We should never, and I never, sit aside and say,
oh, they're just threatening to destroy us.
They won't do it.
If somebody threatens to eliminate you,
as Iran is doing today, and as Hitler did then,
and people discounted it, well,
if somebody threatens to annihilate us,
take them seriously and act to prevent it early on.
Don't let them have the means to do so,
because that may be too late.
The following is a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu,
Prime Minister of Israel,
currently serving his sixth term in office.
He's one of the most influential, powerful,
and controversial men in the world,
leading a right-wing coalition government
at the center of one of the most intense
and long-lasting conflicts and crises in human history.
As we spoke, and as I speak now,
large-scale protests are breaking out all over Israel
over this government's proposed judicial reform
that seeks to weaken the Supreme Court
in a bold accumulation of power.
Given the current intense political battles in Israel,
our previous intention to speak for three hours
was adjusted to one hour for the time being,
but we agreed to speak again for much longer in the future.
I will also interview people who harshly disagree
with the words spoken in this conversation.
I will speak with other world leaders,
with religious leaders, with historians and activists,
and with people who have lived and have suffered
through the pain of war, destruction, and loss
that stoke the fires of anger and hate in their heart.
For this, I will travel anywhere, no matter how dangerous,
if there's any chance it may help add
to understanding and love in the world.
I believe in the power of conversation, to do just this,
to remind us of our common humanity.
I know I'm under-qualified and under-skilled
for these conversations, so I will often fall short,
and I will certainly get attacked, derided, and slandered.
But I will always turn the other cheek
and use these attacks to learn, to improve,
and no matter what, never give in to cynicism.
This life, this world of ours,
is too beautiful not to keep trying,
trying to do some good,
in whatever way each of us know how.
I love you all.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Benjamin Netanyahu.
You're loved by many people here in Israel and in the world,
but you're also hated by many.
In fact, I think you may be one of the most hated men
in the world.
So if there's a young man or a young woman
listening to this right now
who have such hate in their heart,
what can you say to them to one day turn that hate
into love?
I disagree with the premise of your question.
I think I have enjoyed a very broad support
around the world.
There are certain corners in which we have,
we have this animosity that you describe,
and it sort of permeates in some of the newspapers
and news organs and so on in the United States.
But it certainly doesn't reflect the broad support
that I have.
I just gave an interview on an Iranian channel,
16 million viewers.
I gave another one, I just did a little video
a few years ago, 25 million viewers from Iran.
Certainly no hate there, I have to tell you.
Not from the regime, okay?
And when I go around the world,
and I've been around the world,
people want to hear what we have to say.
What I have to say as a leader of Israel
whom they respect increasingly
as a rising power in the world.
So I disagree with that.
And the most important thing that goes against
what you said is the respect that we receive
from the Arab world and the fact that we've made
four historic peace agreements with Arab countries.
They made it with me.
They didn't make it with anyone else.
And I respect them and they respect me.
And probably more to come.
So I think the premise is wrong, that's all.
Well, there's a lot of love, yes.
A lot of leaders are collaborating, are-
Respect, I said, not love.
Okay, all right, well, it's a spectrum.
But there is people who don't have good things
to say about Israel, who do have hate in their heart
for Israel, and what can you say to those people?
Well, I think they don't know very much.
I think they're guided by a lot of ignorance.
They don't know about Israel.
They don't know that Israel is a stellar democracy,
that it happens to be one of the most advanced societies
on the planet, that what Israel develops helps humanity
in every field, in medicine, in agriculture,
in the environment, and telecoms,
and talk about AI in a minute,
but changing the world for the better,
and spreading this among six continents.
We've sent rescue teams more than any other country
in the world, and we're one-tenth of 1%
of the world's population.
But when there's an earthquake or a devastation in Haiti
or in the Philippines, Israel is there.
When there's an earthquake, a devastating earthquake
in Turkey, Israel was there.
When there's something in Nepal, Israel is there,
and it's a second country.
It's the second country after, in one case, India,
or after another case, the United States, Israel is there.
Tiny Israel is a benefactor to all of humanity.
So you're a student of history.
If I could just linger on that philosophical notion
of hate, that part of human nature.
If you look at World War II,
what do you learn from human nature,
from the rise of the Third Reich,
and the rise of somebody like Hitler,
and the hate that permeates that?
Well, what I've learned is that you have to nip
bad things in the bud.
You have to, there's a Latin term that says,
obsta principi, stop bad things when they're small.
And the deliberate hatred,
the incitement of hatred against one community,
it's demonization, delegitimization that goes with it,
is a very dangerous thing.
And that happened in the case of the Jews.
What started with the Jews soon spread to all of humanity.
So what we've learned is that's what we should,
we should never, and I never, sit aside and say,
oh, they're just threatening to destroy us.
They won't do it.
If somebody threatens to eliminate you,
as Iran is doing today, and as Hitler did then,
and people discounted it, well,
if somebody threatens to annihilate us,
take them seriously, and act to prevent it early on.
Don't let them have the means to do so,
because that may be too late.
So in those threats, underlying that hatred,
how much of it is anti-Zionism,
and how much of it is anti-Semitism?
I don't distinguish between the two.
You can't say, well, I'm okay with Jews,
but I just don't think there should be a Jewish state.
It's like saying, I'm not anti-American,
I just don't think there should be an America.
That's basically what people are saying,
vis-a-vis anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
When you're saying anti-Zionism,
you're saying the Jewish people don't have a right
to have a state of their own.
And that is a denial of a basic principle
that I think completely unmasks what is involved here.
Today, anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism.
Those who oppose the Jewish people oppose the Jewish state.
If we jump from human history
to the current particular moment,
there's protests in Israel now
about the proposed judicial reform
that gives power to your government
to override the Supreme Court.
So the critics say that this gives too much power to you,
virtually making you a dictator.
Yeah, well, that's ridiculous.
The mere fact that you have so many demonstrations
and protests, some dictatorship, huh?
There's a lot of democracy here,
more rambunctious and more robust
than just anywhere on the planet.
