I just met his mom.
This is the highest degree of courage that I've seen.
But like Ben, I've seen about a hundred different cases of courage that even I, Prime Minister of Israel, and, you know, I fought, I was a commander in special forces.
I've never seen this degree of courage.
In the wake of the devastating Hamas attacks of October 7, which saw the tragic loss of over 1,200 Israeli lives, mostly civilians, as well as the kidnapping of another 240 people by Hamas, We're joined by a figure central to Israeli politics and international diplomacy, Naftali Bennett.
Bennett, born in 1972 in Haifa to American immigrant parents, has been a dynamic figure in Israeli politics.
His journey is marked by a transition from a high-achieving soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces' elite Sayeret Matkal and Maglan units to a successful tech entrepreneur.
Bennett's political ascendancy began as Chief of Staff for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, followed by his leadership of the Jewish Home Party, and then the New Right Party, reflecting his evolving political philosophy.
He served in various ministerial roles, including Minister of Economy, Religious Services and Education, showcasing his versatility and commitment to Israel's development.
As the 13th Prime Minister of Israel and later the alternate Prime Minister, Bennett has navigated through tumultuous times, marking his tenure with significant decisions on domestic and international fronts.
His approach to leadership, technology, and defense has been influential, making him a key figure in understanding the complexities of the Israel-Hamas conflict and Middle Eastern politics at large.
During his time in office, Bennett faced a myriad of challenges and opportunities.
He famously formed a unique coalition government, bringing together a diverse array of eight political parties, combining right and left, Jewish and Arab, religious and secular factions.
In this episode, we'll dissect the events of October 7th and the ongoing war, in an attempt to understand their implications on the future of Israel and the Middle East.
We'll discuss ongoing strategies to navigate the conflict, and we'll be shedding light on the intricate dynamics of Middle Eastern politics and the path forward in these tumultuous times.
This is more than just an interview.
It's an essential dialogue in a time of crisis.
Welcome to the Sunday Special.
Really appreciate it.
Great to be here, Ben.
So you were telling me a little bit earlier before we started that you've had a busy day, that you were down south near the Gaza Strip.
What was that like?
What's going on down there?
Well, I make it my business to go down every two, three days to meet the soldiers, soldiers that just came out of Gaza and are on their way back.
To meet the communities down in the south because I want to have a touch of what's going on.
By and large, IDF is operating very well.
I'm impressed.
Doing very good and effective tactic advance in the northern part of Gaza.
At this moment, still, IDF is primarily operating At the northern half of Gaza that's been evacuated of civilians, of Gaza civilians.
So about a million Gazans moved southward.
We did that according to international law that we have to evacuate them from harm's way.
And we're killing a lot of Hamasniks.
At the same time, I'll say the bottom line verdict from my perspective, it's going to take a while.
This can take months because we have to clean up all of Gaza from Hamas.
We have to eradicate Hamas totally.
This is one of the things that I think people need to understand is how difficult what Israel is trying to do actually is.
It's not a situation in which you have uniformed officers of an opposing military who are out in the field attempting to fight you.
It's a situation in which people are merging into the civilian population, not only hiding
in tunnels, but I would assume that since there are so many civilians who have been
mobilizing to the south of Gaza, some of the people who are mobilizing the south, I would
imagine, are people who are also attempting to escape the Israeli cordon and move down
into the south.
And so that does raise the question of what happens once Israel has basically cleaned
up the north.
Again, it's bereft of population, largely.
What happens now that you have to move down to the south?
I assume there's going to be a similar population transfer back to the north because Egypt has
not been opening their al-Faqih gate.
So what exactly happens when you move down to the south?
Not necessarily to the north, but I assume IDF will arrange some humanitarian areas or
safe havens that we believe are in good geography, and then we'll take care and isolate a certain
part, take care of it, and so on and so forth.
IDF is really bending over backward to prevent unnecessary harm to civilians on the other side.
Remarkable to see how much effort Hamas is putting in to increase not only the Israeli death toll, but the Gazan death toll.
They are literally shooting at Gazans that are trying to evacuate.
They are preventing Gazan civilians from evacuating certain neighborhoods, hospitals, etc.
In fact, just yesterday I saw evidence of A mass terrorist walking with children as human shields.
This is a new footage from just yesterday and in an area that the only reason to be there is to fight.
So they were not evacuating the kids.
