Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
Well, the epicenter of all of this is Iran itself. | ||
My strategy is not necessarily a one-off strategy. | ||
It's knowing that Iran is the head of the octopus, I would apply an ongoing campaign to weaken and weaken and weaken Iran, not necessarily with always kinetic actions, forceful or hard power, but there's enough things that we could do because this regime is going to collapse. | ||
It's going to collapse. | ||
It's reminiscent of the Soviet Union Corrupt and, of course, cruel. | ||
The whole thing is hollow from within. | ||
And I believe with sanctions, with a few other things of empowering opposition, just like what Ronald Reagan did in the 80s to accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union, it will collapse. | ||
And the Persians, the Iranians, are a great people. | ||
This is highly doable. | ||
unidentified
|
*music* *music* Thank you. | |
Thank you. | ||
Okay, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, tech bro. | ||
That's what it says in some of the articles about you. | ||
Here we are in your office, which is also your bomb shelter, you just noted to me. | ||
I know we're both on limited time here, so let's max out. | ||
Limited time and safe. | ||
And very safe. | ||
I just did a show in Tel Aviv that a minute before it started, they got the alert and we were already in a bombshell. | ||
My family comes here once every two days at about 3 in the morning when we get those sirens of radio. | ||
But it is calming down a little bit. | ||
It is. | ||
It is. | ||
And it's fine. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Most countries, one rocket a month. | ||
It's the cost of doing business. | ||
You know, it's already ingrained. | ||
It's baked in. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, thank you for taking the time. | ||
Thank you for letting us use your home for this. | ||
For anyone that just does not know anything about you, let's just do like a two-minute bio, and we've got a half hour here, so we're going to try to plow through as many things as possible. | ||
Well, my parents were born and raised in San Francisco. | ||
They were... | ||
After 1967, when Israel was about to be annihilated but then defeated the Arab armies, they got on the first plane and came to Israel, knowing not one word in Hebrew. | ||
Three brothers on the smalls born and raised here in Israel and served in Israel's elite unit called Sayeret Makal. | ||
Later on became a platoon and company commander in another commando unit called Maglan, doing a lot of operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. | ||
But I, with three friends, started up a high-tech startup and became the CEO, ran it for six years, failed miserably throughout those years. | ||
Ultimately succeeded, sold the company, ran another company, also sold it, and then entered politics, was Minister of Economy, Education, Defense, and Prime Minister of Israel. | ||
That is quite a bio right there in two minutes. | ||
All right. | ||
So you become prime minister of Israel. | ||
It was fairly short term, right? | ||
At least shorter than probably you would have liked. | ||
But relative to what's happened in Israel over the last 30 years, you're pretty much one of about two guys that have done it. | ||
So how do you look back on that? | ||
Well, it was a very unique moment. | ||
What I did was form a unity government where we brought in So while I hold the right-wing values and opinions, I think the key challenge today is to work together, because that's killing us. | ||
It's killing us in America, it's killing you, the polarization. | ||
I became very adept at getting people with very different opinions working together on the greed part, which is about 70-80% of the issues are more technocratic. | ||
They're not ideological. | ||
Traffic, cost of living, security, it should be almost devoid of ideology. | ||
And that's what we did. | ||
While it was short, it's considered, even my detractors who say I lied, I betrayed, whatever the heck, they say, but he ran a good government. | ||
And we dramatically increased growth, reduced unemployment, reduced crime in the Arab sector, in the Jewish sector. | ||
Israel was good. | ||
What happened was, though, the pressure on us because of this unity, and we had a razor-thin margin of 60 to 59, so in a coalition-based structure, it couldn't hold. | ||
In retrospect, and then we'll move on to some other things, bringing the Arabs on board, some of whom are anti-Zionist parties, so not really for the state of Israel in its current makeup, to say the least. | ||
Do you regret it? | ||
Did you feel like you just had to do it because you guys had been through how many elections and how many years? | ||
unidentified
|
We'd been four. | |
So that's a very good question. | ||
Look, we were at a point, we had been through four elections and on our way to the fifth, and Israel was in chaos. | ||
