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

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 and with people who have lived and have suffered through the pain of war, destruction and loss that stoke the fires of anger and hate in their heart. For this I will travel anywhere, no matter how dangerous, if there's any chance it may help add to understanding and love in the world. I believe in the power of conversation to do just this, to remind us of our common humanity. I know I'm 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 how. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Numerai for the world's hardest Data Science Tournament, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software and Shopify for E Commerce. Choose wisely my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com hiring and now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting but if you must skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Numerai, a hedge fund that uses machine learning to make investment decisions. It's basically a really difficult data set, a really difficult competitions with real world testing with a test set with the highest of stakes. As I talk about in this conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. He's a big believer in the power and the efficiency of the market. That's the cleanest signal you can get in the interaction of a very large number of people competing purely with good information and to step into that world as a machine learning algorithm to see what you can do with past data and how to make predictions such that you can outperform other humans or other algorithms. That's super interesting. I'm just a big fan of real world data sets and large scale real world machine learning benchmarks, both as a way to learn of what works and what doesn't and just the fun. The fun of competing. The fun of competition is a good catalyst for learning and taking steps on the long journey towards mastery. Head over to Numerai slash lex that's N U M E R A I slash Lex to sign up for a tournament and hone your machine learning skills. That's Numer AI lex for a chance to play against me and win a share of the tournament tournaments prize pool. This episode is also brought to you by betterhelp spelled H E L P Help. In my early teenage years, when I first started reading the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, I dreamed of becoming a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, because I thought that as a way to explore the human mind in some funny kind of way. The journey I took through computer science and the development of robots and machine learning systems, artificial intelligence systems, all of that took me to a podcast called Artificial Intelligence that was then renamed to just my name. And now I am finally doing psychotherapy on microphones with other people. But if you want to do the same kind of process and you don't want to start your own podcast, then maybe you want to sign up for BetterHelp because it's super easy to get started, it's affordable, it's accessible, discreet, all of that available worldwide. Super easy. I'm a big believer in talk therapy and so you should try out BetterHelp because it's the easiest way to try out and integrate talk therapy into your life. Check them out@betterhelp.com lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com Lexus this show is also brought to you by Netsuite, an all in one cloud business management system that manages all kinds of stuff. Financials, human resources, inventory, e commerce, all that kind of messy stuff that nobody really thinks about when they launch a company. I certainly don't think about when I'm thinking about launching a company. I'm thinking about big design decisions, big engineering decisions. I'm thinking about how to hire a team of amazing people. A team that is diverse in their background, in the way they see the world, in their approaches to problem solving. All of that, that's what excites me. All the messy stuff that's as essential, if not more for running a business I don't think about. That's why you should use the best tools for the job to at least help you out on that part. You can start now with no payment or interest for six months. Go to netsuite.com lex to access their one of a kind financing program netsuite.com lex that's netsuite.com lex this show is also brought to you by Shopify. A platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. With a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day to day operations. I've been wanting to put out some merch out there because I'm working with an amazing artist to help me out create some awesome stuff and I've been so lazy about it. And when I say lazy I just mean my plate is so full. And I've been doing some extremely difficult travel, but also taking on these difficult projects and trying to figure out my life. But through all of that, a source of excitement, a source of opportunity for me is just how fun and easy it is to use Shopify to create your own store. So if that's something that's exciting to you, you should definitely do it. Go sell some cool stuff. It has thousands of integrations and third party apps. It's, it's basically so anything you want to do you can get done from on demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, all that kind of stuff. Again, highly, highly, highly recommend you try out Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com lex that's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com 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 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, I've 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, the newspapers and news organs and so on in, in the United States. But it certainly doesn't reflect the, the broad support that I have. I just gave a, an interview on an Iranian channel. 16 million viewers. I gave another one. I just did a, a little video a few years ago. 25 million viewers from Iran. Certainly no hate there. I have to tell you, not from the regime. Okay. And when I go around the world, and I've been around the world, people want to hear what we have to say, what I have to say as a leader of Israel, whom they respect increasingly as a rising power in the world. So I disagree with that. And the most important thing that goes against what you said is the respect that we receive from the Arab world and the fact that we've made four historic peace agreements with Arab countries. They made it with me. They didn't make it with anyone else. And I respect them and they respect me, and, and probably more to come. So I think the premise is wrong. That's all.

Well, there's a lot of love. Yes. A lot of leaders are collaborating.

Are respect. I said not, not love.

