Dec. 11, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It's also millions and millions of people, not only millions of people in Israel, millions of Jews throughout the world, but millions of non-Jews who see in the story of Israel a parable for humanity. | ||
| Because if the Jewish people can overcome the most dreadful odds in history, can come back from the dead, I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the twice and future Prime Minister of the State of Israel and author of the new book, Bibi, My Story, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the twice and future Prime Minister of the State | ||
| of Israel and author of the new book, Bibi, My Story, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
| Pleased. | ||
| You know, I have to say, I've watched you obviously on television, a million interviews over the years, speaking at the UN, all kinds of things, and one of the things that I always think, when you're speaking or any advocate for Israel, is why don't they show more maps? | ||
| Just show a map of the Middle East and the size of Israel versus, you know, the entire region and everything else, and then I get a copy of your book, And we're going to show you the full thing on screen, but I'm going to hold it up for just a moment. | ||
| That's exactly how the book begins, right? | ||
| The opening flap right there, just to give a little context to the size. | ||
| And I thought that would be an interesting way to start the conversation. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| You have to do something. | ||
| Open that book. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Put your finger on Israel so they get a feeling for the Arab world. | ||
| This is Israel, right? | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And don't even begin to encompass the Arab world or Iran in these two flaps. | ||
| So that's my two cents worth of proportion. | ||
| Yeah, well, I thought it was a nice way to start because basically when people look at most maps of the world, you can't even fit one letter of the word Israel on Israel itself. | ||
| And I feel like if people understood that a little bit more, maybe they'd be perhaps a little bit kinder. | ||
| Is that just naivete as someone that's been defending Israel for, you know, 60 plus years? | ||
| Well, it's a twistful thinking, but yeah, I guess when people are exposed to the facts, which many are not, yeah, they see it differently, and they realize that Israel is a tiny country, but it's a gigantic country, because even though we constitute less than one-tenth, one-tenth of one percent of the world's population, we have been consistently ranked in the decade that I led the country between 2010 and 2020 as the eighth most powerful | ||
| Country in the world, which is it's kind of Unbelievable. I mean when you think of it | ||
| And that that is I suppose not only you can explain that rationally, but I think it's a miracle of faith and | ||
| resolution Israel because of the | ||
| Resolution the resolve of its citizens the genius of its people has become the juggernaut | ||
| Innovation nation in the world and we have we've just crossed in GDP | ||
| We've crossed Japan France Britain And Germany GDP per capita and remember when I described this in my book when we began the economic revolution Towards free markets away from socialism. | ||
| We were basically the last place in Western Europe and now we're pretty much in first place. | ||
| And we're going to catch up with the United States. That's a personal quest. | ||
| I'm not saying that we'll be in that sense, but we'll catch up with the United States. | ||
| So as I described in the opening, you are the twice and future prime minister of Israel as | ||
| As we speak right now, you're in the midst of forming this coalition. | ||
| You have the mandate to do it. | ||
| You've done this a couple times before, but Israel seems to have elections every, what, six months or so. | ||
| Are you confident that you're going to pull this thing together? | ||
| I mean, this one looks a little more solid, I guess, than the last few, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, first of all, this is the sixth time I'm forming a government. | ||
| I've been Israel's longest-serving prime minister, and I describe my travails and triumphs in the course of that very long career. | ||
| Within a year, I'll be the longest-serving elected leader of a democracy in over half a century, of any place in the world. | ||
| But somebody put me a note the other day, gave me a note, and he said, well, you should know that there are leaders who've come back from political death. | ||
| Churchill, one example. | ||
| But this fellow told me, I've checked, when was the last time somebody came back from political death twice? | ||
| And he said that happened three quarters of a century ago. | ||
| So I don't belittle the task before me, but I think after a succession of indecisive elections and the formation of a peculiar government that was brought down after a year, We now have a solid majority, a coherent majority, to form a center-right and right government, coherent in policy, that will, I think, take Israel and the Middle East to fantastic places. | ||