In about six years or something. | ||
In less. | ||
In three years or two and a half years. | ||
It was crazy. | ||
It was like the Weimar in the 20s, 30s. | ||
And I had a very tough decision, which was, do I... | ||
Stick with my base and the comfort zone, or do I take a very difficult decision, disappointing some of my supporters? | ||
And I decided that the good of Israel is to establish its government and it proved itself. | ||
At this time, I would say, since we're at war, we... | ||
So you can't rely on non-Zionist. | ||
Which just means that they believe that the state should exist. | ||
That's correct. | ||
unidentified
|
The word has been used in a very kind of way. | |
Exactly. | ||
Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have a homeland in their homeland. | ||
And a home in their homeland. | ||
Yeah. | ||
At this point, what we need in Israel, Israel's in not only the security situation in the war, but domestically, it's just not being governed. | ||
Israel is not being governed. | ||
economy is not governed, crime is... | ||
All right, so, like, nothing's working, and we have this supposed right-wing government, but it's failing. | ||
What we need is to put together, but this time really bring in all the major factions, calm things down, take out all the dramas, and just get to work. | ||
Alright, so putting the political part aside for a moment, what I'm sensing from everybody that I've talked to here is that, and I saw you give a talk not too long ago where you addressed this, that if and when Israel gets to the other side of this thing, there's this intractable problem seemingly right now, but when it gets to the other side, you laid out a whole bunch of reasons why you think this country will flourish and thrive and all that. | ||
But first, let's do this part. | ||
How do you get out of this 7 to 10 front war that you're in at the ball deck? | ||
My strategy is not necessarily a one-off strategy. | ||
Knowing that Iran is the head of the octopus, I would apply an ongoing campaign to weaken and weaken and weaken Iran, not necessarily with always kinetic actions, forceful or hard power, but there's enough things that we could do because this regime is going to collapse. | ||
It's going to collapse. | ||
It's reminiscent of the Soviet Union in 1986. | ||
Very old, disconnected leaders, incompetent, corrupt, and, of course, cruel. | ||
The whole thing is hollow from within. | ||
And I believe with sanctions, with a few other things of empowering opposition, just like what Ronald Reagan did in the 80s to accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union, it will collapse. | ||
And the Persians, the Iranians are great people. | ||
This is highly doable. | ||
Do you feel like that's what's going on right now? | ||
No, it's not. | ||
For two reasons. | ||
My government's not doing it. | ||
Has not attempted in a serious way to pull or work together with America on this. | ||
And again, this is a soft power thing, because I get it. | ||
I understand there's no big appetite for wars, etc. | ||
I would point out, everyone keeps on saying we're afraid of a regional war, but we just had the regional war, right? | ||
So they shot what they could. | ||
And it's a very narrow window of opportunity, a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity. | ||
Let's understand this. | ||
You have the epicenter of terror of the whole Middle East, and you're in a boxing match. | ||
And now I tell you that your opponent for the next five minutes is paralyzed, cannot move his arms, legs. | ||
That's the situation because... | ||
They don't have Hezbollah as one arm and Hamas as another arm to protect them. | ||
They are bare. | ||
And what do you do in that situation? | ||
Go in for the knockout. | ||
That's what I would do. | ||
I think we had a window at the end between Biden and Trump. | ||
I thought and said that we should act at that time. | ||
We didn't. | ||
That was a lost opportunity. | ||
Do you think some of that, though, is just because the American, even though it was an outgoing administration, that it was just completely unreliable and no one sort of knew who was in charge? | ||
Well, we don't need necessarily America to help us. | ||
America could obviously give us ammunition and various arms that would... | ||
So I don't think so. | ||
I think it's simply a missed opportunity. | ||
But it's not too late, though time is running out. | ||
I mean, our opponent is rebuilding their air defenses. | ||
They're not going to sit idle. | ||
So we have we have this very unique opportunity in history. | ||
Regardless of that, I think Gaza is taking way, way too long. | ||
We should have been able to do this in, you know, six to seven months. | ||
I thought there are better ways to go about it, more clever and less kinetic, but that's behind us right now. | ||
We have to bring the hostages home, defeat Hamas. | ||
