The Islamic Republic of Terror: Hezbollah & Hamas | Naftali Bennett | EP 487

What's going on in the Middle East is about 70% of the problems in the entire Middle East stem from the Islamic Republic of Iran. What it does is it exports its ideology and terror with its arms all across the Middle East. Every country it touches, it ultimately destroys. It's like the anti-as touch. It provides them weapons, it trains them, and ultimately it also commands them to generate terror.

Hello, everybody! I had the privilege and opportunity today to have a discussion with Naftali Bennett, who was the 13th Prime Minister of Israel. So, obviously, there's plenty to discuss on that front. We did discuss plenty; we discussed the polarization in Israel and how discussion and then protest regarding the Reformation of the Judiciary in Israel distracted the population and the state and laid at least some of the groundwork for the October 7th attack.

We talked about that attack and its geopolitical causes, concentrating most particularly on Iran, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, more specifically focusing on that regime's stated intent to supplant and replace, let's say, eradicate and annihilate the United States and Israel, which is certainly the kind of statement that would make you assume that you're dealing with a regime that is, to say the least, your sworn enemy.

The fact that Iran is responsible in large part for funding the events that led up to, in the narrow and broader sense, the attack on October 7th and what that might mean for the future while also maintaining a certain amount of optimism, let's say, on the Muslim-Jewish-Christian peace front given the establishment and the continuation of the Abraham Accords and what that means for the future, even after the atrocities of October 7th.

So, join us for that update yourself and find out what's going on in the Middle East and the world, particularly with regards to Iran.

Well, Mr. Bennett, I think we should probably start with the presumption of a fair bit of ignorance on the part of the viewers and listeners, and well, and with regard to me as well. We'll get you, if you would, to position yourself, let everybody know who you are, what role you've played in Israel, what role you're playing now. Just set the stage for us personally so that everyone understands who I'm talking to and why.

Sure. Well, I had the privilege of serving as Israel's 13th Prime Minister in the years 2021-2022. Prior to that, I was Education Minister, Minister of Economy, and Defense Minister. So I spent a bit more than a decade in politics. Before that, I had a whole other life in high-tech. I was a startup founder, founded a company, became CEO—a real roller coaster—but ultimately, we had success, and then I ran another company that we sold.

Also, prior to that, like all Israelis, I served in the military in Israel's top unit. It's called Sayeret Matkal—the guys who did Entebbe and all of that. I had the privilege of becoming a platoon commander and later a company commander in a special commando unit. I spent quite a few years fighting our enemies, primarily Hezbollah in Lebanon. I grew up in a beautiful city in Northern Israel. Some people compare it to San Francisco because it's a mountain that sort of goes down into the sea.

My mom and dad were born and raised in San Francisco, and they did what's called Aliyah in Hebrew. When you move to Israel, you ascend; you go up. The term "Aliyah" is to go up. So they made Aliyah in 1967, and they are really my biggest heroes—my dad and mom.

So where would you position yourself on the political spectrum in Israeli politics? Would you describe what the political spectrum is in Israel? Because obviously, there's a left-right spectrum or something approximating it, but that doesn't mean that it maps—isomorphically—with what we might expect in the rest of the West. So flesh out the political landscape there and your position.

I would talk about two dimensions of my political beliefs and opinions. I'm right of center. I do not believe in land concessions. I think our enemies want to annihilate us. I think the only way to achieve peace is by being incredibly strong. I'm a free market guy, so I would be considered a moderate Republican here in America. However, the way I view the political system today, it's less about a battle of opinions and more about a very dangerous group identity politics where opinions almost don't matter. What matters is, are you for your group, or is it against your group?

We can talk about this later. In that sense, the government I established was a very unique creature. It was the most diverse government in Israel's history. When I was Prime Minister, I had left-wing ministers, right-wing ministers and parties. I had secular and religious; I had Jews and Arabs— for the first time, eight different parties.

Even my biggest detractors agree it was an effective government in terms of getting stuff done. They were angry at me for lots of stuff because I sort of broke ranks from what was before then. Either you're right and you only fight for the right-wing camp, and you’ve got to be against the left-wingers. I do not agree with that anymore.

I think while I harbor my opinions and will fight for them, we have to be able to sit together in broad unity governments, bipartisan governments. I believe that's the only way forward for Israel because, I'll say right now at the start, I think that the number one problem of Israel and the challenge for the Jewish state today is the domestic poison and the internal hatred between these two camps at levels that we've never seen before.

And what are the issues that are dividing them? I mean, we're seeing something like a devolution into group identity politics broadly in the West. And I mean, obviously, the danger in that—at least one of the dangers—is that it undermines the primary narrative, let's say, or identity that holds everyone together. So that's obviously dangerous if you don't like a descent into chaos.

But now I understand the identity politics that characterize the United States, say, in Canada, the UK, etc. I'm not exactly clear what the identity fragmentations are, I guess on the Jewish side but also between the Jews and the Arabs in Israel. So how exactly is the domestic landscape fractionating, as far as you're concerned, in Israel?

Well, I believe that this is an artificially manufactured grouping for political reasons because there's a lot of benefit in creating camps in politics. You have your base, and you get them mad at the other side. But I think it's phony. I think it's not predicated on real big debates because here's the interesting thing— and you ask me about issues, if you actually analyze the big issues that supposedly tear ourselves apart—actually, most Israelis agree on them.

It's three areas: it's religion and state, it's the judicial reform, and it's the Palestinian issue. Okay, so I can tell you in about 40 seconds where almost everyone agrees. On religion, Israel is a Jewish state. We want our kids to love our tradition, to love our heritage, our history, to be knowledgeable about it, but we're also against laws that coerce religion. And I'd say 80% of the Israeli Jews agree on that. So this is an artificial battle that is done for political reasons.

On the judicial issue, there's also a fairly simple compromise. Basically, what happened over the past 40 years was the judicial system usurped a lot of power from the executive, from the government. But over the past seven years, there has been a very gradual incremental rebalancing. So we have many more conservative judges who say this is not our business, government. I love hearing that when a judge says this should not come to the court; this should be a political decision.

The whole craze about the judicial reform, in my opinion, was mainly about the terrible way the government introduced it. It didn't introduce a change in order to improve the lives of our people. It seemed and articulated, "We're against the other side; we're going to aggravate those lefties." And again, I'm a right-wing guy, but I don't think that when I’m Prime Minister or Education Minister, my goal in life is to get the other side to be terrified or aggravated, right?

So has the—I would call it a "poke you in the eye" attitude; so it's more about that. And even on the Palestinian issue, the de facto argument today almost doesn't exist. And I'll explain. For about 50 years, there's been a big divide where the left supported a two-state solution and the right opposed it.

For the past 20 years, the second intifada and especially now, post-October 7th, mainstream Israelis do not believe anymore that we should be founding a Palestinian state, certainly not in the near future. So, we agree that right now, one way or another, we're not going to allow a Palestinian state. So why not be together in government?