Can you steel man the case that this may give too much power
to the coalition government, to the prime minister,
not just to you, but to those who follow?
No, I think that's complete hogwash
because I think there's very few people
who are demonstrating against this.
Quite a few, quite many, don't have an idea
what is being discussed.
They're basically being sloganized.
You can sloganize, you know something
about not mass media right now, but the social network.
You can basically feed deliberately with big data
and big money, you can just feed slogans
and get into people's minds.
I'm sure you don't think I exaggerate
because you can tell me more about that.
And you can create mass mobilization
based on these absurd slogans.
So here's where I come from and what we're doing,
what we're trying to do,
and what we've changed and what we're trying to do.
I'm a 19th century Democrat in my, small D, yes,
in my views, that is, I ask the question,
what is democracy, okay?
So democracy is the will of the majority
and the protection of the rights of,
they call it the rights of the minority,
but I say the rights of the individual, okay?
So how do you balance the two, okay?
How do you avoid mobocracy, okay?
And how do you avoid dictatorship, the opposite side?
The way you avoid it is something that was built
essentially by British philosophers and French philosophers,
but was encapsulated by the founding fathers
of the United States.
You create a balance between the three branches
of government, okay?
The legislative, the executive, and the judiciary.
And this balance is what assures the balance
between majority rights and individual rights.
And you have to balance all of them, okay?
That balance was maintained in Israel in its first 50 years
and was gradually overtaken and basically broken
by the most activist judicial court on the planet.
That's what happened here.
And gradually over the last two, three decades,
the court aggregated for itself the powers
of the parliament and the executive.
So we're trying to bring it back into line.
Bringing it back into line into what is common
in all parliamentary democracies and in the United States
doesn't mean taking the pendulum from one side
and bringing it to the other side.
We want checks and balances, not unrivaled power.
Just as we said, we want an independent judiciary,
but not an all powerful judiciary.
That balance does not mean bringing it back into line
doesn't mean that you can have the parliament arknesset
override any decision that the Supreme Court does.
I pretty much early on said after the judicial reform
was introduced, get rid of the idea of a sweeping override
clause that would have with 61 votes, that's majority of one
you can just nullify any Supreme Court decision.
So let's move it back into the center.
So that's gone.
And most of the criticism on the judicial reform
was based on an unlimited override clause,
which I've said is simply not gonna happen.
People are discussing something that already
for six months does not exist.
The second point that we received criticism on
was the structure of how do you choose Supreme Court judges?
How do you choose them?
And the critics of the reform are saying that the idea
that elected officials should choose Supreme Court judges
is the end of democracy.
If that's the case, the United States is not a democracy,
neither is France and other are just, I don't know,
just about every democracy on the planet.
So there is a view here that you can't have the sorted hands
of elected officials involved in the choosing of judges.
And in the Israeli system, the judicial activism went so far
that effectively the sitting judges have an effective veto
on choosing judges, which means that this is not the case.
This is a self-selecting court that just perpetrates itself.
And we wanna correct that.
Again, wanna correct it in a balanced way.
And that's basically what we're trying to do.
So I think there's a lot of misinformation about that.
We're trying to bring Israeli democracy to where it was
in its first 50 years.
And it was a stellar democracy.
It still is, Israel is a democracy,
will remain a democracy, a vibrant democracy.
And believe me, the fact that people are arguing
and demonstrating in the streets and protesting
is just, is the best proof of that.
And that's how it'll remain.
We spoke about tech companies offline.
There's a lot of tech companies nervous
about this judicial reform.
Can you speak to why large and small companies
have a future in Israel?
Because Israel is a free market economy.
I had something to do with that.
I introduced dozens and dozens of free market reforms
that made Israel move from $17,000 per capita income
to within a very short time to $54,000.
That's nominal GDP per capita, according to the IMF.
And we've overtaken in that Japan, France, Britain, Germany.
How did that happen?
Because we unleashed the genius that we have
and the initiative and the entrepreneurship
that is latent in our population.
And to do that, we had to create free markets.
So we created that.
So Israel has one of the most vibrant
free market economies in the world.
And the second thing we have is a permanent investment
in conceptual products, because we have a permanent
investment in the military and our security services,
creating basically knowledge workers
who then become knowledge entrepreneurs.
And so we create this structure.
And that's not gonna go away.
There's been a decline in investments
in the high tech globally.
I think that's driven by many factors,
but the most important one is the interest rate,
which I think will, it'll fluctuate up and down.
But Israel will remain a very attractive country
because it produces so many, so many knowledge workers
in a knowledge based economy.
And it's changing so rapidly.
The world is changing.
You're looking for the places that have innovation.
The future belongs to those who innovate.
Israel is the preeminent innovation nation.
It has few competitors.
And I would say, all right, where do you have
this close cross disciplinary fermentation
of various skills and areas?
I would say it's in Israel.
And I'll tell you why.
We used to be just telecoms because people went out
of the military intelligence, our NSA.
But that's been now broad based.
So you find it in medicine, you find it in biology,
you find it in agri-tech, you find it everywhere.
Everything is becoming technologized.
And in Israel, everybody is dealing in everything.
And that's a potent reservoir of talent
that the world is not gonna pass up.
And in fact, it's coming to us.
We just had Nvidia coming here,
and they decided to build a supercomputer in Israel.
I wonder why.
We've had Intel coming here and deciding now
to invest $25 billion just now in a new plant in Israel.
I wonder why.
I don't wonder why.
They know why.
Because the talent is here and the freedom is here.
Then it will remain so.
So you had a conversation about AI
with Sam Altman of OpenAI and with Elon Musk.
What was the content of that conversation?
What's your vision for sort of this very highest
of tech, which is artificial intelligence?
Well, first of all, I have a high regard
for the people I talk to, okay?
And I understand that they understand things
I don't understand, and I don't pretend
to understand everything.
But I do understand one thing.
I understand that AI is developing at a geometric rate.
And mostly in political life and in life in general,
people don't have an intuitive grasp of geometric growth.
You understand things basically in linear increments.
And the idea that you're coming up a ski slope
is very foreign to people.