Calm things down. | ||
Reach out to the Saudis, to the Emirates who are already our friends, and begin building a good future here in the Middle East. | ||
Okay, so let's try to do the best version of all this. | ||
So somehow the Iranian threat is now gone. | ||
Hezbollah is largely gone in the north. | ||
The hostages are back and Hamas is incapacitated, basically. | ||
So now you're on the other day of that thing, that thing that you've talked about. | ||
What starts happening to the country and to the region? | ||
The most important thing is to have a unifying leadership in Israel because we're killing ourselves again, like we did in year 2023 with the judicial reform. | ||
A house divided can't stand, I believe Lincoln said. | ||
A house divided cannot survive in Israel. | ||
And so we're very talented people, but when you take the talent and energy of the people and direct it, An internal fight, they're very talented at that. | ||
So we're great at hitting ourselves. | ||
So if we unite Israel, then there's a few things of releasing the coils of springs, and then you'll see this huge growth, I think phenomenal growth, I think the highest in the world, and I'll explain. | ||
Israel is a startup nation, and we are based on innovation and more than innovation, entrepreneurship. | ||
Just the distinction, innovation is thinking of a brilliant idea. | ||
Entrepreneurship is getting stuff done. | ||
Much harder. | ||
I think there's too much premium on ideas and not enough premium on energy and entrepreneurship. | ||
We are really good, especially on entrepreneurship. | ||
And in the age of AI, you still need people to get stuff done in the real world. | ||
It'll be a while until optimists can also start companies, right? | ||
But we were running out of talent. | ||
Our high-tech sector was just eating everything we have, all the brilliant guys. | ||
What we need is more talent, and we have this huge reserve of talent called the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, really smart people, but they're not working, not serving in the military, and that's got to change. | ||
I got to get into it. | ||
Once we get them into it. | ||
So imagine pouring this talent into the high-tech pool. | ||
So the, you know, the, the, the machine is going to grow very strong. | ||
Another, So how do you actually get that? | ||
How do you move them into that sector? | ||
You stop paying them to not work, not serve, and not learn. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And you think you can win an election potentially by doing that, assuming that your future involves Look, there's ultra-Orthodox Jews in America, and they work. | ||
They're part of the economy. | ||
I'm not aware that the American government subsidizes their studying of Torah. | ||
I'm a religious guy. | ||
I believe that it's important to study our heritage, but... | ||
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
Yeah, there's just a number. | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
And when we get them in, it's going to be this. | ||
And I think we're going to get quite a few Jews once the war is over and once we're united and attractive. | ||
We're going to get very talented Jews from all kinds of places in the world because there's a tremendous amount of anti-Semitism and here there's no anti-Semitism and it's a great place to live. | ||
So that's a second thing that we'll do. | ||
And I think the third thing is to reach out to our regional partners. | ||
There is so much that we can do, especially in the Arabian Peninsula. | ||
Does that seem like the future of where all the alliances will be? | ||
I mean, if Iran basically is gone and the proxies are gone, that then that all of these countries, Saudi Arabia, will come in. | ||
Obviously, there's been major moves with the Abraham Accords that it really could look like a very different. | ||
It's a great route to the east. | ||
Yes, I would see Israel, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, India, sort of like this line, and it would also be ultimately a physical line of trains, etc. | ||
There's a tremendous amount of things we can do. | ||
There's also another huge opportunity that people simply have not noticed, unnoticed. | ||
Israel is a first-world country, and we are flanked by countries whose GDP is a tenth and sometimes twentieth of ours. | ||
So there's a natural arbitrage, and it's very rare, very rare. | ||
And if you think about it, there's a huge win-win with Egypt, with Jordan, that could be very effective, and that's something I'd want to do. | ||
Our relationship with Egypt and Jordan, While we are formally in peace, it's a very cold peace. | ||
There's very limited trade going on, and we signed this in 1979, so it's been a while. | ||
This is another untapped opportunity. | ||
When you take it all together, and finally, one more thing, here's Bennett's formula of why Israel has an amazing future. | ||
