Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace

00:00:00.000 | "We should never, and I never, sit aside and say,

00:00:03.840 | "Oh, they're just threatening to destroy us.

00:00:05.900 | "They won't do it."

00:00:06.960 | If somebody threatens to eliminate you,

00:00:08.880 | as Iran is doing today, and as Hitler did then,

00:00:12.400 | and people discounted it, well,

00:00:14.520 | if somebody threatens to annihilate us,

00:00:17.080 | take them seriously, and act to prevent it early on.

00:00:20.600 | Don't let them have the means to do so,

00:00:22.920 | because that may be too late.

00:00:24.360 | - The following is a conversation

00:00:28.040 | with Benjamin Netanyahu,

00:00:29.720 | Prime Minister of Israel,

00:00:31.480 | currently serving his sixth term in office.

00:00:34.640 | He's one of the most influential, powerful,

00:00:37.280 | and controversial men in the world,

00:00:39.560 | leading a right-wing coalition government

00:00:41.680 | at the center of one of the most intense

00:00:44.040 | and long-lasting conflicts and crises in human history.

00:00:47.560 | As we spoke, and as I speak now,

00:00:50.200 | large-scale protests are breaking out all over Israel

00:00:53.000 | over this government's proposed judicial reform

00:00:55.640 | that seeks to weaken the Supreme Court

00:00:57.600 | in a bold accumulation of power.

00:01:00.960 | Given the current intense political battles in Israel,

00:01:03.560 | our previous intention to speak for three hours

00:01:06.440 | was adjusted to one hour for the time being,

00:01:09.800 | but we agreed to speak again for much longer in the future.

00:01:13.640 | I will also interview people who harshly disagree

00:01:16.160 | with the words spoken in this conversation.

00:01:18.400 | I will speak with other world leaders,

00:01:20.820 | with religious leaders, with historians and activists,

00:01:24.320 | and with people who have lived and have suffered

00:01:28.040 | through the pain of war, destruction, and loss

00:01:31.440 | that stoke the fires of anger and hate in their heart.

00:01:35.440 | For this, I will travel anywhere, no matter how dangerous,

00:01:39.520 | if there's any chance it may help add

00:01:42.400 | to understanding and love in the world.

00:01:45.080 | I believe in the power of conversation, to do just this,

00:01:50.120 | to remind us of our common humanity.

00:01:53.280 | I know I'm underqualified and underskilled

00:01:56.120 | for these conversations, so I will often fall short,

00:01:59.920 | and I will certainly get attacked, derided, and slandered,

00:02:04.160 | but I will always turn the other cheek

00:02:06.360 | and use these attacks to learn, to improve,

00:02:08.920 | and no matter what, never give in to cynicism.

00:02:12.800 | This life, this world of ours,

00:02:15.840 | is too beautiful not to keep trying,

00:02:18.560 | trying to do some good in whatever way each of us know how.

00:02:24.100 | I love you all.

00:02:25.900 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:02:27.500 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:02:29.700 | in the description, and now, dear friends,

00:02:32.460 | here's Benjamin Netanyahu.

00:02:34.520 | You're loved by many people here in Israel and in the world,

00:02:39.340 | but you're also hated by many.

00:02:42.380 | In fact, I think you may be one of the most hated men

00:02:45.820 | in the world, so if there's a young man or a young woman

00:02:49.380 | listening to this right now who have such hate

00:02:52.300 | in their heart, what can you say to them

00:02:55.340 | to one day turn that hate into love?

00:02:58.900 | - I disagree with the premise of your question.

00:03:01.620 | I think I have enjoyed a very broad support

00:03:05.580 | around the world.

00:03:06.420 | There are certain corners in which we have

00:03:09.380 | this animosity that you describe,

00:03:13.380 | and it sort of permeates in some of the newspapers

00:03:17.500 | and news organs and so on in the United States,

00:03:21.580 | but it certainly doesn't reflect the broad support

00:03:24.660 | that I have.

00:03:25.500 | I just gave an interview on an Iranian channel,

00:03:30.500 | 16 million viewers.

00:03:33.340 | I gave another one, I just did a little video

00:03:37.340 | a few years ago, 25 million viewers from Iran.

00:03:41.760 | Certainly no hate there, I have to tell you.

00:03:43.420 | Not from the regime, okay?

00:03:45.780 | And when I go around the world,

00:03:47.580 | and I've been around the world,

00:03:50.220 | people want to hear what we have to say,

00:03:54.100 | what I have to say as a leader of Israel

00:03:55.900 | whom they respect increasingly

00:03:57.420 | as a rising power in the world.

00:03:59.540 | So I disagree with that.

00:04:01.700 | And the most important thing that goes against

00:04:04.740 | what you said is the respect that we receive

00:04:08.300 | from the Arab world and the fact that we've made

00:04:11.220 | four historic peace agreements with Arab countries.

00:04:13.580 | They made it with me, they didn't make it with anyone else.

00:04:17.180 | And I respect them and they respect me.

00:04:20.060 | And probably more to come.

00:04:21.420 | So I think the premise is wrong, that's all.

00:04:24.620 | - Well, there's a lot of love, yes.

00:04:28.220 | A lot of leaders are collaborating, are--

00:04:32.060 | - Respect, I said, not love.

00:04:34.020 | - Okay, all right, well, it's a spectrum.

00:04:36.380 | But there is people who don't have good things

00:04:41.820 | to say about Israel, who do have hate in their heart

00:04:44.820 | for Israel, and what can you say to those people?

00:04:49.220 | - Well, I think they don't know very much.

00:04:50.780 | I think they're guided by a lot of ignorance.

00:04:53.780 | They don't know about Israel, they don't know

00:04:55.180 | that Israel is a stellar democracy, that it happens

00:04:57.860 | to be one of the most advanced societies on the planet,

00:05:01.260 | that what Israel develops helps humanity in every field,

00:05:05.220 | in medicine, in agriculture, in the environment,

00:05:08.900 | in telecoms, and talk about AI in a minute,

00:05:13.900 | but changing the world for the better,

00:05:16.660 | and spreading this among six continents.

00:05:21.220 | We've sent rescue teams more than any other country

00:05:23.380 | in the world, and we're 1/10 of 1% of the world's population.

00:05:27.420 | But when there's an earthquake or a devastation

00:05:30.580 | in Haiti or in the Philippines, Israel is there.

00:05:33.900 | When there's an earthquake, a devastating earthquake

00:05:36.340 | in Turkey, Turkey, Israel was there.

00:05:39.460 | When there's something in Nepal, Israel is there,

00:05:42.700 | and it's the second country, it's the second country

00:05:46.260 | after, in one case, India, or after, in another case,

00:05:49.860 | the United States, Israel is there.

00:05:51.620 | Tiny Israel is a benefactor to all of humanity.

00:05:56.000 | - So you're a student of history.

00:05:58.900 | If I could just linger on that philosophical notion

00:06:01.140 | of hate, that part of human nature.

00:06:04.420 | If you look at World War II, what do you learn

00:06:09.420 | from human nature, from the rise of the Third Reich,

00:06:14.940 | and the rise of somebody like Hitler,

00:06:17.580 | and the hate that permeates that?

00:06:19.300 | - Well, what I've learned is that you have to nip

00:06:22.140 | bad things in the bud.

00:06:24.780 | You have to, there's a Latin term that says,

00:06:28.060 | obsta principi, stop bad things when they're small.

00:06:31.940 | And the deliberate hatred, the incitement of hatred

00:06:36.940 | against one community, it's demonization,

00:06:43.100 | delegitimization that goes with it,

00:06:45.460 | is a very dangerous thing.

00:06:48.060 | And that happened in the case of the Jews.

00:06:50.820 | What started with the Jews soon spread to all of humanity.

00:06:54.160 | So what we've learned is that's what we should,

00:06:56.700 | we should never, and I never, set aside and say,

00:07:00.540 | oh, they're just threatening to destroy us.

00:07:02.580 | They won't do it.

00:07:03.580 | If somebody threatens to eliminate you,

00:07:05.500 | as Iran is doing today, and as Hitler did then,

00:07:09.020 | and people discounted it, well, if somebody threatens

00:07:12.060 | to annihilate us, take them seriously,

00:07:15.060 | and act to prevent it early on.

00:07:17.260 | Don't let them have the means to do so,

00:07:19.540 | because that may be too late.

00:07:21.780 | - So in those threats, underlying that hatred,

00:07:25.900 | how much of it is anti-Zionism,

00:07:29.380 | and how much of it is anti-Semitism?

00:07:31.820 | - I don't distinguish between the two.

00:07:33.620 | You can't say, well, I'm okay with Jews,

00:07:35.880 | but I just don't think there should be a Jewish state.

00:07:38.220 | It's like saying, I'm not anti-American,

00:07:40.020 | I just don't think there should be an America.

00:07:41.900 | That's basically what people are saying,

00:07:45.260 | vis-a-vis anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

00:07:48.700 | When you say anti-Zionism, you're saying

00:07:51.380 | the Jewish people don't have a right

00:07:53.100 | to have a state of their own.

00:07:55.140 | And that is a denial of a basic principle

00:08:00.140 | that I think completely unmasks what is involved here.

00:08:08.940 | Today, anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism.

00:08:12.000 | Those who oppose the Jewish people oppose the Jewish state.

00:08:15.700 | - If we jump from human history

00:08:17.900 | to the current particular moment,

00:08:20.540 | there's protests in Israel now

00:08:22.660 | about the proposed judicial reform

00:08:26.500 | that gives power to your government

00:08:28.080 | to override the Supreme Court.

00:08:29.980 | So the critics say that this gives too much power to you,

00:08:33.580 | virtually making you a dictator.

00:08:35.540 | - Yeah, well, that's ridiculous.

00:08:36.920 | The mere fact that you have so many demonstrations

00:08:40.060 | and protests, some dictatorship, huh?

00:08:43.060 | There's a lot of democracy here,

00:08:46.620 | more rambunctious and more robust

00:08:50.180 | than just anywhere on the planet.

00:08:52.460 | - Can you still man the case that this may give

00:08:55.940 | too much power to the coalition government,

00:09:00.020 | to the prime minister, not just to you,

00:09:03.060 | but to those who follow?

