Israel's Right to Exist? | PM Benjamin Netanyahu | EP 311

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor's home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80 percent of scriptural memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing! Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now, the book is available to everyone; from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine, and science to civilization itself, it is the most influential book in all history. Hopefully, people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

If you own territory—a vast swath of land and you're doing nothing to it, and someone comes and squats on it and spends a lot of time improving it, at some point they actually develop a valid legal claim to the property itself. There seems to be something intrinsic to our notion of valid ownership that if you're going to occupy a territory, you actually have to do something with it that’s productive. That's at least part of the claim you're making at the moment to buttress the notion that the Jewish people have a valid claim to the present territory. There were a lot of movements back and forth, but the Jews have actually taken the land and made something of it.

Well, I'm saying something else, though. I'm saying that they held the land for two thousand years, were kicked out, the Arabs came and conquered it, and immediately lost it to others and did nothing with it. The others did nothing with it. So it was basically they took over my apartment. A long time ago, the guys who took over, who basically kicked me out, were kicked out themselves. The apartment was left barren, and many decades, in this case centuries later, I come back to this mess, this ruin, and I built it up. I not only improve it; I not only make my ownership based on improvement, but then nobody else did anything with it. There was practically no one else there. That's my argument.

[Music] Thank you. Hello everybody watching and listening. I'm always excited to talk to the guests that I'm talking to, which is why I bring them on the podcast to begin with. But today we have something that I think is unique. I'm going to be speaking with Benyamin Netanyahu, who was recently elected as Prime Minister of Israel. This is a very interesting development, as far as I'm concerned. It's the first time I've had the opportunity to speak with someone who is a sitting head of state or soon will be.

I think the reason that that's relevant and worthy of note is because it’s one of the markers for the development of a new kind of political dialogue. We're in a situation now where it's possible to sit with a political leader and have a genuine conversation for a long period of time. We'll go at least 90 minutes unscripted so that there's no soundbite quality or editing to it. You just get the unvarnished words of someone who is in a position to make decisions that affect all of us. I’m very excited about this.

I'll read the bio, and then we'll go on to the interview. Benjamin Netanyahu, as I said, was recently re-elected as Prime Minister of Israel, having previously served in the office from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021. From 1967 to 1972, he served as a soldier and commander in Sayeret Matkal, an elite Special Forces unit of the Israel Defense Forces. A graduate of MIT, he served as Israel's ambassador to the U.N. from 84 to 88 before being elected to the Israeli Parliament as a member of the Likud party in 1988. He has published five previous books on terrorism and Israel's quest for peace and security. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife Sarah.

In his newest book "Bibi: My Story," the newly re-elected prime minister tells the story of his family, his people, his path to leadership, and his unceasing commitment to defending his country and securing its future.

Hello Prime Minister Netanyahu, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me tonight. I've been reading your book, your new book "Bibi: My Story," and it weaves an interesting personal tale, familial tale, and political cultural tale altogether. There was one particular element of it I wanted to begin discussing with you that I think of broad interest.

One of the things I realized when I was reading was just how ignorant I am, in some fundamental sense, about the history of the development of the Jewish state of Israel. I know that there's tremendous constant noise about issues as fundamental as Israel's right to exist, even. You start by talking about, in your book, you embark on explaining that, at least in some part, by talking about Herzl and his terror, that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe was going to cause a catastrophe, which was obviously a justified terror.

Would you be kind enough to walk me and my viewers and listeners through your rationale for the moral justification for Israel, or the political justification as well? I'm going to do what I can, to my limited ability, let's say, to push back. I've heard the arguments of ten young people who are more prone to give credence and sympathy to, say, the Palestinian viewpoint, and I'd like to rectify my ignorance and maybe help my viewers and listeners do the same thing.

So, would it be useful to start with Herzl?

Well, I'd actually start—Herzl was what I call our modern Moses, but I'd actually start with the original Moses. The Jewish people have lived in the land of Israel, what is now the state of Israel, have lived here and have been attached to this place for about 3,500 years, three and a half millennia.

Now, for the first two millennia, roughly, of that time, we were living in what is described in a text commonly known as the Bible. The Bible describes how the Jewish people lived on this land, were attached to this land, fought off conquerors, sometimes were conquered, but stayed on their land. That continued for a very long time until roughly the sixth-seven century, actually after the birth of Christ.

Now, for roughly 2,000 years, we were conquered by the Romans, we were conquered by the Byzantines. They did a lot of bad things to us, but they didn't really exile us, contrary to what people think. The loss of our land actually occurred when the Arab conquest took place in the 7th century. The Arabs burst out from Arabia, and they did something that no other conqueror—not the Romans, not the Byzantines, not the Greeks before them, not Alexander the Great—nobody did before.

They actually started taking over the land of the Jewish farmer. They brought in military colonies that took over the land, and gradually over the next two centuries, the Jews became a minority in our land. So it is under the Arab conquest that the Jews lost their homeland. The Arabs were the colonials; the Jews were the natives dispossessed.

Well, that happens in history; the Jews were dispossessed. We were flung to the far corners of the earth, suffered unimaginable, terrible suffering because we had no homeland, but we didn't disappear. We never gave up the dream of coming back to our ancestral homeland. So generation after generation, Jews could be in Warsaw, they could be in Yemen, they could be in China, and they said, “Next year in Jerusalem, we'll come back next year in Jerusalem.”

Well, that was made possible because the Arabs who had conquered the land basically left it barren. They never made it their own. It was a barren land; it really had practically—it was an empty land.