So they don't understand it, and they're naturally also
sort of taken aback by it, because what do you do, okay?
So I think there's several conclusions
from my conversations with them
and from my other observations
that I've been talking about for many years.
I'm talking about the need to do this.
Well, the first thing is this.
There is no possibility of not entering AI with full force.
Secondly, there is a need for regulation.
Third, it's not clear there'll be global regulation.
Fourth, it's not clear where it ends up.
I certainly cannot say that.
Now, you might say, does it come to control us?
Okay, that's the question.
Does it come to control us?
I don't know the answer to that.
I think that as one observation
that I had from these conversations
is if it does come to control us,
that's probably the only chance
of having a universal regulation,
because I don't see anyone deciding to avoid the race
deciding to avoid the race and cooperate
unless you have that threat.
Doesn't mean you can't regulate AI within countries
even without that understanding,
but it does mean that there's a limit to regulation
because every country will wanna make sure
that it doesn't give up competitive advantage
if there is no universal regulation.
I think that right now, just as 10 years ago,
I read a novel.
I don't read novels,
but I was forced to read one by a scientific advisor.
I read history, I read about economics,
I read about technology, I just don't read novels, okay?
And this time, follow Churchill.
He said, fact is better than fiction.
Well, this fiction would become fact.
And it was a book, it was a novel
about a Chinese American's future cyber war.
And I read the book in one sitting,
called in a team of experts and I said,
all right, let's turn Israel
into one of the world's five cyber powers
and let's do it very quickly.
And we did actually, we did exactly that.
I think AI is bigger than that and related to that
because it'll affect, well, cyber affects everything,
but AI will affect it even more fundamentally
and the joining of the two could be very powerful.
So I think in Israel, we have to do it anyway
for security reasons and we're doing it.
But I think what about our databases
that are already very robust on the medical records
of 98% of our population?
Why don't we stick a genetic database on that?
Why don't we do other things that could bring magical,
what are seemingly magical cures and drugs
and medical instruments for that?
That's one possibility.
We have it in, as I said, in every single field.
The conclusion is this, we have to move on AI.
We are moving on AI just as we moved on cyber
and I think Israel will be one of the leading AI powers
in the world.
The questions I don't have an answer to is,
where does it go?
How much does it eat chew up on jobs?
There's an assumption that I'm not sure is true
that all previous, the two big previous revolutions
in the human condition, namely the agricultural revolution
and the industrial revolution definitely produce more jobs
than they consumed, okay?
That is not obvious to me at all.
I mean, I could see new jobs creating
and yes, I have that comforting statement,
but it's not quite true because I think unbalanced,
they'll probably consume more jobs,
many more jobs than they'll create.
At least in the short term.
And we don't know about the long term.
No, I don't know about the long term,
but I used to have the comfort being a free market guy,
always said, we're gonna produce more jobs
than by, I don't know, limiting certain government jobs
we're actually putting out in the market,
we'll create more jobs, which obviously happen.
We had one telecom company, a government company,
when I said, we're going to create competition,
they said, you're gonna run us out,
we're not gonna have more workers.
Yeah, they had 13,000 workers, they went down to seven,
but we created another 40,000 in the other companies.
So that was a comforting thought.
I always knew that was true, okay?
Not only that, I also knew that wealth would spread
by opening up the markets completely opposite
to the socialist and semi-socialist creed
that they had here.
They said, you're gonna make the rich richer
and the poor, poor, no, and made everyone richer.
And actually the people who entered the job market
because of the reforms we did actually became a lot richer
on the lower ladders of the socioeconomic measure.
But here's the point, I don't know.
I don't know that we will not have
what Elon Musk calls the end of scarcity.
So you'll have the end of scarcity,
you'll have enormous productivity.
You know, very few people are producing
enormous added value.
You're gonna have to tax that to pass it to the others, okay?
You're gonna have to do that, that's a political question.
I'm not sure how we answer that.
What if you tax and somebody else doesn't tax,
you're gonna get everybody to go there.
That's an issue, an international issue
that we constantly have to deal with.
And the second question you have is,
suppose you solve that problem and you deliver money, okay,
to those who are not involved in the AI economy.
What do they do?
The first question you ask somebody whom you just met
after the polite exchanges is, what do you do, right?
Well, people define themselves by their profession.
And it's gonna be difficult if you don't have a profession.
And people will spend more time self-searching,
more time in the arts, more time in leisure,
I understand that.
If I have to bet, it will annihilate many more jobs
than it will create and it will force a structural change
in our economics, in our economic models
and in our politics.
And I'm not sure where it's gonna go.
And that's something we have to respond to
at the nation level and just as a human civilization,
both the threat of AI to just us as a human species
and then the effect on the jobs
and like you said, cybersecurity.
And what do you think?
You think we're gonna lose control?
No, first of all, I do believe maybe naively
that it will create more jobs than it takes.
Write that down and we'll check it.
And we don't say we'll check it after our lifetime.
No, we'll see it in a few years.
We'll see it in a few years.
I'm really concerned about cybersecurity
and the nature of how that changes with the power of AI.
And in terms of existential threats,
I think there'll be so much threats
that aren't existential along the way
that that's the thing I'm mostly concerned about
versus AI taking complete control
and becoming sort of superseding the human species.
Although that is something you should consider seriously
because of the exponential growth of its capability.
It's exactly the exponential growth
which we understand is before us,
but we don't really, it's very hard to project forward.
To really understand.
That's right, exactly right.
So I deal with what I can and where I can affect something.
I tend not to worry about things I don't control
because at a certain point, there's no point.
You have to decide what you're spending your time on.
So I think in practical terms,
I think we'll make Israel a formidable AI power.
We understand the limitation of scale, computing power,
and other things.
But I think within those limits,
I think we can make here this miracle
that we did in many other things.
We do more with less.
I don't care if it's water, the production of water,
or the production of energy,
or the production of knowledge,
or the production of cyber capabilities,
defense, and other.
We just do more with less.
And I think in AI, we're gonna do a lot more
with a relatively small but highly gifted population.