We can defer continuing to argue about it for the next 68 years where I'll argue and fight against that; they'll support it. But in the short term, there's no disagreement. So there's no support for a two-state solution. Nobody thinks it would be a total disaster, but there are others who think that I’m wrong, which is fine; we can argue and debate that in between us eight years from now. We don't have to waste our energy right now.

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So this judicial issue, so my sense is that—I mean, I've seen arguably similar moves in Canada in particular where the judiciary has increasingly taken on the role of the legislative branch, partly because the legislators don't like to make complex decisions, and then they default to the judiciary, which is not a good thing in the long run because it undermines parliamentary supremacy.

That's right. Has something analogous to that been going on in Israel? And you said there's been a rebalancing, but that it was handled badly on the messaging side. It became—what did it become? It became something like a battle between the legislative branch and the judiciary?

Yes, I mean, that's well articulated. You basically articulated it precisely right. As I said, in the past we had a fairly minimalistic Supreme Court that was very hesitant and not inclined to cancel laws or to override the government. It did it from time to time, but in a very cautious way. What happened in the beginning of the late 80s primarily was the Supreme Court became way more active and gradually began canceling laws and creating its own self-made constitution based on the what's called basic laws in Israel.

But they went too far. Was that primarily a leftist movement on the judiciary side?

I would say so. Now, in many cases, you said it so rightly—in many cases, it was a result of the government not being courageous enough to resolve some very fundamental issues, like the draft law for ultra-Orthodox. When the politicians are not courageous enough, they throw it to the Supreme Court and then they attack the Supreme Court for getting involved in what they couldn't solve.

Now, there was already a gradual process of rebalancing that was happening prior to this craze of the past couple of years. So things were on track to gradually get better. I remember as Minister—you know, as Prime Minister, I cannot recall one event where I wanted to get something done and knew how to do it, and the legal folks stopped me.

I do remember as a minister there were one or two cases that really got me angry, and I thought, dang, you know, the judicial system is too aggressive. But it was on track. Then the government came and, as I said, they talked about a revolution. They said we're fed up with those lefties, and it's funny because I'm a right-wing guy, but what they came to do was to punish the other side, to terrify the other side.

And guess what? They succeeded. The other side, which is lots of very decent people—about half of the country—who serve in the military, risk their lives, pay taxes—hardworking people, much of the middle class in Israel, the secular middle class—they indeed got terrified.

They felt subjectively that there's a government that wants to punish them, and no one should feel that their government hates them. And that created a rebound effect of these huge protests and refusal to serve in reserve, which is a terrible thing, right? Because we need our army.

What happened essentially in the year 2023 was a horrible year. Prior to October 7th, the whole country went crazy in this internal war. We got distracted from our enemies. Our enemy saw that we're killing ourselves from within. They saw our national immune system was getting weaker and weaker, and they waited.

Bam! You think that was associated with that internal strife?

Absolutely. The cost of internal have done this attack two years ago, four years ago, ten years ago, twelve years ago. We know from intelligence—from hard intelligence—that they were following this, and you know what their biggest mistake was? That they attacked. We were doing a great job tearing ourselves apart, right?

That horrendous attack stopped the craze, and now we have another opportunity to get our act together, and we have to seize this opportunity.

So let's talk about—first of all, I'd ask you just for a definition because there'll be lots of people who don't know this—the second intifada. Tell us about intifada and exactly what it means.

The second intifada started in, I believe, October of 2000. Just as we have background—beginning 1993 all the way to 2000—Israel engaged in the Oslo Accords. A Labor government led by Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister that was thereafter assassinated, believed that we need to reach a compromise with the Palestinians and ultimately believed in the two-state solution.

At that time, I was a soldier. I opposed it, but I could understand the other side. I can understand that they had a theory that if we hand over land, the Palestinians will fulfill their national aspirations and will live side by side in peace. A slim majority of Israelis supported that.

What happened was already in the 90s as we handed more land over to the Palestinians? It started in the Labor government. Then Netanyahu continued and handed, I believe, about 133% of Judea and Samaria—aka the West Bank—to the Palestinians. We began seeing more and more terror from the very areas we vacated.

What happened in the Oslo Accords, though, was the Palestinians formed an entity—a government called the Palestinian Authority—and a big tract of Judea and Samaria, the controversial territories, was handed to them, almost half, and they govern it to this day.

What happened in October 2000? There was a violent uprising and war against Israel that started, and it manifested itself in suicide attacks where Palestinians came in, usually with explosive vests, entered a bus in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, blew themselves up killing a dozen Israelis almost every day. It was horrible; it was a terrible period.

And I'd been living in Manhattan running my company, but the R&D center was in Israel, so I was back and forth. Finally, we had enough, and in March of 2002, we went forward with Operation Defensive Shield and recaptured those territories militarily.

To this day, we have the way it runs is they govern themselves on the civilian aspect, so we don't— they have their own government; they had elections; it's a democratic government, though they only had elections once. They pay their own taxes; they have their own anthem, their own Parliament, what have you.

But the overall security responsibility is Israel's, and that's why we don't have this sort of terror stemming from the PA that we saw from Gaza.

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Okay, okay. So let me switch a bit to—I'm going to ask you a complicated question. I want to lay out, if you don't mind, how the situation in Israel looks to me. Not that that's particularly important, but it'll give you a chance to restructure the story if need be.

I want to tell you how it looks to me from the outside, and I've been trying to sort this out very carefully in my imagination so that I can have a clear head about the circumstances in the Middle East.

Okay, so I'm going to start with the Abraham Accords, and they're very striking to me. The first thing they indicate is that there are profound divisions within the Arab world with regard to Israel and how Israel should be treated and dealt with. And the Abraham Accords formalized an agreement with a number of Arab states that Israel should be regarded as a valuable trading partner.

Now, the reason for that, as far as I'm concerned, is threefold. The previous approach wasn't working; Israel's proved itself to be an economic powerhouse. It's starting to—it's like a second Silicon Valley in many ways. There are extreme economic advantages to partnering with Israel, trading with Israel, and learning from the Israeli experience. And then Israel is also a formidable military powerhouse.

So the combination of those three things was sufficient, along with some alteration in the stance on the more forward-looking Arab side to make agreements of peace with Israel a reality. We saw that happen in the Abraham Accords.

Now, my sense is the Abraham Accords are viewed with something you might describe as extreme skepticism and horror, even by the Iranians. Most fundamentally because they don't want to see— they’re sworn enemies of the United States, they are sworn enemies of Israel, they are sworn enemies of many of the Arab states that signed the Abraham Accords. They are seriously not happy about this, and they'll do anything to undermine and destroy it, along with Israel and the United States.

So, okay, so then let's think about that in relationship to Palestine. So, you're putting forward something approximating a two-state solution. That's been a solution that's been proffered in the past, but the problem with the two-state solution is it's predicated on the idea that the parties involved in establishing the states want states and they want peace.