00:09:04.260 | - No, I think that's complete hogwash

00:09:06.540 | because I think there's very few people

00:09:10.500 | who are demonstrating against this.

00:09:12.100 | Quite a few, quite many don't have an idea

00:09:15.460 | what is being discussed.

00:09:16.540 | They're basically being sloganized.

00:09:18.180 | You can sloganize, you know something about,

00:09:20.800 | not mass media right now, but the social network.

00:09:24.940 | You can basically feed deliberately

00:09:27.600 | with big data and big money.

00:09:29.520 | You can just feed slogans and get into people's minds.

00:09:33.980 | I'm sure you don't think I exaggerate

00:09:36.260 | because you can tell me more about that.

00:09:38.220 | And you can create mass mobilization

00:09:40.180 | based on these absurd slogans.

00:09:42.300 | So here's where I come from and what we're doing,

00:09:45.580 | what we're trying to do and what we've changed

00:09:47.420 | in what we're trying to do.

00:09:49.140 | I'm a 19th century Democrat in my,

00:09:52.280 | small D, yes, in my views.

00:09:56.180 | That is, I ask the question, what is democracy?

00:10:00.220 | Okay, so democracy is the will of the majority

00:10:05.020 | and the protection of the rights of,

00:10:06.620 | they call it the rights of the minority,

00:10:08.140 | but I say the rights of the individual, okay?

00:10:11.500 | So how do you balance the two, okay?

00:10:14.540 | How do you get those, how do you avoid mobocracy, okay?

00:10:18.820 | And how do you avoid dictatorship, the opposite side?

00:10:22.260 | The way you avoid it is something

00:10:23.980 | that was built essentially by British philosophers

00:10:26.700 | and French philosophers, but was encapsulated

00:10:30.920 | by the founding fathers of the United States.

00:10:33.340 | You create a balance between the three branches

00:10:35.700 | of government, okay?

00:10:37.620 | The legislative, the executive and the judiciary.

00:10:40.980 | And this balance is what assures the balance

00:10:43.940 | between majority rights and individual rights.

00:10:48.540 | And you have to balance all of them, okay?

00:10:50.620 | That balance was maintained in Israel in its first 50 years

00:10:55.620 | and was gradually overtaken and basically broken

00:11:01.160 | by the most activist judicial court on the planet.

00:11:04.480 | That's what happened here.

00:11:05.320 | And gradually over the last two, three decades,

00:11:09.920 | the court arrogated for itself the powers

00:11:13.600 | of the parliament and the executive.

00:11:15.680 | So we're trying to bring it back into line.

00:11:18.480 | Bringing it back into line into what is common

00:11:20.960 | in all parliamentary democracies and in the United States

00:11:24.720 | doesn't mean taking the pendulum from one side

00:11:27.440 | and bringing it to the other side.

00:11:29.460 | We want checks and balances, not unrivaled power.

00:11:33.560 | Just as we said, we want an independent judiciary,

00:11:35.880 | but not an all powerful judiciary.

00:11:38.360 | That balance does not mean bringing it back into line

00:11:40.800 | doesn't mean that you can have the parliament,

00:11:43.840 | our Knesset override any decision

00:11:46.000 | that the Supreme Court does.

00:11:47.840 | So I pretty much early on said

00:11:50.080 | after the judicial reform was introduced,

00:11:52.600 | get rid of the idea of a sweeping override clause

00:11:57.260 | that would have with 61 votes, that's majority of one,

00:12:01.280 | you can just nullify any Supreme Court decision.

00:12:03.620 | So let's move it back into the center.

00:12:06.000 | So that's gone.

00:12:07.440 | And most of the criticism on the judicial reform

00:12:10.200 | was based on an unlimited override clause,

00:12:14.000 | which I've said is simply not gonna happen.

00:12:16.000 | People are discussing something that already

00:12:18.560 | for six months does not exist.

00:12:20.560 | The second point that we received criticism on

00:12:23.560 | was the structure of how do you choose

00:12:27.140 | Supreme Court judges?

00:12:28.380 | Okay, how do you choose them?

00:12:31.020 | And the critics of the reform are saying that the idea

00:12:36.020 | that elected officials choose Supreme Court judges

00:12:39.700 | is the end of democracy.

00:12:41.500 | If that's the case, the United States is not a democracy,

00:12:43.900 | neither is France and other are just, I don't know,

00:12:46.620 | just about every democracy on the planet.

00:12:49.980 | So there is a view here that you can't have

00:12:53.620 | the sordid hands of elected officials

00:12:56.360 | involved in the choosing of judges.

00:12:59.320 | And in the Israeli system, the judicial activism went so far

00:13:03.700 | that effectively the sitting judges have an effective veto

00:13:08.700 | on choosing judges, which means that this is

00:13:13.780 | a self-selecting court that just perpetrates itself.

00:13:17.040 | And we wanna correct that.

00:13:18.040 | Again, wanna correct it in a balanced way.

00:13:20.960 | And that's basically what we're trying to do.

00:13:22.900 | So I think there's a lot of misinformation about that.

00:13:25.600 | We're trying to bring Israeli democracy

00:13:28.100 | to where it was in its first 50 years.

00:13:31.080 | And it was a stellar democracy.

00:13:33.160 | It still is.

00:13:34.000 | Israel is a democracy, will remain a democracy,

00:13:36.360 | a vibrant democracy.

00:13:38.960 | And believe me, the fact that people are arguing

00:13:41.240 | and demonstrating in the streets and protesting

00:13:43.920 | is just, is the best proof of that.

00:13:47.720 | And that's how it'll remain.

00:13:49.920 | - We spoke about tech companies offline.

00:13:53.520 | There's a lot of tech companies nervous

00:13:55.720 | about this judicial reform.

00:13:57.440 | Can you speak to why large and small companies

00:14:01.360 | have a future in Israel?

00:14:03.280 | - Because Israel is a free market economy.

00:14:05.600 | I had something to do with that.

00:14:06.720 | I introduced dozens and dozens of free market reforms

00:14:10.160 | that made Israel move from $17,000 per capita income

00:14:14.720 | to within a very short time to $54,000.

00:14:18.960 | That's nominal GDP per capita, according to the IMF.

00:14:23.600 | And we've overtaken in that Japan, France, Britain, Germany.

00:14:28.600 | How did that happen?

00:14:30.680 | Because we unleashed the genius that we have

00:14:34.320 | and the initiative and the entrepreneurship

00:14:36.280 | that is latent in our population.

00:14:38.640 | And to do that, we had to create free markets.

00:14:41.240 | So we created that.

00:14:42.560 | So Israel has one of the most vibrant free market economies

00:14:46.320 | in the world.

00:14:47.400 | And the second thing we have is a permanent investment

00:14:51.040 | in conceptual products,

00:14:53.120 | because we have a permanent investment in the military

00:14:58.120 | and our security services,

00:14:59.560 | creating basically knowledge workers

00:15:03.360 | who then become knowledge entrepreneurs.

00:15:06.320 | And so we create this structure

00:15:08.200 | and that's not gonna go away.

00:15:09.580 | There's been a decline in investments

00:15:11.480 | in high tech globally.

00:15:13.320 | I think that's driven by many factors,

00:15:15.040 | but the most important one is the interest rate,

00:15:17.360 | which I think it'll fluctuate up and down.

00:15:21.080 | But Israel will remain a very attractive country

00:15:24.400 | because it produces so many, so many knowledge workers

00:15:28.640 | in a knowledge-based economy.

00:15:31.080 | And it's changing so rapidly.

00:15:32.800 | The world is changing.

00:15:33.960 | You're looking for the places that have innovation.

00:15:37.640 | The future belongs to those who innovate.

00:15:41.480 | Israel is the preeminent innovation nation.

00:15:46.320 | It has few competitors.

00:15:47.680 | And I would say, all right,

00:15:49.200 | where do you have this close cross-disciplinary fermentation

00:15:54.200 | of various skills and areas?

00:15:58.440 | I would say it's in Israel.

00:15:59.520 | I'll tell you why.

00:16:00.340 | We used to be just telecoms

00:16:02.280 | because people went out of the military intelligence,

00:16:05.560 | our NSA, but that's been now broad-based.

00:16:08.600 | So you find it in medicine, you find it in biology,

00:16:12.360 | you find it in agri-tech, you find it everywhere.

00:16:15.680 | Everything is becoming technologized.

00:16:17.640 | And in Israel, everybody is dealing in everything.

00:16:21.400 | And that's a potent reservoir of talent

00:16:26.040 | that the world is not gonna pass up.

00:16:28.560 | And in fact, it's coming to us.

00:16:29.680 | We just had Nvidia coming here

00:16:32.080 | and they decided to build a supercomputer in Israel.

00:16:35.920 | Wonder why.

00:16:37.040 | We've had Intel coming here

00:16:38.480 | and deciding now to invest $25 billion just now

00:16:41.240 | in a new plant in Israel.

00:16:44.360 | I wonder why.

00:16:45.560 | I don't wonder why.

00:16:46.480 | They know why.

00:16:47.560 | Because the talent is here and the freedom is here.

00:16:50.440 | And it will remain so.

00:16:51.600 | - So you had a conversation about AI

00:16:54.320 | with Sam Altman of OpenAI and with Elon Musk.

00:16:57.720 | What was the content of that conversation?

00:17:00.760 | What's your vision for sort of this very highest of tech,

00:17:05.760 | which is artificial intelligence?

00:17:09.000 | - Well, first of all, I have a high regard

00:17:10.400 | for the people I talk to, okay?

00:17:12.560 | And I understand that they understand things

00:17:15.480 | I don't understand.

00:17:16.320 | And I don't pretend to understand everything,

00:17:17.960 | but I do understand one thing.

00:17:20.000 | I understand that AI is developing at a geometric rate.

00:17:25.000 | And mostly in political life and in life in general,

00:17:30.200 | people don't have an intuitive grasp of geometric growth.

00:17:33.600 | You understand things basically in linear increments.

00:17:38.200 | And the idea that you're coming up a ski slope

00:17:42.240 | is very foreign to people.

00:17:43.320 | So they don't understand it.

00:17:44.360 | And they're naturally also sort of taken aback by it.