Very gifted.
So taking a small tangent, as we talked about offline,
you have a background in Tae Kwon Do.
Oh yeah, yeah.
We mentioned Elon Musk.
I've trained with both.
This is a quick question.
Who do you have, who are you betting on in a fight?
Well, I refuse to answer that.
I will say this.
Such a politician you are.
Yeah, of course.
Here I'm a politician.
I'm openly telling you that I'm dodging the question, okay?
But I'll say this.
I spent five years in our special forces in the military,
and we barely spent a minute on martial arts.
I actually learned Tae Kwon Do later when I came to...
It wasn't even at MIT.
At MIT, I think I did karate,
but when I came to the UN, I had a martial arts expert,
and he taught me Tae Kwon Do, which was kind of interesting.
Now, the question you really have to ask is,
why did we learn martial arts in this special elite unit?
And the answer is, there's no point.
If you saw Indiana Jones, there's no point.
You just, you know, pull the trigger.
That's simple.
Now, I don't expect anyone to pull the trigger
on this combat, and I'm sure you'll make sure
that doesn't happen.
Yeah, I mean, martial arts is kind of,
it's bigger than just combat.
It's this kind of journey of humility,
and it has, it's an art form.
It truly is an art, but it's fascinating
that these two figures in tech are facing each other.
And I won't ask a question of who you would face
and how you would do, but.
Well, I'm facing opponents all the time.
All the time?
Yeah, that's part of life.
But not each.
Part of life is-
Not yet.
I'm not sure about that.
Are you announcing invites, or okay?
No, no, no.
Part of life is competition, you know.
You know, the only time competition ends is death.
But, you know, political life, economic life,
cultural life is engaged continuously
in creativity and competition.
And the problem I have with that,
as I mentioned earlier just before we began the podcast,
is that at a certain point,
you want to put barriers to monopoly.
And if you're a really able competitor,
you're gonna create a monopoly.
That's what Peter Thiel says is a natural course of things.
It's what I learned,
and basically in the Boston Consulting Group,
if you're a very able competitor,
you'll create scale advantages that give you the ability
to lock out your competition.
And as a prime minister,
I want to assure that there is competition in the market,
so you have to limit this competitive power
at a certain point.
And that becomes increasingly hard
in a world where everything is intermeshed.
Where do you define market segments?
Where do you define monopoly?
How do you do that?
That is very, that actually conceptually,
I find very challenging.
Because of all the dozens of political,
of economic reforms that I've made,
the most difficult part is the conceptual part.
Once you have, you've ironed it out,
you say, here's what I want to do,
here's the right thing to do,
then you have a practical problem
of overcoming union resistance, political resistance,
press calumny, opponents from this or that corner,
that's a practical matter.
But if you have it conceptually defined,
you can move ahead to reform economies
or reform education or reform transportation, fine.
In the question of the growing power of large companies,
big tech companies, to monopolize the markets
because they're better at it,
they provide a service, they provide it at lower cost,
at rapidly declining cost, where do you stop?
Where do you stop in a monopoly power is a crucial question
because it also becomes now a political question.
If you amass enormous amount of economic power,
which is information power,
that also monopolizes the political process,
which creates, these are real questions
that are not obvious, I don't have an obvious answer.
Because as I said, as a 19th century Democrat,
these are questions of the 21st century,
which people should begin to think,
do you have a solution to that?
The solution of monopolies growing arbitrarily
unstoppably in power.
Economic power and therefore in political power.
I mean, some of that is regulation,
some of that is competition.
You know where to draw the line?
It's not breaking up AT&T, you know, it's not that simple.
Well, I believe in the power of competition
that there will always be somebody
that challenges the big guys,
especially in the space of AI,
the more open source movements are taking hold,
the more the little guy can become the big guy.
So you're saying basically the regulatory,
the regulatory instrument is the market.
In large part, in most part, that's the hope.
Maybe I'm a dreamer.
That's been in many ways my policy up to now, okay?
That the best regulator is the market.
The best regulator in economic activity is the market.
And the best regulator in political matters
is the political market.
That's called elections.
That's what regulates, you know?
You have a lousy government
and people make lousy decisions.
Well, you don't need, you know,
the wise men raised above the, you know,
the masses to decide what is good and what is bad.
Let the masses decide,
let them vote every four years or whatever
and they throw you up.
By the way, it happened to me.
There's life after political death.
There's actually political life.
I was reelected five or six times and this is my sixth term.
So, you know, I believe in that.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure that in economic matters,
in the geometric growth of tech companies
that you'll always have the little guy,
the nimble mammal that will come out
and slay the dinosaurs or overcome the dinosaurs,
which is essentially what you said.
Yeah, I wouldn't count out the little guy.
You wouldn't count out the little guy.
Well, I hope you're right.
Well, let me ask you about this market of politics.
So you have served six terms as prime minister
over 15 years in power.
Let me ask you again, human nature.
Do you worry about the corrupting nature of power
on you as a leader, on you as a man?
Not at all.
Because I think that the, again,
the thing that drives me is nothing but the mission
that I took to assure the survival and thriving
of the state, the Jewish state,
that is its economic prosperity.
But its security and its ability to achieve peace
with our neighbors, and I'm committed to it.
I think there's still, there are many things
that have been done.
There are a few big things that I can still do,
but it doesn't only depend on my sense of mission.
It depends on the market, as we say.
It depends really on the will of the Israeli voters,
and the Israeli voters have decided to vote for me
again and again, even though I wield no power in the press,
no power in many quarters here, and so on, nothing.
I mean, I am probably, I'm going to be very soon
the longest serving prime minister
in the last half century in the Western democracies,
but that's not because I am mass great political power
in any of the institutions.
I remember I had a conversation with Silvio Berlusconi,
who recently died, and he said to me about
I don't know, 15 years ago, something like that.
He said, so, Bibi, how many of Israel's
television stations do you have?
And I said, none.
He said, do you have none?
I have two.
Do you have?
I said, none, I have two.
He said, no, no, but what, you mean you don't have any
that you control?
I said, not only do I have none that I control,
they're all against me.
So he says, so how do you win elections?
And with both hands tied behind your back,
and I said, the hard way.
That's why I have the largest party,
but I don't have many more seats that I would have
if I had a sympathetic voice in the media.
And Israel is, until recently, was dominated completely
by one side of the political spectrum
that often vilified me.
Not me, because they viewed me as representing,
basically, the conservative voices in Israel
that are majority.
So the idea that I'm an omnipotent authoritarian dictator
is ridiculous.
I am, I would say I'm not merely a champion
of democracy and democratization.
I believe, ultimately, the decision is with the voters,
and the voters, even though they've had,
you know, they have constant, constant press attacks,
they've chosen to put me back in.
So I don't believe in this thing
of amassing the corrupting power.
If you don't have elections, if you don't have,
if you control the means of influencing the voters,
I'd understand what you're saying.
But in my case, it's the exact opposite.
I have to constantly go in elections,
constantly, you know, with the disadvantage
that the major media outlets
are very violently sometimes against me,
but it's fine, and I keep on winning.
So I don't know what you're talking,
I would say the concentration of power lies elsewhere,
not here.
Well, you have been involved in several corruption cases.
How much corruption is there in Israel,
and how do you fight it in your own party and in Israel?
Well, you should ask a different question.
What's happened to these cases?
These cases have basically are collapsing.
And before our eyes, the, you know,
there was recently an event in which the judges,
the three judges in my case called in the prosecution
and said, you know, your flagship, the bribery charge,
so-called bribery charge, you know, is gone, doesn't exist.
Before a single defense witness was called,
and it sort of tells you that this thing is evaporating.
It's quite astounding.
Even that, I have to say, was covered
even by the mainstream press in Israel,
because it's such an earthquake.
So, you know, a lot of these charges are, not a lot,
these charges will prove to be nothing.
I always say, listen, I stand before the legal process.
I don't claim that I'm exempt from it in any way.
On the contrary, I think the truth will come out,
and it's coming out.
And we see that not only that, but with other things.
So I think it's kind of instructive that, you know,
no politician has been more vilified.
No, none has been put to such a, you know,
what is it, about a quarter of a billion shekels
were used to scrutinize me, scour my bank accounts,
sending people to the Philippines, into Mexico,
into Europe, into America, and looking at everybody
using spyware, the most advanced spyware on the planet
against my associates, blackmailing witnesses,
telling them, you know, think about your family,
think about your wife, you know,
you better tell us what you want.
All that is coming out in the trial.
So I would say that most people now are not asking,
are no longer asking, including my opponents,
sort of trickling in as the stuff comes out,
people are not saying, what did Netanyahu do?
Because he apparently did nothing.
What was done to him is something that people ask.
What was done to him, what was done to our democracy?
What was done in the attempt to put down somebody
who keeps winning elections despite the handicaps
that I described?
Maybe we can nail him by framing him.
And the one thing I can say about this court trial
is that things are coming out, and that's very good.
Just objective things are coming out, changing the picture.
So I would say the attempt to brand me as corrupt
is falling on its face, but the thing that is being uncovered
in the trial, such as the use of spyware on a politician,
on a politician's surroundings,
to try to shake them down in investigations,
put them in flea-ridden cells for 21 days,
invite their 84-year-old mother to investigations
without cause, bringing in their mistresses in the corridor,
shaking them down, that's what people are asking.
That corruption is what they want corrected.
What is the top obstacle to peaceful coexistence
of Israelis and Palestinians?
Let's talk about the big question of peace
in this part of the world.
Well, I think the reason you have the persistence
of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,
which goes back about a century,
is the persistent Palestinian refusal
to recognize a Jewish state, a nation state
for the Jewish people in any boundary.
That's why they opposed the establishment
of the state of Israel before we had a state,
and that's why they've opposed it after we had a state.
They opposed it when we didn't have Judea and Samaria,
the West Bank in our heads, and Gaza,
and they opposed it after we had it.
Doesn't make a difference.
It's basically their persistent refusal
to recognize a Jewish state in any boundaries,
and I think their tragedy is that they've been
commandeered for a century by leadership
that refused to compromise with the idea of Zionism,
namely that the Jews deserve a state
in this part of the world.
The territorial dispute is something else.
You have a territorial dispute if you say,
okay, you're living on this side, we're living on that side,
let's decide where the border is, and so on.
That's not what the argument is.
The Palestinian society, which is itself fragmented,
but all the factions agree,
there shouldn't be a Jewish state anyway, okay?
They just disagree between Hamas that says,
oh well, you should have it,
we should get rid of it with terror,
and the others who say, well no,
we should also use political means to dissolve it.
So that is the problem.
So even as part of a two-state solution,
they're still against the idea?
Well, they don't want a state next to Israel.
They want a state instead of Israel.
And they say, if we get a state,
we'll use it as a springboard
to destroy the smaller Israeli state,
which is what happened when Israel unilaterally
walked out of Gaza and effectively established
a Hamas state there.
They didn't say, oh good, now we have our own territory,
our own state, Israel is no longer there,
let's build peace, let's build economic projects,
let's enfranchise our people.
No, they turned it basically into a terror bastion
from which they fired 10,000 rockets into Israel.
When Israel left Lebanon,
because we had terrorist attacks from there,
then we had Lebanon taken over by Hezbollah,
a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.
And therefore, every time we just walked out,
what we got was not peace,
we didn't give territory for peace,
we got territory for terror, that's what we had.
And that's what would happen
as long as the reigning ideology says,
we don't want Israel in any border.
So the idea of two states assumes
that you'd have on the other side,
a state that wants to live in peace
and not one that will be overtaken by Iran
and its proxies in two seconds
and become a base to destroy Israel.
And therefore, I think that most Israelis today,
if you ask them, they'd say,
it's not gonna work in that concept.
So what do you do?
What do you do with the Palestinians?
Okay, they're still there.
And I don't, unlike them, I don't want to throw them out.
They're gonna be living here
and we're gonna be living here in an area
which is, by the way, just to understand,
the area, the entire area of so-called West Bank
and in Israel is the width of the Washington beltway,
more or less, just a little more, not much more.