My sense of it is that Iran would sacrifice every single Palestinian in a heartbeat if they could do serious damage to Israel and the United States in doing so. Iran continually funds the agitators in, let's say, Hamas and Hezbollah, for example, to do nothing but cause Israel and the United States problems, and they don't give a damn in any way, shape, or form about the Palestinians.

So I don't understand at all, first of all, how the Israelis can negotiate with the Palestinians with the Iranians lurking behind them doing nothing but causing trouble and funding at every possible opportunity, every way of breaking down any possibility of peace. Because what do they care whether the Palestinians make peace with the Israelis? That's just annoying to them from a foreign policy perspective.

So I don't see any victory; I don't see any potential for solving that problem as long as Iran is pulling the strings behind the scenes. It's in their best interest, given their stated foreign policy objectives, to keep the Palestinians and the Israelis at each other's throats for as long as possible, and if that does in the Palestinian people—oh well, you know, collateral damage in the bigger game.

So, and then, okay, so—and I want to add, now, uninformed people in the West might be thinking that by standing with the poor, oppressed Palestinians, they're, what would you say, they're showing their solidarity with the oppressed people of the world, right?

But they're certainly not allied with the mainstream of peace-loving Arabs around the world and peace-loving Muslims, as far as I'm concerned, and they're crawling into bed with a state that's hated, not least by its own people, like it's a brutal, awful, terrible state, and it wants to destroy the United States and Israel.

So all the protesters on American campuses who are hypothetically supporting the poor, oppressed, victimized Palestinians—and I know there's plenty of complex things to say about that—are really acting as proxy agents for Iran. And the commander came out on X Twitter not very many months ago and basically said exactly that, congratulating the American protesters, for example, for supporting his agenda, right?

I mean, it was mind-boggling. It didn't seem to slow down the protests at all. Okay, so the first question, having laid that out, is like: is there anything that I miss with regards to the positioning of Iran in relationship to Israel and the United States?

I think you've hit the nail on its head. About a decade ago, I came up with a strategy against Iran, and I called it the octopus—terror octopus or octopus strategy. The first thing was to understand what's going on, and then you can build a strategy.

What's going on in the Middle East is about 70% of the problems in the entire Middle East stem from the Islamic Republic of Iran. I would view it as a very radical regime, by the way. It's also incompetent and corrupt, a bit similar to the Soviet Union of the '80s. But what it does is it exports its ideology and terror with its arms all across the Middle East. Every country it touches, it ultimately destroys. It's like the anti-as touch.

Look at Lebanon, look at Syria, look at Iraq— it's like it—in all these places, it builds a local proxy, sometimes based on Shiites that live there, but not always. For example, Hamas is a Sunni organization. It empowers them; it funds them; it provides them weapons; it trains them; and ultimately it also commands them to generate terror, not only against Israel generally, but also against Israel now.

If—and I'll say straight at this point, we need to topple the Iranian regime; that's what we need to do, and it will fall. The mistake that Israel has made for the past 30 years—and I was a soldier; I was fighting—essentially the fingertip of one of its tentacles. The mistake was that we have expended and exhausted ourselves fighting those fingertips of the octopus and instead of directing our energy to topple the goddamn head of the octopus.

What I did as Prime Minister was gradually— I wanted to not have wars on our borders because that's plain to their strategy and redirected our efforts to the head of the octopus. Israel has done a lot of work throughout the years on the nuclear dimension, but my point was, it's not only about nuclear; let's topple the regime.

Now how do you do it? I'm not talking about all-out war. I look at the Cold War as a very good analogy, and ultimately the Soviet Union fell without war. America never bombed. You know what I did? When I became Prime Minister, I dedicated the first month of my job to deep study of Iran—its society, its economy—and what America did in the '80s to accelerate the toppling of the Soviet Union.

It turns out America did a lot. Reagan's America empowered oppositions in Eastern Europe—why can't we do that? It strengthened the enemies of the Soviet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen, etc. Later it had unintended consequences, but my point is we need America, Israel, and the West to apply tremendous diplomatic, economic pressures, and covert overt cyber—lots of stuff—to accelerate the demise of Iran.

This regime will fall because it's much weaker than we think.

So, to continue, what sort of support do you think the Iranian government has in Iran itself? I mean, my sense is very little; it’s despised by its people.

I'm saying this as a fact. It has all the plagues of this sort of regime—the children of the leaders are all corrupt, you know, driving in Lamborghinis or whatever while the people in many areas of Iran don't even have good tap water. And it could be a very rich country; it was doing quite well in the '70s.

And, and so I believe this regime will topple, will fall. Either it could be in 50 years or it could be in five years.

What I did when I met the Biden administration and the folks there was outline a bunch of about 30 different vectors of action that we can take—soft action. I sort of divided the job between us and them. There are some areas that we could give you an example. Every time there's protests there, you know what the first thing the regime does? It turns off the internet so you can't communicate.

Why don't we ensure the internet's on with technologies like Starlink, etc.? There are lots of stuff—easy stuff, cheap stuff that we can do to accelerate the toppling. All we need to do is help the Iranian people, who are a great people.

And unfortunately, my successor discontinued this policy, but I think it’s time to go.

So what sort of—what do you see happening in the West, in the United States, with the rest of the Western countries—with regard to their stance contra Iran? And I’d like to hear about what you think is being done that’s actually effective and also what you think could be done that isn't effective or counterproductive.

By and large, they’re not doing enough. And everything I described—there are a bunch of moderate Arab states: Saudis, Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, let’s say Jordan. There's lots of subtleties here, but I would just say all of them hate radical Islam. Hate radical Islam in one of two strands: either the Shiite strand, which is Iran, or the Sunni strand, which is the Muslim Brotherhood.

They can’t always voice this publicly, but they need Israel to lead the way. Their biggest dream is for Israel to step up to the plate—in what? In relationship to radical Islam. Fight radical Islam, weaken it.

Choke the money—there’s so much that we can do with great roi. I mean, it's not the most complicated stuff that we're not doing. America is perceived in the region—and I'm not going to talk about one side or another—as unstable and sort of doesn’t see things through.

So, you know, you might be there today, but you’re out tomorrow. And in this sense, Israel is there. We're here to stay. We didn’t choose our neighborhood, but we're stuck in the neighborhood, and we're a reliable partner.

Granted, October 7th took a hit on our credibility because it should not have happened. But I think we’re in the process of strengthening again, and you know stuff that's happened over the past month or so has seemed pretty clever. That's the sort of thing that we've got to be doing.

So let's talk about radical Islam for a minute, and maybe we can use that as an entry point into discussing the relationship between religion and politics more broadly?

Yes, because I would really like to do that. So the first issue is it’s interesting to me that there are a variety of forward-looking leaders in the Muslim world who, for example, have been pushing for the Abraham Accords, normalization of relations with Israel.