00:17:49.360 | Because what do you do?

00:17:51.520 | So I think there's several conclusions

00:17:55.920 | from my conversations with them

00:17:58.400 | and from my other observations

00:18:01.240 | that I've been talking about for many years.

00:18:02.880 | I'm talking about the need to do this.

00:18:05.080 | Well, the first thing is this.

00:18:06.720 | There is no possibility of not entering AI with full force.

00:18:11.360 | Secondly, there is a need for regulation.

00:18:14.640 | Third, it's not clear there'll be global regulation.

00:18:18.520 | Fourth, it's not clear where it ends up.

00:18:21.640 | I certainly cannot say that.

00:18:23.640 | Now you might say, does it come to control us?

00:18:26.920 | Okay, that's a question.

00:18:28.000 | Does it come to control us?

00:18:30.240 | I don't know the answer to that.

00:18:31.840 | I think that as one observation

00:18:37.400 | that I had from these conversations

00:18:44.440 | is if it does come to control us,

00:18:46.280 | that's probably the only chance

00:18:47.680 | of having universal regulation

00:18:50.160 | because I don't see anyone deciding to avoid the race

00:18:55.160 | and cooperate unless you have that threat.

00:19:03.560 | Doesn't mean you can't regulate AI within countries

00:19:06.280 | even without that understanding.

00:19:08.720 | But it does mean that there's a limit to regulation

00:19:10.960 | because every country will wanna make sure

00:19:12.640 | that it doesn't give up competitive advantage

00:19:15.960 | if there is no universal regulation.

00:19:19.120 | I think that right now, just as 10 years ago,

00:19:22.200 | I read a novel.

00:19:25.400 | I don't read novels,

00:19:26.280 | but I was forced to read one by a scientific advisor.

00:19:30.360 | I read history, I read about economics,

00:19:33.320 | I read about technology, I just don't read novels.

00:19:35.920 | And this time, follow Churchill.

00:19:39.680 | He said, "Fact is better than fiction."

00:19:42.120 | Well, this fiction would become fact.

00:19:44.600 | And it was a book, it was a novel

00:19:46.680 | about a Chinese-American future cyber war.

00:19:51.680 | And I read the book in one sitting,

00:19:54.080 | called in a team of experts and I said,

00:19:57.000 | "All right, let's turn Israel

00:19:59.080 | "into one of the world's five cyber powers

00:20:02.160 | "and let's do it very quickly."

00:20:03.320 | And we did actually, we did exactly that.

00:20:05.800 | I think AI is bigger than that and related to that

00:20:11.720 | because it'll affect, well, cyber affects everything,

00:20:14.280 | but AI will affect it even more fundamentally.

00:20:17.080 | And the joining of the two could be very powerful.

00:20:19.760 | So I think in Israel, we have to do it anyway

00:20:23.800 | for security reasons and we're doing it.

00:20:26.480 | But I think what about our databases

00:20:30.600 | that are already very robust

00:20:33.600 | on the medical records of 98% of our population?

00:20:38.280 | Why don't we stick a genetic database on that?

00:20:40.720 | Why don't we do other things

00:20:41.960 | that could bring magical,

00:20:44.800 | what seem are seemingly magical cures

00:20:47.880 | and drugs and medical instruments for that?

00:20:51.520 | That's one possibility.

00:20:52.720 | We have it in, as I said, in every single field.

00:20:56.680 | The conclusion is this, we have to move on AI.

00:21:00.000 | We are moving on AI just as we moved on cyber.

00:21:02.600 | And I think Israel will be one of the leading,

00:21:04.880 | one of the leading AI powers in the world.

00:21:10.600 | The questions I don't have an answer to is,

00:21:13.200 | where does it go?

00:21:14.880 | How much does it eat, chew up on jobs?

00:21:17.960 | There's an assumption that I'm not sure is true

00:21:22.600 | that all previous, the two big previous revolutions

00:21:27.600 | in the human condition, namely the agricultural revolution

00:21:32.400 | and the industrial revolution,

00:21:34.720 | definitely produce more jobs than they consumed.

00:21:40.200 | Okay, that is not obvious to me at all.

00:21:44.360 | I mean, I can see new jobs creating,

00:21:46.120 | and yes, I have that comforting statement,

00:21:49.180 | but it's not quite true.

00:21:51.720 | Because I think on balance,

00:21:53.200 | they'll probably consume more jobs,

00:21:55.440 | many more jobs than they'll create.

00:21:57.960 | - At least in the short term.

00:22:00.200 | And we don't know about the long term.

00:22:01.480 | - No, I don't know about the long term,

00:22:02.840 | but I used to have the comfort being a free market guy,

00:22:05.600 | always said, you know, we're gonna produce more jobs

00:22:07.680 | than, you know, by, I don't know,

00:22:09.680 | limiting certain government jobs.

00:22:11.520 | We're actually putting out in the market,

00:22:13.240 | we'll create more jobs, which obviously happened.

00:22:15.720 | You know, we had one telecom company,

00:22:17.560 | a government company, when I said,

00:22:20.520 | we're going to, you know, we're going to create competition.

00:22:23.080 | They said, you're gonna run us out,

00:22:24.740 | we're not gonna have more workers.

00:22:26.560 | Yeah, they had 13,000 workers, they went down to seven,

00:22:29.600 | but we create another 40,000 in the other companies.

00:22:32.680 | So that was a comforting thought.

00:22:34.400 | I always knew that was true, okay?

00:22:36.400 | Not only that, I also knew that wealth would spread

00:22:38.600 | by opening up the markets completely opposite

00:22:41.320 | to the socialist and semi socialist creed

00:22:44.400 | that they had here.

00:22:46.080 | They said, you're gonna make the rich richer

00:22:48.000 | and the poor, poor, no, and made everyone richer.

00:22:50.680 | And actually, the people who entered the job market

00:22:53.700 | because of the reforms we did actually became a lot richer

00:22:56.880 | on the lower ladders of the socioeconomic measure.

00:23:02.920 | But here's the point.

00:23:06.320 | I don't know, I don't know that we will not have

00:23:11.320 | what Elon Musk calls the end of scarcity.

00:23:15.920 | So you'll have the end of scarcity,

00:23:17.360 | you'll have enormous productivity.

00:23:19.260 | You know, very few people are producing

00:23:22.480 | enormous added value.

00:23:24.460 | You're gonna have to tax that to pass it to the others, okay?

00:23:29.960 | You're gonna have to do that, that's a political question.

00:23:32.280 | I'm not sure how we answer that.

00:23:34.280 | What if you tax and somebody else doesn't tax,

00:23:36.400 | you're gonna get everybody to go there.

00:23:38.580 | That's an issue, an international issue

00:23:40.480 | that we constantly have to deal with.

00:23:42.200 | And the second question you have is,

00:23:44.980 | suppose you solve that problem and you deliver money, okay,

00:23:50.920 | to those who are not involved in the AI economy.

00:23:57.960 | What do they do?

00:24:01.200 | The first question you ask somebody

00:24:03.560 | whom you just met after the polite exchanges is,

00:24:07.840 | what do you do, right?

00:24:10.080 | Well, people define themselves by their profession.

00:24:13.400 | And it's gonna be difficult if you don't have a profession.

00:24:16.760 | And people will spend more time self-searching,

00:24:20.320 | more time in the arts, more time in leisure,

00:24:24.240 | I understand that.

00:24:25.520 | If I have to bet, it will annihilate many more jobs

00:24:29.440 | than it will create and it will force a structural change

00:24:33.400 | in our economics, in our economic models

00:24:37.480 | and in our politics.

00:24:39.400 | And I'm not sure where it's gonna go.

00:24:40.800 | - And that's something we have to respond to

00:24:43.140 | at the nation level and just as a human civilization.

00:24:46.400 | Both the threat of AI to just us as a human species

00:24:50.940 | and then the effect on the jobs

00:24:53.120 | and like you said, cyber security.

00:24:55.240 | - And what do you think?

00:24:56.080 | You think we're gonna lose control?

00:25:00.000 | - No, first of all, I do believe maybe naively

00:25:03.220 | that it will create more jobs than it takes.

00:25:05.720 | - Write that down and we'll check it.

00:25:07.280 | - It's on record.

00:25:08.120 | - And you know, we don't say we'll check it

00:25:10.120 | after our lifetime.

00:25:11.080 | No, we'll see it in a few years.

00:25:12.240 | - We'll see it in a few years.

00:25:13.780 | I'm really concerned about cyber security

00:25:15.560 | and the nature of how that changes with the power of AI.

00:25:20.400 | And in terms of existential threats,

00:25:23.160 | I think there'll be so much threats

00:25:25.360 | that aren't existential along the way

00:25:27.540 | that that's the thing I'm mostly concerned about

00:25:31.120 | versus AI taking complete control

00:25:33.820 | and becoming sort of superseding the human species.

00:25:36.900 | Although that is something you should consider seriously

00:25:39.880 | because of the exponential growth of its capability.

00:25:43.260 | - It's exactly the exponential growth

00:25:45.040 | which we understand is before us,

00:25:48.460 | but we don't really, it's very hard to project forward.

00:25:51.500 | - To really understand.

00:25:52.620 | - That's right, exactly right.

00:25:54.420 | So, you know, I deal with what I can

00:25:57.820 | and where I can affect something.

00:25:59.740 | I tend not to worry about things I don't control

00:26:03.580 | because at a certain point, you know, there's no point.

00:26:06.140 | I mean, you have to decide what you're spending your time on.

00:26:09.400 | So I think in practical terms,

00:26:11.820 | I think we'll make Israel a formidable AI power.

00:26:16.820 | We understand the limitation of scale,

00:26:19.220 | computing power and other things.

00:26:22.520 | But I think within those limits,

00:26:24.080 | I think we can make here this miracle

00:26:28.300 | that we did in many other things.

00:26:30.280 | You know, we do more with less.

00:26:33.460 | I don't care if it's water, the production of water

00:26:35.500 | or the production of energy or the production of knowledge

00:26:37.700 | or the production of cyber capabilities, defense and other.

00:26:41.320 | We just do more with less.

