#389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace
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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 value

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 underqualified and underskilled 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. I love you all.

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Again, highly, highly, highly recommend you try out Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. 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 is 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. 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. Yeah. 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, uh, uh, 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, uh, humanity in every field and medicine and agriculture and, uh, and the environment. And, uh,

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, 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, in 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 can 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, "Obstaprincipi," 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 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 say anti-Zionism, you're saying that 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. 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 a broad...

Very few people 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 in what we're trying to do. I'm a 19th century Democrat in my views. That is, I ask the question, what is democracy? So democracy is...

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 get those, 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 replaced

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

arrogated 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, our Knesset, override any decision that the Supreme Court does. So I pretty much early on said, after the judicial reform was introduced, get rid of the idea of sweeping override clericals.

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 going to 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 is

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 now there 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 sordid 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 the judges

on choosing judges, which means that this is a self-selecting court that just perpetrates itself. And we want to correct that. Again, want to 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

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 going to go away. There's been a decline in investments in high tech globally. I think that's driven by many factors, but the most important one is the interest rate, which I think 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 this 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, RNSA, 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 going to pass up and in fact is coming to us. We just had Nvidia coming here and they decided to build a supercomputer in Israel. 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. - Yeah. - 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 will 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,

If it does come to control us, that's probably the only chance of having universal regulation because I don't see anyone 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 want to 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

I read about technology. I just don't read novels. Okay. And this time, follow Churchill. You know, 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 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 results?

What seem 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 on balance, 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, I always said, you know, we're going to produce more jobs than, you know, by, I don't know, limiting certain government jobs. We're actually putting out in the market, we'll create more jobs, which obviously happened.

You know, we had one telecom company, a government company. When I said we're going to create competition, they said, you're going to run us out. We're not going to 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. Not only that, I also knew that wealth would spread by opening up the markets completely opposite to the economy.

socialist and semi-socialist creed that they had here. They said, you're going to 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. Very few people are producing enormous added value. You're going to have to tax that to pass it to the others. You're going to 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 going to 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,

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 going to be difficult if you don't have a profession.

And, you know, 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 going to 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 going to 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. It's on record. And you know, 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 will be so many 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 capabilities. 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, you know, 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, you know, there's no point. I mean, you have to decide what you're spending your time on. So I think in practical terms, I think we'll make...

will 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. You know, 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 things.

We just do more with less. And I think in AI, we're going to 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

uh a background in taekwondo oh yeah yeah we mentioned elon musk i've uh trained with both just as a quick question who you have uh who are you betting on in a fight well uh i refuse to answer that uh i will say this such a politician you are yeah of course here i'm a politician i'm openly telling you then i'm dodging the question okay but uh i'll say this uh

You know, I actually, I spent five years in our special forces in the military, and we barely spent a minute on martial arts. I actually learned Taekwondo later when I came to Hawaii.

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 taekwondo, 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, you know, 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 this 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. Well, I'm facing opponents all the time. All the time? Yeah, that's part of life. But not a peach. Part of life is... Not yet. I'm not sure about that. Are you announcing invites? No. Okay. No, no. Part of life is competition. The only time competition ends is...

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 going to create a monopoly. That's what Peter Thiel says is a natural course of things. It's what I learned 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 the world where everything is intermixed, where do you define market segments? Where do you define monopoly? How do you do that? 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, you know, opponents from this or that corner. That's a practical matter. But if you have it conceptually defined, then

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.

rapidly declining costs. 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 a monopoly is growing arbitrarily, unstoppably in power. In 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. 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 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 by 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 have a lousy government,

and people make lousy decisions, well, you don't need the wise men raised above 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 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.

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 not, 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, 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 going to be very soon the longest serving president.

prime minister in the last half century in the Western democracies. But that's not because I amass 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?" - Do you have? - 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, you know, with both hands tied behind your back. And I said, the hard way. That's why, you know, 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, you know, 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 would say I'm not merely a champion of democracy and democratization. I'm

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 have 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 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 a 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 about. 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, 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 case

The bribery charge, so-called bribery charge, you know, is gone. It 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.