But even more importantly, the establishment of truly productive relations. So it's obvious that within the broader confines of the Islamic world, the possibility for peace and productive peace exists.

Absolutely. So now, the next issue I’m trying to work out in the West in general is, you know, there’s always a percentage of truly bad actors in any population. So the psychological data indicates that the prevalence of pure psychopathy in the population is—to be conservative—let's say 3%.

So those are seriously bad actors, and we want to say a few things about the psychopathic types. Okay, so they’re malevolent; they only use their language to manipulate for their own benefit, right? They’re parasitic predators; that makes them psychopathic.

They’re narcissistic, which means they want undeserved attention and will do anything to get it. And to top it all off, because that’s not enough, they have a strong proclivity towards sadism, which is a positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others.

Okay, so these are bad actors; now, the question is how do they operate? And we actually know the answer to that. They like to hide behind a mask of victimization because that's very effective.

So the psychopathic types are always claiming that they're the victims and that there are people they can identify as oppressors. And the moral thing is to stand with them. But the other thing they do is hijack the political agenda on both sides.

For example, the psychopaths will use compassion to manipulate the left, and they'll use free speech issues to manipulate the right. But they don’t care because they’re not political at all. What they are is out for themselves 100%.

And then what even makes the situation more dire is that the psychological literature indicating that the psychopathic types can be rehabilitated is dismal, to say the least. They can’t. It's a no-go; no is the simple answer.

And again, I’m speaking, let’s say, of the 1% criminals who are responsible for 65% of the crimes. It’s not corrigible.

Okay, okay. Now, you know a person who deviates from the path of law and order and makes a mistake once—that's a whole different issue. But I don't think that this is the explanation to what's going on in the Islamic world because while there are psychopaths, like Saddam Hussein was a psychopath definitely, and Yassin was a psychopath, I'm not sure other radical Islam leaders are necessarily psychopaths.

I think they truly believe that the world needs to act according to Sharia law. Well, this is what I'm trying to untangle. It’s such a difficult thing because you have on the one hand the obvious fact that there is much movement in the Islamic world to establish peace with Israel and to move their populations forward in a productive manner.

But then you have this core and separating out the religious claims from the manipulation of the religious claims by the self-interested psychopaths—that’s a very difficult thing to manage. I think what undermines this case is the numbers. I don’t have the data regarding what percentage of Muslims support radical Islam.

I'm not saying they engage in terrorism, but they support. My hunch is a fairly high percent. And we can’t just attribute—are they better?

Are the—okay, I push back slightly because I'm wondering, you know, is that also because it's easier for the psychopathic self-interested manipulators to manipulate a comparatively undereducated population and to get away with their claims that really what they’re doing is abiding by the doctrines of the one true religion?

Right? Because when you’re dealing with a population whose fundamental structure is encapsulated within a single religious viewpoint, it’s a lot easier for the bad actors to manipulate that.

So they definitely use this, first of all, to deflect all their incompetence. Yes, yes, definitely. But that doesn't mean you're a psychopath; it just means you're a cynical person that wants to continue governing.

I've seen lots of people do that, and I think the—I'll tell you what I think about how we need to go about fighting radical Islam. And this is something that evolved, I think, especially in the case of Gaza. Everyone asks me, but Hamas is an ideology, and you can't kill an ideology. That's half true.

I agree that there’s no point in trying to persuade people not to be radical, not to be Hamas supporters. Hamas enjoys great popular support in the Palestinian population—about two-thirds.

But there is a way to get them away from Hamas by defeating Hamas. I'll give you an analogy. Had we, you probably know way better than me, let’s hypothesize had we done a poll in Nazi Germany in December of ’44—everyone knew where it was going.

My belief, I have no basis for this, is that a vast majority of Germans still supported the Nazi ideology. It’s likely, very likely. Now, within several years after the war, we had a new Germany. What happened was there was a step before persuading their hearts and minds that Nazism is bad.

There was something way more important: that Nazism is gone. So first defeat Hamas; first defeat the Nazis, and then it’s no longer a matter of whether it's good or bad; it's gone. It's gone; we killed them; they’re done.

Now, get on with life, and only then, I think, I’m asking you actually psychologically, can the individual open his mind to hear other arguments.

I think there is; well, first of all, we hope so. That’s what I think that we need to do. We need to defeat Hamas and then begin changing their hearts and minds.

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Well, I think the historical precedents that you outlined are the correct ones: the same thing happened in Japan, and very rapidly, right? And very thoroughly. I mean, Japan went from that warlike state that it was to a very peaceful and productive society overnight. Well, and you could say exactly the same thing about Germany.

So, you know, and thank God for that. All right, so there’s good historical precedent; whether that’s the relevant case, that's a different issue. But it’s not unreasonable to happen. We have no success in sustainable Arab democracies; it's just a fact. You know, you look—none of the countries in the Middle East—even the stable ones—are democracies.

And it gets you thinking that maybe we're trying to implement something to square a circle, and maybe there needs to be some sort of hybrid. Give you an example: one of the great leaders today, I believe, is Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed of the Emirates. He’s a remarkable guy.

Are the Emirates a full-blown democracy? No, they aren’t. But is he doing good? Is the vector a good one? Absolutely. So we have to be creative about these sorts of things—not impose our values and structures where it won’t necessarily succeed.

Well, this gets us further down the religious rabbit hole too. We don’t know what the grounds for democracy are, right? You know, democracy emerged in its modern form as an offshoot of Judeo-Christian culture, and I think you can make a strong case for that.

And I've felt this particularly from studying the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, is that once the presumptions of Judeo-Christian morality are axiomatic, it's possible to erect a democracy that’s functional and stable.

That’s very interesting. There are preconditions for liberal individualism, and one of the preconditions is that your society is basically peaceful and everybody trusts one another, right? And then, well, now you can all go out there and be individual and liberal and vary in your creative ways, and that’ll work.

It isn’t fluke, obviously, that there aren’t functional democracies in the Arab world now. Why there aren't functional democracies is a hard thing to pull off, and there are many places in the world that don't have functional democracies—it's hard in America and in Israel as well.

Yes, exactly, exactly! And they've had a hard time really getting going in South America, for example. Like the one countries that were settled by England tend to have functional democracies, and countries that were settled by any other country—France, Spain, Portugal—and Israel's a remarkable miracle in that sense.

Because the Jews had been in exile in diaspora for 2,000 years. They didn't have—you know, we were organized in small communities, not as a nation. And to have these folks come from all around the world back to our homeland and form a stable democracy, in itself, is a miracle; that’s for sure.

Well, but you know, when you think about it, it makes sense because Judaism, as it evolved in the diaspora and previously in the two previous states we had in Israel, was a very democratic and open-for-debate society.