In the 19th century, the idea of coming back next year in Jerusalem became a reality. By the way, in part because of Christian Zionist support for the idea of the great return, the Jews came back in the 19th century to the land of Israel. The result of this return was that we started building farms, factories, places of employment. Arabs from nearby countries started immigrating, and they now became—they call themselves Palestinians. They reconstructed history and said we've been here for centuries. No, they haven't; they weren't there at all, and they didn't have a national consciousness.

We came back, made it our land, and we said, “Okay, we now will live together.” We decided to establish a state in 1948; that's 75 years ago. We said everybody can live here. The Arabs said there can't be a Jewish state; you have no right to be here; it's our land; it's not your land; it's been our land for 3,500 years.

If you took over somebody's apartment, knocked them out, dispossessed them, and they never gave up the claim, and they said, “It's our claim,” and you left this barren dump, okay? And the families, the progeny of the people you kicked out came back, rebuilt the house. You cannot come back and tell them you don't belong here; we're going to kick you out, especially since your latecomers, who’ve come to live in part of the house, which is what the so-called Palestinians are.

We say to them, “You can live here; we can live here, but it's our land; it's our state.” And the reason this conflict continues is because the Palestinians, who represent the colonial powers, the Arab conquest of the Middle East and beyond, are saying you have no right for a Jewish state. Well, we do! If any people has any right to a state, if any people never gave up their dreams of returning to their ancestral home, if any people rebuilt their home from nothing, from barren wasted land, it’s the Jewish people.

To tell them you'll have suffered more than anyone else, you have never lost your dream of coming back, rebuilding your national life in your ancestral homeland, you have no right to be there. But the Arabs, who are trying to destroy you, they have that right. That is a complete perversion of history and also a complete perversion of justice. The Jews belong to this land; this land belongs to the Jews.

The Palestinians are free to live here next to us, among us, but they're not free to demand the dissolution of the Jewish state. That is not justice; that is injustice. That’s the shortest lecture I can give you about Jewish history.

In today's world, we sometimes lose sight of the Judeo-Christian beliefs that built our society. This is why it is so important to study scripture and develop a dedicated prayer life. There’s no better way to do that than with Hallow. Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the U.S. and the number one Catholic app in the world. It's filled with studies, meditations, and reflections, including the number one Christian podcast, The Bible in a Year.

Download Hallow today and try their Advent Pray 25 Challenge, a 25-day journey through Bible stories from both the Old and New Testament leading up to the birth of Jesus. These meditations are led by cast members from the largest Christian streaming series in history, The Chosen. Advent Pray 25 will help grow your understanding of mankind and develop a disciplined prayer habit during a season when our discipline is put to the test.

Download Halo for three months completely free and experience personal development that can come from regular prayer, meditation, and reflection on who the Bible calls us to be. Get Hallow for free at hallow.com/Jordan. That’s hallow.com/Jordan.

Give yourself the gift of peace, calm, and discipline this Christmas. Go to hallow.com/Jordan today.

So, why do you think the claim that the Palestinians were somehow there in Israel first and have been displaced in a colonial occupation, let's say, by the Jews? Why do you think that idea has gained such cachet, not least in the West?

Because of ignorance. I mean, what do you mean they were here first? Well, you know, you're familiar with the story of Jesus, right? Jesus was a Jewish rabbi living 2,000 years ago. He was a rabbi from the Galilee, okay? He came to Jerusalem; he turned the money tables of the money changers on the Temple Mount. Where did that happen? Did it happen in Tibet? It happened here! Jerusalem was our capital! King David made it our capital 3,000 years ago!

So the Jews are here! To try to say that they weren't here and that the Palestinians were here thousands of years ago is ridiculous. Anybody can Google this and find out how absurd this thing is.

As far as reinventing ancient history, that is unpardonable, because anybody can find out and understand that the Jews were here for thousands of years. The Palestinians weren’t here! As far as modern times are concerned, what did Palestinians say? Oh, and I write this in my book and I showed it because it’s so comical what they say. They say we were here—Palestine was a verdant land in the 19th century, teeming with the Palestinians until the Jews came in and took it over and threw it out.

Okay, the problem with that is that Twelve years before, a famous visitor named Mark Twain visited the Holy Land, and he describes a totally different picture. He describes Palestine as "a vast wasteland." He said only imagination can grace this barren land with the pomp of circumstance in life. He said, “We traveled for a whole day; we didn’t see a human being. One single human being.”

He said, “Jerusalem sits in sackcloth and ashes.” And as he was saying that, it’s the Jewish return that began. The Jewish return that began building the land!

Well, perhaps one could argue it’s obvious that Mark Twain was not in the service of the Jewish state because it didn’t exist. He wasn’t in the service of the Jewish Lobby because it was an eddy—there was no Jewish lobby. He was just reporting what was there.

Could there possibly have been a tremendous influx of Palestinians between 1869 and 1881, the year that Arafat says the Jewish invasion began and destroyed the Palestinian paradise? Well, alas, no! Because in the year 1881, another famous visitor, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, very famous—he was a courtier of Queen Victoria’s Court. He came here on a special visit.

He says, "I looked south and I looked north." He says, "I'm in Judea and I see nothing." He says, "A barren expanse." Both Twain and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley say the same thing—when will the Jews come back and bring this land to life?!

And the answer is, right then! We came back, brought it back to life! There were Arabs living here but it was, as I said, a barren wasteland. But ours began to immigrate naturally because we created a rise in the standard of living that attracted Arabs from neighboring states.

Those Arabs are now the descendants of those Arabs who migrated as a result of the Jewish return. Many of them now are considered Palestinians. So what I'm saying—and I'm saying this to you, Jordan, and to your audience—there has been a complete fabrication of history. It's the biggest lie of the big lies that have permeated the 20th century and the 21st century—to say that the Arabs were here before; that is, the Palestinians who were here before the Jews when we were here for thousands of years; that we are the colonials when, in fact, it was the Arabs who were the colonials who dispossessed the original natives.