| Contrary to the left-leaning press, we'll get more peace treaties, perhaps end the Arab-Israeli conflict altogether. | ||
| Not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the conflict with the Arab world, which is 99 times the size of the Palestinians, and block Iran, and develop technologies that will stupefy the world and service all of humanity. | ||
| These are some of the goals that I have, and I think they're within reach. | ||
| Yes, I think it'll be more stable, and I think it'll be successful. | ||
| You mentioned a center-right or right coalition. | ||
| Can you sort of compare how that's different than, say, an American right? | ||
| I know you're a student of American politics as well, but for you guys, the right, it's a little bit different just by the nature of the demographics and everything else. | ||
| Well, I think the, first of all, it's a parliamentary system, so you have to cobble together a coalition. | ||
| It's not as if the prime minister is elected by popular vote like the president. | ||
| He can choose his cabinet and so on. | ||
| This is not... Do you get jealous of our two-party system when you're in the midst of trying to cobble this thing together? | ||
| Wildly so. | ||
| Envious to the roots of my being. | ||
| Because cobbling together a coalition is like, you know, you're familiar with the Rubik's Cube, you know? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Turn one, and then you have to turn the other one, and it matches, and you turn it, and you think you got it, and then the last piece doesn't match, you have to start all over again. | ||
| That's more or less what I've been doing over the last few weeks, but I think I'm getting there. | ||
| This is not Rubin's Cube, this is Rubik's Cube. | ||
| I'm Rubik, so at the end I have to be Rubik or there's no government. | ||
| There will be a government. | ||
| So, the first thing is you have to cobble together a coalition. | ||
| That is a majority in the members of the Parliament, our Congress, if you will, and they choose the Prime Minister. | ||
| Obviously, if we put it together, they'll choose me. | ||
| That's the first change. | ||
| The second change is because you have a multiplicity of parties. | ||
| You don't have two parties. | ||
| You have, I don't know, 12 parties in the Knesset, something like that. | ||
| And the third thing is that The right in Israel is, first of all, premised—the differences between left and right are premised, first of all, on the intensity that you put on the question of security. | ||
| Security is the number one issue in Israeli elections. | ||
| The economy is a second, sometimes a distant second. | ||
| And the—I would say the intensity of identification with the Jewish state, And how you protect it is really what guides Israeli elections. | ||
| And that's what brought me to office here, because the outgoing government, to cobble together their coalition, basically made a pact with a party, an Arab party, that identifies with the Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| The Muslim Brotherhood I want to recognize a Jewish state that wants to dissolve a Jewish state. | ||
| Now obviously the outgoing coalition didn't want to dissolve the Jewish state, but they made themselves hostage to a party that does in order to stay in power. | ||
| That didn't last long, and it was brought down, and now I assure you that's not going to be repeated. | ||
| By the way, many Arabs support me. | ||
| Many Arabs vote for the Likud. | ||
| Arabs have served in the Likud and can serve in any government in the future. | ||
| But the issue is not the ethnicity of the voters or the ministers or the Knesset members, it's their ideology. | ||
| And once the ideology, to which unfortunately some Jews subscribe to, Jewish Knesset members, that Israel should be dissolved, destroyed, eliminated, obviously that didn't do well with the voters. | ||
| So here we are. | ||
| We have a way to correct this. | ||
| How do you balance some of the tensions between the secular people and the more religious people as someone that's going to be prime minister for everybody? | ||
| You've obviously done this a couple times before, obviously very successfully, but that that's one of the sort of fissures in Israeli society. | ||
| What you do in any democracy is you compromise. | ||
| You make compromises. | ||
| There are things you don't compromise about. | ||
| On Israel's existence, on security, I don't compromise. | ||
| And if I have to stand up and go to a joint session of Congress to challenge a person I respected but disagreed with, President Obama, he wanted to pass this, and did actually, this dangerous Iran nuclear deal, which would pave Iran's path with gold to a nuclear arsenal. | ||
| Well, I thought I had no choice. | ||
| I have to go and take a stand and give a speech there, which I described in detail. | ||
| So there are things you don't compromise about, but in political life and democracies, that's what you constantly do. | ||
| You either come to an agreement with opposing views, and if you don't come to an agreement, you bring it to a vote. | ||
| And often you come to an agreement by arriving at some kind of balance between opposing views, and that's being done every day. | ||