They were using the kids as human shields.
From their understanding, the higher the Gazan death toll, the closer we will be to a ceasefire.
They're wrong, but that's their assessment of, you know, Western media and Western pressure.
So they're actually trying to pump up the Gazan death toll.
I mean, this is such a major issue, and you've been spending an enormous amount of time talking to media that are largely oriented against Israel, whether you're talking about the United States, whether you're talking about the BBC.
And the real reason, as you've argued, I've argued the same, that the Hamasniks are attempting to get as many Gazan civilians killed is because they understand the math.
They understand that if they can make Israel out to be a military that's committing war crimes or that's targeting civilians, then they can actually defend Hamas.
Hamas knows that, and they're playing directly into the teeth of the media and then providing them with propaganda that
suggests that Israel is doing just that.
What's amazing is how either gullible or nefarious the media are to believe these claims.
It's truly a frustrating experience.
I know for me it's a frustrating experience watching it and covering it.
I can't imagine how it must be for you.
Well, in Israel we're used to it.
It's always been this way.
And, you know, not only are we fighting an asymmetric war, where one side, being Israel, abides to international law, and the other side, Hamas, is a terror group who explicitly goes out to murder civilians.
And then we're told again and again, well, Okay, but you guys are not like them, so we expect you to save the lives of Gazans.
Our goal is to defend our own lives first and foremost, and yes, we want to reduce the amount of collateral damage, but there will be collateral damage.
This is very Difficult.
We are abiding by international law, fully abiding by international law.
Whenever we hit a target, there's a reason.
We never deliberately shoot at the civilians.
But we have to understand that we're facing someone who explicitly wants to raise their own numbers of death.
They are not sensitive to death of their own people.
And I'll also say something that might not be very popular.
And this is unfortunate.
I wish it were not the case.
But it turns out that not an insignificant portion of the population in Gaza is highly, highly supportive of Hamas.
And of the atrocities they did.
Now, I'm not saying this as a reason for us to target civilians.
We don't.
But it's more complex.
Some want to pretend that the Gaza population was hijacked by mean Hamas and we've got this population who is all just seeking peace.
I wish that were the case.
It's not.
You know, that point has a lot of relevance for all the questions that are being asked prematurely about what happens the day after, because Israel obviously is trying to distinguish between civilians and Hamas.
Again, that's a very difficult proposition, given the fact that Hamas explicitly does not engage in the rules of war.
They're not wearing military uniforms.
They're embedding directly among civilians.
People slide in and out of membership of Hamas pretty easily.
And you saw that even on October 7th, when civilians were literally crossing the border from the Gaza Strip into these towns in the Gaza envelope.
By the way, Ben, that's a very good point that I want to elaborate on.
in the in the slaughter in the in the looting and then going right back into
the gaza strip and that makes it very difficult for israel to even tell sometimes
who is the civilian and who is not the civilian and that that's a nearly impossible task but
by the way ben uh... that's a very good point that i i want to elaborate on
uh... some of the worst atrocities were actually conducted by uh... civilians
that came in gaza civilians that came in in the third wave The first wave was a wave of what's called nukhba, the Hamas commando.
Second wave was a wave of what we call simple soldiers.
And the third wave was just an all out pogrom.
Some of the worst atrocities were actually done by these Gaza civilians.
Now, you know, The general opinion in Israel has shifted dramatically since October 7th, because now, left and right, everyone in Israel now realizes something that not everyone realized beforehand, that we're dealing with a degree of hatred
Of just poisonous hatred against Jews and against Israelis that is so deeply entrenched in the psyche of the masses in Gaza and of our enemy.
We in Israel again saying that this very royal we but many in Israel have been under the impression that if the lives of the Gazans will be good enough and they have a good enough economic future, etc, etc.
Gradually this will go away and it simply is not the case.
Again, that has implications for the day after.
There is a poll, there's only one poll that's actually been done in the Gaza Strip and the so-called West Bank of the Palestinian Arabs who are living there.
And what it found is that 75% of all Palestinian Arabs supported the October 7th attack, 78% wish to see the complete destruction Of the state of Israel, Hamas has about a 76% approval
rating in these areas after October 7th, much, much higher than the Palestinian Authority or
any other supposed governing entity.
That's leaving aside the fact that the Palestinian Authority itself has been downplaying the
atrocities they claimed just this week, that the atrocities that happened at the music
festival were actually caused by Israeli helicopter gunships as opposed to Hamas itself.