00:26:45.220 | And I think in AI, we're gonna do a lot more

00:26:47.380 | with relatively small but highly gifted population,

00:26:52.020 | very gifted.

00:26:53.740 | - So taking a small tangent, as we talked about offline,

00:26:56.940 | you have a background in Taekwondo.

00:27:00.380 | - Oh yeah.

00:27:01.220 | - Yeah, we mentioned Elon Musk.

00:27:02.900 | I've trained with both.

00:27:04.580 | Just as a quick question, who are you betting on in a fight?

00:27:08.820 | - Well, I refuse to answer that.

00:27:12.660 | I will say this.

00:27:13.500 | - Such a politician you are.

00:27:14.740 | - Yeah, of course.

00:27:15.580 | Here I'm a politician.

00:27:16.500 | I'm openly telling you then I'm dodging the question, okay?

00:27:19.660 | But I'll say this.

00:27:21.400 | You know, I actually,

00:27:24.380 | I spent five years in our special forces in the military

00:27:28.780 | and we barely spent a minute on martial arts.

00:27:33.020 | I actually learned Taekwondo later when I came to,

00:27:37.060 | it wasn't even at MIT.

00:27:40.220 | At MIT, I think I did karate.

00:27:41.640 | But when I came to the UN, I had a martial arts expert

00:27:44.580 | and he taught me Taekwondo, which was kind of interesting.

00:27:47.000 | Now, the question you really have to ask is,

00:27:49.300 | why did we learn martial arts

00:27:52.500 | in this special elite unit?

00:27:55.660 | And the answer is, there's no point.

00:27:58.420 | If you saw Indiana Jones, there's no point.

00:28:01.860 | You just pull the trigger.

00:28:04.620 | That's simple.

00:28:06.060 | Now, I don't expect anyone to pull the trigger

00:28:08.740 | on this combat and I'm sure you'll make sure

00:28:12.300 | that doesn't happen.

00:28:13.300 | - Yeah, I mean, martial arts is this kind of,

00:28:17.580 | it's bigger than just combat.

00:28:18.900 | It's this kind of journey of humility

00:28:20.820 | and it's an art form, it truly is an art.

00:28:25.540 | But it's fascinating that these two figures in tech

00:28:27.980 | are facing each other.

00:28:29.460 | And I won't ask a question of who you would face

00:28:32.500 | and how you would do, but--

00:28:34.180 | - Well, I'm facing opponents all the time.

00:28:37.220 | - All the time?

00:28:38.060 | - Yeah, that's part of life.

00:28:39.220 | - But not a huge--

00:28:40.420 | - Part of life is--

00:28:41.260 | - Not yet.

00:28:42.100 | - I'm not sure about that.

00:28:42.920 | - Are you announcing invites?

00:28:44.500 | - No, no, no, part of life is competition.

00:28:48.180 | The only time competition ends is death.

00:28:52.700 | But political life, economic life,

00:28:55.820 | cultural life is engaged continuously

00:28:59.700 | in creativity and competition.

00:29:01.380 | The problem I have with that, as I mentioned earlier

00:29:06.860 | just before we began the podcast,

00:29:08.980 | is that at a certain point,

00:29:12.960 | you want to put barriers to monopoly.

00:29:16.580 | And if you're a really able competitor,

00:29:19.180 | you're gonna create a monopoly.

00:29:20.640 | That's what Peter Thiel says is a natural course of things.

00:29:24.540 | It's what I learned basically

00:29:27.180 | in the Boston Consulting Group.

00:29:28.300 | If you're a very able competitor,

00:29:30.400 | you'll create scale advantages that give you

00:29:32.740 | the ability to lock out your competition.

00:29:34.940 | And as a prime minister, I want to assure

00:29:37.300 | that there is competition in the market,

00:29:38.900 | so you have to limit this competitive power

00:29:42.860 | at a certain point.

00:29:43.700 | And that becomes increasingly hard

00:29:46.300 | in a world where everything is intermixed.

00:29:49.020 | Where do you define market segments?

00:29:51.500 | Where do you define monopoly?

00:29:54.740 | How do you do that?

00:29:55.580 | That is very, that actually conceptually

00:29:58.580 | I find very challenging.

00:30:00.700 | Because of all the dozens of political,

00:30:03.260 | of economic reforms that I've made,

00:30:05.860 | the most difficult part is the conceptual part.

00:30:08.820 | Once you've ironed it out, you say,

00:30:10.900 | "Here's what I want to do, here's the right thing to do,"

00:30:13.580 | then you have a practical problem

00:30:15.060 | of overcoming union resistance, political resistance,

00:30:19.260 | press calumny, opponents from this or that corner.

00:30:24.260 | That's a practical matter.

00:30:27.020 | But if you have it conceptually defined,

00:30:29.940 | you can move ahead to reform economies

00:30:33.460 | or reform education or reform transportation, fine.

00:30:38.460 | And the question of the growing power

00:30:42.580 | of large companies, big tech companies

00:30:46.220 | to monopolize the markets because they're better at it,

00:30:49.180 | they provide a service, they provide it at lower cost,

00:30:52.100 | rapidly declining cost, where do you stop?

00:30:56.020 | Where do you stop in a monopoly power is a crucial question

00:31:00.580 | because it also becomes now a political question.

00:31:03.660 | If you amass enormous amount of economic power,

00:31:06.660 | which is information power,

00:31:08.020 | that also monopolizes the political process,

00:31:12.220 | which creates, these are real questions

00:31:14.660 | that are not obvious, I don't have an obvious answer.

00:31:17.660 | Because as I said, as a 19th century Democrat,

00:31:20.620 | these are questions of the 21st century

00:31:22.580 | which people should begin to think.

00:31:25.380 | Do you have a solution to that?

00:31:27.620 | - The solution of monopolies growing arbitrarily,

00:31:31.100 | unstoppably in power.

00:31:33.220 | - In economic power and therefore in political power.

00:31:35.980 | - I mean, some of that is regulation,

00:31:37.740 | some of that is competition.

00:31:39.840 | - You know where?

00:31:42.140 | - To draw the line?

00:31:43.500 | It's not breaking up AT&T, it's not that simple.

00:31:47.900 | - Well, I believe in the power of competition

00:31:52.060 | that there will always be somebody

00:31:53.580 | that challenges the big guys,

00:31:55.660 | especially in the space of AI,

00:31:58.140 | the more open source movements are taking hold,

00:32:00.580 | the more the little guy can become the big guy.

00:32:02.580 | - So you're saying basically the regulatory instrument

00:32:06.980 | is the market?

00:32:07.820 | - In large part, in most part, that's the hope.

00:32:12.340 | - Maybe I'm a dreamer.

00:32:13.340 | - That's been in many ways my policy up to now.

00:32:16.340 | That the best regulator is the market,

00:32:20.940 | the best regulator in economic activity is the market,

00:32:25.940 | and the best regulator in political matters

00:32:30.500 | is the political market, that's called elections.

00:32:32.820 | That's what regulates, you have a lousy government

00:32:36.620 | and people make lousy decisions.

00:32:39.980 | Well, you don't need the wise men raised above the masses

00:32:44.980 | to decide what is good and what is bad,

00:32:49.620 | let the masses decide, let them vote every four years

00:32:52.460 | or whatever, and they throw you up.

00:32:54.420 | By the way, it happened to me,

00:32:55.420 | there's life after political death.

00:32:58.180 | There's actually political life,

00:32:59.300 | I was reelected five or six times,

00:33:01.020 | and this is my sixth term.

00:33:02.740 | So I believe in that, I'm not sure.

00:33:06.940 | I'm not sure that in economic matters,

00:33:09.580 | in the geometric growth of tech companies,

00:33:14.260 | that you'll always have the little guy,

00:33:17.060 | the nimble mammal that will come out

00:33:19.020 | and slay the dinosaurs or overcome the dinosaurs,

00:33:22.260 | which is essentially what you said.

00:33:25.100 | - Yeah, I wouldn't count out the little guy.

00:33:27.460 | - You wouldn't count out the little guy.

00:33:29.260 | Well, I hope you're right.

00:33:30.460 | (laughing)

00:33:31.940 | - Well, let me ask you about this market of politics.

00:33:35.180 | So you have served six terms as prime minister

00:33:38.500 | over 15 years in power.

00:33:40.740 | Let me ask you again, human nature.

00:33:42.780 | Do you worry about the corrupting nature of power

00:33:45.980 | on you as a leader, on you as a man?

00:33:48.100 | - Not at all, because I think that the,

00:33:52.380 | again, the thing that drives me is not,

00:33:55.220 | is nothing but the mission that I took to assure

00:34:00.420 | the survival and thriving of the state, the Jewish state.

00:34:05.420 | That is, its economic prosperity,

00:34:08.560 | but its security and its ability to achieve peace

00:34:11.640 | with our neighbors, and I'm committed to it.

00:34:13.640 | I think there's still, there are many things

00:34:15.960 | that have been done.

00:34:17.160 | There are a few big things that I can still do,

00:34:20.880 | but it doesn't only depend on my sense of mission.

00:34:23.440 | It depends on the market, as we say.

00:34:26.160 | It depends really on the will of the Israeli voters,

00:34:29.160 | and the Israeli voters have decided to vote for me

00:34:31.880 | again and again, even though I wield no power in the press.

00:34:35.640 | No power in many quarters here, and so on.

00:34:40.640 | Nothing, I mean, I am probably, I'm going to be very soon

00:34:44.960 | the longest serving prime minister in the last half century

00:34:48.520 | in the Western democracies, but that's not because

00:34:51.720 | I amassed great political power in any of the institutions.

00:34:56.680 | I remember I had a conversation with Silvio Berlusconi,

00:35:01.680 | who recently died, and he said to me about,

00:35:05.420 | I don't know, 15 years ago, something like that.

00:35:07.900 | He said, "So, Bibi, how many of Israel's television stations

00:35:12.900 | "do you have?"

00:35:21.260 | And I said, "None."

00:35:22.600 | He said, "Do you have none?"

00:35:23.440 | "I have two." - Do you have?

00:35:24.340 | - Do you have?

00:35:25.180 | I said, "None, I have two."

00:35:27.380 | He said, "No, no, but what, you mean you don't have any

00:35:31.380 | "that you control?"