And that is the Jews—who came back to this land that was laid barren by the Arab conquest, brought it back to life, and allowed Arab immigration—what we now call Palestinian immigration—to come back in. And now they say to us, in unimaginable chutzpah, "You don’t belong here!" They recreate ancient history; they recreate modern history, and this is a lot of how come it's ridiculous; it's absurd.

So some of it also seems to be, I would say technically speaking, something like a timeframe problem, right? I mean, you said the Arabs came in in the 7th century, and that's a long time ago. So from the 7th century to now, you might think about—you might think of that as being a time frame long enough to allow for a valid claim of sovereignty, ownership. But the Jews' rejoinder is, “Well, we have a much older claim than that one that spans 3,500 years.”

The problem I have with that conceptually—and then I'll get to some of the other issues that are relevant to this—is that it's not exactly obvious what timeframe of analysis should be primary. You have a very, and I don't really know how to solve that.

I do! And I’ll answer your question; it’s a valid question. If the Arabs, having conquered the land in the 7th century, and dispossessed the Jews over the next two centuries, the Jewish farmers kicked them out and so on, if they established a viable state, a viable national identity there, and so on—you're right! These things happen in history; you’re supplanted by another people, fine! But that's not what happened.

The Arab conquerors themselves were replaced by others. First of all, they did nothing with the land; it just was barren. They actually built one town; one town called Ramla—that's it! You know, hundreds and hundreds of Jewish biblical sites and hundreds and thousands—hundreds of new sites that we built; the Arabs built one place, one town called Ramla—that's it! They did nothing with the land. Then they were replaced by other conquerors—other conquerors came in, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, ultimately the British—a series of conquerors.

In other words, they took over the land, lost the land, and did nothing with the land. So if they had done what you say, if they had created—the house that we were expelled from, was taken over by another family, they built a family there, they had children, grandchildren, extended the porch, they built a parking garage—and so it's gone! What can you do?

You still have the ability to demand reclamations, compensation, and so on, but you know, tough luck; that happens in history! But that's not what happened. Once the Jews were conquered by the Arabs, the Arabs did nothing with it, lost the land to others. Now we come back and bring it back to life 13 centuries later and performed this miracle.

And they fabricate a history, a fake history that deracinates the Jewish roots that are unparalleled. There’s no other story in the history of nations where people fought for so long for their land for thousands of two thousand years, were dispossessed, came back to it, did not kick out an existing population with a national consciousness, rebuilt the land, and now are being told, “You have no connections to it; you’re the colonials.”

No! We're not! We're not! Just to give this a fine point because this is so crucial, what we're discussing—and I discuss it in considerable length in my book because people are so ignorant of history—we are not the Belgians in the Congo. We're not the Dutch in Indonesia. We are not the British in South Africa. We had been there all the time! We had been in the Congo!

If you will, the equivalent in Indonesia, we were kicked out of the Congo and nothing happened in the Congo! Nothing! No other people there, no development, nothing! Okay, now we come back to our land, build it up, enable immigration from Arabs—now called Palestinians from neighboring lands, and they tell us, “Oh, you don’t belong here!”

They dispossess us! This is essentially what our propaganda and Palestinian propaganda has done, and what I labored not only in the present book, my own history, maybe my story, but in a previous book, "A Place Among the Nations," to debunk.

You know what the interesting thing is? No fact that I put forward in any of these books has ever been challenged—not one! Not one! Usually, you know, when people place among the Nations, my previous book, answering much of the questions that you ask, usually polemical books are challenged. You know, the critics, they would find some straggler, some factoid that is wrong, some formulation that is unfortunate, and so on. Okay? Nothing!

Nobody ever challenged it! It got, in those days, rave reviews from The New York Times, from great writers like Conor Cruise O'Brien and Paul Johnson and others—these are great writers! And it wasn’t challenged! Okay? My current book has not been challenged on the historical facts—nothing! People can argue about my opinions, but they don't argue about my facts.

I'm very—try to be very rigorous about the facts. This whole attack on the Jewish people's right to live in their Jewish homeland, the attempt to erase the Bible and to erase the history after the Bible, and to recreate modern fantasy that doesn't exist based on the Palestinians who want to destroy us, who support terrorism, who are anti-democratic or basically neocolonials—because they're really the colonials—that is something that I think has—it's not really folly; it has something fundamentally wrong morally because it is both untrue and unjust.

Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform trusted by millions of entrepreneurs to create their online store and so much more. Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone, from anywhere, whether you're selling succulents or stilettos. Start selling with Shopify and join the platform simplifying commerce for millions of businesses worldwide. With Shopify, you'll customize your online store to your brand, discover new customers, and build the relationships that will keep them coming back.

Shopify covers all the sales channels to successfully grow your business, from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce platform, even across social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Thanks to 24/7 support and free on-demand business courses, Shopify is here to help you succeed every step of the way! It’s how every minute, new sellers around the world make their first sale with Shopify, and you can too!

Sign up for a free trial at shopify.com/JBP. Go to shopify.com/JBP to start selling online today. That’s shopify.com/JBP.

Okay, so your claim so far, if I'm going to say lean in the direction of your argument without leaning too far and too obviously, I would say is something like this: there’s a host of competing claims to the territory that now constitutes Israel. You could have some debate, perhaps technically, about which of those claims should reign supreme. The additional case that you make, however, is that the Israelis, the Jews, have done a tremendous amount of work in improving this territory.