You can't really divide it up.
You can't say, well, you're gonna fly in.
Who controls the airspace?
Well, it takes you about two and a half minutes
to cross it with a regular 747, okay?
With a fighter plane, it takes you a minute and a half, okay?
So you're not, how are you gonna divide the airspace?
Well, you're not gonna divide it.
Israel's gonna control that airspace
and the electromagnetic space and so on.
So security has to be in the hands of Israel.
My view of how you solve this problem
is that it is a simple principle.
The Palestinians should have all the powers
to govern themselves and none of the powers
to threaten Israel, which basically means
that the responsibility for overall security
remains with Israel.
And from a practical point of view,
we've seen that every time that Israel leaves a territory
and takes its security forces out of an area,
it immediately is overtaken by Hamas or Hezbollah
or Jihadists who basically are committed
to the destruction of Israel and also bring misery
to the Palestinians or Arab subjects.
So I think that that principle
is less than perfect sovereignty
because you're taking a certain amount of power,
sovereign powers, especially security, away.
But I think it's the only practical solution.
So people say, ah, but it's not a perfect state.
I say, okay, call it what you will.
Call it, I don't know, limited sovereignty,
call it autonomy plus, call it whatever you wanna call it.
But that's the reality.
And right now, if you ask Israelis
across the political spectrum,
except the very hard left, most Israelis agree with that.
They don't really debate it.
So a two-state solution where Israel controls the security
of the entire region?
We don't call it quite that.
I mean, there are different names,
but the idea is, yes, Israel controls security
in the, it's the entire area.
It's this tiny area between the Jordan River and the sea.
I mean, it's like, you can walk it in not one afternoon.
If you're really fit, you can do it in a day.
Less than a day, I did.
So the expansion of settlements in the West Bank
has been a top priority for this new government.
People, many harshly criticize this
contributing to escalating the Israel-Palestine tensions.
Can you understand that perspective
that this expansion of settlements is not good
for this two-state solution?
Yeah, I can understand what they're saying,
and they don't understand why they're wrong.
First, most Israelis who live in Judea Samaria
live in the urban blocks,
and that accounts for about 90% of the population, okay?
And everybody recognizes that those urban blocks
are gonna be part of Israel in any future arrangement.
So they're really arguing about something
that has already been decided and agreed upon, really,
by Americans, even by Arabs, many Arabs.
They don't think that Israel's gonna dismantle
these blocks, and you look outside the window here,
and within about a kilometer, a mile from here,
is you have Jerusalem.
Half of Jerusalem grew naturally
beyond the old 1967 border.
So you're not gonna dismantle half of Jerusalem.
That's not gonna happen.
And most people don't expect that.
Then you have the other 10% scattered in tiny,
you know, small communities, and people say,
well, you're gonna have to take them out.
Why?
Why?
Remember that in pre-1967 Israel,
we have over a million and a half Arabs here.
We don't say, oh, Israel has to be ethnically cleansed
from Arabs in order to have, from its Arab citizens,
in order to have peace.
Of course not.
Jews can live among Arabs, and Arabs can live among Jews.
And what is being advanced by those people who say
that we can't live in our ancestral homeland
in these disputed areas.
Nobody says that this is Palestinian areas,
and nobody says that these are Israeli areas.
We claim them, they claim them,
we've only been attached to this land
for, oh, 3,500 years.
But, you know, but it's a dispute, I agree.
But I don't agree that we should throw out the Arabs,
and I don't think that they should throw out the Jews.
And if somebody said to you,
the only way we're gonna have peace with Israel
is to have an ethnically cleansed Palestinian entity,
you know, that's outrageous.
If you said the only way, you know,
you shouldn't have Jews living in, I don't know,
in suburbs of London or New York and so on.
I don't think that will play too well.
The world is actually advancing a solution
that says that Jews cannot live among Arabs,
and Arabs cannot live among Jews.
I don't think that's the right way to do it.
And I think there's a solution out there,
but I don't think we're gonna get to it,
which is less than perfect sovereignty,
which involves Israeli security,
maintained for the entire territory by Israel,
which involves not rooting out anybody,
not kicking out, uprooting Arabs or Palestinians.
They're gonna live in enclaves in sovereign Israel,
and we're going to live in, probably in enclaves there,
probably through transportational continuity
as opposed to territorial continuity.
That is, you know, for example,
you can have tunnels and overpasses and so on
that connect the various communities.
We're doing that right now.
We're doing that right now, and it actually works.
I think there is a solution to this.
It's not the perfect world that people think of,
because that model, I think, doesn't apply here.
If it applies elsewhere, it's a question.
I don't think so.
But I think there's one other thing,
and that's the main thing that I've been involved in.
You know, people said,
if you don't solve the Palestinian problem,
you're not gonna get to the Arab world.
You're not gonna have peace with the Arab world.
Remember, the Palestinians are about 2% of the Arab world.
And the other, you know, the other 98%,
you're not gonna make peace with them, and that's our goal.
And for a long time, people accepted that.
After the initial peace treaties with Egypt,
with Prime Minister Begin of the Likud
and President Sadat of Egypt,
and then with Jordan,
between Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein.
For a quarter of a century,
we didn't have any more peace treaties,
because people said,
you gotta go through the Palestinians.
And the Palestinians, they don't want a solution
of the kind that I described, or any kind,
except the one that involved the dissolution
of the state of Israel.
So we could wait another half century.
And I said, no, I mean,
I don't think that we should accept the premise
that we have to wait for the Palestinians,
because we'll have to wait forever.
So I decided to do it differently.
I decided to go directly to the Arab capitals,
and to make the historic Abraham Accords,
and essentially reversing the equation,
not a peace process that goes inside out,
but outside in.
And we went directly to these countries
and forged these breakthrough peace accords
with the United Arab Emirates,
with Bahrain, with Morocco, and with Sudan.
And we're now trying to expand that in a quantum leap
with Saudi Arabia.
What does it take to do that with Saudi Arabia,
with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman?