00:35:32.260 | I said, "Not only do I have none that I control,

00:35:34.580 | "they're all against me."

00:35:35.860 | So he says, "So how do you win elections?"

00:35:37.940 | And with both hands tied behind your back,

00:35:40.220 | and I said, "The hard way."

00:35:42.300 | That's why I have the largest party,

00:35:45.900 | but I don't have many more seats than I would have

00:35:48.140 | if I had a sympathetic voice in the media.

00:35:51.500 | And Israel is, until recently, was dominated completely

00:35:54.980 | by one side of the political spectrum

00:35:57.740 | that often vilified me, not me, because they viewed me

00:36:04.260 | as representing basically the conservative voices

00:36:07.380 | in Israel that are majority.

00:36:09.660 | So the idea that I'm an omnipotent, authoritarian dictator

00:36:14.660 | is ridiculous.

00:36:16.260 | I am, I would say I'm not merely a champion

00:36:20.900 | of democracy and democratization.

00:36:25.380 | I believe ultimately the decision is with the voters,

00:36:29.940 | and the voters, even though they've had,

00:36:32.460 | you know, they have constant, constant press attacks,

00:36:36.620 | they have chosen to put me back in.

00:36:39.340 | So I don't believe in this thing of amassing

00:36:41.860 | the corrupting power.

00:36:43.260 | If you don't have elections, if you don't have,

00:36:46.260 | if you control the means of influencing the voters,

00:36:51.100 | I'd understand what you're saying,

00:36:53.180 | but in my case, it's the exact opposite.

00:36:55.340 | I have to constantly go in elections,

00:36:57.620 | constantly, you know, with the disadvantage

00:37:00.220 | that the major media outlets are very violently sometimes

00:37:05.220 | against me, but it's fine, and I keep on winning.

00:37:09.540 | So I don't know what you're talking,

00:37:11.060 | I would say the concentration of power lies elsewhere,

00:37:13.460 | not here.

00:37:14.300 | - Well, you have been involved in several corruption cases.

00:37:18.460 | How much corruption is there in Israel,

00:37:20.500 | and how do you fight it in your own party and in Israel?

00:37:24.180 | - Well, you should ask a different question.

00:37:25.460 | What's happened to these cases?

00:37:26.700 | These cases have basically are collapsing,

00:37:30.180 | and before our eyes, there was recently an event

00:37:35.180 | in which the judges, the three judges in my case,

00:37:40.540 | called in the prosecution and said,

00:37:42.660 | "You know, your flagship, the bribery charge,

00:37:45.580 | "so-called bribery charge, you know, is gone.

00:37:48.420 | "It doesn't exist."

00:37:49.540 | Before a single defense witness was called,

00:37:55.700 | and it sort of tells you that this thing is evaporating.

00:38:00.700 | It's quite astounding.

00:38:04.180 | Even that, I have to say, was covered

00:38:06.180 | even by the mainstream press in Israel

00:38:08.700 | because it's such an earthquake.

00:38:09.940 | So, you know, a lot of these charges are, not a lot,

00:38:13.620 | these charges will prove to be nothing.

00:38:15.380 | I always said, "Listen, I stand before the legal process.

00:38:18.460 | "I don't claim that I'm exempt from it in any way.

00:38:22.460 | "On the contrary, I think the truth will come out,

00:38:24.860 | "and it's coming out."

00:38:25.900 | We see that not only that, but with other things.

00:38:28.820 | So I think it's kind of instructive

00:38:31.300 | that no politician has been more vilified,

00:38:35.460 | no one has been put to such a, you know,

00:38:38.460 | what is it, about a quarter of a billion shekels

00:38:42.620 | were used to scrutinize me, scour my bank accounts,

00:38:47.620 | sending people to the Philippines and to Mexico

00:38:50.860 | and to Europe and to America,

00:38:52.860 | and looking at everybody using spyware,

00:38:54.940 | the most advanced spyware on the planet

00:38:56.980 | against my associates, blackmailing witnesses,

00:39:00.740 | telling them, you know, "Think about your family,

00:39:04.740 | "think about your wife, you know,

00:39:06.280 | "you better tell us what you want."

00:39:07.660 | All that is coming out in the trial.

00:39:10.100 | So I would say that most people now are not asking,

00:39:15.100 | are no longer asking, including my opponents,

00:39:18.220 | it's sort of trickling in as the stuff comes out.

00:39:22.180 | People are not saying, "What did Netanyahu do?"

00:39:25.580 | Because he apparently did nothing.

00:39:28.020 | What was done to him is something that people ask.

00:39:31.500 | What was done to him, what was done to our democracy?

00:39:34.460 | What was done in the attempt to put down somebody

00:39:37.700 | who keeps winning elections

00:39:38.900 | despite the handicaps that I described?

00:39:42.060 | Maybe we can, maybe we can nail him by framing him.

00:39:46.460 | And the one thing I can say about this court trial

00:39:49.620 | is that things are coming out, and that's very good.

00:39:53.820 | Just objective things are coming out, changing the picture.

00:39:57.580 | So I would say the attempt to brand me as corrupt

00:40:02.300 | is falling on its face,

00:40:03.540 | but the thing that is being uncovered in the trial,

00:40:07.700 | such as the use, the use of spyware on a politician,

00:40:15.740 | a politician's surroundings,

00:40:17.700 | to try to shake them down in investigations,

00:40:22.700 | put them in flea-ridden cells for 21 days,

00:40:27.260 | invite their 84-year-old mother to investigations

00:40:32.260 | without cause, bringing in their mistresses

00:40:35.220 | in the corridor, shaking them down,

00:40:38.980 | that's what people are asking.

00:40:40.780 | That corruption is what they want corrected.

00:40:44.140 | (inhales)

00:40:46.060 | - What is the top obstacle to peaceful coexistence

00:40:49.820 | of Israelis and Palestinians?

00:40:51.580 | Let's talk about the big question of peace

00:40:53.860 | in this part of the world.

00:40:55.940 | - Well, I think the reason you have the persistence

00:41:00.660 | of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,

00:41:04.100 | which goes back about a century,

00:41:06.020 | is the persistent Palestinian refusal

00:41:09.580 | to recognize a Jewish state,

00:41:12.180 | a nation state for the Jewish people in any boundary.

00:41:15.380 | That's why they opposed the establishment

00:41:18.060 | of the state of Israel before we had a state,

00:41:19.860 | and that's why they've opposed it after we had a state.

00:41:23.100 | They opposed it when we were,

00:41:24.500 | we didn't have Judea and Samaria,

00:41:26.580 | the West Bank in our heads, and Gaza,

00:41:28.500 | and they opposed it after we have it.

00:41:30.060 | Doesn't make a difference.

00:41:30.940 | It's basically their persistent refusal

00:41:33.180 | to recognize a Jewish state in any boundaries,

00:41:36.260 | and I think their tragedy is that they've been commandeered

00:41:39.740 | for a century by leadership that refused to compromise

00:41:43.020 | with the idea of Zionism, namely that the Jews deserve

00:41:48.020 | a state in this part of the world.

00:41:49.620 | The territorial dispute is something else.

00:41:51.980 | You have a territorial dispute if you say,

00:41:53.860 | "Okay, you're living on this side,

00:41:55.660 | "we're living on that side,

00:41:56.620 | "let's decide where the border is," and so on.

00:41:59.060 | That's not what the argument is.

00:42:00.900 | The Palestinian society, which is itself

00:42:06.340 | fragmented, but all the factions agree

00:42:10.220 | there shouldn't be a Jewish state anywhere, okay?

00:42:13.220 | They just disagree between Hamas that says,

00:42:15.500 | "Oh, well, you should have it,

00:42:17.840 | "we should get rid of it with terror,"

00:42:19.920 | and the others who say, "No, we should also use

00:42:23.900 | "political means to dissolve it."

00:42:26.380 | So that is the problem.

00:42:28.780 | - So even as part of a two-state solution,

00:42:31.020 | they're still against the idea?

00:42:33.060 | - Well, they don't want a state next to Israel.

00:42:35.260 | They want a state instead of Israel,

00:42:37.580 | and they say, "If we get a state,

00:42:38.980 | "we'll use it as a springboard

00:42:40.780 | "to destroy the smaller Israeli state,"

00:42:43.660 | which is what happened when Israel unilaterally

00:42:46.220 | walked out of Gaza and effectively established

00:42:48.300 | a Hamas state there.

00:42:49.880 | They didn't say, "Oh, good, now we have

00:42:52.180 | "our own territory, our own state,

00:42:53.740 | "Israel is no longer there, let's build peace,

00:42:55.880 | "let's build economic projects,

00:43:00.320 | "let's enfranchise our people."

00:43:02.600 | No, they turned it into a basically into a terror bastion

00:43:06.040 | from which they fired 10,000 rockets into Israel.

00:43:09.560 | When Israel left Lebanon,

00:43:11.940 | because we had terrorist attacks from there,

00:43:16.080 | then we had Lebanon taken over by Hezbollah,

00:43:20.320 | a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.

00:43:23.480 | And therefore, every time we just walked out,

00:43:26.760 | what we got was not peace.

00:43:28.520 | We didn't give territory for peace,

00:43:31.880 | we got territory for terror.

00:43:34.220 | That's what we had.

00:43:35.280 | And that's what would happen as long as

00:43:37.320 | the reigning ideology says,

00:43:39.000 | "We don't want Israel in any border."

00:43:41.260 | So the idea of two states assumes that you'd have

00:43:45.480 | on the other side, a state that wants to live in peace

00:43:48.240 | and not one that will be overtaken by Iran

00:43:50.360 | and its proxies in two seconds

00:43:52.120 | and become a base to destroy Israel.

00:43:54.200 | And therefore, I think that most Israelis today,

00:43:56.720 | if you ask them,

00:44:00.560 | they'd say, "It's not gonna work in that concept.

00:44:03.360 | "So what do you do?

00:44:04.200 | "What do you do with the Palestinians?"

00:44:06.040 | Okay, they're still there.

00:44:07.520 | And I don't, unlike them, I don't want to throw them out.