So we're churning these really talented people, especially towards entrepreneurship, especially Folks who came out of the IDF and at a very young age were assigned huge responsibility, and that builds your character in a way that nothing else does. | ||
So X is the quality, very high quality, times the number of kids in Israel. | ||
Israel is the only democracy in the world. | ||
That's having kids. | ||
That's positive. | ||
So you need 2.1 per month to keep any population. | ||
Israel's at about 3 right now. | ||
And it's also secular Jews. | ||
It's everyone. | ||
So here's my formula. | ||
Really good kids times a lot of kids equals a great future. | ||
That's a positive spin right there. | ||
It's not a spin. | ||
It's a positive vision. | ||
I won't name the country. | ||
I will. | ||
I was in South Korea, and I heard that they have 0.8, 0.9 kids. | ||
And as I flew back, I thought, you know, Israel's got a lot of problems. | ||
Would I replace? | ||
Would I swap our problems? | ||
And my short answer is no. | ||
Because the fundamentals of Israel, which I just said, that formula, are really good. | ||
And yeah, we have huge problems with Gaza, with the Palestinians, etc., but we can figure them out. | ||
And then the underlying trend, the fundamentals are great. | ||
unidentified
|
Do you think the world will let Israel win? | |
To get to the things that you're talking about, like in some sense, the world likes keeping Israel in this intractable problem, this slow thing that's going on with Gaza and everything else, even if you would have managed the war slightly differently. | ||
Like there's some version of the PR angle that just likes keeping Israel in this thing and churning it and squeezing it. | ||
It's a good question. | ||
And I don't know the answer because Israel... | ||
40% of our trade is with Europe, about 35% with America, and the rest is the rest of the world. | ||
And we're an export-leaning country, especially technology. | ||
So we cannot be an autarky. | ||
Autarchy or however you pronounce it. | ||
Autocracy, yeah. | ||
Autocracy. | ||
We can't. | ||
We need those connections. | ||
And I am very cognizant of what's going on. | ||
And it does seem that sometimes they don't want to let us win. | ||
And they stop us in our tracks. | ||
But I think good leadership here needs to take that into account. | ||
Act more quickly and make a distinction between areas you fight on and things you don't fight about, like choose your battles. | ||
So be focused on what we need to achieve and get it done. | ||
And I would also recommend that our ministers just... | ||
They just, you know, don't be stupid, right? | ||
A lot of our problems are just because of stupid remarks. | ||
Right, they get one random guy to say something. | ||
Yeah, and it's not as if it's actually happening, but when you say it, it's out, and hey, the minister of whatever the heck said this and that, and then I have to go and explain. | ||
All this nonsense. | ||
When you were Prime Minister, did you get a sense, and you tried to do something with Russia-Ukraine to kind of close the gap there, very early on. | ||
Unfortunately, it didn't work, but you did try. | ||
Did you sense that your European counterparts, that any of them were hopeful for what's going on in their parts of the world? | ||
In terms of the Ukraine-Russia? | ||
Just in terms of their own countries. | ||
Of their own countries? | ||
And the demographics, and just all of the immigration problems, and things that we're seeing all over the place. | ||
Because here you come from this tiny little country. | ||
You're going to Europe where they have these huge countries, huge economies, and they seem to be kind of floundering. | ||
Well, I sensed in many cases that the leaders are... | ||
There was not a lot of talk of the demographic decline in Europe and, you know, the long-term trends. | ||
So that is not something that they would, you know, talk about, and I'm not going to raise it. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
Is your hope, though, ultimately, that you could model something here that then they could look at and say, boy, we could fix some things in our country? | ||
Well, in a sense, in many ways, I think one of Israel's core missions beyond existing and being strong is to sort of be the pilot of all the messiest problems in the world and how do you deal with it. | ||
All right, so, you know, how does a country deal with no water? | ||
Which that was the thing 30 years ago. | ||
for the first 100 years of Zionism. | ||
We didn't have water. | ||
So we built all these smart ways and moved water from one place to another. | ||
And now we're the highest water-generating country So you export water now. | ||
We export water to Jordan. | ||
Yeah. | ||
But that's just one example. | ||
And then, you know, we're thrown at seven armies around us. | ||