Let me tell you something: open for debate. The core of Judaism—when you have the Orthodox Jews study Talmud, Talmud essentially people don't know what I'm going to talk about this—Talmud is sort of a law code of Judaism, but the Talmud's not about the bottom line. It's not a set of rules based on its not a book of rules. It's very—you can fill a library with it.

What it is, it’s debates between rabbis. They debate the most arcane, strange topics, but no one cares about the bottom line. You learn to debate. It’s a very intellectually challenging thing; it’s like a combination of mathematics and logic. But it’s all about debate.

And then 400 years later, rabbis in Europe continued the debate, layers of debate. And the method of study in Judaism is also unique. It’s called “chevruta”—how they taught Jews for millennia. Two guys sit one next to another and learn together and debate. That’s what they do.

You don’t sit—the structure was not a teacher in a classroom, and we've been doing this for thousands of years. And I believe, by the way, that’s part of the secret of the startup nation—that we’re such a debating people—and at its best, it brings you innovations.

I remember in my startup company, we were yelling at each other the whole time. You know, anyone who came into my company heard screaming between the VPs. But it was positive. At its worst, it can tear apart societies when the debate is not for the right reasons.

Yeah, well, so that means upward-oriented debate. Well, it seems to me that it seems to me that that implies that maybe one of the things that the Jewish State and Christian or Judeo-Christian democracies have in common is something like a conceptualization or an embodiment of the logos, right?

The idea that the way that you make progress forward is through thought, and that’s mediated by speech, and that speech has to be free and it can be intense.

Yes. And so think about that: the most respected person in the community for those 2,000 years was the rabbi. And the rabbi was typically the smartest guy; he was the best at studying Talmud. That’s how the most famous rabbis, like Maimonides, who was also a physician, first and foremost, they were the best at study.

And by the way, they also got—their children got the best marriages—usually the most wealthy, and that’s a very positive cycle—a genetic cycle, which made for very smart folks all across the Jewish world.

The good thing is that rabbis get married and have kids; priests do not.

So you take a really smart guy, but then he doesn’t have descendants.

Yeah, that’s a problem.

Yeah, yeah. By the way, in Israel today, Israel is the only Western country in the world with a positive demographic. That’s a remarkable thing too.

It is, and I wonder why. Why do you think?

I don’t know! You don't know?

I don't know. You know, I have all kinds of ideas. By the way, people think it’s only because of the ultra-Orthodox because they do have a lot of kids, but even if you carve them out, the secular are also net positive. You need 2.1 to retain a population; we’re at about 2.3 with the secular, and all in all, at three kids per family.

I don’t know exactly why.

Yeah, well that’s a real mystery. I mean, it seems to indicate something—you know, it’s a wild hypothesis—that there’s a certain degree of existential threat that might optimally facilitate the desire to have children.

Right, I agree. I think that’s part of it. You can be more cavalier, I suppose, about life in general. Like one of the things I noticed about being in Jerusalem—I’ve been there a couple of times—is the intensity of life. It’s a unbelievably intense place.

Jerusalem is intense. Yeah. People, you know, in some ways, people are conducting themselves as if tomorrow is uncertain. Now, they're wealthy and they have opportunity, but tomorrow is still uncertain, and I wonder if, you know, Hemingway said at one point that every generation needed a war to sort out what was important.

And sufficient existential threat might play that role of focusing.

You're onto a very salient point because October 7th shook us. I grew up—I was born in ’72, a year before the Yom Kippur War, which was sort of the last time that we thought existentially that we were at a threat. So I don't—I cannot remember it. My childhood in Mount Carmel and Kiryat Shmona was very standard and regular Western childhood.

My whole generation grew up taking Israel for granted. We did not feel that there was any existential threat. October 7th shook that complacency. We now understand it again.

What's evolved from October 7th, by the way, is a fascinating insight that not many people are aware of. On October 7th, basically, there’s two stories. One is a massive institutional failure of the state of Israel on our most fundamental objective, which is to protect Jews from a long massacre, and Jews being helpless. You know, we've always had terror, but a terror attack usually wraps itself up within five seconds to five minutes—it's done.

This was different, so it was a huge failure of intelligence, of operations, and the government melted down for the month subsequent. So that’s the bad news, but the amazing news is that we discovered that the younger generation of Israeli boys and girls, let’s say from 18 to 40, are incredibly strong, tough, courageous, willing to sacrifice their lives.

Let me illustrate this: on that morning of Sabbath, October 7th, as the news percolated, thousands of Israeli boys and girls got in their cars—civilians—and drove down to the Gaza area to fight and defend people they’ve never met, their brothers and sisters that they’ve never met. Many of them lost their lives while doing it.

And that is the supreme level of courage. And you know, I was in Manhattan on September 11th—that’s where my headquarters were. I remember the buildings on fire, and there was a river of people running away to the north or walking very quickly to the north. Only the firefighters went south, which is okay. People move from harm's way.

But this younger generation on October 7th just went and fought, sometimes with their bare hands, sometimes with a pistol against machine guns. And these boys and girls are the toughest we’ve had. And you know, when I compare them to boys and girls of their age, let’s say 21-year-olds—let’s say here in America.

I do a lot of universities, and I see the nonsense that they’re being fed with, or the way they’re being developed, versus our kids. It’s not that I would choose this; it’s a horrible thing to have to fight wars.

But we are developing—I coin the term—a nation of lions. A courageous younger generation, tough, resilient, being embedded with values of work ethic, working as a team, dedicating yourself. Spending 10 months fighting terrorists—and then I see what kids here—they need the right pronoun, otherwise they're triggered, and they need a safe space and microaggressions and all this nonsense, which neurotic suffering builds very feeble people.

Because I have a news flash: the world out there is a tough world and you need strong kids. And the reason I'm so optimistic about the next 50 years of Israel is this is our finest generation.

You remember American GIs came back from Europe and they carried America for its best 50 years from ’45 to, let’s say, 2000. These boys and girls—including my own son and daughter. My oldest son, Yoni, he’s now joined the army in a combat unit, but he was still a civilian this year. You know what he did the entire year?

He volunteered with children of evacuees and went to do farming because we didn’t have hands to do it. My daughter was volunteering in farming, but they’re typical; they’re not unique, and I’m so darn proud of them.

And I know that that year of farming or fighting is developing them so much more than any university. So by the time they're going to enter this civilian world after the army, we are manufacturing these supermen and women who are going to carry Israel forward—innovation, self-reliance, responsibility—they're going to be amazing.

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We don't know how much that kind of heroic commitment to the future has to be inculcated or developed in young men and young women so that they'll take up the responsibility for example—well, any responsibility for that matter, but certainly the responsibility of having a family.

And so, and I guess part of the problem possibly with being wealthy and secure is that you can always—it always appears as though you can put things off, yes, right? You can always wait another day, another week.

Yeah, well, tick-tock, man, life's short, and you miss things a lot faster than you think. And so, you know, like I’ve calculated, for example, and I think this is about right, that the typical person is lucky with regard to—so we know, for example, that half of women in the West now will be childless at 30, and half of them will never have a child, right?