And people, I think, need to understand the nature of that conflict in order so that they
can even have a logical conversation about what happens when Israel achieves its goal
of fully deposing the power of Hamas.
I mean, I assume when you say it's going to take months, I think the reality in the Gaza
Strip is it's going to take years because Israel is going to have to embed in the Gaza
Strip indefinitely.
Because when you have a population that is thoroughgoingly anti-Semitic, which by polling
data they are, and when that population is filled with people who, if left to their own
devices, would start to act on behalf of that ideology again, Israel is going to have to
essentially treat the Gaza Strip in much the same way that it has to treat Jenin or Nablus
are many of the places in the West Bank.
That's correct.
I guess one good way to view Gaza and Hamas is an analogy to the Nazi regime in Germany.
The Nazi regime enjoyed very widespread support of the German population, not everyone, But many and a sure majority.
And then imagine after years of incitement and of brainwashing, they enjoyed very, very broad support.
Therefore, the defeat of Nazi Germany had to be a full, you know, unconditional surrender.
And then there was a process of several years of denazification in order to re-educate the people.
To new values and and we're gonna have to go through a similar process and it can take quite a few years it could take easily four or five six seven years to denazify the education system the media and and and see that people begin to if you will detox themselves from thinking that Jews are pigs and And devils, because as long as they think that, they're going to continue wanting to kill us.
Does Israel have any allies in that particular effort?
Because it seems like you're seeing pressure from particular sources, including apparently the Biden administration, to push for a Palestinian authority-led negotiation in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip, which is in many ways practically hilarious.
I mean, they have effectively no presence in the Gaza Strip as it is, because Hamas literally killed everybody who was a member of Fatah back in 2006-2007.
2006, 2007. So it's bringing in a foreign body and that foreign body also happens to
govern a nearly ungovernable area that has similar levels of anti-Semitism in the West
Bank. So it's substituting an entity that is not quite Hamas, but certainly is not a
traditional civilian led government that is willing to make peace. If they hadn't been
willing to make peace, then they would have in the past when Mahmoud Abbas was literally
sitting across the negotiating table from former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who offered
pretty much the entire thing and Abbas got up and walked away. Those are the people that
the Americans are now apparently counting on, at least in some of their rhetoric, to
come in and sort of handle the negotiations. And that raises the question of whether Israel
is going to have to do this alone single-handedly or whether a coalition can be built maybe
with the Abraham Accord countries, because the one thing that can't be done is to hand
this thing back to the UNRWA.
I mean, the UNRWA has been a front group for Hamas in the Gaza Strip for a very long time.
The schools that are run by the UNRWA are chalk-filled with anti-Semitism and hatred for Israel.
And so Israel is going to have to take a much stronger hand in the institutions of civil society.
It would be nice if they had some allies in that effort who are not already toxic.
I think that's exactly right.
Look, we on critical issues, we're going to insist, because ultimately it's our defense, our security.
Let's remind ourselves of the basic fact.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally evacuated the entire Gaza Strip down back to the 1949 Green Line, to the very last centimeter.
We pulled out our soldiers, we pulled out all the Israelis living in communities there, and we handed the entire Gaza Strip over to the Palestinian Authority.
Guess who led it?
Say, Mahmoud Abbas.
So we did precisely that.
And keep in mind that back then, the Palestinian Authority was much stronger than it is now.
What happened was in 2006, I believe, there were elections held in Judea and Samaria and Gaza, the entire Palestinian population, and Hamas enjoyed a full majority.
Out of 132 seats in the Palestinian parliament, Hamas got 76.
That's an absolute majority.
Also, the Gaza representatives had an absolute majority, I believe 10 out of 15 seats.
And then about a year following that, Hamas took over in a coup, in a coup d'etat, and just killed a bunch of PA folks.
The current Palestinian Authority, when I say PA, that's the Palestinian Authority, is much more feeble, much more corrupt, uh than it was back then so you know fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me we're not going to do the same thing again we're just not going to do it and you're right about UNRWA uh u-n-r-w-a that that's the for our listeners that's the united nation organ which is dedicated to uh
Supposedly to helping the Palestinian refugees.
In fact, what it's doing is eternalizing the Palestinian refugee problem.
But here's the irony.