You know, I'm a student of history,
and I read a lot of history,
and I read that in the Versailles discussions
after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson said,
I believe in open covenants openly arrived at.
I have my correction.
I believed in open covenants secretly arrived at.
So we're not gonna advance a Saudi Israeli peace
by having it publicly discussed,
and in any case, it's a decision of the Saudis
if they wanna do it,
but there's obviously a mutual interest.
So here's my view.
If we try to wait for the 2% in order to get to the 98%,
we're gonna fail, and we have failed.
If we go to the 98%, we have a much greater chance
of persuading the 2%.
You know why?
Because the 2%, the Palestinian hope
to vanquish the state of Israel and not make peace with it
is based, among other things, on the assumption
that eventually the 98%, the rest of the Arab world
will kick in and destroy the Jewish state,
help them dissolve or destroy the Jewish state.
When that hope is taken away,
then you begin to have a turn to the realistic solutions
of coexistence.
By the way, they'll require compromise
on the Israeli side too,
and I'm perfectly cognizant of that and willing to do that,
but I think a realistic compromise
will be struck much more readily
when the conflict between Israel and the Arab states,
the Arab world, is effectively solved.
And I think we're on that path.
It was a conceptual change, just like, you know,
I've been involved in a few,
I told you the conceptual battle
is always the most difficult one.
And, you know, I had to fight this battle
to convert a semi-socialist state
into a free market capitalist state.
And I have to say that most people today recognize
the power of competition and the benefits of free markets.
So we also had to fight this battle that said,
you have to go through the Palestinian straight,
S-T-R-A-I-T, to get to the other places.
There's no way to avoid this.
You know, you have to go through this impassable pass.
And I think that now people are recognizing
that we'll go around it and probably circle back.
And that I think actually gives hope
not only to have an Arab-Israeli peace,
but circling back in Israeli-Palestinian peace.
And obviously this is not something that you find
in the sound bites and so on,
but in the popular discussion of the press.
But that idea is permeating.
And I think it's the right idea,
because I think it's the only one that will work.
So expanding the circle of peace,
just to linger on that,
requires what secretly talking man-to-man,
human-to-human, to leaders of other nations.
Theoretically you're right.
Theoretically, okay.
Well, let me ask you another theoretical question.
On the circle of peace, as a student of history,
looking at the ideas of war and peace,
what do you think can achieve peace in the war in Ukraine,
looking at another part of the world?
If you consider the fight for peace
in this part of the world,
how can you apply that to that other part of the world
between Russia and Ukraine now?
I think it's one of the savage horrors of history
and one of the great tragedies that is occurring.
And let me say in advance that if I have any opportunity
to use my contacts to help bring about
an end to this tragedy, I'll do so.
I've had, I know both leaders,
but I don't just jump in and assume.
There'll be a desire at a certain point,
because the conditions have created the possibility
of helping stop this carnage.
Then I'll do it, and that's why I choose my words carefully,
because I think that may be the best thing that I could do.
Look, I think what you see in Ukraine is what happens
if you have territorial designs on a territory
by a country that has nuclear weapons.
And that, to me, you see the change in the equation.
Now, I think that people are loath to use nuclear weapons,
and I'm not sure that I would think
that the Russian side would use them with happy abandon.
I don't think that's the question.
But you see how the whole configuration changes
when that happens.
So you have to be very careful
on how you resolve this conflict
so it doesn't go off the rails, so to speak.
That's, by the way, the corollary is here.
We don't want Iran, which is an aggressive force
with an, just aggressive ideology of dominating
first the Muslim world and then eliminating Israel
and then becoming a global force.
Having nuclear weapons, it's totally different
when they don't have it than when they do have it.
And that's why one of my main goals
has been to prevent Iran from having the means
to, the means of mass destruction,
which will be used, atomic bombs,
which they openly say will be used against us,
and you can understand that.
How to bring about an end to Ukraine?
I have my ideas.
I don't think it's worthwhile discussing them now
because they might be required later on.
Do you believe in the power of conversation
since you have contacts with Vladimir Zelensky
and Vladimir Putin, just leaders sitting in a room
and discussing how the end of war can be brought about?
I think it's a combination of that,
but I think it's the question of interest
and whether you have to get both sides to a point
where they think that that conversation
will lead to something useful.
I don't think they're there right now.
What part of this is just basic human ego, stubbornness,
all of this between leaders,
which is why I bring up the power of conversation,
of sitting in a room, realizing we're human beings,
and then there's a history that connects Ukraine and Russia.
Yeah, I don't think they're in a position
to enter a room right now, realistically.
You can posit that it would be good if that could happen,
but entering the room is sometimes more complicated
than what happens in the room,
and there's a lot of pre-negotiation on the negotiation.
Then you negotiate endlessly on the negotiation.
They're not even there.
It took a lot of work for you to get to handshake
in the past.
It's an interesting question.
How did the peace, the Abraham Accords, how did that begin?
I mean, we had decades, 70 years or 65 years
where these people would not meet openly
or even secretly with an Israeli leader.
Yeah, we had the Mossad making contacts with him
all the time and so on,
but how did we break the ice to the top level of leadership?
Well, we broke the ice
because I took a very strong stance against Iran,
and the Gulf states understood
that Iran is a formidable danger to them,
so we had a common interest.
And the second thing is that because of the economic reforms
that we had produced in Israel,
Israel became a technological powerhouse,
and that could help their nations,
not only in terms of anything,
just bettering the life of their peoples.
And the combination of the desire to have
some kind of protection against Iran
or some kind of cooperation against Iran
and civilian economic cooperation came to a head
when I gave a speech in the American Congress.
Which I didn't do lightheartedly,
I had to decide to challenge a sitting American president
and on the so-called Iranian deal,
which I thought would pave Iran's path with gold
to be an effective nuclear power, that's what would happen.
So I went there.
And in the course of giving that speech
before the joint session of Congress,
our delegation received calls from Gulf states
who said, we can't believe what your prime minister
is doing, he's challenging the president of the United States
while I had no choice,
because I thought my country's own existence was imperiled.
