The Islamic Republic: the Octopus of Terror | Naftali Bennett

I'm going to start with the Abraham Accords, and they're very striking to me because I saw a number of—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. 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 has 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. 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 that.

They're sworn enemies of the United States; they are sworn enemies of Israel; they're 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 a 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. They don't give a damn, in any way, shape, or form about the Palestinians.

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 end in the Palestinian people suffering? Oh well, you know, collateral damage in the bigger game.

So, I want to add it now. So, 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, peace-loving Muslims, as far as I'm concerned.

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.

The command 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'm missing with regards to the positioning of Iran in relation to Israel and the United States?

No, 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 that 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, also incompetent and corrupt— a bit similar to the Soviet Union of the ‘80s. But what it does is export its ideology and terror with its arms all across the Middle East. Every country it touches, it ultimately destroys. It’s like the anti-Assad. Look at Lebanon; look at Syria; look at Iraq; look at Yemen.

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, funds them, provides them weapons, 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—I was a soldier; I was fighting Kisah, which is essentially the fingertip of one of its tentacles. The mistake was that we have expended and exhausted ourselves fighting those fingertips of the octopus instead of directing our energy to topple the goddamn head of the octopus.

What I did as Prime Minister, I 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 an 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, in the first month of my job, I dedicated to a 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 Union in Afghanistan, Mujahideen, etc. Later, it had unintended consequences, but my point is that 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. To continue, what sort of support do you think the Iranian government has in Iran itself? 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 their cars—Lamborghinis, whatever—while the people in many areas of Iran don’t even have good tap water.

It could be a very rich country; it was doing quite well in the ‘70s—huge, yeah. And so I believe that this regime will topple; it will fall. But it could be in 50 years, or it could be in five years. When I met with the Biden administration and the folks there, I outlined a bunch of about 30 different vectors of action that we can take—soft action—and sort of divided the job between us and them.

There are some areas that we could give you an example. Every time there are 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 that the internet’s on with technologies like Starlink, etc.? There are lots of 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.

Unfortunately, my successor discontinued this policy, but I think it's time to go. What do you see happening in the West, in the United States, and with the rest of the Western countries with regard to their stance contra Iran?

I'd like to hear about what you think is being done that’s actually effective and also what you think is being done that isn't effective or counterproductive. By and large, they’re not doing enough.