This United Nations organ is responsible for inciting antisemitism in the brains of a whole generation.
So it's as if in 1945, 1946, during the Marshall Plan, we would have handed, the West would have handed the education system back to the Nazis to educate another generation of Nazis.
That would just be stupid.
So we're not going to do stupid stuff.
Even if our good friends think otherwise, we'll persuade them.
But one way or another, we're going to do what's right.
However, at the same time, I want to tell you, Ben, we don't want to govern and manage the lives of 2 million people.
So it's not as if we want to run their lives.
No Israeli has that desire.
So what we're going to need to do, and you alluded to this, Build a structure probably based on Abraham Accord partners and some form of alliance to find first stage a technocratic government that can run the show, take care of taxes, of energy, of water, of education, of sewage, of taking garbage, doing all the basic services any modern state needs.
And we're going to have to do that for a few years until we, if you will, denazify Gaza Strip and then figure out a structure which may be a democratic structure, may not be a democratic structure.
You know, there's some non-democratic structures in the Middle East that are more successful than the democratic ones.
We're going to have to figure out, we don't have to make that decision right now.
What I can tell you is that the PA is the worst candidate to do that.
We'll get to more with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in just one second.
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Thousands more have been injured, kidnapped, and held hostage.
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Thank you.
So I want to talk in order about some of the other threats that Israel is facing on its other borders, and then I sort of want to reverse course, talk about the beginning of the conflict, what led to this failure on the part of the Israeli security establishment, the failure of imagination here, and how Israel sort of internally has changed, what that means for the world.
So to talk about the other threats on Israel's borders.
Obviously, you have the threat that exists in the West Bank.
That is not an insignificant threat and people are pretending that it is.
The reality is that Israel is expending extraordinary resources actually in Judea and Samaria, the so-called West Bank, up to October 6th.
In fact, one of the sort of things that led to October 7th was the fact that Israel was so focused
on the roiling undercurrent of violence that was happening in Judea and Samaria,
knife attacks and gun attacks and all of that was happening for months.
I mean, I visited Israel obviously in the weeks immediately prior to October 7th.
I got home the morning of October 6th.
And the focus when I was there was on security in the West Bank.
The West Bank is a very difficult area to govern.
It's got it's it's extremely nonunitary.
I mean, you have cities that are not linked to each other.
But at the same time, you do have a lot of cross-traffic, especially around Jerusalem.
You have a lot of cross-traffic from Palestinian areas to Jewish areas.
No cross-traffic from Jewish areas to Palestinian areas, because if you drive into those areas, then presumably you'll be killed.
There's giant red signs on the side of the road that tell you as much.
So whenever people say it's an apartheid state, Israel, say, well, there's only one actual
group of people who put the giant who insist on giant red signs and say, if you drive in
here, then you might be murdered.
But the when it comes to the West Bank, what is Israel's plan there?
You mentioned the Palestinian Authority is on its last legs or at least incredibly weak.
Mahmoud Abbas is 88 years old.
He is not as though he in his ravagingly charismatic person is holding things together.
He's, you know, widely seen and correctly seen as an elderly corrupt oligarch.
And it's not clear who's going to take over for him.
It's not clear if open conflict breaks out in the West Bank between members of, for example, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, members of what's a smaller group called the Lion's Den.
They're a bunch of terrorist groups that are operating in the region, and there is no organized non-terror group that's operating in terms of governance over there.
So what is Israel's plan over there?
So the plan for Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank, would be similar to the one in Gaza.
We ultimately don't want to govern the Palestinians, but at the same time we want to ensure that we secure Israel.
And keep in mind that in Judea and Samaria, there's 550,000 Israelis currently living there
and about 2 million Palestinians. But the good news is they live in separate areas by and large.
So we don't have to mix too much between that.
We should minimize friction.
And we need to ensure that there's a stable and competent civilian organ right now.
Look, right now the PA is there.
It is what it is.
And we have to ensure That the PA denazifies itself in two dimensions.
One is education.
And it's really important because this is something that we tend to sort of say.
It sort of bores everyone.
All right.
Yeah, the Palestinians in sight.
It is what it is.
No.
It's not.
Now we've learned that incitement actually brings people to dismember babies, to burn families, to rape women out of nationalistic or religious hatred.
And the second thing is the PA currently pays terrorists post-fact.
After they've murdered Jews, it pays them basically according to the number of years that you're in jail, which is Also, according to the number of Jews you've killed.