Okay. All right. Well, it's, 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 ignorance. They don't know about Israel. They don't know that Israel is a stellar democracy, that it happens to be one of the most advanced societies on the planet, that what Israel develops helps humanity in every field, in medicine and agriculture and, and the environment and telecoms and talk about AI in a minute. But changing the world for the better and spreading this among six continents. We've sent rescue teams more than any other country in the world, and we're 1/10 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, 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 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 obsta prinky. Stop bad things when they're small. And the deliberate hatred, the. The incitement of hatred against one community, it's demonization, delegitimization that goes with it is. Is a very dangerous thing. And that happened in the case of the Jews. What started with the Jews soon spread to all of humanity. So what we've learned is that's what we should. We should never. And I'd never set 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 the Jewish people don't have a right to have a state of their own. And that is a denial of a basic principle that I think completely unmasks what is involved here today. Anti Semitism is anti Zionism. Those who oppose the Jewish people oppose the Jewish state.

If we jump from human history to the current particular moment. There's protests in Israel now about the proposed judicial reform that gives power to your government to override the Supreme Court. So the critics say that this gives too much power to you, virtually making you a dictator.

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 ambunctious and more robust than just anywhere on the planet.

Can you steel man the case that this may give too much power to the coalition government, to the Prime Minister, not just to you, but to those who follow.

No, I think that's complete hogwash because I think there's very few people who are demonstrating against this. Quite a few, quite many don't have an idea what is being discussed. They're basically being sloganized. You can sloganize. You can, 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, here's where we, 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 small d. Yes, in my views, that is, I view, I ask the question, what is democracy? Okay, 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, of the individual. Okay, so how do you balance the two, okay, how do you get the, 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 over 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, 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 say we want an independent judiciary, but not an all powerful judiciary. That balance does not mean bringing it back into line, doesn't mean that you can have the parliament arknesset override any decision that the Supreme Court does. So I pretty much early on said after the judicial reform was introduced, get rid of the idea of a sweeping override clause that would have, with 61 votes, that's majority of one, you can just nullify any Supreme Court decision. So let's move it back into the center. So that's gone. And most of the criticism on the judicial reform was based on an unlimited override clause, which I've said is simply not 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, the structure of how do you choose Supreme Court judges? Okay, how do you choose them? And the critics of the reform are saying that the idea that elected officials should choose Supreme Court judges is the end of democracy. If that's the case, the United States is not a democracy, neither is France, and neither are just, I don't know, just about every, 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.

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 will 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, you know, 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 Agritech, 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 it's 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'll remain so.

So you had a conversation about AI with Sam Altman of OpenAI and with Elon Musk. What was the content of that conversation? What's your vision for sort of this very highest of tech, which is artificial intelligence?

Well, first of all, I have a high regard for the people I talk to, okay. And I understand that they understand things I don't understand. And I don't pretend to understand everything, but I do understand one thing. I understand that AI is developing at a geometric rate. And mostly in political life and in life in general, people don't have an.

Intuitive grasp of geometric growth.

You understand things basically in linear increments. And the idea that you're coming up A ski slope is very foreign to people, so they don't understand it and they're naturally also sort of taken aback by it because what do you do? Okay, so I, I think the, there's several conclusions from my conversations with, 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 a question. Does it come to control us? I don't know the answer to that. I think that. As one observation that I had from these conversations is if it does come to control, 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's not does give up competitive advantage if there is no universal regulation. I think that right now, just as you know, 10 years ago I read, I read a novel, I don't read novels, but I was forced to read one by a scientific advisor. I read history, I read about economics, I read about technology. I just don't read novels. Okay, on this I'm 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, One sitting called in a team of experts and I said, all right, let's, 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, on the medical records of 98% of our population? Why don't we stick a genetic database on that? Why don't we do other things that could bring magical, what 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, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. Okay. Not only that, I also knew that wealth would spread by opening up the markets completely opposite to the socialist and semi socialist creed that they had here. They said, you're 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. You know, very few people are producing enormous added value. You're going to have to tax that to pass it to the others. Okay, 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, 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, you know, 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, cyber security.

And what do you think? You think it's going to, 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 have, 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 cyber security and the nature of how that changes with the power of AI. And in terms of existential threats, I think there will be so much threats that aren't existential along the way that that's the thing I'm mostly concerned about versus AI taking complete control and becoming sort of superseding the human species. Although that is something you should consider seriously because of the exponential growth of its 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'm so I deal with what I can and where I can affect something. I tend not to worry about things I don't control because at a certain point, you know, there's no point. I mean, you have to decide what you're spending Your time on. So I, 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, 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. We just do more with less. And I think in AI, we're going to do a lot more with relatively small but highly gifted population. Very gifted.