You know, a lot of these charges are not a lot. These charges will prove to be nothing. I always said, 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. We see that not only that, but with other things. So I think it's kind of instructive that, you know, no, no politician has been more vilified. No, none has been put to such a, uh,

you know, what is it, about a quarter of a billion dollars

were used to scrutinize me, scour my bank account, sending people to the Philippines and to Mexico and to Europe and to 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

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 the attempt to brand me as corrupt is falling on its face But the thing that isn't being uncovered in the trial such as the use the use of spyware on a politician 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. Mm-hmm.

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. Now, 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. They oppose it after we have it. 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 anywhere, okay? They just disagree between Hamas that says, oh, well, you should have it, you know, we should get rid of it with terror,

And the others are saying, 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 going to 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.

And they're going to be living here and we're going to be living here in an area which is, by the way, just so understand, the area, the entire area of so-called West Bank and 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 going to fly in. Who controls the airspace? Well, it takes you about two and a half minutes to cross it with a regular 747. With a fighter plane, it takes you a minute and a half. How are you going to divide the airspace? Well, you're not going to divide it. Israel is going to 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 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. You know, I don't know. Limited sovereignty, call it autonomy plus, call it whatever you want to 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 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 may harshly criticize this as contributing to escalating

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

And that accounts for about 90% of the population. Okay? And everybody recognizes that those urban blocks are going to 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 is going to dismantle these blocks. You know, 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 going to dismantle half of Jerusalem. That's not going to 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 going to 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 heirs. 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 going to have peace with Israel is to have an ethnically cleansed Palestinian entity, you know, that's outrageous. If you said the only way you shouldn't have Jews living in, I don't know, in the 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 –

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 going to live in enclaves in sovereign Israel, and we're going to live 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 going to get to the Arab world. You're not going to 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 going to 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 President

and King Hussein, for a quarter of a century, we didn't have any more peace treaties because people said, you got to 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 muhammad boussaman you know i'm a student of history and i read a lot of history and i read that you know in the versailles discussions after world war one 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 going to advance a Saudi-Israeli peace by having it publicly discussed. And in any case, it's a decision of the Saudis if they want to 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 going to 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...

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, you know, I'm

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 you know the the Palestinian straight SDR a IT to get to the other places there's no way to avoid this you know you have to go through this 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 an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And obviously, this is not something that you find in the soundbites 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 know both leaders, but I don't just jump in and assume. There will 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 loathe 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. By the way, the corollary is here. We don't want Iran, which is an aggressive force with an 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 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

that that conversation would 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 that 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. I mean, 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 piece, 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 do 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 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, you know, the president of the United States. Well, I had no choice. I mean, because I thought my country's own existence was imperiled. And remember, we always understand through changing administrations that America is

under no matter what leadership is always the irreplaceable and indispensable ally of Israel and will always remain that we can have arguments as we have But in the families we say in the mishpochah, you know, it's the the family But nevertheless, I was forced to take a stand that produced a

calls from Gulf states that ultimately led to clandestine meetings, that ultimately flowered into the Abraham Accords, then 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 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. You know, you can be hobbled by saying, well, you know, you've had this hiccup in Gaza or, you know, this or that thing happening in the Palestinians. It's important for us because we want security. But I think the larger question is, can we break out into a much wider piece and ultimately come back and make peace?

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 danger.

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 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 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 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. As I spent time in government, being reelected 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 learning.

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. 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've 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? Dan Rather came to see me with his grandson a few years ago, and he asked me, uh,

The grandson asked me, he was a student in Ivy League 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, history.

in 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. 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 being with conscience, I mean, one of the unhappy things about...

The human brain can contemplate its own demise. And so 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 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. And 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. 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 can't be any other way. And 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, a coalition of the smarts means Israel is the sixth eye, and America has no better ally.

All right. Now off mic, I'm going to force you to finally tell me who's going to 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.