| You do it in the American Congress, you do it in the Israeli Knesset. | ||
| So as someone that's, you're basically the same age as the country within a couple years, and you were born in a time when, you know, the country was trying to come together, was obviously not powerful, a couple miracles basically to even come into existence as a nation, versus now where there's a military might and an economic power that you're talking about. | ||
| How different is that for the Israeli psyche, or even just for you as the leader of the country, knowing what the country was 50 years ago, compared to where it's at in 2022? | ||
| Well, you know, I described the roots of my views, and it's very much influenced by my father, who was a great historian of the Jewish people. | ||
| But what he taught me was that there is no finality in the life of nations. | ||
| Nations have come and nations have gone, and the Jewish people are perhaps unique in the fact that having lost our country, having lost our state, having been dispersed to the far corners of the earth, We actually came back and reconstituted our national life in our homeland, our tiny homeland, but our homeland. | ||
| And the fact that we did, that was, I would say, the mission of restoring Jewish nationhood and Jewish independence in the land of Israel was the task that informed my grandfather and my father in founding and helping found the state. | ||
| The task that I inherited was to secure the future, the prosperity and especially the security and permanence of this state, because it's not guaranteed. | ||
| Well, what guarantees the life of states in a turbulent world, which is often cruel? | ||
| Well, you know, for some people on the left, they think that if you're moral, and if you're Put up a nice facade to the world, a compliant facade, then history will protect you. | ||
| In fact, they often quote Martin Luther King, who said that the arc of history bends towards justice. | ||
| Maybe so, but it is a very brittle arc. | ||
| And it could break under the pounding of the darkest forces, the totalitarian, dictatorial, and ideological forces that are opposed to the very idea of freedom and justice. | ||
| And history doesn't favor morality. | ||
| It favors strength. | ||
| That's what it does. | ||
| That's why Genghis Khan could conquer the world and hold on. | ||
| That empire could hold on for a century. | ||
| An enormous subjugation. | ||
| The Romans, whatever you think of them, held it for many, many more centuries through just sheer power, sheer coercion and power. | ||
| And does it guarantee that our free civilization, does history guarantee that our free civilization would triumph over totalitarian forces? | ||
| And the answer is categorically not. | ||
| If they can amass greater economic, military, and political power, especially economic and military power, Then they'll overcome you, if you don't have enough counter-revealing force. | ||
| Israel, being a tiny country, had to be enormously more powerful, given that it was surrounded at first by hundreds of millions of Arabs who wanted to destroy it, and lately by about a hundred million Iranians We don't want to destroy it, but are governed by these theological thugs who do, and openly declare death to Israel, and by the way, death to America too, but they're building atomic bombs—that's what they seek to do—to destroy Israel. | ||
| So, you need to be very, very strong. | ||
| I devoted my life, as I describe in my book, To empower Israel, not to subjugate others, but to defend itself from others, and to make sure that nobody could destroy the one and only Jewish state once it was reconstituted after thousands of years. | ||
| The one thing that And all Israelis understood that. | ||
| They understood that we have to have a strong army. | ||
| The first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, invested an enormous effort to build such an army. | ||
| But I came to the conclusion that it couldn't be sustained. | ||
| It couldn't be sustained because F-35 fighter aircraft, submarines, drones, cyber, intelligence, and so on, they have one common quality. | ||
| They cost money, a lot of money. | ||
| And if you have a socialist economy, you're not going to be able to pay for defense. | ||
| Typically, the way Israelis thought about it, well, the government will produce the money. | ||
| How will they produce the money? | ||
| Tax the rich. | ||
| Tax the rich? | ||
| Well, first of all, they're not enough rich people in a socialist economy. | ||
| And secondly, those who are will move to other places when you overtax them. | ||
| I came with a radical idea, which I describe in my book, that there's a thing called free markets, capitalism. | ||
| And that's the way we generate both a better life for our people A higher income, a higher distribution of income compared to what the socialist-leaning people were thinking, but also it gives us the wherewithal to fund our military. | ||
| And therefore I initiated a free market revolution in Israel that made Israel into this juggernaut, this free market juggernaut of the innovation nation that can compete with any country in the world, and in fact does. | ||
| And that changed Israel. | ||