00:44:10.500 | They're gonna be living here and we're gonna be living here

00:44:14.000 | in an area which is, by the way, just to understand,

00:44:16.600 | the area, the entire area of so-called West Bank

00:44:22.320 | and Israel is the width of the Washington Beltway,

00:44:25.680 | more or less, just a little more, not much more.

00:44:28.600 | You can't really divide it up.

00:44:29.800 | You can't say, "Well, you're gonna fly in."

00:44:32.040 | Who controls the airspace?

00:44:33.720 | Well, it takes you about two and a half minutes

00:44:36.840 | to cross it with a regular, you know, 747, okay?

00:44:41.840 | With a fighter plane, it takes you a minute and a half.

00:44:46.480 | Okay, so you're not,

00:44:47.960 | how are you gonna divide the airspace?

00:44:49.600 | Well, you're not gonna divide it.

00:44:50.640 | Israel's gonna control that airspace

00:44:52.720 | and the electromagnetic space and so on.

00:44:56.560 | So security has to be in the hands of Israel.

00:45:00.120 | My view of how you solve this problem

00:45:04.000 | is that it is a simple principle.

00:45:07.120 | The Palestinians should have all the powers

00:45:09.000 | to govern themselves and none of the powers

00:45:11.040 | to threaten Israel, which basically means

00:45:13.320 | that the responsibility for overall security

00:45:16.080 | remains with Israel.

00:45:17.320 | And from a practical point of view,

00:45:18.640 | we've seen that every time that Israel leaves a territory

00:45:23.520 | and takes its security forces out of an area,

00:45:27.080 | it immediately is overtaken by Hamas or Hezbollah

00:45:31.360 | or jihadists who basically are committed

00:45:34.880 | to the destruction of Israel and also bring misery

00:45:37.140 | to the Palestinians or Arab subjects.

00:45:40.400 | So I think that that principle

00:45:43.600 | is less than perfect sovereignty

00:45:45.200 | because you're taking a certain amount of powers,

00:45:48.840 | sovereign powers, especially security, away.

00:45:51.720 | But I think it's the only practical solution.

00:45:54.080 | So people say, ah, but it's not a perfect state.

00:45:56.240 | I say, okay, call it what you will, call it, you know,

00:45:59.040 | I don't know, limited sovereignty, call it autonomy plus,

00:46:03.280 | call it whatever you wanna call it.

00:46:05.200 | But that's the reality.

00:46:06.320 | And right now, if you ask Israelis

00:46:08.360 | across the political spectrum,

00:46:10.360 | except the very hard left, most Israelis agree with that.

00:46:13.240 | They don't really debate it.

00:46:14.720 | - So a two-state solution where Israel controls

00:46:16.920 | the security of the entire region?

00:46:18.800 | - We don't call it quite that.

00:46:20.240 | I mean, there are different names,

00:46:21.260 | but the idea is, yes, Israel controls security

00:46:23.760 | and it's the entire area, it's this tiny area

00:46:27.040 | between the Jordan River and the sea.

00:46:28.720 | I mean, it's like, you know, you can walk it

00:46:31.640 | in not one afternoon, if you're really fit,

00:46:34.080 | you can do it in a day.

00:46:36.080 | Less than a day, I did.

00:46:39.480 | - So the expansion of settlements in the West Bank

00:46:42.480 | has been a top priority for this new government.

00:46:45.320 | People, many harshly criticize this

00:46:48.680 | as contributing to escalating the Israel-Palestine tensions.

00:46:53.680 | Can you understand that perspective,

00:46:55.500 | that this expansion of settlements is not good

00:46:58.380 | for this two-state solution?

00:46:59.700 | - Yeah, I can understand what they're saying

00:47:02.180 | and they don't understand why they're wrong.

00:47:04.340 | First, most Israelis who live in Judea, Samaria,

00:47:08.300 | live in urban blocks, and that accounts

00:47:12.060 | for about 90% of the population, okay?

00:47:16.020 | And everybody recognizes that those urban blocks

00:47:18.780 | are gonna be part of Israel in any future arrangement.

00:47:22.080 | So they're really arguing about something

00:47:24.440 | that has already been decided and agreed upon, really,

00:47:27.060 | by Americans, even by Arabs, many Arabs.

00:47:31.840 | They don't think that Israel's gonna dismantle these blocks.

00:47:34.760 | You know, you look outside the window here,

00:47:36.860 | and within about a kilometer, a mile from here,

00:47:39.980 | is you have Jerusalem, half of Jerusalem grew naturally

00:47:44.940 | beyond the old 1967 border.

00:47:48.100 | So you're not gonna dismantle half of Jerusalem,

00:47:50.540 | that's not gonna happen.

00:47:52.220 | And most people don't expect that.

00:47:54.580 | Then you have the other 10% scattered in tiny,

00:47:58.580 | you know, small communities.

00:48:00.940 | And people say, "Well, you're gonna have to take them out."

00:48:03.380 | Why, why?

00:48:05.660 | Remember that in pre-1967 Israel,

00:48:08.780 | we have over a million and a half Arabs here.

00:48:11.140 | We don't say, "Oh, Israel has to be ethically cleansed

00:48:15.300 | "from Arabs in order to have, from its Arab citizens,

00:48:18.480 | "in order to have peace."

00:48:19.740 | Of course not.

00:48:20.660 | Jews can live among Arabs, and Arabs can live among Jews.

00:48:23.860 | And what is being advanced by those people who say

00:48:27.580 | that we can't live in our ancestral homeland,

00:48:30.540 | in these disputed areas, nobody says

00:48:32.500 | that this is Palestinian areas,

00:48:34.600 | and nobody says that these are Israeli areas.

00:48:36.340 | We claim them, they claim them,

00:48:37.640 | we've only been attached to this land

00:48:39.300 | for, oh, 3,500 years.

00:48:41.740 | But, you know, but it's a dispute, I agree.

00:48:45.360 | But I don't agree that we should throw out the Arabs,

00:48:49.300 | and I don't think that they should throw out the Jews.

00:48:51.900 | And if somebody said to you, "The only way we're gonna have

00:48:53.980 | "peace with Israel is to have an ethnically cleansed

00:48:57.420 | "Palestinian entity," you know, that's outrageous.

00:49:00.700 | If you said, "The only way," you know,

00:49:02.940 | "you shouldn't have Jews living in, I don't know,

00:49:05.420 | "in suburbs of London or New York and so on,"

00:49:07.900 | I don't think that will play too well.

00:49:09.660 | The world is actually advancing a solution

00:49:12.500 | that says that Jews cannot live among Arabs

00:49:16.820 | and Arabs cannot live among Jews.

00:49:18.180 | I don't think that's the right way to do it.

00:49:20.380 | And I think there's a solution out there,

00:49:23.940 | but I don't think we're gonna get to it,

00:49:25.540 | which is less than perfect sovereignty,

00:49:27.540 | which involves Israeli security,

00:49:29.420 | maintained for the entire territory by Israel,

00:49:34.060 | which involves not rooting out anybody,

00:49:36.580 | not kicking out, uprooting Arabs or Palestinians.

00:49:39.300 | They're gonna live in enclaves in sovereign Israel,

00:49:42.700 | and we're going to live in, probably, in enclaves there,

00:49:46.580 | probably through transportational continuity

00:49:48.940 | as opposed to territorial continuity.

00:49:51.340 | That is, you know, for example, you can have tunnels

00:49:53.860 | and overpasses and so on that connect

00:49:56.100 | the various communities, and we're doing that right now.

00:49:58.860 | We're doing that right now, and it actually works.

00:50:02.180 | I think there is a solution to this.

00:50:04.860 | It's not the perfect world that people think of

00:50:07.540 | because that model, I think, doesn't apply here.

00:50:10.480 | If it applies elsewhere, it's a question.

00:50:13.860 | I don't think so, but I think there's one other thing,

00:50:18.540 | and that's the main thing that I've been involved in.

00:50:21.940 | You know, people said,

00:50:22.780 | if you don't solve the Palestinian problem,

00:50:25.700 | you're not gonna get to the Arab world.

00:50:27.100 | You're not gonna have peace with the Arab world.

00:50:29.540 | Remember, the Palestinians are about 2% of the Arab world,

00:50:33.220 | and the other, you know, the other 98%,

00:50:36.220 | you're not gonna make peace with them, and that's our goal.

00:50:39.620 | And for a long time, people accepted that.

00:50:41.780 | After the initial peace treaties with Egypt,

00:50:44.420 | with Prime Minister Begin of the Likud

00:50:46.620 | and President Sadat of Egypt, and then with Jordan,

00:50:50.660 | between Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein,

00:50:55.780 | for a quarter of a century,

00:50:56.620 | we didn't have any more peace treaties

00:50:57.820 | because people said, you gotta go through the Palestinians,

00:51:00.540 | and the Palestinians, they don't want a solution

00:51:03.620 | of the kind that I described, or any kind,

00:51:05.380 | except the one that involves the dissolution

00:51:07.380 | of the state of Israel.

00:51:08.660 | So we could wait another half century.

00:51:10.820 | And I said, no, I mean, I don't think

00:51:13.900 | that we should accept the premise

00:51:15.500 | that we have to wait for the Palestinians

00:51:17.300 | because we'll have to wait forever.

00:51:19.420 | So I decided to do it differently.

00:51:21.420 | I decided to go directly to the Arab capitals

00:51:25.380 | and to make the historic Abraham Accords,

00:51:29.020 | and essentially reversing the equation,

00:51:32.100 | not a peace process that goes inside out, but outside in.

00:51:37.100 | And we went directly to these countries

00:51:40.780 | and forged these breakthrough peace accords

00:51:44.780 | with the United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain,

00:51:47.380 | with Morocco, and with Sudan.

00:51:49.860 | And we're now trying to expand that

00:51:52.260 | in a quantum leap with Saudi Arabia.

00:51:56.100 | - What does it take to do that with Saudi Arabia,

00:51:58.220 | with the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman?

00:52:01.620 | - You know, I'm a student of history,

00:52:02.820 | and I read a lot of history, and I read that,

00:52:06.740 | you know, in the Versailles discussions

00:52:09.020 | after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson said,

00:52:12.540 | "I believe in open covenants openly arrived at."

00:52:16.940 | I have my correction.