I know there’s a principle of ownership in Western common law and English common law, and I’m not a lawyer, so I may muck this up to some degree, but I understand the principle. If you own territory—a vast swath of land and you’re doing nothing to it—and someone comes and squats on it and spends a lot of time improving it, at some point they actually develop a valid legal claim to the property itself. So, it seems to be something intrinsic to our notion of valid ownership that if you’re going to occupy a territory, you actually have to do something with it that’s productive.

That’s at least part of the claim you’re making at the moment to buttress the notion that the Jewish people have a valid claim to the present territory.

Well, and there were a lot of movements back and forth. Yes, but the Jews have actually taken the land and made something of it!

Well, I’m saying something else, though. I’m saying that they held the land for two thousand years, were kicked out, the Arabs came and conquered it, and immediately lost it to others and did nothing with it. The others did nothing with it. So, it was basically they took over my apartment, okay?

A long time ago, the guys who took over, who basically kicked me out, were kicked out themselves. The apartment was left barren, and many decades—in this case, centuries later—I come back to this mess, okay, this ruin, and I built it up back. And I not only improve it—I not only make my ownership based on improvement—but then nobody else did anything with it. There were—there was no someone else there; practically, there were no tenants.

Right, that’s my argument. Ready, you’re well, and you're also making the case that when the Jews came to Israel, they were doing what they could to coexist with the people who were there—the sparse number of people who were there—but also to set up a state that would invite other people who weren’t Jewish to live there as well. So, it wasn’t an oppressive regime in any—

No, we know what happened; we know what happened. We know that when 75 years ago, when the state of Israel was declared, you didn’t have a single Arab refugee. I mean, the Arabs say now that their enmity to Israel and the reason they went to war with Israel was because of the Arab refugee—but there wasn’t a single Arab refugee or Palestinian refugee when Israel was established! In fact, the refugees are the result of Arab aggression and not its cause!

And in fact, the Arab onslaught—the five Arab armies that attacked the tiny Jewish state in its inception—the tiny—these five Arab armies created two refugee problems. One, the Palestinian refugees who fled before the advancing armies, being promised that they could come back in a few days because the Jews would be annihilated, driven to the sea—that didn’t work out, thank God.

But in those five Arab states, there lived many Jews—those Jews were summarily kicked out after our War of Independence. So the Arab onslaught on Israel and Israel’s inception produced two refugee problems: one, Palestinian refugees—Arab refugees we call them Palestinians—and the second is Jewish refugees.

Now Israel, with less than one percent of the total land mass of the Arab states, takes in the same number of refugees—Jewish refugees—as you had Palestinian refugees. You don’t see them here—they’re integrated into our society, into our government, to do business, into everything!

We solved, without the cornucopia of Arab oil, we solved our refugee problem caused by the Arab onslaught in Israel. The Palestinian refugee problem is kept alive by the Arabs that have a hundred times more land, infinite oil resources—they keep it alive as a battering ram to produce exactly the propaganda you say.

So basically, what the technique of our propaganda has been—and I describe it to some extent in my present biography too because you have to understand it—you have to see it to believe it—is to turn the results of Arab aggression against Israel into its cause!

They first did that with the refugees when Israel was established. They then didn’t accept Israel’s right to exist even though we are a tiny country. They tried to attack us again 19 years later and destroy us. That’s called the Six-Day War. In six days, we pushed back the Arab countries and took over our ancestral lands of Judea and Samaria. And again, what the—exactly the same thing—they said that our occupation—that so-called occupation—of the heartland of the Jewish people, Judea and Samaria, that produced the war.

No! That didn’t produce the war; it was the result of their attempt, their second attempt, to annihilate us! So this technique of reversing causality—that is accusing Israel—basically turning the results of Arab aggression into its cause—is again one of these ways of creating the delegitimization of Israel.

The reason we have not had peace with the Palestinians is not because of the Arab refugees. There weren’t any when they attacked us! The reason is not the territories. We didn’t control Arab these territories—they were in Arab hands before the Six-Day War! All of these things are a result of Arab aggression.

And what is the cause of the Arab aggression? It’s the persistent Arab refusal to accept a Jewish state in any boundary in our ancestral homeland. And if you move that, you get peace!

Now how do we know that we get peace? Because this persistent Arab refusal has dissipated! It’s dissipated over time as the strength of Israel—as I described in my book, as Israel becomes not merely a fact but a permanent fact at the Middle East. So they know they can’t get rid of it.

So Arab countries begin to make peace with us! I had the privilege, which I described again in my book, of forging four Arab peace agreements—four peace agreements with Arab states! Because that barrier, that obstacle of refusing to accept a Jewish state in any boundary has disappeared. Where does it persist? In the Palestinians or one to two percent of the entire world, wagging the—you know, it's the tail wagging the dog!

Or they tried—until recently they were quite successful in wagging the dog. The Palestinians cling on to the fantasy of eliminating Israel, denying us our historical and present rights to live anywhere in this land, refusing to any kind of practical compromise, refusing to accept the Declaration of Israel in the U.N., the partition resolution we did—they refused!

Refusing any kind of realistic negotiation for peace! What has happened? Here’s what happened, Jordan. For the last quarter of a century, after the initial peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, for 25 years we had no peace treaties with any Arab country because the elites—the foreign policy elites and the experts and the intellectuals—explained you cannot make peace with the rest of the Arab world unless you make peace first with the Palestinians! There’s a problem there! Right?

Well, you can’t, because the Palestinians are not interested in peace with Israel—they’re interested in peace without Israel! They’re not interested in a state next to Israel; they’re interested in a state instead of Israel! So if you wait for the Palestinians, you'll wait another quarter of a century, another half century, another century. You’re not going to get anywhere!