| It gave it the economic power to have To have military power. | ||
| And the combination of the two gave us diplomatic power. | ||
| And that is what can guarantee our future. | ||
| Not forever. | ||
| I don't know of anything that protects you forever. | ||
| But for the coming decades. | ||
| And that's what I intend to nurture further in the coming years and my next tenure as Prime Minister. | ||
| So, I wanna get back to the economic stuff, because I think it's super interesting that you guys went, in essence, from a socialist nation to a capitalist nation, and then an economic powerhouse, where in the United States, we seem to be doing some version of the reverse of that, at least at the moment, hopefully not for too long. | ||
| But on some of the security stuff you just mentioned, you were sort of way ahead when it came to the Gaza withdrawal of 20 some odd years ago. | ||
| You were not for it when Sharon did it, and you said it would not bring peace. | ||
| Clearly, that was proven correct. | ||
| When you talk to your lefty counterparts, or if they're willing to talk to you, do they still believe that, oh, if we just give away enough land that actually that would provide peace? | ||
| I mean, are there really thought leaders on the left that believe those things at this point? | ||
| Or is it just posturing? | ||
| Well, no, I think some of them believe it, but they also avoid talking about it because most of the public doesn't accept it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we tried it. | ||
| So we left, we vacated Lebanon. | ||
| The argument was you give territory, you get peace. | ||
| Territory for peace. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We left Lebanon, and that territory was taken over by proxies of Iran, Hezbollah, who fired 10,000 rockets since then into Israel. | ||
| We left Gaza, again, with the hope that this would create peace, and this was taken over by another proxy of Iran, or a close ally of Iran, Hamas. | ||
| And they fired 10,000 rockets into Israel. | ||
| And if you say, all right, so let's leave Judea, Samaria, which is the heartland, the biblical heartland of Israel, And it envelops Jerusalem and is within spitting distance of Tel Aviv. | ||
| Just leave. | ||
| And Israel, by the way, would become 10 miles wide with its back. | ||
| And just shut your eyes, hope for the best, and hope that what happened in Lebanon with Hezbollah, what happened in Gaza with Hamas, doesn't occur in Judea, Samaria, and the West Bank. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| People can't buy that now because we've tried it. | ||
| You know, fool me once, Shame on me, fooled me twice, you know that. | ||
| And that's, people are not going to do that. | ||
| So you ask, do they believe it? | ||
| They probably cling to it as a religious, you know, sort of a religious, quasi-religious belief that they don't have it right away. | ||
| But politically, this simply didn't come up in the previous elections. | ||
| It just wasn't an issue. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| And, you know, the issue was me. | ||
| I was the issue. | ||
| They basically said, you know, the issue wasn't Israel's security, not the idea of creating a Palestinian state, which would be an armed Palestinian state committed to our destruction. | ||
| People didn't buy that. | ||
| It would also be two states, wouldn't it? | ||
| Wouldn't, in essence, there would be two? | ||
| I mean, it would really be a three-state solution, not a two-state solution, because Gaza and the West Bank obviously are not connected. | ||
| People don't seem to really understand that. | ||
| Gaza's already been shorn away, and it's effectively an independent state. | ||
| It's surrounded by Israel and Egypt, but it's an independent state. | ||
| Well, what do they do with it? | ||
| You know, they build tunnels in order, terror tunnels, in order to penetrate us or build rockets. | ||
| They don't do a damn thing for their people, the Hamas. | ||
| You know, they execute. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| They shoot them in the back of the neck if they dare utter dissent. | ||
| You know, they abuse women, they abuse gays and so on, but that doesn't prevent the international left from talking about human rights, talking about Israel and human rights and not about these These thugs who do these horrible things to their own people just as until recently they didn't talk about Iran until those brave and extraordinarily brave women went out in the street and this created a united front of left and right that finally sees the true nature of this horrible regime in Tehran. | ||
| That hasn't yet happened to the Palestinians but But you can look, what do you think is the difference between the Iranian regime and the Palestinian regime in Gaza? | ||
| The answer is nothing. | ||
| It's only smaller and less well armed. | ||
| That's the only difference. | ||
| But in terms of violating the rights of Palestinians and men and women and everybody else, they're horrible, horrible people. | ||
| So you can't get peace if you talk about peace. | ||
| The reason we haven't had peace with the Palestinians Uh, is because the Palestinians don't want peace. | ||