That’s the 90% who appear will regret it—that’s one in four. So it’s one in two at 30 who don’t have a partner or a child.

This is already, you know, I came back from South Korea last week. Yeah, they’re at 0.8; they’re not having kids. And you're going to have one kid who's going to have to support four grandparents. And it's just crazy!

Well, it’s not sustainable. I was thinking about establishing a relationship with—you know, you're a fortunate person indeed if you get to try out five people in your lifetime. Like, you know, people don’t understand how constrained the choice realm is, even for people who are highly successful.

Like, you could easily be—I imagine it’s probably one in five people who don’t have five people to choose from in the course of, yeah, in terms of sequential relationships.

Well, you imagine it takes—what if the person's a stranger? It takes a year to sort of assess them, something like that, really—well, I mean, that’s the question: how long does it take you to reasonably assess someone romantically and practically as a long-term partner?

You know, it's going to be something between six months and a year because not—I'm not espousing this, but the ultra-Orthodox Jews, they don’t have any of this. They have set marriages; they have an opportunity to meet three or four times, but that's about it, and then they get married with very low divorce rates.

I cannot attest whether they’re happy or unhappy; I've got no idea, but it's very interesting. It gets you thinking.

Yeah, well, definitely. And it’s a complicated problem to solve. And so you’re lucky if you have five kicks at the can, and that’s, and you know, that’s completely independent of the question of whether alternative forms of marital arrangement are more appropriate.

Lots of cultures have used them, and I don't think there's any evidence at all that those people are necessarily more unhappy or that the relationships are less stable, right? I think people in those relationships probably assume that they're going to have to do some work on an ongoing basis to make it work right from the beginning.

But my point is more that it’s easy to overestimate the amount of time you have to do anything. Like the window to have children is relatively short.

The window to get married is very short. The advantage of a certain degree of existential threat is it brings that home.

It does, right? And so, you know, what we’re continuing that point, there's now a very positive wave of young men and women—the most talented—that I get phone calls almost every day of amazing people that would have gone to the private sector.

Now they say, you know, we need to save Israel, and we're going to get this influx of the most talented people because this was not the case in Israel by and large for the past several decades. Very—you know, the best of the best went to high-tech.

Now we're going to get some of them, or even successful entrepreneurs entering politics. I’m fairly rare. I think I'm the only—certainly the only Prime Minister who was a CEO of a company, founder in politics. I’m one of the very few that came from high-tech and founded a company, ran two companies. I know business, and we're going to get this best and brightest into Israel's public sector.

And that's why I'm incredibly optimistic, except barring the one issue which I talked about, which is the domestic wars, if you know the polarization.

Polarization, yes. I think Lincoln said, "A house divided cannot stand" and that is true, especially true with the Jews. Do you know, Jordan, the current state of Israel is the third instance we have a sovereign Jewish state in the land of Israel.

We had it twice before. What's called first temple—that was King David and Solomon, then several hundred years later the second temple for several hundred years.

But what people don't realize is that in our first commonwealth and second one, we were united and sovereign only for about 80 years. David’s grandchild, Rehoboam—Solomon's son, he screwed up, and the Kingdom of Israel divided into Judea, two tribes, and Israel, ten tribes.

And they never got together again, and subsequently, the Assyrians conquered Israel—those ten tribes—and we lost them. We lost 80% of the Jewish people, and all Jews today are descendants of Judea.

That’s why we’re called Jews. So it was because of an internal divide that we lost our sovereignty. Fast forward to our second commonwealth; also, it went on as a sovereign state for only 75 years. The Hasmoneans and the Maccabees, their great-grandchildren, there were two brothers who fought each other in the year 76 of the kingdom.

I think we’re talking about A.D. 80; B.C. was also; it was Jews who invited the Romans into Judea. Back then, we were so stupid because we couldn't get along. And now Israel's in its eighth decade, and this time we have to get it right because, you know, the most important thing is the eternity of the state of Israel.

But my point is what killed us twice before was domestic divide—internal division.

Not external enemies. So I want to return to the issue of there are two issues you brought up that I'd like to discuss, if that's okay.

Everyone outside of Israel, and obviously many people within Israel, are wondering how did the events of October 7th come about? Now we already outlined the structure of Israel's external enemies. You have Iran, you have them in cahoots with Hamas; there are all sorts of bad players there.

They’re just looking for an opportunity. You said the internal division that was obvious in Israel, a massive distraction. You know if our enemies could choose one wish, it would be a year 2023, the internal divide.

Like if you were a genie and you came and said, "What do you pray for?" they would say that there’s internal division. Those eight or nine ten terrible months of division where we were killing each other.

So that’s his best wish, right? And I said had they not attacked, I don't know what would have been left of our country because we were killing ourselves, and it seemed almost insolvable.

And so I would call it a weapon of mass distraction, right? We don’t need—you know, there are tons of Iranian bots that are fermenting and Russian bots, but we're doing a good enough job killing ourselves even without the Iranians and the Russians.

And we Israelis have to tackle this and solve it, right? And the only way, in my opinion, is unity; left and right, bipartisan governments for the next decade to bring the warring sides together.

Yeah, because you're stuck with each other anyways, regardless of how divided you are. Well, the same thing is the case in the United States with the 50-50 divide between Republicans and Democrats.

You've seen over the past 30-40 years, you know those famous polls: would you have your child marry someone who’s Democratic if you’re a Republican? And the huge divide that happened in America and that sort of thing might happen in Israel if we—that’s where it gets terrible because it’s fine to have different policies, but I won’t marry someone who, you know, whose parents hold a different political opinion.

Yeah, because it’s not about opinions; it’s about tribalism in the negative sense.

Yeah, so one of the things that’s very mysterious to outsiders and, as I said, likely is to themselves, is like how do you account, in a non-finger pointing way, let’s say for this apparent massive security failure?

Like when I look at that, I think—I’m trying to put myself in the position of the security people, and I know, you know, a tiny bit about security having to be concerned about it from time to time.

It’s a lot harder to keep things secure than it looks!

Yes! There are lots of points of attack and entry, and unless your state is totalitarian to the extreme and you're watching everyone for every second, God only knows what your enemies are going to get up to.

Well, I think there are a couple of things. So, we talked about, one, the fact that we weakened ourselves and distracted ourselves. I mean, quite literally, we were focusing not on our enemies but on ourselves.

And by the way, right, so fragmented attention. And think of, when you have very talented and smart people using their energy to kill each other, they'll do a good job at it because Israelis tend to be very talented and smart. So if you direct it inward, you’ll kill yourself.

That’s definitely—you know, I think this would not have happened if we didn’t have that horrible year of 2023. I also would say that this is sort of a rule in history of mental rigidity of leaderships—what happens in terms of intelligence.