So, if you kill more Jews, you get paid more.
Now, this sounds really crazy, but it's a reality as we speak.
Right now, every month, the terrorists get paid, or their families get paid, and that's crazy.
That's simply crazy, because it incentivizes folks to go out and kill Jews.
And it's also a measure that reflects on the nature and character of the Palestinian Authority.
But Ben, if I may, I want to zoom out one moment because we sort of zoomed into Gaza Strip and to Judea and Samaria, but the big picture is indeed a bigger picture.
And if I may, this will take one minute to explain.
We have an octopus of terror in the Middle East, and right now we're viewing each of its arms individually, but it's actually one octopus.
So we need to set aside the microscope and just look at it with a full view.
The head of this octopus is in Tehran.
It funds, trains, arms, and instructs its arms to hit and shed blood for Israel.
Now it's got its tentacles of this octopus are many fold. There's one tentacle, one arm of the octopus
is his Bala that sits on Israel's northern border in Lebanon. It's got two more arms, Islamic
Jihad and Hamas that sit in the Gaza strip. Just to make a point here, 100%
100% of Hezbollah's military budget comes from Iran.
100% of Palestinian Jihad, Islamic Jihad, comes from Iran.
20% of Hamas funds come from Iran.
Then you have the Houthis in Yemen and you have militias in Iraq and in Syria.
And they've built a very convenient methodology to hurt Israel as a representative of the free world in the Middle East.
And so Iran, they sit quietly, enjoy life back in Tehran, the corrupt mullahs.
And these arms hit us through Lebanon and through Gaza primarily, but also West Bank and others.
I've been, since I was a soldier and a commander and later on in security cabinet, this has frustrated me because I felt that we're fighting the wrong war.
We're playing to their strategy.
They want us to fight the arms and shed blood.
And that's what's happening right now.
Now, right now, I don't think we have much of a choice, but when I was prime minister, I effected a new doctrine, I called it the Octopus Doctrine, which said, as far as I can, I want to not fight wars in Lebanon and Gaza.
And I want to go to the, hit the head, go for the jugular.
And according to foreign sources, during my tenure, Israel was hitting hard targets in Tehran not only related to the nuclear project
for example when when they tried to hit us with UAVs or advanced drones
Suddenly a few days after according to foreign sources a whole drone base was destroyed on
Iranian soil When they tried to kill Israelis in Turkey and Cyprus, suddenly a commander of their terror unit was assassinated in the heart of Iran.
Because I noticed something very interesting.
Tehran and Iranians, the Iranian regime is much softer than its arms.
A family in Iran, you know how many kids they have?
Two.
Two kids.
They've modernized, they're soft, and I still believe that this is the right approach.
Strategically, we have this cold war going on between us and Iran, and now we need a strategic goal of toppling that regime.
I'm saying this explicitly.
In the past, I didn't say it.
I think all of the energy that we're expending in Gaza and in Lebanon, we'd be better off Focusing on the very head and strangling it, and then ultimately the arms would die away for lack of resources.
So let's talk about that, because I was about to move to the north and talk about Hezbollah, but you're talking about going after Iran instead.
What capacity would Israel have to have in order to actually take out the regime in Iran?
Obviously, both the Trump administration and the Biden administration have been very reluctant
to go directly up against Iran, despite the fact that America is a tremendously powerful
country militarily.
Obviously, the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is very large.
They seem very loyal to the ayatollahs, which is part of the problem.
Is there any prospect of rebellion from within the IRGC?
Because it seems like in the Middle East, that's really the only way they end up with
a regime replacement.
It's not as though popular uprisings in these places tend to alone topple the regimes.
We've seen literally hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the streets over the past few
years and that has effectively accomplished very little with regard to changing the nature
of the regime in Tehran.
So what sort of forces could be applied against the Iranian regime in order to topple that
regime or replace it?
So that's a very good question, Ben.
And the answer is, I view it very similar to the Cold War of the Middle East, where Israel is, if you will, the America of the Middle East, the free nation, a democracy with a vibrant economy and growing economy.
And then you have The Soviet Union, if you will, the uranium corrupt, old, out of contact with people regime, incompetent, not delivering services, not being able to deliver water to certain tracts of land.
Iran and and ultimately if you use that analogy and I would There are ways to accelerate the demise of this very Very rotten regime beyond the fact that ideologically it's horrible And I'm talking about many dimensions.