| I mean, they've been led by leaders who are committed to Israel's destruction for now for a century, before the existence of Israel and since the existence of Israel. | ||
| And they say they want peace, but without Israel. | ||
| They say they want a state, but it's not a state next to Israel. | ||
| It's a state instead of Israel. | ||
| So, one of the things that happened as a result of what I just described is that people said, You have to first have peace with the Palestinians before we can have peace with the broader Arab world. | ||
| Remember, the Palestinians are 1-2% of the Arab world, both in land mass and in population. | ||
| But the regnant thinking, the prevailing thinking in the foreign policy elites and the foreign ministry chancellories of the world, you have to have peace with the Palestinians or you won't have peace between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. | ||
| And you did it the other way. | ||
| Not only did I do it the other way, we waited for 25 years, a quarter of a century. | ||
| That way, we didn't get anywhere. | ||
| And we'd wait another half century, maybe another century. | ||
| I said, no, we're going around. | ||
| We're going to go around that and we'll go directly to the Arab world. | ||
| And as a result of the rise of Israeli power, because of the revolution that I led to make Israel a free market economy, which bolstered our military and intel and cyber capabilities, we became very valuable To other countries, valuable in civilian technology, which could better the lives of their citizens, and valuable in terms of offering security help, fending off a common threat like Iran. | ||
| So what happened was, and I could see this happening, and I nurtured it to happen, is that Arab states began to look at us Not as an enemy, but as their indispensable ally in fending off Iranian aggression, which would subjugate them too, and bringing a better life for their citizens. | ||
| And that view was, I would say, was dramatized, brought to a head in that speech that I made in Congress challenging President Obama's deal with Iran while I was giving that speech. | ||
| In real time. | ||
| We got phone calls from Gulf states in which the representatives of these governments were saying, we can't believe what your Prime Minister is doing. | ||
| We can't believe he's standing up the way he is because he's really standing up for us. | ||
| We don't have, you know, the gumption to do that. | ||
| But that led to clandestine meetings. | ||
| I'm talking about 2015. | ||
| 2015. | ||
| That led to secret meetings with the Gulf leaders, and that laid the foundation for the Abraham Accords that turned things upside down. | ||
| If the idea was that you make peace inside out from the Palestinians to the broader Arab world, I said, well, Maybe so, if the Palestinians want to come. | ||
| But we're not going to wait for them, and I said we're going to make an inside-outside-in. | ||
| We'll go to the Arab states, and finally we'll, you know, double back to the Palestinians. | ||
| But that is, that produced four historic peace accords with the help of President Trump and his team. | ||
| The Abraham Accords, peace with the United Arab Emirates, peace with Bahrain, peace with Morocco, and peace with Sudan. | ||
| And I've actually come to this podcast, to this discussion of ours, right from the celebrating the Independence Day of the Emirates here in Tel Aviv. | ||
| If you'd said two years ago, You know, if you said two years ago this would happen, people would think you're crazy. | ||
| I didn't think it was crazy. | ||
| I knew it would happen. | ||
| If you told me that hundreds of thousands of Israelis would be flying over the skies of Saudi Arabia and dancing in the streets with the Emiratis in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, you'd say this is crazy. | ||
| But it's not crazy. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| This is the path to peace that I intend to pursue with much greater, even greater fervor. | ||
| Not much greater fervor, but greater fervor. | ||
| And great opportunity in the coming year. | ||
| How much of the Mishigas, there's a word for you, of the Middle East is just people not really understanding the history. | ||
| I've heard you talk about the history of Israel many, many times, but people not understanding that when you talk about Judea and Samaria, which we now know as the West Bank, Judea, Jews used to live there. | ||
| Bethlehem, that's where Jesus lived, that this is not a place that Jews are foreign from, that people simply don't understand the basic history of the land. | ||
| Well, you know, in the modern world, if you have... you're lucky if... | ||
| Your historical memory goes back to breakfast. | ||
| But in our case, I mean, people, you're right, they don't know the facts. | ||
| They think we're the Belgians in the Congo or the Dutch in Indonesia or some British colonials, I don't know, in some other part of Africa and so on. | ||
| And of course, this is not the case. | ||
| As you say, Jews came from Judea. | ||
| King David, it's been our homeland for 3,500 years. | ||
| 3,000 years ago King David proclaimed Jerusalem as our capital. | ||