Think Stalin, Barbarossa. Stalin had an amass—hundreds of thousands, I believe even millions of soldiers—on the border with the Soviet Union. You had all the information there. But there was a concept, a worldview, that he was convinced there’s going to be peace with Hitler.

He didn’t let the facts confuse him. To some extent that happened here. We looked down at Hamas. Hamas was sort of the weak little brother. The government had erected a, you know, this big wall and fence with all these gadgets and technology.

And there was a sense that it couldn’t be penetrated. And then when the facts began coming, I think there was a not-good environment in the intelligence system that did not foster dissent.

The best things happen when anyone can speak up, and at the end, a military organization is not democratic.

We know now that some people thought that there would be an attack, but they were silenced. It’s a terrible thing. What I try to do in any organization I run—whether it’s a company, a platoon, a Ministry of Education, or as Prime Minister—I have a habit of trying to bypass all the hierarchies and talk to the end people almost on a random basis.

I give out my cell phone number so I can hear what's going on, but hierarchies are very dangerous in that sense.

So some stultification within, yes—because you know you have some distraction, some presumption, some stultification of—

Okay, okay, so now let’s turn to this issue of the defeat of Hamas. You talked about your optimism with regards to the restructuring of the attitude of people in Gaza if the Hamas enterprise was taken out.

Yeah, I want to qualify that; I’m not sure.

Yeah, okay, fine; I can talk about abilities. I can’t talk about motivations. I don’t presume that we have the abilities to drastically influence motivations.

What we can do is set up a civil entity governed by a combination of Egypt, local competent folks from Gaza, Saudis, Emirates, and stop immediately, stop the incitement in the mosques, in the media, and in the schools.

If we do that, it might succeed; it might not.

Right, right, I don't know.

Right, and that incitement—what proportion of that do you think is, is—I know you don’t have an exact number, but what’s your sense of the degree to which that incitement is continually fermented by Iranian actors, for example, funded at least?

In Gaza, it’s a mix between the Iranian and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is a fairly effective movement; you know, Turkey governs Turkey, and Erdoğan is a real bad guy.

And in Egypt, there’s a lot of grassroots support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Tell us about the Muslim Brotherhood. We talked about Iran a little bit; inform us a little bit about the Muslim Brotherhood and what it constitutes, its origins, and so forth.

So, I believe it started fairly early in the previous century, and the idea is to radicalize the people and ultimately to govern by Sharia law. It’s an independent variant of the same ethos that possesses the Islamic Republic of Iran, though the Muslim Brotherhood is Sunni and Iran is Shiite, so it’s a different strand of Islam.

The Muslim Brotherhood does a lot of social activities in order to garner popular support, and it’s a fairly simple ideology in that sense. And they have, you know, branches everywhere.

Okay, so let’s talk about the military and sociological aims of Israel post-October 7th. So first of all, I guess here’s a bunch of questions: how effective has Israel’s military campaign been?

What do you say to people? I mean, there’s constant agitation with regards to the genocide that Israel is conducting in Gaza, and so what’s your view of the manner in which this defensive war has been conducted?

And then I would be very curious, like, what’s a vision of victory? Like, I'm always curious when a war breaks out, and this is, because of the way it started, in some ways it’s its own unique entity.

But, like, I’m very confused about what victory would look like and what is the victory. What is victory defined by Israel now in relationship to this? Because you could win the war and lose the public opinion, for example—wouldn't be good.

So I’ll answer the questions one, three, and two in that order.

So how’s it going? Well, the military itself has been very successful—very effective. The soldiers, the reservists especially—Israel is based on a massive reserve service. So you continue doing reserves till about 45, age of 45.

However, in my opinion, the government lacks a coherent strategy and did not outline what a victory is—that precise question. We've never been told what does it actually mean?

You know, I would have gone about this whole war in a very different way. I thought that we should apply a siege on Northern Gaza, allow all the civilians to get out, but we would screen and basically smoke out the terrorists from the tunnels.

Without having to have so much friction and cost for everyone—that plan was not adopted. That siege plan—they decided to go in kinetically, which is a legit decision; it has its advantages.

But also that is not being prosecuted the way it should. If you're going to fight, fight right. There's no war in Gaza; there’s not a war; there’s no fighting going on. We’re at 3% intensity, and the notion that Israel should have long, low-intensity wars of attrition, I don’t buy that.

I think that’s the wrong strategy. Israel should have short, high-intensity wars. If we have to do a war, that’s what we always did. The '56 war was just a few days; the Six-Day War was indeed six days; the Yom Kippur War was two and a half weeks. Suddenly, we’re in this protracted, dragged-on thing.

Why? Why is it bad for us? Many reasons. First and foremost, global opinion needs a short time span for us.

Even if it’s very high intensity—lots of buildings fell or whatever—but you move on. There’s something new on the agenda. I don’t know, Taylor Swift comes out with a new song, and everyone changes topics. But the fact that we’re ripping this—and we’re always going to be inferior in world opinion. So the less they talk about us, the better off we are.

That’s one mistake.

Second, it also puts tremendous pressure on our economy, on our reservists. And that’s exactly what Iran wants us to do. Iran wants to exhaust us in a slow-dripping war.

That’s why I think I would surge and defeat. And if we’re not going to do that, I would cut a deal—a big deal—and bring the hostages home. We need them to come home and to fight another day.

What does victory look like? Again, I can say what I would have set the parameters: Hamas raising a white flag and getting on ships to be transferred—the 5,000 or 10,000 Hamas being transferred out of Gaza to some Arab state, but we let them live—that would be the deal.

The leverage would be if you don’t do that, we’re going to kill you. But we’re not doing that, so we don’t have that.

Are those key players already identified?

Yeah, we know. Ultimately, we’re probably going to be able to kill Yehya Sinwar and get the hostages home without the—we have a hundred hostages that Hamas is still holding, a hundred Israelis that were kidnapped from their beds at 6:30 or 7 in the morning—just citizens of Israel.

And the most fundamental ethic in Israel is you don’t forget anyone; you don’t leave anyone behind. And this is unacceptable.

In the U.S., there’s been widespread protests, especially on university campuses but also spilling through the cities. You see that in London, for example, you see it in France; it's a worldwide campaign.

And so, first of all, what’s your sense of how those campaigns were organized and who’s lurking behind the scenes there?

And then I guess the next thing I’d like to know is what you have—many opportunities, but this is one of them at least—to say something to people who believe that they’re on the side of the good when they’re protesting Israel’s actions in the Middle East after October 7th.

So let’s start with those.

Those protests emerged very rapidly, and they’re very, very well organized. I mean, I’ve seen plans, for example, for the protesters and their community at UCLA. I mean, it’s a multi-prong strategy.

Yeah! So, so it’s at hand, right? And I believe they pulled in the Antifa types and the professional protesters, and they more or less know what they’re doing. But it works; clearly, it’s working.

You know, I see here a merge of two different strands that are almost opposite of each other, but in a peculiar way, they merge. The first one is radical Islam.