00:52:18.220 | I believed in open covenants secretly arrived at.

00:52:21.780 | So we're not gonna advance a Saudi-Israeli peace

00:52:25.720 | by having it publicly discussed.

00:52:27.460 | And in any case, it's a decision of the Saudis

00:52:31.900 | if they wanna do it,

00:52:33.600 | but there's obviously a mutual interest.

00:52:35.660 | So here's my view.

00:52:36.820 | If we try to wait for the 2% in order to get to the 98%,

00:52:42.260 | we're gonna fail, and we have failed.

00:52:44.060 | If we go to the 98%, we have a much greater chance

00:52:47.540 | of persuading the 2%.

00:52:48.620 | You know why?

00:52:49.820 | Because the 2%, the Palestinian hope

00:52:54.500 | to vanquish the State of Israel and not make peace with it

00:52:57.100 | is based, among other things, on the assumption

00:53:00.460 | that eventually the 98%, the rest of the Arab world

00:53:03.040 | will kick in and destroy the Jewish state,

00:53:05.540 | help them dissolve or destroy the Jewish state.

00:53:08.460 | When that hope is taken away,

00:53:13.460 | then you begin to have a turn

00:53:16.340 | to the realistic solutions of coexistence.

00:53:18.980 | By the way, they require compromise on the Israeli side too.

00:53:21.860 | And I'm perfectly cognizant of that and willing to do that,

00:53:26.660 | but I think a realistic compromise will be struck

00:53:29.780 | much more readily when the conflict

00:53:33.420 | between Israel and the Arab states,

00:53:35.780 | the Arab world is effectively solved.

00:53:37.980 | And I think we're on that path.

00:53:39.260 | It was a conceptual change, just like, you know,

00:53:42.180 | I've been involved in a few, I told you,

00:53:44.060 | the conceptual battle is always the most difficult one.

00:53:47.260 | And, you know, I had to fight this battle

00:53:50.140 | to convert a semi-socialist state

00:53:52.100 | into a free market capitalist state.

00:53:56.020 | And I have to say that most people today recognize

00:53:58.140 | the power of competition and the benefits of free markets.

00:54:01.380 | So we also had to fight this battle that said,

00:54:04.300 | you have to go through the, you know,

00:54:07.220 | the Palestinian straight, S-T-R-A-I-T,

00:54:12.220 | to get to the other places.

00:54:14.940 | There's no way to avoid this.

00:54:16.260 | You know, you have to go through this impassable pass.

00:54:21.260 | And I think that now people are recognizing

00:54:23.900 | that we'll go around it and probably circle back.

00:54:28.460 | And that I think actually gives hope,

00:54:30.340 | not only to have an Arab-Israeli peace,

00:54:33.340 | but circling back an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

00:54:36.660 | And obviously this is not something that you find

00:54:38.660 | in the sound bites and so on,

00:54:41.420 | but in the popular discussion of the press.

00:54:44.620 | But that idea is permeating.

00:54:46.980 | And I think it's the right idea,

00:54:48.180 | 'cause I think it's the only one that will work.

00:54:50.260 | - So expanding the circle of peace,

00:54:52.300 | just to linger on that, requires what?

00:54:55.060 | Secretly talking man to man, human to human,

00:54:59.300 | to leaders of other nations.

00:55:02.160 | - Theoretically, you're right.

00:55:04.620 | - Theoretically, okay.

00:55:07.060 | Well, let me ask you another theoretical question.

00:55:09.780 | On the circle of peace, as a student of history,

00:55:15.580 | looking at the ideas of war and peace,

00:55:18.780 | what do you think can achieve peace in the war in Ukraine?

00:55:23.340 | Looking at another part of the world,

00:55:25.380 | if you consider the fight for peace

00:55:29.780 | in this part of the world,

00:55:31.500 | how can you apply that to that other part of the world,

00:55:34.780 | between Russia and Ukraine now?

00:55:36.340 | - I think it's one of the savage horrors of history

00:55:43.700 | and one of the great tragedies that is occurring.

00:55:47.100 | And let me say in advance that if I have any opportunity

00:55:52.100 | to use my contacts to help bring about

00:55:58.940 | an end to this tragedy, I'll do so.

00:56:01.420 | I've had, I know both leaders,

00:56:05.460 | but I don't just jump in and assume.

00:56:09.340 | There'll be a desire at a certain point,

00:56:11.980 | because the conditions have created the possibility.

00:56:16.220 | of helping stop this carnage, then I'll do it.

00:56:21.220 | And that's why I choose my words carefully,

00:56:23.020 | because I think that may be the best thing that I could do.

00:56:28.020 | Look, I think what you see in Ukraine is what happens

00:56:35.140 | if you have territorial designs on a territory

00:56:39.580 | by a country that has nuclear weapons.

00:56:42.980 | And that to me, you see the change in the equation.

00:56:47.300 | Now, I think that people are loathe to use nuclear weapons

00:56:51.980 | and I'm not sure that I would think

00:56:54.420 | that the Russian side would use them with happy abandon.

00:56:59.260 | I don't think that's the question,

00:57:00.460 | but you see how the whole configuration changes

00:57:05.140 | when that happens.

00:57:06.660 | So you have to be very careful

00:57:08.580 | on how you resolve this conflict,

00:57:11.340 | so it doesn't go off the rails, so to speak.

00:57:16.340 | By the way, the corollary is here.

00:57:20.060 | We don't want Iran, which is an aggressive force

00:57:23.620 | with an just aggressive ideology of dominating

00:57:27.660 | first the Muslim world and then eliminating Israel

00:57:30.140 | and then becoming a global force, having nuclear weapons.

00:57:34.500 | It's totally different when they don't have it

00:57:36.460 | than when they do have it.

00:57:38.060 | And that's why one of my main goals has been

00:57:40.280 | to prevent Iran from having the means

00:57:43.020 | to the means of mass destruction,

00:57:46.300 | which will be used atomic bombs,

00:57:48.140 | which they openly say will be used against us.

00:57:50.140 | And you can understand that.

00:57:52.180 | How to bring about an end to Ukraine?

00:57:54.080 | I have my ideas.

00:57:56.820 | I don't think it's worthwhile discussing them now

00:58:01.820 | because they might be required later on.

00:58:06.780 | - Do you believe in the power of conversation

00:58:09.260 | since you have contacts with Volodymyr Zelensky

00:58:11.520 | and Vladimir Putin, just leaders sitting in a room

00:58:14.640 | and discussing how the end of war can be brought about?

00:58:18.360 | - I think it's a combination of that,

00:58:20.720 | but I think it's the question of interest

00:58:23.320 | and whether you have to get both sides to a point

00:58:28.320 | where they think that that conversation

00:58:33.520 | will lead to something useful.

00:58:35.360 | I don't think they're there right now.

00:58:37.220 | - What part of this is just basic human ego,

00:58:40.960 | stubbornness, all of this between leaders,

00:58:44.480 | which is why I bring up the power of conversation,

00:58:47.160 | of sitting in a room realizing we're human beings

00:58:49.600 | and then there's a history that connects Ukraine and Russia.

00:58:52.520 | - Yeah, I don't think they're in a position

00:58:53.920 | to enter a room right now, realistically.

00:58:55.840 | I mean, you can posit that it would be good

00:58:58.800 | if that could happen, but entering the room

00:59:01.480 | is sometimes more complicated than what happens in the room.

00:59:04.080 | And there's a lot of pre-negotiation,

00:59:06.720 | on the negotiation, then you negotiate endlessly

00:59:09.080 | on the negotiation, they're not even there.

00:59:11.000 | - It took a lot of work for you to get a handshake

00:59:13.920 | in the past.

00:59:15.440 | - It's an interesting question.

00:59:16.460 | How did the peace, the Abraham Accords,

00:59:18.480 | how did that begin?

00:59:19.600 | You know, I mean, we had decades,

00:59:24.880 | 70 years or 65 years where these people

00:59:28.720 | would not meet openly or even secretly

00:59:33.120 | with an Israeli leader.

00:59:34.720 | Yeah, we had the Mossad making contacts

00:59:37.600 | with them all the time and so on,

00:59:38.880 | but how do we break the ice to the top level of leadership?

00:59:43.680 | Well, we broke the ice because I took a very strong stance

00:59:47.820 | against Iran and the Gulf States understood

00:59:51.660 | that Iran is a formidable danger to them,

00:59:55.120 | so we had a common interest.

00:59:57.000 | And the second thing is that because of the economic reforms

00:59:59.960 | that we had produced in Israel,

01:00:01.560 | Israel became a technological powerhouse

01:00:05.040 | and that could help their nations,

01:00:06.960 | not only in terms of anything,

01:00:08.960 | just bettering the life of their peoples.

01:00:11.020 | And the combination of the desire to have some kind

01:00:17.160 | of protection against Iran or some kind of cooperation

01:00:23.040 | against Iran and civilian economic cooperation

01:00:27.720 | came to a head when I gave a speech

01:00:29.640 | in the American Congress, which I didn't do lightheartedly.

01:00:34.600 | I had to decide to challenge a sitting American president

01:00:37.760 | and on the so-called Iranian deal,

01:00:42.240 | which I thought would pave Iran's path with gold

01:00:45.500 | to be an effective nuclear power, that's what would happen.

01:00:48.400 | So I went there and in the course of giving that speech

01:00:54.720 | before the joint session of Congress,

01:00:58.020 | our delegation received calls from Gulf States

01:01:02.900 | who said, "We can't believe what your prime minister

01:01:05.860 | is doing, he's challenging the president

01:01:10.060 | of the United States."

01:01:10.900 | Well, I had no choice, I mean,

01:01:12.700 | because I thought my country's own existence was imperiled.

01:01:16.600 | And remember, we always understand

01:01:18.260 | through changing administrations that America,

01:01:21.240 | under no matter what leadership,

01:01:22.940 | is always the irreplaceable and indispensable ally of Israel

01:01:27.060 | and will always remain that, we can have arguments

01:01:29.380 | as we have, but in the families, we say in the mishpocha,

01:01:32.980 | you know, it's the family.

01:01:34.420 | But nevertheless, I was forced to take a stand.