| The events described in the Bible occurred for a period of about 2,000 years, actually less, but about 1,500 years until the birth of, just before the birth of Christianity. | ||
| Now where did that happen? | ||
| Where did Jesus turn Over the tables of the money changers. | ||
| It wasn't in a temple in Tibet. | ||
| Next to Joburg in South Africa. | ||
| It happened right there in Jerusalem. | ||
| And what language did Jesus speak? | ||
| He spoke Hebrew. | ||
| And he spoke Aramaic, probably wrote in Hebrew and so on. | ||
| His name is a Hebrew name. | ||
| He was a Jewish rabbi from the Galilee. | ||
| So there's an attempt to erase the first roughly 2,000 years of Jewish history. | ||
| It didn't exist. | ||
| The Jews were not there. | ||
| Well, we're the original natives of the land, and actually we were dispossessed. | ||
| You know, all these conquerors, people who conquered us, the Romans and before them, the Greeks and after them, the Byzantines and so on, none of them displaced us. | ||
| Actually, the displacement of the Jews from their homeland took place in greater numbers and in significant numbers after the Arabs conquered the land in the 7th century, okay? | ||
| So it's not—the Arabs were the ones who Who expropriated the land from the Jews, and the Jews didn't expropriate it from the Arabs. | ||
| Well, that happens. | ||
| So, what, you're going to go back now 1,300 years to the 7th century? | ||
| The Arabs came in, they lived there, it's their land. | ||
| No, that's not what happened. | ||
| The Arab conquests didn't populate the land. | ||
| They didn't build new cities, except one, communities, one. | ||
| One! | ||
| Everything else was left barren, and they too were displaced by others. | ||
| Conquerors. | ||
| The Mamluks, the Ottomans, the British, I won't get into that. | ||
| But a succession of empires governed this land, and it was nothing. | ||
| It wasn't the homeland of anyone except the Jews who never gave up. | ||
| The dream of coming back to there. | ||
| And over the centuries, Jews would pray, next year in Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem. | ||
| And it was only in the 19th century when a modern Moses emerged for our people. | ||
| His name was Theodor Herzl. | ||
| He was 36 years old and he worked only for 8 years. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| For 8 years. | ||
| A giant of history. | ||
| Because he died young at 44. | ||
| And he said, the only way to have national salvation And to avoid what he foresaw would be the Holocaust in Europe, would be for the Jewish people to come back to their ancestral homeland. | ||
| That return that began in the latter part of the 19th century Brought the land back to life. | ||
| And as we were bringing it back to life, there were people living there, but very few. | ||
| But there was a great influx that came in as a result of the Jewish return. | ||
| influx of Arabs who came in for better wages, for the factories, for the hospitals, | ||
| for the farms that the Jews built, that attracted many Arabs. | ||
| They now call themselves Palestinians. | ||
| They say, we've been here for thousands of years, you know, from the time of Jesus. | ||
| No, they weren't. | ||
| We had a verdant homeland when the Jews came here No, you didn't. | ||
| Mark Twain will attest to that and hundreds of others. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| You had nothing there. | ||
| We came back to our ancestral homeland, rebuilt it, accepted our Arab neighbors, but they refused to have ours and they still refuse. | ||
| So if you want to understand the justice of the Jewish case is we never gave up our claim to our homeland. | ||
| We are the native owners of the land. | ||
| We are the ones who have every right to live there, having been dispossessed from it, first of all by Arabs, but we don't want to dispossess the Arabs themselves. | ||
| They're the ones who refuse to do it. | ||
| And if you ask me what is the persistent obstacle to having an Israeli-Palestinian peace, as opposed to an Israeli-Arab peace, which we're achieving, It's the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| And because that's not going to be resolved right away, I say, go to the Arab world, get these extraordinary agreements with the Arab countries, and the greatest prize would be, without a doubt, Saudi Arabia, which would effectively, peace with Saudi Arabia would effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict. | ||
| And then do your damnedest to get the rejectionist leadership in the Palestinian world, Palestinian society, to accept the right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own, and then I think we can have a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. | ||
| But I think it's, I think that's going to be the order. | ||
| I had to change a perception that had been ingrained in the minds of the experts and mavens, and you name them, for close to half a century. | ||
| I simply challenged it. | ||
| And I was— The think tank people in DC probably were not that thrilled | ||
| with you. | ||
| The think tank people in Tel Aviv weren't thrilled with me. | ||
| And basically, you know, I have an idea that all think tanks and many diplomats are all | ||
| produced in a secret plant 30 kilometers west of Luxembourg, and then they're sort of sent | ||