And remember, we always understand
through changing administrations that America,
under no matter what leadership,
is always the irreplaceable and indispensable ally
of Israel, and we'll always remain that.
We can have arguments as we have,
but in the families we say, in the mishpocha,
you know, it's the family.
But nevertheless, I was forced to take a stand.
That produced calls from Gulf states
that ultimately led to clandestine meetings
that ultimately flowered into the Abraham Accords.
Then, and I think we're at a point where
the idea of ending the Arab-Israeli conflict,
not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,
the Arab-Israeli conflict can happen.
I'm not sure it will.
It depends on quite a few things, but it could happen.
And if it happens, it might open up the ending
of the Israeli-Islamic conflict.
Remember, the Arab world is a small part.
It's an important part,
but there are large Islamic populations,
and it could bring about an end to an historic enmity
between Islam and Judaism.
It could be a great thing.
So I'm looking at this larger thing now.
You know, you can be hobbled by saying,
well, you know, you've had this hiccup in Gaza
or this or that thing happening in the Palestinians.
I don't, it's important for us because we want security,
but I think the larger question is,
can we break out into a much wider peace
and ultimately come back and make the peace
between Israel and the Palestinians,
rather than waiting to solve that
and never getting to paint on the larger canvas?
I want to paint on the larger canvas
and come back to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
As you write about in your book,
what have you learned about life from your father?
My father was a great historian,
and well, he taught me several things.
He said that the first condition for a living organism
is to identify danger in time,
because if you don't, you could be devoured,
you could be destroyed very quickly,
and that's the nature of human conflict.
In fact, for the Jewish people, we didn't,
we lost the capacity to identify danger in time,
and we were almost devoured and destroyed
by the Nazi threat.
So when I see somebody parroting the Nazi goal
of destroying the Jewish state,
I try to mobilize the country and the world in time,
because I think Iran is a global threat,
not only a threat to Israel, that's the first thing.
The second thing is I once asked him,
before I got elected, I said,
well, what do you think is the most important quality
for a prime minister of Israel?
And he came back with a question, what do you think?
And I said, well, you have to have a vision
and you have to have the flexibility of navigating
and working towards that vision,
be flexible, but understand where you're heading.
And he said, well, you need that for anything.
You need it for, you know, if you're a university president
or if you're a leader of a corporation or anything,
anybody would have to have that.
I said, all right, so what do you need
for it to be the leader of Israel?
He said, he came back to me with a word that stunned me.
He said, education.
You need a broad and deep education,
or you'll be at the mercy of your clerks
or the press or whatever.
You have to be able to do that.
Now, you know, as I spend time in government,
being reelected, you know, by the people of Israel,
I recognize more and more how right it was.
You need to constantly ask yourself,
where's the direction we want to take the country?
How do we achieve that goal?
But also understand that new disciplines are being added.
You have to learn all the time.
You have to learn all the time.
You have to add to your intellectual capital all the time.
Kissinger said that, he wrote that once you enter
public life, you begin to draw on your intellectual capital
and it'll be depleted very quickly if you stay a long time.
I disagree with that.
I think you have to constantly, constantly increase
your understanding of things as they change
because my father was right.
You need to broaden and deepen your education
as you go along.
You can't just sit back and say, well, I studied some things
in university or in college or in Boston or at MIT
and that's enough, you know, I've done it.
No, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, never stop.
And if I may suggest, as part of the education,
I would add in a little literature, maybe Dostoevsky
in the plentiful of time you have as a prime minister
to read.
Well, I read him, but I'll tell you what I think
is bigger than Dostoevsky.
Oh no, who's that?
Not who's that, but what's that?
I was, Dan Rather came to see me with his grandson
a few years ago and he asked me, the grandson asked me,
he was a student in Iverley College and he said,
he's 18 years old and he wants to study to enter politics.
And he said, what's the most important thing
that I have to study to enter a political life?
And I said, you have three things you have to study, okay?
History, history, and history.
That's the fundamental discipline for political life,
but then you have to study other things.
Study economics, study politics and so on
and study the military.
If you have, I had an advantage because I spent
some years there, so I learned a lot of that,
but I had to acquire the other disciplines
and you never acquire enough.
So read, read, read, and by the way, if I have to choose,
I read history, history, and history.
Good works of history, not lousy books.
Last question, you've talked about a survival of a nation.
You yourself are a mortal being.
Do you contemplate your mortality?
Do you contemplate your death?
Are you afraid of death?
Aren't you?
Yes.
Who's not?
I mean, if you're a conscious,
if you're a being with conscience,
I mean, one of the unhappy things about
the human brain is that it can contemplate its own demise.
And so we have to, we all make our compromises with this,
but I think the question is what lives on?
What lives on beyond us?
And I think that you have to define how much of a posterity
do you want to influence?
I cannot influence the course of humanity.
We all are specks, you know, little specks.
So that's not the issue, but in my case,
I've devoted my life to a very defined purpose
and that is to assure the future and security and
I would say permanence, but that is obviously
a limited thing of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
I don't think one can exist without the other.
So I've devoted my life to that and I hope that
in my time on this earth and in my years in office,
I'd have contributed to that.
Well, you had one heck of a life
starting from MIT to six terms as prime minister.
Thank you for this stroll through human history
and for this conversation, it was an honor.
Thank you and I hope you come back to Israel many times.
It's, remember, it's the innovation nation.
It's a robust democracy.
Don't believe all the stuff that you're being told.
It'll remain that, it cannot be any other way
and it's, I'll tell you the other thing,
it's the best ally of the United States
and its importance is growing by the day
because our capacities in the information world
are growing by the day.
We need a coalition of the like-minded smarts.
This is a smart nation and we share the basic values
of freedom and liberty with the United States.
So the coalition of the smarts means Israel is the sixth eye
and America has no better ally.
All right, now off mic, I'm gonna force you
to finally tell me who was gonna win
Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, but that's a good time to end.
We ran out of time here.
I'll tell you outside.
Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Benjamin Netanyahu.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Mahatma Gandhi.
An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.