01:01:37.560 | That produced calls from Gulf States

01:01:42.560 | that ultimately led to clandestine meetings

01:01:46.180 | that ultimately flowered into the Abraham Accords.

01:01:50.320 | Then, and I think we're at a point where the idea

01:01:53.340 | of ending the Arab-Israeli conflict,

01:01:57.180 | not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,

01:01:59.160 | the Arab-Israeli conflict can happen.

01:02:02.500 | I'm not sure it will, it depends on quite a few things,

01:02:05.860 | but it could happen.

01:02:07.500 | And if it happens, it might open up the ending

01:02:10.380 | of the Israeli-Islamic conflict.

01:02:14.780 | Remember, the Arab world is a small part,

01:02:17.780 | it's an important part, but there are large

01:02:21.860 | Islamic populations and could bring about

01:02:24.420 | an end to the, an historic enmity

01:02:28.620 | between Islam and Judaism.

01:02:30.140 | It could be a great thing.

01:02:31.820 | So I'm looking at this larger thing.

01:02:33.940 | You know, you can be hobbled by saying,

01:02:36.100 | well, well, you know, you've had this, you know,

01:02:39.380 | this hiccup in Gaza or, you know, this,

01:02:43.900 | this or that thing happening in the Palestinians.

01:02:48.180 | I don't, it's important for us because we want security,

01:02:51.380 | but I think the larger question is,

01:02:52.980 | can we break out into a much wider peace

01:02:56.860 | and ultimately come back and make the peace

01:03:00.340 | between Israel and the Palestinians,

01:03:01.740 | rather than waiting to solve that

01:03:04.020 | and never getting to the,

01:03:07.380 | to paint on the larger canvas.

01:03:10.140 | I want to paint on the larger canvas

01:03:12.100 | and come back to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

01:03:15.120 | - As you write about in your book,

01:03:17.900 | what have you learned about life from your father?

01:03:21.420 | - My father was a great historian

01:03:23.780 | and well, he taught me several things.

01:03:31.540 | He said that the,

01:03:32.860 | the first condition for a living organism

01:03:38.420 | is to identify danger in time.

01:03:40.980 | Because if you don't, you could be devoured,

01:03:43.540 | you could be destroyed very quickly.

01:03:45.340 | And that's the nature of human conflict.

01:03:47.940 | In fact, for the Jewish people,

01:03:50.500 | we didn't, we lost the capacity to identify danger in time

01:03:54.660 | and we were almost devoured and destroyed by the Nazi threat.

01:03:59.620 | So when I see somebody parroting the Nazi goal

01:04:04.220 | of destroying the Jewish state,

01:04:08.020 | I try to mobilize the country and the world in time,

01:04:12.480 | because I think Iran is a global threat,

01:04:14.340 | not only a threat to Israel.

01:04:15.660 | That's the first thing.

01:04:17.140 | The second thing is I once asked him,

01:04:19.700 | before I got elected, I said,

01:04:21.260 | "Well, what do you think is the most important quality

01:04:25.060 | for a prime minister of Israel?"

01:04:27.420 | And he came back with a question, "What do you think?"

01:04:30.220 | And I said, "Well, you have to have a vision

01:04:32.620 | and you have to have the flexibility of navigating

01:04:36.020 | and working towards that vision,

01:04:38.180 | be flexible, but understand where you're heading."

01:04:41.260 | And he said, "Well, you need that for anything.

01:04:42.820 | You need it for, if you're a university president

01:04:46.160 | or if you're a leader of a corporation or anything,

01:04:48.760 | anybody would have to have that."

01:04:51.500 | I said, "All right, so what do you need

01:04:54.180 | to be the leader of Israel?"

01:04:57.940 | He said, he came back to me with a word that stunned me.

01:05:02.940 | He said, "Education.

01:05:05.980 | You need a broad and deep education

01:05:09.740 | or you'll be at the mercy of your clerks."

01:05:12.280 | Or the press or whatever.

01:05:15.980 | You have to be able to do that.

01:05:19.580 | Now, as I spend time in government,

01:05:23.740 | being reelected by the people of Israel,

01:05:30.040 | I recognize more and more how right it was.

01:05:37.360 | You need to constantly ask yourself,

01:05:40.800 | where's the direction we wanna take the country?

01:05:44.740 | How do we achieve that goal?

01:05:46.140 | But also understand that new disciplines are being added.

01:05:49.380 | You have to learn all the time.

01:05:51.020 | You have to learn all the time.

01:05:52.820 | You have to add to your intellectual capital all the time.

01:05:57.820 | Kissinger said that, he wrote that,

01:06:00.380 | "Once you enter public life,

01:06:01.660 | you begin to draw on your intellectual capital

01:06:05.260 | and it'll be depleted very quickly if you stay a long time."

01:06:08.980 | I disagree with that.

01:06:11.640 | I think you have to constantly, constantly increase

01:06:15.180 | your understanding of things as they change

01:06:18.400 | because my father was right.

01:06:20.220 | You need to broaden and deepen your education

01:06:22.980 | as you go along.

01:06:23.880 | You can't just sit back and say,

01:06:25.020 | "Well, I studied some things in university

01:06:27.420 | or in college or in Boston or at MIT and that's enough.

01:06:30.500 | I've done it."

01:06:31.340 | No, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, never stop.

01:06:34.880 | - And if I may suggest, as part of the education,

01:06:37.660 | I would add in a little literature, maybe Dostoevsky,

01:06:41.300 | in the plentiful of time you have

01:06:43.020 | as a prime minister to read.

01:06:44.300 | - Well, I've read him, but I'll tell you what I think

01:06:46.060 | is bigger than Dostoevsky.

01:06:47.420 | - Oh no, who's that?

01:06:49.380 | - Not who's that, but what's that?

01:06:51.460 | Dan Rather came to see me with his grandson a few years ago

01:06:57.620 | and he asked me, the grandson asked me,

01:07:02.180 | he was a student in Ivory League College

01:07:04.900 | and he said he's 18 years old

01:07:07.420 | and he wants to study to enter politics.

01:07:11.240 | And he said, "What's the most important thing

01:07:14.380 | that I have to study to enter a political life?"

01:07:19.180 | And I said, "You have three things you have to study, okay?

01:07:22.760 | History, history, and history."

01:07:27.360 | That's the fundamental discipline for political life,

01:07:32.640 | but then you have to study other things,

01:07:34.460 | study economics, study politics and so on

01:07:38.260 | and study the military.

01:07:40.620 | If you have, I had an advantage

01:07:43.220 | because I spent some years there,

01:07:45.120 | so I learned a lot of that,

01:07:47.060 | but I had to acquire the other disciplines

01:07:49.940 | and you never acquire enough.

01:07:51.820 | So read, read, read, and by the way,

01:07:54.840 | if I have to choose, I read history, history, and history.

01:07:59.040 | Good works of history, not lousy books.

01:08:01.100 | - Last question, you've talked about a survival of a nation.

01:08:05.540 | You yourself are a mortal being.

01:08:09.060 | Do you contemplate your mortality?

01:08:11.440 | Do you contemplate your death?

01:08:12.820 | Are you afraid of death?

01:08:14.020 | - Aren't you?

01:08:16.220 | - Yes.

01:08:17.060 | - Who's not?

01:08:17.980 | I mean, if you're a conscience,

01:08:19.940 | if you're a being with conscience,

01:08:22.860 | I mean, one of the unhappy things about the human brain

01:08:26.380 | is that it can contemplate its own demise.

01:08:31.380 | And so we have to, we all make our compromises with this,

01:08:34.760 | but I think the question is what lives on?

01:08:38.240 | What lives on beyond us?

01:08:40.560 | And I think that you have to define how much

01:08:43.320 | of a posterity do you want to influence?

01:08:47.320 | I cannot influence the course of humanity.

01:08:52.120 | We all are specks, little specks.

01:08:56.200 | So that's not the issue, but in my case,

01:08:58.960 | I've devoted my life to a very defined purpose,

01:09:01.280 | and that is to assure the future and security

01:09:05.800 | and I would say permanence,

01:09:10.600 | but that is obviously a limited thing of the Jewish state

01:09:13.720 | and the Jewish people.

01:09:15.160 | I don't think one can exist without the other.

01:09:17.600 | So I've devoted my life to that,

01:09:19.280 | and I hope that in my time on this earth

01:09:24.040 | and in my years in office, I'd have contributed to that.

01:09:28.060 | - Well, you had one heck of a life,

01:09:32.720 | starting from MIT to six terms as prime minister.

01:09:37.720 | Thank you for this stroll through human history

01:09:42.000 | and for this conversation, it was an honor.

01:09:44.320 | - Thank you, and I hope you come back to Israel many times.

01:09:46.720 | It's, remember, it's the innovation nation.

01:09:50.280 | It's a robust democracy.

01:09:51.880 | Don't believe all the stuff that you're being told.

01:09:54.080 | It'll remain that.

01:09:55.200 | It cannot be any other way.

01:09:57.680 | And it's, I'll tell you the other thing,

01:10:00.200 | it's the best ally of the United States.

01:10:04.040 | And its importance is growing by the day

01:10:06.440 | because our capacities in the information world

01:10:10.120 | are growing by the day.

01:10:11.480 | We need a coalition of the like-minded smarts.

01:10:15.400 | This is a smart nation,

01:10:17.320 | and we share the basic values of freedom and liberty

01:10:21.640 | with the United States.

01:10:22.640 | So the coalition of the smarts means Israel is the sixth eye

01:10:29.800 | and America has no better ally.

01:10:32.120 | - All right, now off mic,

01:10:34.520 | I'm gonna force you to finally tell me

01:10:36.040 | who is gonna win Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg,

01:10:38.080 | but that's a good time to end.

01:10:40.720 | We ran out of time here.

01:10:41.840 | - I'll tell you outside.

01:10:43.040 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:10:45.800 | with Benjamin Netanyahu.

01:10:47.480 | To support this podcast,

01:10:48.680 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

01:10:51.000 | And now let me leave you with some words from Mahatma Gandhi.

01:10:55.000 | An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.

01:10:59.360 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

01:11:02.440 | (upbeat music)

01:11:05.040 | (upbeat music)

01:11:07.640 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace | Lex Fridman Podcast #389

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