| dispatched to all the bureaucracies, the foreign policy bureaucracies of the world, and they | ||
| just chant this thing. | ||
| The Palestinian conflict is the center of the—is the core of the conflict, always in the singular. | ||
| In the Middle East? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| The only way that you can solve it is for Israel to become so weak that it couldn't defend itself? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| There's not going to be peace with the rest of the Arab world if you don't solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| But, you know, if you vest yourself in this nonsense for decades, it's very hard to Detach yourself from it. | ||
| I always find it interesting how it sort of mainstreams itself in a bizarre sense. | ||
| So, for example, you know, Rashida Tlaib, our congresswoman in Michigan, who I have no doubt you're not a big fan of. | ||
| I think maybe she was even banned from Israel at one point. | ||
| You know, every December she wishes Jews a happy Hanukkah, but at the same time she doesn't want Jews living in the place that is the story of Hanukkah. | ||
| Does she know about the hills? | ||
| Probably about two miles from you right now? | ||
| Happy Hanukkah. | ||
| You know, Hanukkah celebrated the victory of the brave Maccabees against one of the conquerors of our land, actually 2,200 years ago, roughly 2,200 years ago. | ||
| 2,200 years ago, Jews were fighting for their freedom against basically the Seleucid Empire, which was based in Syria. | ||
| It's named after one of the generals of Alexander the Great. | ||
| Who actually had a positive attitude towards Jews, but his inheritors didn't. | ||
| And one of them wanted to wipe out the Jewish religion, and Jews rebelled. | ||
| And this rebellion, led by five brothers, who each died, they all died in this battle, finally achieved the liberation of the land. | ||
| And the liberation of Jerusalem. | ||
| That's what we celebrate. | ||
| The Hanukkah is the liberation of Jerusalem, specifically the cleansing of the Jewish temple. | ||
| So you tell that to Rashida Tlaib. | ||
| I want to hear her response. | ||
| So were the Jews there or not? | ||
|
unidentified
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Were the Palestinians there in Hanukkah or the Jews were there in Hanukkah? | |
| You know, and it amplifies the tremendous ignorance that you discuss. | ||
| They just don't know. | ||
| The Jews, the Jewish people, are probably one of the oldest civilizations—or not probably, are one of the two or three oldest civilizations in history. | ||
| Our attachment to our ancestral homeland is unmatched. | ||
| A lot of people are attached to their ancestral homeland, but they're not as old as us. | ||
| And a lot of them lost their ancestral homeland and disappeared. | ||
| We're the only ones who were kicked out of it, expelled from it and said, we're gonna come back. | ||
| And we came back to find the odds of history, achieve this miracle, | ||
| built this extraordinarily modern, successful state. | ||
| We respect our roots, we respect our neighbors, and we're bringing a light onto the nation's | ||
| principally by incredible technology. | ||
| And yet they say you have no right to live there. | ||
| You know, we kicked you out once, we'll kick you out again. | ||
| No, you won't. | ||
| It won't happen. | ||
| Whether you're a Hamas or a Hezbollah or Iran, it's not going to happen. | ||
| We're not going to let it happen. | ||
| Well, it certainly ain't going to happen under your watch. | ||
| I do want to be respectful of your time because it's late night in Israel right now and you are in the midst of this coalition bill that I'm sure you have some things to do. | ||
| I want to ask you just one thing personally and I'll post the link to the book and people can read all about your history and your brother and there's really some remarkable stuff in there. | ||
| But just on a personal note to end, You know, you've had to go into the fire a million times, not only in the military, but in terms of going to the UN, giving these speeches, the hostility towards Israel, standing up for your country and your beliefs and your religion, all of those things. | ||
| It can't be easy. | ||
| It can't be that fun. | ||
| I mean, the amount of hate and protests and all of this stuff. | ||
| And I wonder, at your age, coming back, doing this again, It's not the easiest thing in the world, but you're doing it again, and you seem as energized as ever, and where does that come from within you? | ||
| And did you think about not doing it? | ||
| I mean, when the last election didn't go your way, did you think, okay, let me just step away, or you were basically fighting in the opposition immediately? | ||
| Well, there was one incident that I described in one of my defeats, because I've had a few defeats. | ||
| I've had a succession of victories, but I also had defeats, and, you know, that question arose. | ||
| I had one elections where my party contracted to 12 seats. | ||
| That's 10% of the Knesset. | ||
| So for comparison, we now have 32 seats in a coalition of 64 out of 120. | ||
| 32 led by my party, which is by far the largest party in the Knesset. | ||