So taking a small tangent as we talked about offline, you have a, a background in Taekwondo?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

We mentioned Elon Musk. I've trained with both. This is a quick question. Who do you have? Who are you betting on in a fight?

Well, I refuse to answer that. I will say this.

Such a politician you are.

Yeah, of course, here I'm a politician. I'm openly telling you. Then I'm dodging the question. Okay, but, but I'll say this. You know, I, I actually, I spent five years in our special forces in, in the military, and we barely spent a minute on martial arts. I actually learned Taekwondo later when I came to. It wasn't even at mit. At mit, I think I did karate. But when I came to the un, I had a martial arts expert and he taught me Taekwondo, which was kind of interesting. Now the question you really have to ask is, why didn't 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, I'm sure you'll, you'll make sure that doesn't happen.

Yeah, I mean, martial arts is, it's 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 these two figures in tech are facing each other. And I won't ask a question of who you would face and how you would do, but.

Well, I'm facing opponents all the time.

All the time.

Yeah.

That's part of life. But part of life.

Part of life is not yet.

I'm not sure about that.

Are you announcing?

No, no. Part of life is competition, you know. You know, the only time Competition ends is death. But you know, political life, economic life, cultural life is engaged continuously in creativity and competition. And the, the problem I have with that, as, 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 in 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, limit this competitive power at a certain point. And that becomes increasingly hard in, in a world where everything is intermissed. Where do you define market segments? Where do you define monopoly? How do you do that? That is very, 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 opponents from this or that corner. That's a practical matter. But if you have it conceptually defined, you can move ahead to reform economies or reform education or reform transportation. Fine. In the question of the growing power of large companies, big tech companies, to monopolize the markets because they're better at it, they provide a service, they provided lower cost at rapidly declining cost, where do you stop? Where do you, where do you stop in a monopoly power? A crucial question because it also becomes now a political question. If you amass enormous amount of economic power, which is information power, you know, that also monopolizes the political process which creates. These are real questions that are not obvious. I don't have an obvious answer because as I said, as a 19th century democrat, these are questions of the 21st century which people should begin to think, do you have a solution to that?

The solution of monopolies growing arbitrarily, unstoppably.

In power, economic power, and therefore in political power.

I mean, some of that is regulation, some of that is competition.

You know, where to draw the line. It's not breaking up at and t, you know, it's not that simple.

Well, I believe in the power of competition, that there will always be somebody that challenges the big guys, especially in the Space of AI. The more open source movements are taking hold, the more the little guy can become the big guy.

So you're saying basically the regulatory instrument is the market.

In large part, in most part. That's the hope. Maybe I'm a dreamer.

That's been in many ways my policy up to now. Okay. That the best regulator is the market. The best regulator in economic.

In economic.

Activity is the market. And the best regulator in political matters is the political market. That's called elections. That's what regulates, you know, you have a lousy government and people make lousy decisions. Well, you don't need, you know, the wise men raised above the, you know, the masses to decide what is good and what is bad. Let the masses decide. Let them vote every four years or whatever and 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 turn. So, you know, I believe in that. I'm not sure, I'm not sure that in economic matters, in the geometric growth of tech companies, that you'll always have the little guy, the nimble mammal that will come out and slay the dinosaurs or overcome the dinosaurs, which is essentially what you said.

Yeah, I wouldn't count out the little guy.

You wouldn't count out the little. Well, I hope you're right.

Well, let me ask you about this market of politics. So you have served six terms as prime minister over 15 years in power. Let me ask you again, human nature. Do you worry about the corrupting nature of power on you as a leader, on you as a man?

Not at all. Because I, I think that the, again, the, the thing that drives me is not, is nothing but the mission that I took to assure the, 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, I'm committed to it. I think there's still, there are many things that have been done. There are a few big things that I can still do. But it doesn't only depend on my sense of mission. It depends on the market, as we say. It depends really on the will of the Israeli voters. And the Israeli voters have decided to vote for me again and again, even though I wield no power in the press, no power in many quarters here and so on.

Nothing.

I mean, I am probably, I'm going to be very soon the longest serving prime minister in the last half century in the Western democracies but that's not.

Because.

I 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, how many of Israel's television stations do you have? And I said, none. He said, 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, 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 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, 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.

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 collapsing. And before our eyes, the, the, you know, there were, there was recently an event in which the judges, the three judges in my case called in the prosecution and said, you know, your flagship, the bribery charts, so called bribery charge, you know, is gone, doesn't exist before a single defense was. Witness was called and it sort of Tells you that this thing is evaporating. It's quite astounding. Even that, I have to say, was.