I'm talking about covert overt economic warfare diplomatic warfare and indeed also What we call, you know, actual physical warfare, but I'm not necessarily suggesting that tomorrow we physically attack Iran.
There are many ways to enhance and accelerate internal unrest.
For example, I don't want to give too many examples, but I'll just go back to open up the textbook of what America did to the USSR in the 80s.
It empowered solidarity, which was in Poland, it was underground, and gave them tools to be much more effective.
the free world and this cannot be an israeli project alone it needs to be done with in collaboration of course with our biggest ally america but what if we empowered uh... internet uh... communication tools uh... arms to to the various uh... groups and next time there's mass demonstrations they're much more effective uh... this time the iranian regime just turned off the internet and and internet connections and whatsapp and telegram all crashed but There are ways to solve all of this, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
So my point, Ben, is if we set this and we finally understand that the epicenter of evil and unrest and terror of this entire region and beyond that, the rest of the world is actually the Islamic Republic of Iran, I think we can work out a reasonable plan to make this happen within a reasonable timeframe.
I can't put a stopwatch on it.
We'll get to more with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in just one second.
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It's an interesting approach given the fact that it does look like there is a shot clock that's already going with regard to Hezbollah.
What I mean by that is that if you're Iran and Hezbollah is effectively your forward operating arm, and for folks who don't understand, Hezbollah is effectively a terror group in control of the country.
They're in control of Lebanon, they control the southern Lebanon border, which is right on Israel's northern border.
About 200,000 rockets that are pointed into the interior of Israel.
Tens of thousands of those, maybe up to 50,000, are sophisticated rockets that actually are capable of targeting, as opposed to the dumb rockets that were being fired from the Hamas-controlled territory in the Gaza Strip.
They have significant military capabilities.
They have a very large army of their own.
They're effectively a military, but again, a much larger, more powerful military, actually, than Hamas was able to deploy in this or any other war.
Let's say that Iran arrives at a nuclear weapon.
It seems at that point, then the possibility of Hezbollah getting fully into a war with Israel rise pretty dramatically.
Because then the idea would be that if Israel fights back too strongly, then Iran would threaten to either fire a nuke or hand off a nuke to one of its allied groups.
So that means the clock is sort of going with regard to Hezbollah.
And after what just happened with Hamas, how long does Israel have before it either has to Take out the Iranian regime if they can or take out Hezbollah because the fact is right now there are 30,000 Jews who have evacuated from the north of Israel and are not living in their homes.
That can't last indefinitely.
Correct.
So I think the clock is ticking on the Iranian nuclear program, and I think that's the main point, that's the main lever, and you're absolutely right that we can't allow that to happen.
They don't have yet nuclear arms, but they've made tremendous progress over the past five years, and And I have a sense that, I would put it this way, I think it's not enough to say we won't allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.
There's much more that can be done on the Israeli-Washington alliance to prevent this from happening.
To some extent, sometimes it seems it's sort of lip service saying that we're not going to have Iran acquire this, but there's many, many actions that have to happen so we ensure that That Iran doesn't acquire a weapon, a nuclear weapon, before the demise of its regime.
Sort of a race between what would happen first.
I'm not talking about weeks or months, it could be years, but we have to ensure that they don't achieve that.
It would be a disaster not only vis-a-vis Hezbollah and Israel, It would turn the entire Middle East into a nuclear nightmare, because everyone would go nuclear.
And they would cite self-defense as a reason.
The Saudis would go nuclear.
Turkey, Egypt, everyone would go nuclear.
And then you've got the craziest region on Earth, the most unstable region on Earth, With hundreds of nuclear weapons.
So the next 9-11 would be a nuclear 9-11 and it would be in Manhattan or in Boston or in San Francisco.
If there's a lesson learned from 9-11 and October 7th, the combined lesson is these guys will do anything.
So it's not about affecting their motives.
It's about preventing them capabilities to do harm.
So let's talk about the linkage between anti-Westernism and anti-Israel sentiment.
So I think the temptation for a lot of people in the West is to say, well, it's happening very far away.
It's happening over there.
It has nothing to do with us here in the United States or in England or in France.
Who really cares?
You know, sure, the Israelis are good.
Sure, Hamas is bad.
But the easiest thing to do is sort of wash your hands.
What do we care?
Blood and treasure.
There's no reason for us to sacrifice either one of those.
And you know, Israel is strong enough to sort of take care of itself.
So what's the big deal?
How do you answer that question?
That's a very good point, and I answer it with historic evidence.
Here's the bottom line.
The radical Islamic terror innovations, the startups, happen in the Middle East, if you will.
We're the accelerator.
But then they go public in Europe and America.
Let me illustrate this.
The innovation of hijacking airplanes started in the Middle East in the 70s and hit the rest of the world.
Then there was an innovation, another radical Islamic innovation of actually it was Fatah and Hamas.
In the early 90s of suicide terrorists that blow up blow themselves up in vehicles, etc.
So it started here, but it was exported very handily to Manhattan on September 11th.
And I was in Manhattan on that day and to London and to Madrid.
And then you can go on.
Now the new startup, it's a new form of terror.
I would call it mob terror that evolves into a pogrom, into unblocked slaughter.
I would almost guarantee this will happen if we don't Or we're not allowed to eradicate Hamas.
Because the way it works these days, certainly, is terror happens in a wave.
You have the initial startup, then a bit of inspiration, and you have your first attack, then second, third, and fourth.
After the fourth, you can get into dozens of attacks.
So it's sort of like You know, this wave of accelerated pace of terror, if it succeeds.
However, if you nip it in the bud very early, then it doesn't evolve into this wave.
That's why anyone watching this that is sitting in Minnesota, or Belgium, or Florence for that matter, Has a big interest in truncating and severing this wave early on before it goes public in the West.
Now, in that sense, Israel is doing your job.
We're doing your job.
We're unfortunate to be the neighbors of these lunatic radical Islamist terrorists.
But in many countries in the world, there's Considerable Islamic populations that also consist of portions that harbor radical Islamic ideas, not everyone by any stretch of imagination, but some of them.
And if it succeeds here, you're going to see copycats.
So what I would do if I was a leader of any Western country is help Israel win.
Certainly not to condemn or try to bring upon a so-called ceasefire, which is really the dumbest thing in the world, because we had a ceasefire, they attacked, now we're attacking back, and we have to win.
And you can't cease the fire before we eradicate Hamas.
If the world tries to force us to that, and God forbid succeeds, It's coming soon.
One of the things that I think this entire conflict has exposed is an extraordinary
level of moral gap all over the world.
I'm not sure I've ever seen as much moral clarity as you see in this moment when you
see people marching hundreds of thousands strong through Western capitals in favor of
And when people are chanting from the river to the sea, what they are chanting is in favor of Hamas.
This attempt to sort of distinguish the quote-unquote Palestinian cause from Hamas.
That's something the protesters themselves don't attempt to do.
The protesters never say, Hamas needs to be replaced so we can have a two-state solution.
That is not a thing that any protester I've ever seen has said.
Instead, they're making the case that Israel needs to stop killing Hamas so that from the river to the sea can eventually be quote-unquote liberated.
by liberated they mean completely dominated by a Toronto Islamic fascist regime. It's
absolutely insane. When we talk about moral clarity I want to talk about it in a couple
of different contexts. One, I want to talk about it in the context of Israel where there's
a new sort of reawakening of moral clarity. And then I want to talk about it in the West
and then I want to talk about the lack of it in the media.
So let's start with Israel.
So as I mentioned, I've been spending a lot of time in Israel for the Jewish holidays
recently and until October 7th, the kind of narrative in Israel is that Israel was uniquely
divided, fractured.
There was a lot of irresponsible and I think rather disgusting talk about civil war in Israel, which I thought was ridiculous on its face, considering that everybody who's Chiloni, everybody who's secular there has a cousin who is Dati Lumi.
I mean, it's just, it's too small a country.
There was certainly an enormous amount of dislike, an enormous amount of anger, but the reality is that, again, even people who are secular in Israel celebrate Shabbat, and even Dati Lumi, meaning people who are Orthodox, who are not Haredi, they're serving the military as well.
But that was the nature of the debate.
The debate was all about these internal fractures, and was the state going to survive these internal fractures, and all this kind of stuff.
And then October 7th happened.
And the entire state comes together in a way that it really has not ever.
I mean, the last predicate for this might be 48, the War of Independence.
But even there, I think it would be hard to say that Israel has come together in the same way that it has right now.