| A quarter of the seats. | ||
| More than a quarter. | ||
| And a coalition that is solid. | ||
| But here again, this happened where I contracted To 12 seats. | ||
| And I went, you know, I came back from, you know, meeting the party faithful. | ||
| There weren't too many in that evening of defeat. | ||
| And I said to my wife, Sarah, I said, look, you know, maybe this is the end, you know. | ||
| We've, you know, they eulogize me all the time. | ||
| Maybe this time you're right. | ||
| And, you know, why don't we just, you know, get on with our family, with our two young boys, and with our life, and get on with our life. | ||
| And she said to me, Bibi, this is your life. | ||
| Don't leave it. | ||
| This is your purpose. | ||
| And if you ask what has guided me, what allows me to do this, it's the sense of purpose. | ||
| It's the fact that I'm pursuing a mission, and the mission which I inherited from my | ||
| Well, my grandfather and my father and my fallen brother is to assure the security and permanence of the State of Israel only by making it strong and powerful. | ||
| But I think it's not only my family and my wife and kids, two boys who support me and who share this mission. | ||
| Otherwise, it would be impossible to continue. | ||
| But it's also millions and millions of people. | ||
| Not only millions of people in Israel, millions of Jews throughout the world, but millions of non-Jews who see in the story of Israel a parable for humanity. | ||
| Because if the Jewish people can overcome the most dreadful odds in history, can come back from the dead, can forge this river between annihilation and salvation, and build this remarkable state, then there's hope for all of humanity. | ||
| And alongside the defamation of Israel, the slander, the vilification, I have to say there's enormous, enormous respect and admiration and sometimes adoration in many, many lands. | ||
| And as Israel emerges as one of these Rising powers in the world able to send aid missions, emergency missions to dozens and dozens of countries, some of them hostile countries, to help people out of earthquakes or hurricanes or floods. | ||
| You know, and people see the true nature of this state, and when they pick up their cell phone, and they understand that a good part of that technology, that cell phone that makes their life different completely, comes from Israel. | ||
| Or when you navigate in your car with Waze, Another Israeli product, and it's endless. | ||
| It goes on and on. | ||
| The medicine, the technology, the health, the water desalinization, all these things that are not pie in the sky. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| It's changing the life, not only of Israelis, but of the world. | ||
| Then there's also a different admiration for Israel. | ||
| So the life of purpose that I'm talking about says that the Jewish people have come back from the dead. | ||
| And we are here, and we will continue to hold the high ground, literally and figuratively. | ||
| We are here, and we're here to stay. | ||
| That's my purpose. | ||
| And I would say to those people who want to read my book, my story, it's not really my story alone. | ||
| It is. | ||
| My years in the In a combat unit. | ||
| I nearly died several times in firefights. | ||
| I describe most of it within the limits of military propriety. | ||
| And I nearly died twice politically. | ||
| But it's not merely my life. | ||
| It's interwoven with the life of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. | ||
| But I think that there is a larger issue here. | ||
| I live And I can say this categorically, a life of purpose. | ||
| And I think it's the—if you have a purpose in your life, and preferably if it goes beyond yourself, it will enrich your life and make it meaningful. | ||
| It's the only life worth living. | ||
| And if you want to glean some insights about that, then unabashedly, I tell you, I'm plugging my book. | ||
| Read my book. | ||
| I think you'll benefit from it. | ||
| Well, we will link down to your book below, Mr. Prime Minister. | ||
| It's cards on the table. | ||
| It's fairly obvious to me why the Israeli people are giving you another crack at this, and I suspect some other peace deals and other good things are going to come. | ||
| And I have to say that I will be in Israel in May doing a few events, and you did break bread with my good friends Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro not too long ago, so maybe I can take you out for hummus? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Maybe I can take you out. | ||
| The Israeli economy is doing well. | ||
| It would be an honor, sir. | ||
| The book is Bibi, My Story. | ||
| The link is right down below, and I appreciate it, Mr. Prime Minister. | ||
| Now go do your coalition thing. | ||
| I'm doing exactly that. | ||
| You think I'm joking, but that's exactly what I'm joking the other week. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Really, truly an honor, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about international issues instead of nonstop yelling, check out our international playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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