Covered even by the mainstream press in.

Israel because it's such an earthquake. So, you know, a lot of these charges are not a lot. These charges will prove to be nothing. I always 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 and 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. None has been put to such, you know, what is it? About a quarter of a billion shekels were used to scrutinize me, scour my.

Bank account, sending people to the Philippines, into Mexico, into Europe, into America, and looking at everybody using spyware, the most advanced spyware on the planet, against, and 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. It's sort of trickling in as the, as the stuff comes out.

People are not saying what did Netanyahu do? Because he apparently did nothing.

What was done to him is something that people ask, what was done to him? What was done to our democracy? What was done in the attempt to.

Put down somebody who keeps winning elections.

Despite the handicaps that I described.

Maybe we can, 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, 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 is 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.

Well, I think the reason you have the persistence of the Palestinian, Israeli conflict, which goes back about A century is the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state, a nation state for the Jewish people in any boundary. That's why they opposed the establishment of the state of Israel before we had a state, and that's why they've opposed it after we had a state. They opposed it when we were, we didn't have Judea and Samaria, the west bank in our heads and Gaza, and they opposed 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 who say, no, we should also use political means to dissolve it. So that is, 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, you know, our own territory, our own state, Israel is no longer there. Let's build peace, let's build, you know, economic projects, let's enfranchise our people. No, they turned it into a, basically into a terror bastion from which they fired 10,000 rockets into Israel. When Israel left Lebanon, you know, 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, you know, 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're, they're, they're, 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. They're going to be living here and we're going to be living here in an area which is, by the way, just to understand the area, the entire area of so called west bank and Israel is the width of the Washington beltway, more or less, just a little more, not much more. You can't really divide it up. You can't say, well, you're gonna fly in, who controls the airspace? Well, it takes you about two and a half minutes to cross it with a, with a regular, you know, 747. Okay. With the fighter plane, it takes you a minute and a half. Okay, so you're not, how are you going to divide the airspace? Well, you're not going to divide it. Israel's 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 that 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, the Palestinians or Arab subjects. So I think that that principle is less than perfect sovereignty because you're taking a certain amount of powers, 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 said, okay, call it what you will call it, you know, I don't know, limited sovereignty, call it the 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, it's the entire area. It's this tiny area between the Jordan river and the sea. I mean, it's like, you know, you can walk it in, not one afternoon. If you're really fit, you can do it in a day, less than a day. I did. So.

The expansion of settlements in the west bank has been a top priority for this new government. People, many harshly criticize this as contributing to escalating the Israel Palestine tensions. Can you understand that perspective, that this expansion of settlements is not good for this two state solution?

Yeah, I can understand what they're saying and they don't understand why they're wrong. First, most Israelis who live in Judea Samaria live in, in urban blocks 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 pre1967 Israel, we have over a million and a half Arabs here. We don't say, oh, Israel has to be ethnically cleansed from Arabs in order to have, from its Arab citizens in order to have peace? Of course not. Jews can live among Arabs and Arabs can live among Jews. And what is being advanced by those people who say that we can't live in our ancestral homeland in these disputed areas? Nobody says that this is Palestinian areas and nobody says that these are Israeli areas. We claim them, they claim them. We've only been attached to this land for, oh, 3,500 years. But 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 suburbs of London or New York and so on, I don't think that will play too well. The world is actually advancing a solution that says that Jews cannot live among Arabs and Arabs cannot live among Jews. I don't think that's the right way to do it. And I think there is a solution out there, but I don't think we're going to 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 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 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 Mohammed Besaman?

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 I, President Woodrow Wilson said, I believe in open covenants openly arrived at. I have my correction. I believed in open covenants secretly arrived at. So we're not going to advance a Saudi Israeli peace by having it publicly discussed. And in any case, it's a decision of the, 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 hope to vanquish the state of Israel and not make peace with it, is based, among other things, on the assumption that eventually the 98%, the rest of the Arab world, will kick in and destroy the Jewish state, help them dissolve or destroy the Jewish state. When that hope is taken away, then you begin to have a turn to the realistic solutions of coexistence. By the way, they'll require compromise on the Israeli side too. And you know, 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 Palestinian strait S T R A I T to get to the other places. There's no way to avoid this, you know, you have to go through this impassable pass. And I think that now people are recognizing that will 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, you know, in the sound bites and so on, but, 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 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, the savage horrors of history and one of the great tragedies that is occurring. And let me say in advance that if I have any opportunity to use my contacts to help bring about an end to this tragedy, I'll do so. I've had, I know, both leaders, but I don't just jump in and assume. If there be a desire at a certain point because the conditions have created the possibility of helping stop this, this carnage, then I'll do it. And that's why I choose my words carefully, because I think that may be the best, the best thing that I could do. Look, I, 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, ch. You see the change in the equation now, I think that people are loath to use nuclear weapons, and I'm not sure that I would think that the, 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, well, it doesn't go off the rails, so to speak. That's. By the way, the, the corollary is here, we don't want Iran, which is an aggressive force with an unlimited, just aggressive ideology of dominating first the Muslim world and then eliminating Israel and then becoming a, you know, global force having nuclear weapons. It's totally different when they don't have it than when they do have it. And that's why one of my main goals has been to prevent Iran from having the means to the means of mass destruction, which will be used. Atomic bombs, which they openly say will be used against us. And you can understand that. How to bring about an end to Ukraine. I have my ideas. I don't think. 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 Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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 interests and whether you have to get both sides to a point where they think that that conversation would lead to something useful. I don't think they're there right now.

