Naftali Bennett identifies Iran as the epicenter of regional instability, comparing its corrupt regime to the Soviet Union destined for collapse via sanctions rather than kinetic force. He details his political strategy, including forming a razor-thin 60-to-59 unity government and proposing economic reforms like ending ultra-Orthodox subsidies to unleash innovation. Bennett envisions strong alliances with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, leveraging Israel's superior demographics against global declines, while arguing that national survival requires prioritizing common ground on security over ideological divides to prevent a Weimar-like collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.