We’re not going to change any of their minds, and I believe that there’s significant money, you know, Qatari money, Iranian money being funneled towards this.

Qatar, by the way, is in my eyes a terrible regime whose hands are soaked in blood, and they have a facade of World Cup and this and the Olympics and stuff like that.

But they play a two-sided game—they ferment support, fund terror, as we speak, and they pretend to be Western, you know, progressive folks. And like Iran, everyone at least knows that Iran is a terrible regime.

So that’s one strand. The other strand is radical progressive woke idiots, for lack of a better term, naive people who view the world in a neo-Marxist frame where there's always a victim and a victimizer, and Israel—you know, look, I’ve got white skin here, so I’m the bad guy by definition.

Forget the fact that the land of Israel has been my homeland for 3,800 years. Forget the fact that much of those 3,800 years we had a state in Israel. And when we weren’t in that state, we were praying three times a day, “We will return to Jerusalem.” Now we are in Jerusalem, and it’s incredibly difficult to pull someone out of that frame.

Because basically, if you are the aggressor and he’s the victim, he’s allowed to do anything. He’s allowed to murder people, torture people because he’s the victim.

And factually, that’s just not true. The Arabs have huge areas of land. I think hundreds of times the size of Israel. I’d let your viewers know; they probably don’t know: Israel in its entirety is the size of New Jersey.

That’s how big we are; it’s a tiny, tiny country. And you know, before the Jews came back home beginning in the late 1800s, it was a desolate, barren, miserable land infested with mosquitoes and malaria.

And there was always a Jewish presence, but it wasn’t under Jewish governance. As Jews came from all around the world and began to flourish this desolate land, Arabs began coming from Iraq, from Egypt. In their names, Palestinian names—many of them are called El-Masri, which means Egypt; Mas is Egypt—Al-Baghdadi, all this.

All that, see, see that, which is fine. That’s okay, but, you know, go get a life; stop being victims; go build your future.

And it seems to me that their core ideology is to prevent us from having a state rather than them having their own future.

Sure.

MH. Yeah.

Well, the victim-victimizer narrative is a very—tell me, though, you're—I know because tell me, why are so many people against Israel, and what can we do about it?

I’m always interviewing that CNN, BBC, and all that, and I feel sometimes I’m barely moving the needle. And, you know, the reality is so different than what we are portraying.

And what do you think we can do about it?

Well, I think going after the victim-victimizer narrative is a good long-term strategy because it’s extremely pathological. And so to the degree that we’ve been messaging around this, that’s in various enterprises that I’m involved in—that’s been one of our primary targets of concern.

There’s something wrong with the politics of envy. If you divide the world up into oppressor and oppressed, and now you're good merely because you are on the side of the oppressed or are an ally, like that’s just too simple a moral equation.

And it’s—and there’s every bit of reason for skepticism in relationship to that, but it’s also very bad for you to regard yourself as a victim.

Horrible! Because you lose agency and you lose hope, and you’re subject to someone else’s will!

So, it’s so funny—my dad, may he rest in peace, Jim Bennett. He was raised not far from here, in San Francisco, and I guess the biggest thing I took from him was he never whined, he never complained; it was self-reliance.

That’s what he always faced, whatever situation and took responsibility. He didn’t talk about it; he just did it. One of the things you see is so deeply ingrained in me, and that’s why when I see, you know, whiners—

And not to say that there isn’t discrimination and suffering, there is discrimination, and people don’t have the same starting point.

But it’s such a, how will it be able to sustain itself, this ultra-progressive movement if they manufacture people who are designed not to take responsibility?

So, it ought to collapse ultimately. No, it historically—movements like that do collapse; they don't work.

So well, one of the things that you see in the Old Testament accounts is that the Jewish people are characterized in their covenant with God—they’re characterized by—when they’re good, they’re characterized by a refusal to construe themselves as victims.

So the main upward thrusting theme in the Old Testament accounts is the fact that the Jews always presume that if there’s punishment wreaked upon them, that that's a consequence in some manner of their own insufficiency and not the—the—

Though in the desert, during those 40 years, man, they were whining and complaining. That might be the reason that they had to spend 40 years and die out so the next generation would—that's exactly why—they're also not presented as morally laudable for presenting themselves as victims, right?

Right, because Moses is on the side of God, and God and Moses share the opinion that the Israelites who are whining away as they make themselves away so painfully through the desert—lost as they are—by the way, you know, if you’ve ever been to Sinai—if you walk quickly, it could take seven days!

Right?

Right!

Well, so the upshot of the story is that if you’re confused and resentful enough, and you have the habits of slaves, it can take you forever to get nowhere, right?

Right, right.

And that’s exactly right; they just had to die out.

Yeah, well, it's three generations, right? Something like that, right?

Right, and that is the consequence of their slavish habits, right? They’re used to being told what to do; they can't settle their own affairs; they can't regulate their own behavior; they’re very impulsive, and hedonistic.

As soon as Moses disappears for 15 minutes, they’re off dancing naked, drinking too much, and worshiping the golden calf.

They have the habits of slaves, right? And the rectification of that—and this pertains to what you talk about, what you said earlier about building resilient young people—is that you don’t want to raise young people with the habits of hedonistic slaves.

You want, by the way, the 12 spies. So essentially, ten of the spies came back whining. They came back saying, “Alright, you know, it’s going to be tough.” They didn’t—you know, they saw the giants and all that—it’s going to be tough, but it’s a beautiful, wonderful land, and let's go do it.

Well, there’s what’s going on here! If I remember the story correctly, the earth opens up to swallow the faithless scouts and—

No, no, that’s a different story.

That's right!

The earth opens up on a—a different guy called Korah.

Oh, that’s right! Okay, okay.

So anyways, the end of the story is exactly what you said, which is leadership is transferred to the—by the way, they were leaders of their tribes; they weren’t just scouts.

I mean, the sages tell us that they weren’t just scouts; they were actually the leaders of the 12 tribes, and they had to be replaced. But one of the most fascinating periods is the initial entrance into Israel back then by Joshua and then the subsequent hundreds of years where suddenly a slave nation is governing, you know, itself—not as a kingdom, not as a united kingdom—but with distributed responsibility; very distributed, yeah.

Well, the moral upshot of the story is that in the face of the challenges of the future, you're required to be realistically optimistic.

Right, it’s a moral requirement, and that, yeah, yeah, I love that term—realistically optimistic. The faith element of that is that, well, yes, of course, this is going to be difficult and challenging, and there are ways it could go wrong.

But if we maintain our covenant with God and we continue to aim upward and act appropriately, there are no challenges that we can't overcome.

That's the right.

To be realistic, optimistic, and one other element—action-oriented. The Bible is all about action, and generally Judaism—this is the—the Jewish faith cares little about your feelings.

So, you know, here and there, there are blips, but by and large, you are measured by what you do, not by