What part is of this is just basic human ego, stubbornness, all of this between leaders. Which is why I bring up the power of conversation, of sitting in a room realizing we're human beings. And then there's a history that connects Ukraine and Russia.

Yeah, I don't think they're in a position to enter a room right now, realistically. 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 a handshake in the past.

It's an interesting question. How did the peace, the Abraham Accords, how did that begin? You know, I mean, we had decades, 70 years where they. Or 65 years where these people, you know, 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. 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, under no matter what leadership, is always the irreplaceable and indispensable ally of Israel. And we'll always remain that. We can have arguments, as we have, but in the family, as we say in the Mishpochah, you know, it's the family. But nevertheless, I was forced to take a stand that produced calls from Gulf states that ultimately led to clandestine meetings that ultimately flowered into the Abraham Accords. And I think we're at a point where the idea of ending the Arab Israeli conflict, not the Palestinian Israeli conflict, the Arab Israeli conflict can happen. I'm not sure it will. It depends on quite a few things, but it could happen. And if it happens, it might open up the ending of the Israeli Islamic conflict. Remember, the Arab world is a small part, it's an important part, but it's. There are large Islamic populations and it could bring about an end to the historic enmity between Islam and Judaism. It could be a great thing. So I'm looking at this larger thing now. You know, you can be hobbled by saying, oh, well, you know, you had this, you know, this hiccup in Gaza or, you know, this, this or that thing happening in, in the Palestinians. I don't, I don't. It's important for us because we want security. But I think the larger question is can we break out into a much wider piece and ultimately come back the peace between Israel and the Palestinians? Rather than waiting to solve that and never getting to paint on the larger canvas, I want to paint on the larger canvas and come back to the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

As you write about in your book, what have you learned about life from your father?

My father was a great historian and, well, he taught me several things. He said that the first condition for a living organism is to identify danger in time, because if you don't, you could be devoured, you could be destroyed very quickly. And that's the nature of human conflict. In fact, for the Jewish people, we didn't. We lost the capacity to identify danger in time, and we were almost devoured and destroyed by the Nazi threat. So when I see somebody parroting the Nazi goal of destroying the Jewish state, I try to mobilize the country and the world in time because I think Iran is a global threat, not only a threat to Israel. That's the first thing. The second thing is, I once asked him before I got elected, I said, well, what do you think is the most important quality for a prime minister of Israel? And he came back with a question, what do you think? And I said, well, you have to have vision, and you have to have the, you know, the. The flexibility of navigating and working towards that vision. You know, be flexible, but understand where you're heading. And he said, well, you need that for anything. You need it for, you know, if you're a university president or if you're a leader of a corporation or anything, anybody would have to have that. I said, all right, so. 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. 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 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 you know 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 and university or in college or in Boston or at mit, and that's enough. You know, I've done it. No, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. Never stop.

And if I may suggest, as part of the education, I would add in a little literature, maybe Dostoevsky. In the plentiful of time, you have as a prime minister to read.

Well, I read him, but I'll tell you what I think is bigger than Dostoevsky.

Oh, no. Who's that?

Not who's that? But what's that? Dan Rather came to see me with his grandson a few years ago, and he asked me. The grandson asked me, he was a student in 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 and history. That's the fundamental discipline for political life. But then you have to study other things. Study economics, study politics and so on. And study the military. 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 is not? I mean, if you're a conscience, if you're a being with conscience, I mean, one of the unhappy things about the human brain is that it can contemplate its own. Its own demise. And so we have to. We all make our compromises with this. But I. 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. 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 cannot 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 the 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. Then 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.