I had to break that logjam and describe how I did that in my book. I had to go around the Palestinians, go to the United Arab Emirates, go to Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and make peace with them. Why did they change their attitude towards Israel? They changed it because of the result of the growth of Israeli power! As Israel became more powerful technologically—we made a free-market revolution that released the genius in our people! Israel became the innovation nation—you can’t do that if you’re paying 75 marginal tax rate, right?

So we got tax rates, put in basically a capitalist economy, and Israel exploded! But it also became very powerful militarily because we could now afford to fund—I think the combination of economic power through free markets and military and intelligence power—that combined to give us diplomatic power.

With that, Arab leaders in the area began to see Israel not as their enemy but as their indispensable ally against the forces that were threatening both Israel and them—and that’s Iran! Iran’s aggression! And secondly, they saw the innovation nation that is Israel as a font of tremendous technology that could better the lives of their people.

Therefore, we started—we made these historic peace agreements in record time because now we were no longer bound by the Palestinian straitjacket that you’re familiar with in Toronto and New Zealand and so on!

The Arab world is not—they are some of it, but a lot of it is changing. And I—my idea is how do you solve the Palestinian problem? Anytime they want to truly sit down and negotiate, be my guest! I’ll be happy to do that, and I’ve tried that in the past! But in reality, I took a different track! Instead of saying first we’ll solve the problem with the Palestinians, then we’ll solve the problem with the Arab world. I actually reversed it!

I said, “Let’s go to the Arab world and let’s get peace with the Arab world and then circle back to the Palestinians! If they’re ready to come before, fine! But if not, let’s get peace with 99 percent and then try to make peace with the one percent, as opposed to let’s try the implacable one percent and wait until we get to the other 99.” That’s a complete reversal of concept!

It’s still being challenged; you’ll see some of the old guard still say, “No, no, we have to go to the Palestinians before we go to the Arab world and we’ll never get peace.”

Do you have a coffee lover on your holiday shopping list? Black Rifle has all the best brewing gear, thermoses, mugs, and apparel designed for folks who love country and coffee. Black Rifle sources the most exotic roasts from around the globe. All coffee is roasted here in the U.S. by veteran-led teams of coffee experts. Stuff your Christmas stockings with the latest roast from America’s coffee! For 10 percent off with the code Jordan. Better yet, sign your Secret Santa up for a coffee club subscription.

Imagine the joy of a pre-scheduled coffee delivery of your favorite roast when you need it most! It’s the gift that keeps on giving! Black Rifle Coffee Company is veteran founded and operated. They take pride in serving coffee and culture to people who love America! Every purchase you make with Black Rifle helps support veteran and first responder causes!

Go to blackriflecoffee.com and use promo code Jordan for 10 percent off coffee, coffee gear, apparel, or when you sign up for a new coffee club subscription. That’s blackriflecoffee.com with promo code Jordan for 10 percent off Black Rifle Coffee, supporting veterans and America’s coffee.

So I want to divide this into two tracks now. I want to first of all investigate some of the history behind the willingness of other states to support the Jewish claim to a homeland in the Middle East, because I think that's quite interesting. And then I want to speak more about the Abraham Accords, which you discussed.

One of the things that fascinated me, well historically but also in your book is your discussion of the Balfour Declaration. And that’s obviously before the utter catastrophe of the Holocaust and the catastrophes the Jewish people ran into in the middle of the 20th century. By already, by the time of the Balfour Declaration, there was some sense at least in Great Britain that the claim that Herzl had put forward, for example, that the Jews and the world would benefit from a Jewish homeland in the Middle East had some validity.

So why do you think that developed, and how do you think it extended? Because you got bipartisan support for the notion of a Jewish homeland from the Americans by 1944; and then, of course, there was the U.N. 1947 declaration. So it’s not as if the Jews imposed this vision on the Middle East by themselves; there was support all over the world. So could you walk us through how that support developed, why you think it developed?

It developed because—in the certainly in the 19th century and the early 20th century there was a—the propaganda that I’ve described rewriting the history had not taken root. Most educated people knew the history of the Bible, the history of the Jewish people, their dispossession, what they thought of the horrors the Jews suffered in their exile and dispersion, which was nothing compared to what was going to come later in the Holocaust. But that was enough for them.

They basically knew that the land was practically empty—that is, I mean, there were people there, but it was practically empty—and it made sense that both from a biblical prognostication for those who had a religious orientation and also a humanist view, that this evil of history, this injustice of history would be corrected. That this long-suffering people, the Jews, who contributed so much to civilization and to history and to morality—the idea of morality! It’s the Ten Commandments! You know that became the moral code of the world!

So many other things—the birth of Christianity, many of the ideas and moral ideas that we have originated on these hills where I’m sitting in right now—this tiny, you know, dusty edge of Asia where this strange tribe lived here and talked about, you know, man’s—the fact that people should not remain slaves, that there should be a law that applies to all of them—that kings are not divine, that they’re subject to moral authority and censure and all sorts of other crazy ideas like that.

It all originated here! And so the educated leaders that met in World War One after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, they had to decide, you know, who gets what? And they came upon the idea of self-determination—that is, that people should have, you know, the ability to govern their nations—obviously with civic rights for other people living in their midst. And they concluded, knowing the history that I just described that is so unknown today on college campuses in a among so-called intellectuals or anything, but that the Jews deserved this right to rebuild their national life in their ancestral homeland.

And that’s how it developed! But the first one to actually bring it forward—you mentioned in the beginning of your comments—was Theodore Herzl. Theodore Herzl was a giant of history. He was a journalist, he was a Jewish journalist. In the late 19th century, he was born in Hungary but worked for a very prestigious paper in Vienna.

When he was dispatched to Paris as a correspondent, he saw the infamous Dreyfus trial, where a Jewish officer in the French army was falsely accused, as it later turned out, of espionage and betrayal, and was sentenced to Devil’s Island and other horrible things. He said this: “If this can happen to the Jews in the apex of Western Civilization, then it could happen anywhere.” And he predicted that within a few decades, the fires of anti-Semitism would consume the Jews of Europe! That they would be slaughtered! He actually saw that!

He wrote these things in 1900, roughly, before—and of course the Holocaust came less than half a century later. He said, “There’s only one solution for this.” The solution is to have the Jews—a Jewish nation—of their own!

That is, a country of their own. And he sought to persuade first the German Kaiser and after that the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul to give the Jews a state of their own. He didn’t succeed; he died after eight years—that's it—eight years.

But in these eight years, he launched this movement that turned the dream of ages, you know, century after century, “Next year in Jerusalem”—he turned it from a prayer, from a dream, into a practical plan!

My grandfather, Nathan Milikovsky Netanyahu, he was enthralled by Herzl. He became a tremendous speaker at the age of 20. Thousands of people crowded to hear him throughout Europe. History of Poland; there were records, press records checking to see how people fought each other. They broke windows. They fought physically to hear this young man speak about the Jewish, about Herzl’s vision—coming back to the Jewish homeland!

Well, Herzl died—he died too early. His followers continued the dream even though he was dead. My grandfather was one of them; my father was one of them. But they didn't succeed!

So now we fast-forward to 1917: they succeed partly because the British Empire—which now after the defeat of the Ottomans controlled what is now the land of Israel—decided to give the Jews a homeland! They didn’t say a state yet, but they said a homeland. It was clear it was a corridor to a state. This was met by fervent Arab opposition. By many of the Arabs who had immigrated to Israel—to what is now the land of Israel! They said, “Now stop! You can’t come anymore!”

They decided we’re just going to oppose any Jewish law, and the British backed down! They backed down from the so-called promise they gave—it’s called the Balfour Declaration, where they promised the Jewish homeland. They backed off!

Now the Jews are stuck; they’re in Europe; they can’t migrate because Jewish immigration was effectively blocked by the British, who betrayed their promises to the Jewish people. And now, Hitlerism rises in 1933—it arose to power!

My father, who later became a great historian of the Jewish people, he’s all of 23 years old, and here’s what he writes with the rise of Hitler. He says, “Hitlerism will annihilate all the Jews of Europe, and its racial anti-Semitism would consume every last Jew, and the only way we can fight it is to persuade the civilized world that it is not only the Jews who will be annihilated or threatened: it’s their civilization too.” This young Bencio Netanyahu, 23 years old, writes in 1933!

If more people had heeded what he wrote, then perhaps we would avoid a tremendous catastrophe that occurred to my people, but also to the 60 million who lost their lives in World War II! Well, they didn’t! My father saw this coming, and a few years later, he went to the United States in World War II, and he sought to recruit American public opinion—a young man in his early 30s! He’s trying to recruit American public opinion to recognize that it’s not merely for the sake of justice doing justice with the Jews who are being incinerated in Europe, it’s for American interest and Western interest to have a strong Jewish state!

A strong Jewish state! At the end of World War II, well that seems to be what you did with the Abraham Accords!

Exactly right!

Also by allowing or by facilitating Israel’s development into an economic powerhouse! Exactly! You also made the country, you helped build the country into something that could be practically allied with as well as let’s say making them simultaneously—

Exactly! And that’s really—you hit exactly on the vision! Because my purpose in life, inherited from my grandfather and from my father and my fallen brother—my brother who fell while leading the most celebrated rescue mission in modern times—the historic rescue of Entebbe, where he died! I described that moment when I learned about it in some detail, and also what happened there, which is not fully known.

But I inherited from them a life of purpose, and the purpose was to assure the prosperity, security, and permanence of the Jewish state—inasmuch as you can offer anything permanent in our world! And to do that, I realized that Israel had to be not only to fend off the false claims that try to deny its legitimacy as a state and our historic rights and our ancient homeland.

But quite separate or complementing that is to make Israel very powerful! Because history is very unkind and productive!

And productive! Right? Because the other advantage you had with the Abraham Accords was that you could present Israel as a compelling partner in economic development to Arab states that were actually hungry for a pathway forward out of their unidimensional dependence on oil wealth!

Exactly right! When I say powerful, I don’t mean militarily powerful! And that’s exactly what I point out in the book! And I said, “No! Normally, if you ask Israelis before that, what is powerful?” Well, powerful means having a strong army! I concluded very early on, having served in the army—I served in a special unit, an elite unit, and I described my brushes with death and clandestine missions and firefights that I was in.

And one, I nearly drowned in a sewage canal! In one, I was shot while rescuing, or taking part in a rescue of ostriches in a hijacked plane and so on! So I had intimacy with the military! Obviously, because I also served for five years in the special unit as a soldier and officer, and it’s quite a big adventure story, as you must have read.

But I understood early on that to have military power, you have to pay for all these things! You have to pay for F-35 aircraft! You have to pay for submarines, for tanks, for drones, for cyber, for intelligence—it’s all very expensive! How are you going to pay for it?

Oh, well, in Israel's semi-socialist Israel that I grew up in, it’s very obvious—you tax the rich! Well, the problem with that is, you don’t have enough rich people! And they’re all going to leave to other places with lower taxes!

So I figure that the way you can actually enable Israel to be strong militarily is you have to make it strong economically! But to make it strong economically, you have to completely overhaul Israel’s economic system from semi-socialism to free-market capitalism!

And I entered public life essentially with that view, and I became first prime minister, then finance minister, and again prime minister! And I led a free-market revolution that turned Israel from basically a supplicant to one of the most advanced economies on earth!

Just to give you an example, when I became—when I was first elected prime minister, Israel was well behind all the Western European economies and certainly the United States and Canada in terms of per capita income! Well, as a result of the changes that I put forward—and I described in the book—Israel became, in terms of per capita income, wealthier than Japan, France, Britain, Germany! It’s actually outstripped them all!

And the power—my vision was that the fusion of free markets and technology—which we invested in all the time in our military—that produces this tremendous efflorescence—economic efflorescence! And that gives you the power combination!

The power combination is not merely the military, which you can now afford; it’s the civilian technology, which you now develop! And so Arab states could see, “Well, Israel is a strong country, and with enough resolute leadership, it will oppose Iran that threatens both of us!

But Israel also produces fantastic desalinization; Israel produces tremendous developments in energy, tremendous digital developments, tremendous developments in health and so on! We were the first to leave COVID because of our databases that we developed for the population and so on! We were the first to exit COVID and rebuild our economy very quickly!

So the combination of civilian technology and military and intelligence capability produced this desire on the part of the Arabs to make peace with us. And you know the attitudes, those ingrained attitudes, anti-Israeli attitudes that are still rife in the Arab world begin to change!

Because here’s what happened: because I could make these peace treaties with the Gulf States, hundreds of thousands of Israelis now fly over the skies of Saudi Arabia, land in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Bahrain, and Arabs there embrace the Israelis who are coming there! And Arabs and Jews are dancing in the streets! Now they’re making joint ventures together. You know, they have economic interests, but also the views, the cartoonish absurdities of Arab propaganda are dissipated with this human contact!

So the new kind of peace that we have—a peace based on power and interest—is actually changing the previous assumptions about Israel in many parts of the Arab world! My goal, and I say this openly, my goal, if as I hope I’ll form a government very soon, is to continue the expansion of the circle of peace to the rest of the Arab world.

But I don’t think it’s going to be actually a quantum leap again! A quantum leap again! Because there is a country there that is a close neighbor that is extraordinarily important, and that’s Saudi Arabia! And if I can achieve a Saudi-Israeli peace, we will be well on the road to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict and we’ll be left with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But it will be a lot more manageable, and we will have changed history!

The idea is peace through strength! It’s an old idea; I didn’t invent it. But the strength that I’m talking about is the combination of economic, military, and diplomatic strength! I call it the three pillars of peace.

We’ll be right back with Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series "Exodus."

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost.

You will pay the piper! It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert! And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine.

The highest spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question!

Could you walk us through what you did on the economic front? I have two questions there. What did you do on the economic front to move Israel from a relatively far-left leading socialist state to a free-market economy?

So, I’d like to know the details and, second, why do you think that given the radical success of your free-market maneuvers, that the more socialist vision was so attractive to Israelis for such a long period of time?

So let’s start with the first one: tell us what you did on the economic front to allow for the emergence of this Silicon Valley-like miracle in Israel that’s unfolded over the last—what, about 15 years, something like that?

20 years! Yes, exactly! 20 years! What did I—well, the first thing I did was, if I could borrow a phrase from the Clintonites, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” We had a tremendous economic crisis when I took over as finance minister in 2003. Horrible things!

And the country was still on semi-socialist lines! I decided—and most people thought it was because of the collapse of the dot-com markets, if you remember—that which it was, but it was a tiny factor; it wasn't a really important one! Or they thought it was because we had terrorist attacks, which was also part of it!

But I thought it was a structural problem! Why were we before the dot-com collapse, before this or that explosion of terrorism—why were we a gifted people, a people with a pretty good educational system? How come we were trailing all the countries of Western Europe? And the idea was, well, education is enough; if we have good education, we’ll get well—that’s hogwash!

I mean, the Soviet Union had tremendous education! They had tremendous mathematicians, tremendous physicists, and tremendous metallurgists! They were dirt poor! And yet when any one of these people was put on a plane and someone would manage to smuggle themselves to Palo Alto, they were producing wealth within days because you had a free market there!

So technology by itself doesn’t produce wealth! Free markets and technology—free markets do produce wealth! But free markets with technology produce unbelievable spirits of growth and wealth! And that was my vision for Israel!

I had this crisis now, and I said, “In a crisis, I could do impoundable things! I could do things which were never accepted!” So what I did was, you know, I spent—first of all, I was told by my advisors, having been prime minister before and now being in a prime minister in Sharon’s government (who was in his 70s), they said, “Look! If you want to be prime minister again, whatever you do, don’t take on the finance ministry, because you’ll have to cut budgets—you’ll have to do horrible things—and you’ll never be prime minister again!”

And I said, “Well, what do I want to be prime minister for? It’s to push back the Iranian threat, including their quest for nuclear weapons, and to liberate the Israeli marketplace and the Israeli economy. So if I achieve at least one of those goals, that’s a pretty good thing!”

They said, “Okay, but remember you’ll never be prime minister again!” This is 20 years ago! I became prime finance minister, used the crisis! After three weeks of working 20-hour days, I put forward my vision to Israel, which answers your question!

I said, “I fell back on a vision, because people were living, exactly as you say, in semi-socialist Israel. They were awash with false economics, basically saying, ‘Divide the pie, divide the pie; don’t increase the pie!’”

Okay? That was basically what they all grew up with, and unless you get mugged by reality, it’s very hard to change it. But we were being mugged by real economic reality again and again and again, and we didn’t change!

Now comes my opportunity! Three weeks into taking up the finance ministry, I give a press conference! I fell back on my first day in the military in basic training! It’s a long line! The company’s put in a long line in a big square, and the commander points to me and says, “You, Netanyahu, look to your right, put the man on your right on your shoulder!”

I did. He then looks at the next guy, puts the guy on his right on his shoulder, and so on. Well, I had a pretty big guy on my shoulders, because the commander blows the whistle, barely takes a few steps together.

This is a race—it’s called “the elephant race.” The guy at the bottom is the elephant; the guy at the top rides the elephant. The next guy was the smallest guy in the company, and he had the biggest guy on his shoulder. He collapsed on the spot!

The third guy was a big guy, and he had a relatively small guy, and he shot off like a rocket and took the race! I said to the Israeli public, “All national economies are pairs of a private sector and a public sector sitting on the shoulders of a private sector! The private sector is the one that produces the wealth, or most of it, okay? The added value in the economy—and in our case, the public sector became too big!

We were about to collapse! We were about to collapse like the guy next to me! So here’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to put the fat man—this became known as the fat man/thin man example, and taxi cab drivers and comics spoke about it! It actually went into the Israeli cycle. If you ask people now in Israel, fat man thin man, they know what I’m talking about!

The fat man at the top—we’re going to put on a strict diet! Very hard to do politically; you’ll get to cut government budgets, okay? And the thin man at the bottom—well, we’re going to put a lot of lungs, a lot of oxygen in his lungs! And what is oxygen? Well, many things, but number one, number two, and number three is low taxes, low taxes, low taxes! Because that's why people risk; you know, that's why they work!

That’s why—because they don’t want to pay to the fat man at the top; they want to have it themselves! And once we have that, we have to—the guy can race forward, right? He can run forward and take the race.

Compared to other economies, well, not true, because—as he begins to run, he hits a ditch! And then he hits a wall, and then he hits a fence, and these are called barriers to competition! We have to deregulate—the excessive regulation that semi-socialist Israel had and still has to some extent—but we’ve done a lot there!

So it’s three things: compress the fat man, lower taxes, and do other things to make business very attractive and easy, and remove barriers to competition. And frankly, that’s what I did!

I don’t describe the 80 or so major reforms that we did, but I did them in a crisis! And the reason I could get away with it in a crisis is because, you know, things were so bad. They were so bad that they let you do it!

But I paid heavily, and I almost disappeared from politics when I later ran for, you know, as a leader of Likud, my party, compressed to 10 of the Knesset! That’s it! Right now, we’re the biggest party!

But I was nearly destroyed! So my advisors, who told me, “Don’t take the finance ministry!”—why aren’t they wrong? I was declared dead, having survived several brushes with death as a commando soldier, I now survived the brush with death politically!

So I was eulogized! People said Netanyahu did great things in the economy, but he’s dead! He’s done! He’s down to 12 seats out of 120 in our Parliament! It’s finished! Thank you for what you did, go away! Okay?

I recovered from that, and I was re-elected!

Why did you pay? Why did you pay the price?

Like what?

Oh, why? What was it about your reforms that made that price inevitable?

Because part—for the most important part is that, in order to put the fat man, the public sector on a diet, I had to cut back Israel’s lavish welfare system, which encouraged people to live on the dole and not to go out and work!

Okay, so when you cut that—well, Jordan, I can tell you—you don’t become very popular! It’s not cutting government!

Well, there’s a lot of short-term pain there, eh?

There’s short-term immediate pain that’s concrete for a lot of people!

When you cut—and if the benefits only kick in in the medium to long term, then you have—

Well, then you have obviously a problem of emotion!

Well, I’d like to do it up front in the benefits later!

You’re absolutely right! And you have to be prepared for that! That’s what leaders do! If you want to lead, you have to have a purpose, and your purpose has to be beyond yourself!

And you have to be ready to shed political blood, your own! You have to be ready! Otherwise, you can’t lead! Otherwise, it’s meaningless! You’re always looking at the polls. You’re always looking—do you have a vision of what to do?

I had a clear vision! And I wanted to make Israel a power among the nations! And the things—and I paid for it! I nearly died politically, in fact, I was eulogized twice!

Because you got to realize that I checked, you know, somebody showed me the statistics the other day. So I’m the longest-serving prime minister of Israel—15 years!

And in a year, if I, as I anticipated, will form a government in a few days, in a year’s time, I will be the longest-serving leader of a democratic country in the last half-century!

But I’m already beating the odds in a different way, because a lot of people came back once from political death—that’s happened. Winston Churchill is an example from Israel; the lady was another example.

And you can find them in other places—not that often, but you can find them! But the last time somebody came back twice to do a comeback twice was 75 years ago—three-quarters of a century ago!

And the reason that’s happened is because you’re quite right! If you’re able to survive political death, then people appreciate what it is you did for the country and for them, even though you could be swept by tremendous hostile presses in the case of Israel! But you can overcome that!

And in Israel’s case, in my case, in the story of my life, as I describe it, it was to bring into effect this vision of Israel—a powerful state that has this tremendously creative economy along with a powerful military—opening its door to peace with its neighbors and also fighting what is a global threat—Iran with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach Canada and the United States and anywhere—it's a threat to all of humanity!

By protecting Israel, by fending them off, I, of course, protect Israel! But I think we protect the larger international community!

People appreciate that—that’s why I’m sitting with you a few days before I expect to go back into office, because we can have this free-ranging conversation now! I can talk about my book, which I unabashedly am trying to plug in this conversation, and I urge you to read it for two reasons:

One, as you say, to understand better the history of the Jewish state, the Jewish national movement —Zionism—that led it; the reality of the Middle East and how it’s changing, by the way, for the better; the threat of Iran—all of these things!

And my contacts with the successive American presidents, who are very different from one another, and I've had to deal with quite a few of them, and it’s an interesting story. But I think beyond that, I think it’s to live a life of purpose!