As I've been talking about in some of the speeches I've been giving, whether you're talking about secular Jews who are putting on tzitziot in order to show solidarity, or you're talking about charedim who are starting to join the army, the kind of solidarity that has snapped into place is amazing.
I wonder if you want to talk about that solidarity on a social level, that social cohesion, and also the ideological recognition that I think a lot of Israelis were snapped back into, which is that Israel is surrounded by enemies that actually want to slaughter it, and that security is the order of concern that always has to come first.
How does that mindset shift there?
Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
Those are the precise two Eureka moments, if you will, for the Israeli public.
The first one, and here I differ a bit in the sense that I do think we were heading to a horrible, horrible place.
I'm not saying people would shoot each other, but we were tearing ourselves apart, and wrongly so.
And because of a lack of ability to compromise, and everyone's sure that he's the only one right, and here, You know, shame on us.
And in a sense, I actually think that this year, leading up to October 7th, so divided us and so weakened our immune system, our defense systems, our enemies saw that and attacked.
This is clear to me that our attention was diverted from what's important.
We were not focused on the real things.
We were just killing ourselves from within.
And we know that our enemy was paying close attention, waited for the weakest moment and hit us.
So we've awakened from that.
And I think it's vital that we don't revert back To the, you know, to the polarization we were undergoing before.
And it's, I know right now it seems that we're never going to revert back because we took such a big blow.
But when I look at historic precedents, things do tend to settle back into the good old or bad old You know, frames that we're used to, and that would be a disaster.
We have to transcend it.
Look, I myself harbor right-of-center opinions.
If I were living in America, I would be considered a moderate Republican, okay?
Those are my personal opinions regarding many things, economy, nation-state, etc.
But having said that, it's going to be vital to put together a very broad unity government moving forward, setting aside the disagreements as long as we can, and focusing on restoring security, reviving our economy, and even leaping forward in many ways possible.
The second point that you said is also clear.
All of us, all of us, right and left, We sort of tended to forget that we're surrounded by people who want to dismember our bodies, that want to burn us alive.
And it's no longer a cliche.
It's no longer a platitude.
This is reality.
It happened.
It happened.
A deliberate, massive slaughter attack.
And by the way, shame on us for allowing this to happen.
We have to admit the reality as it is.
It's a massive failure of the state of Israel to have allowed this to happen.
This is precisely what Israel was established to prevent, to prevent Jews being slaughtered without protection.
But at the same time, and the reason I'm I'm optimistic, is that while it's our darkest hour, I have to say, and I didn't know this, it's also our finest hour.
The people on ground that I've been meeting, including Earlier today, down in Kfar Aza and in other kibbutzim fighters, the degree of personal courage and generosity that I've seen is something that I didn't think exists in our generation.
I tend to think that it was, you know, the War of Independence, they were the real heroes.
Then the Six-Day War, they were the real heroes.
I am seeing heroism.
For example, just earlier today, I'll tell you a story about a guy called Ben Shimony.
This guy lives in Be'er Sheva.
He was at the party, that big party in Re'im, where there was the big massacre.
He had a car.
He said to a bunch of folks, get in my car, and he evacuated them out to Be'er Sheva.
Saved five lives.
And then he said, well, I'm going back.
And his girlfriend said, you can't.
Don't go back.
Don't go back.
He went back.
Evacuated another five people.
Saved their lives.
Back to Be'er Sheva.
Went back a third time into harm's way.
He didn't owe anything to anyone.
He didn't have to.
He's a citizen.
He's not a soldier.
He's not even a policeman.
On the third time he took a bullet and died.
And I just met his mom.
This is the highest degree of courage that I've seen, but like Ben, I've seen about a hundred different cases of courage that even I, Prime Minister of Israel, and you know, I fought, I was a commander in special forces.
I've never seen this degree of courage.
Why am I telling you this, Ben?
Because it means that we have huge potential.
In this nation, it's an amazing nation of goodwill, of generosity, of sacrifice, of toughness, of ingenuity, innovation.
We can turn Israel into the most amazing country on earth, and we can.
I know it looks crazy to be talking about this right now, but we can, and it's our choice.
So that's why I'm very optimistic, because while we had a total failure of the institutionalized organs of the country, the government, etc., etc., the people have shown amazing I would say strength, and that's why I'm optimistic.
We've got the material to move forward.
Folks, our conversation continues for our Daily Wire Plus members right now.
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