Again, what do you do? | ||
And then what do you do when you have a big minority that belongs to a nation that wants to destroy you, but they are citizens of the country? | ||
I'm talking about the Arabs. | ||
So how do you deal with that? | ||
And I think we've dealt with that in a good way. | ||
The economy is growing better, etc. | ||
There's still a lot of crime and we need to deal with it. | ||
The next thing is asymmetric war. | ||
Now, it's going really tough, but I feel sometimes God is throwing all this stuff, and you guys figure it out and show them how to do it. | ||
One thing we can't teach the world is how to make kids. | ||
It's fairly known how to do that. | ||
I don't know, and I know everyone's working on it. | ||
And nothing works. | ||
All these incentives are not working. | ||
Yeah, I think in Hungary it's working a little bit. | ||
That's right. | ||
I've heard Orbital. | ||
What they do there... | ||
Economically. | ||
I think if you have a child, a woman never will pay taxes again. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
All the others are one-offs. | ||
It's gotta be like, So let me ask you one other thing, because we're short on time, and I hope we can do this again. | ||
And I did my part. | ||
We've got four kids. | ||
You've got four kids? | ||
More than average. | ||
Okay, that's it? | ||
You're done? | ||
We're done. | ||
You're done. | ||
Okay. | ||
Enough is enough. | ||
Let me just ask you one other thing, because I've spent the last couple days in Jerusalem. | ||
I've been here many times, but it's been quite moving this time, I think, more than any other, just relative to what's going on in the country. | ||
You mentioned God just hands a lot of stuff to the Jews, and they have to deal with it. | ||
We're wearing the yarmulke, because the country's largely secular. | ||
You mentioned the stuff with the ultra-Orthodox. | ||
How has any of this changed your religious or philosophic views? | ||
And do you think what's happening here is just another continuation of all of the stories that we tell at all of the holidays? | ||
You know, it got real tough, and then we survived, and we ate, and we move on. | ||
And we tell the story. | ||
That's a wonderful question. | ||
Yeah, I have changed. | ||
And the main development is moderation. | ||
I oppose a Palestinian state. | ||
I oppose handing over land to the Arabs. | ||
I think it's a mistake, etc., etc. | ||
And I have my opinions. | ||
But the how matters. | ||
And I have become an extreme moderate. | ||
I'm a huge believer in being pragmatic, being moderate in how you run the country. | ||
And just solve problems and create a big center. | ||
We need the center of Israel, which is a huge majority. | ||
But is that a spiritual thing, or is that a political beast that's driving? | ||
No, it's deeper. | ||
It's not only, no, because my favorite pastime every Saturday is I read parts of the Bible, not only the parasha, but, and I learn our history across history. | ||
The Jewish people have been plagued by internal strife, internal fighting, and it killed us. | ||
The current state of Israel that you see here, it's the third instance that we have an independent and sovereign state here. | ||
We had it twice before, and we blew it twice before, and in fact, as an independent and sovereign state, In the 81st year, they divided into Judea and Israel. | ||
We are descendants of Judea. | ||
We lost 10 tribes. | ||
And the second time, it lasted for 76 years. | ||
The Maccabees who founded it, their great-grandchildren screwed it and then called in the Romans. | ||
And Israel now is at 76 years. | ||
So it's the decade we've never passed. | ||
And this time, we've got to pass it. | ||
And the way to do it is not to sharpen ideological differences too much, not to figure out. | ||
I'm not saying to lay down your beliefs. | ||
Not at all. | ||
In fact, no one needs to lay down his beliefs. | ||
But we do need to find the common ground and focus on the 70-80% that we do agree upon and figure out how to manage the disagreements. | ||
And sometimes decisions need to be made also on that. | ||
And it's really important for me. | ||
Unity above everything. | ||
This was not my view a decade ago. | ||
And this is my view. | ||
Unity above everything. | ||
That's how you end an interview. | ||
I appreciate your time. | ||
I know you've got a meeting and you're going to let me use your bomb shelter for another thing that I have to do. | ||
You're safe. | ||
But if there's sirens, I'm going to come down and join with my dog, my kids. | ||
That'll be a heck of a show. | ||
It will. | ||
That would be cool. | ||
Thank you. | ||
Appreciate it. | ||
If you're looking for more eye-opening and worldly conversations, make sure to dive into our international playlist. | ||
And if you want to watch full interviews on a wide variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |