On Nov. 1, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party won Israel’s general elections, likely returning Netanyahu to the post of prime minister for the third nonconsecutive time. He is already Israel’s longest-serving premier, having spent over a decade in office before his ouster in 2021. He spent his year in the opposition, in part, writing his autobiography, Bibi: My Story. In an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner, Netanyahu talked about his life and career and what comes next for Israel and the wider world. The following has been condensed for clarity.
WASHINGTON EXAMINER MAGAZINE: Prime minister, a big part of what I learned from your autobiography is the background to how you formed your worldview, how you see the world ideologically, philosophically. And the chapters that really bring that to life are the chapters where you talk about your father, Benzion Netanyahu. Most people know him as a celebrated historian, but he was also an important Zionist activist, and he worked with Vladimir Jabotinsky, the great Zionist leader. And the crux of that seems to be your approach toward convincing the public of the justice of Israel’s cause and rallying support for Israel and the Jewish people and the strategy to do that.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, you’re right that my father was a disciple of Jabotinsky from an early age. In 1939, he goes to London, and he says to Jabotinsky, “You have the right idea trying to influence British public opinion and British policy, but you’re simply in the wrong place.” And Jabotinsky asked him, “Why? Where should I be?” And my father said, “You should be in America because America’s going to be the dominant world power. And if you want to influence British policy, influence American policy.” And Jabotinsky was convinced by that. And he just packed his whole delegation that was in London and moved to the United States, took my father with him, and shortly after they came there, Jabotinsky died. My father was named executive director of the New Zionist Organization of America shortly afterward, the one that Jabotinsky had headed. And now he was left without the great leader — what to do? Well, my father fell back on a principle that Jabotinsky had enunciated in an article years before in which he talked about the theory of public pressure. And he said if you want to influence a democracy, in this case the great democracy of the United States, you have to first influence public opinion. And the only way you can influence public opinion is by appealing to justice. My father added [the need to] also influence the leaders. The way you appeal to leaders is through appealing to their national interest.
My father did something that Jewish leaders simply did not do in those days. He went to the Republicans. After he got the Republican National Convention to adopt a platform supporting a Jewish state, a few months later, the Democratic National Convention under Roosevelt adopted a similar platform. So in many ways, my father was the progenitor of the bipartisan American support for Israel. And that, I think, has been the mainstay of my policy, too.
WEX: The other major influence in the book is your brother Yonatan, the commander of Operation Thunderbolt, the rescue at Entebbe, Uganda, where terrorists had taken a hijacked Air France plane in 1976. He was killed in the operation tragically, and after that, you founded the Jonathan Institute, you became an expert in terrorism, and eventually went into public service. But when Yoni was alive, he said you would end up here. He said you would be prime minister of Israel, and you weren’t really sure what he saw. And so now I’m wondering if you could answer that question. What have you learned about yourself and the state of Israel that Yoni already knew?
NETANYAHU: You know, Seth, I have no idea.
Because I was shocked by this because we were very close as brothers and we served in the same unit, which my younger brother joined, too, so we were three brothers in this tiny unit. … This friend [of Yoni’s] came to me or approached me nearly half a century later: “You know, Yoni said at that time that you one day would be the leader of Israel, the prime minister of Israel,” and I said, “Are you sure? That doesn’t make sense because he never said that to me.” And he said, “Well, he saw in you things you didn’t see in yourself.” And it’s true, I didn’t have an idea or even a notion that I would one day enter politics, let alone become the prime minister of Israel, let alone the longest-serving prime minister of Israel. I never had an inkling of that.
I didn’t talk politics at all with my teammates. But I talked politics and history with [Yoni]. And for some reason, he thought that I would lead Israel one day. I haven’t the faintest idea, and at first, I didn’t believe this person when he said that. And he said, “Well, my wife was there, too, and she heard him, too.” … So, the answer to your question is I don’t know how he could see that. I saw things in him, and I thought, actually, that he could be that leader. And for some reason, he thought that I would be that leader. And it’s impossible for me to ask him that obviously.
WEX: One of the things that’s distinguished you is when people talk about national security, especially with regard to Israel, almost always they’re talking 100% about military strength, but you argue at length that that’s only half of it. The other half is economic freedom. Can you explain why economic freedom is such an important national security issue?
NETANYAHU: Well, again, you have to go to Jabotinsky’s seminal article, not on the theory of public pressure this time, on what he called the “Iron Wall.” And he said that once the Jewish state was established, it would be still challenged by its neighbors. He wasn’t Pollyannaish about it. He understood that we would be challenged and that our very existence would be challenged again and again and again by our neighbors, which is exactly what happened. And he said, “Well, when would that stop? It would stop only when our neighbors saw an iron wall, really of military strength, and they would crash against that wall again and again. Eventually, that would lead to a gradual acceptance of Israel.”
But I thought that [military power alone] wasn’t enough. So when I came into power, and even before that, I believed that military power is not going to be sufficient for the simple reason that airplanes, fighter crafts, F-35s, submarines, drones, military intelligence, cyber, which I later pioneered and made Israel a leading force in the world in this realm, all these have one common characteristic. They cost money, an enormous amount of money. Now, where are you going to get the money? Because soon the needs will outstrip your ability to pay for them. So you can’t just have great soldiers, as we do. You can’t just have exceptional commanders. We do. How do we get to pay for the growing expenses of a modern army? Well, in Israel, the answer was very clear initially [to early governments]. Oh, that’s easy, [they said]: “Tax the rich.” But if you live in a socialist or semi-socialist economy, you don’t have that many rich people, and besides, they’ll leave the country, so you won’t have a base. And I came to the conclusion, especially after my years at MIT and the Boston Consulting Group — I described that in the book, too — that you needed something else. You needed free markets. You needed a free market economy to generate the growth that will give you the means. The only way you’re going to really have the material needs for a strong military is by having a strong economy.
To have a strong economy, you need a free economy. And it wasn’t sufficient to have a highly educated population or technological capabilities that emanate from what you do in the army, especially in military intelligence. Because education and technology by themselves do not make you rich. If that were the case, then the Soviet Union would’ve been one of the richest countries in the world. They had a highly educated population. They had brilliant scientists, mathematicians, metallurgists, businesses. Yet they were dirt poor. They ultimately faced bankruptcy. You must have something else. Science, education, and technology do not make you rich. Free markets do.
The combination of free markets and high technology is unbeatable. That’s where I wanted to take Israel. Israel could only build the iron wall if we liberated the genius of our people, the genius of our entrepreneurs, the initiative that they have built in them. But that was completely strangled by a socialist economy.
So I had to lead, as prime minister and later as finance minister and later again as prime minister, a free market revolution that would give us the means to build up our defense. That’s something I speak about at length: the free market revolution that was very, very difficult to do in Israel — to change the mindset and change the policies. And what happened was it worked.
WEX: Early on in your career, as an Israeli diplomat, one of the things that you were involved in with the Reagan administration was how international terrorism was going to be a new challenge and had to be confronted by the West. And then in the ’90s and later, the next challenge was Iran, Iran’s quest for nukes. And you really put that on the radar of many people in the West as well.
In terms of future threats, you’ve made it a key part of your career to try to see what’s around the bend. So what should Western democracies and the free world be looking around the bend for now?
NETANYAHU: At the time, we were dealing with the threat of international terrorism, which was basically carried out by states using front organizations or their own intelligence agencies to foment and dispatch terrorists against the Western democracies. Proxy war, a “deniable” war.
And it was necessary to expose these state sponsors of terrorism to begin to fight terrorism. Because without sovereign states, you can’t carry the terrorist war. Even ISIS understands it. They tried to make a state, an ISIS state, an Islamic state.
Well, there is such an Islamic terrorist state. It’s called Iran. Except the terror that they’re seeking to promote is the ultimate terror: holding the entire world hostage to their nuclear arsenal, which would serve this crazed ideology, this theological thuggery, which makes Iran having nuclear weapons different from other powers.
And I mean, it’s one thing for Holland to have nuclear weapons. But to have the ayatollahs who chant, “Death to Israel! Death to America! And death to all the infidels in between,” have nuclear weapons, that’s a pivot, a horrible pivot of history. Because if a radical Islamic regime has nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to every part of the globe, you’ve just changed history.
So I’ve argued all the time that we must prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons. Not only because it threatens my country, which they openly say they would, they seek to annihilate us, but also because it would threaten the entire peace of the world. It would threaten the cities of the United States once they have the ability to threaten you.
WEX: Where does that go from here, then, because it seems like it’s stuck in a bit of a holding pattern? The development of the fight to stop Iran from attaining nukes had for a long time, progress was made along the lines of — and I know you were involved in this as well — sanctions to put a stranglehold on their economy. And then you had the fight over the Iran nuclear deal, which former President Donald Trump pulled out of, and then briefly it looked like the Biden administration was trying to get back into it.
At this point, I would think Iran thinks time is on their side because they can just run out the clock until they attain what they’re looking for. Where does this go now?
NETANYAHU: Well, first of all, you have to do everything in your power to delay or block them. I think the actions that my governments have taken, which I obviously don’t elaborate on, but the various actions that we’ve made probably set them back about 10 years, at least. That’s what our outgoing [Israel Defense Forces] chief of staff said. I don’t describe them. But one of them I do mention. And that’s the raid that the Mossad carried under my orders to a secret atomic archive in a suburb of Tehran. It was hidden, masquerading in a dilapidated warehouse.
Our guys went there, they busted the safes, these modern safes, took half a ton of material. If you’d seen the movie Argo, this was Argo on super steroids. Because thousands of Iranian security personnel were chasing them in Tehran. And finally they got out, brought the material to Israel. I distilled it, brought it to President Trump, showed it to him. And I think it helped give backing to his decision to get out of this flawed nuclear deal, which would merely have paved Iran’s path with gold to a nuclear arsenal.
But the jury is still out. The answer to your question is the jury is out.
I think if you ask, “What stops a rogue regime from acquiring nuclear weapons?” no agreement will stop. Not only because they cheat, but in the case of the Iran deal, they don’t have to cheat. They just have to keep the deal. In three, four years, they’ll have, under international seal of approval on this deal, basically unrestricted enrichment of uranium, which is the hardest component of making a nuclear arsenal. They’ll just be able to do it as much as they want. They’ll become a threshold nuclear state with international approval.
If you look at the five rogue states who sought to develop nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was stopped from making nuclear weapons by an Israeli military action; Syria, under current President [Bashar] Assad, was stopped by an Israeli military action; Libya was stopped by threat of an American military action under [Moammar] Gadhafi.
The fourth, North Korea, was not stopped. It was a signatory to the nonproliferation treaty — didn’t make a damn difference. They produced an arsenal. They didn’t fear any kind of an American action by successive U.S. administrations. So they developed a nuclear arsenal. And soon, and maybe already, they’ll have the capacity not only to reach half of Asia but possibly reach the Western Seaboard of the United States.
That is nothing compared to what Iran would be.
WEX: Over the course of your premiership, especially the dozen years that you were just in the office … Israeli politics sort of changed to the extent that there was a consensus built around this center-right outlook on the peace process, on security, on the economy. Why is that? Why did Israeli politics move in that direction?
NETANYAHU: Because people tired of the idea of territory for peace and we gave territory and we didn’t get peace. We got territory for terror. We got out of Gaza and we got Hamas, which is an Iranian proxy. We got out of Lebanon and we got Hezbollah, which is an Iranian proxy. From both Gaza and Lebanon, we’ve had roughly 20,000 rockets fired into Israel. … We’re asked to shut our eyes, hope for the best, hope that the Palestinians who still cling to this fantasy of destroying or dissolving Israel would, you know, would not be taken over by the radicals or pursue these fantasies of eliminating Israel.
I argued that as Israel becomes stronger under my policy of empowering it militarily, economically, it would also be empowered diplomatically and that we could pursue a peace with our Arab neighbors that went around the Palestinian veto, not recognizing Israel and seeking its dissolution.
And people said, “You can’t do that. You have to solve the Palestinian problem. Otherwise, you’ll never get to a broader peace with the Arab world.” I said, “No. If we wait for the Palestinians, we’ll wait another half-century until we can make peace, another quarter of a century until we make peace with the next Arab state after we made peace with Egypt and Jordan. Twenty-five years ago was the last peace treaty we had.”
And I had to break out of this mold. And I said that power will not only give us the iron wall. Power will give us peace. And that went completely at loggerheads with the prevailing view, both in Washington and in Israeli political elites — that it’s not power that will give you peace; it’s peace that will give you power. And I said, “But if the cost of peace is making yourself so vulnerable, well, then you won’t be able to protect yourself. That peace will hold about five minutes.”
And it took me a while to persuade President Trump. Couldn’t persuade President Obama or President Clinton, with whom I worked. And by the way, I respected both, but I disagreed with them. I couldn’t persuade them on that. Couldn’t persuade President Obama on Iran, but I respected him.
I did succeed after a while to persuade President Trump and his team that we have an opportunity. Because of the rise of Iran’s power and the rise of Israel’s power, Arab countries began to look differently at Israel, not as their enemy but as their indispensable ally against Iranian aggression, which threatens them as well, and also as a source for crucial innovation in areas like energy, water, medicine, you name it, because Israel is a juggernaut of innovation.
As a result, we made four historic peace treaties with Arab states — with United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain, with Morocco, and with Sudan — because of this different approach, which I had to work on. I described some clandestine meetings that I had before 2016, before the rise of the Trump administration. I already had secret meetings with Arab leaders to lay the foundation for the historic Abraham Accords, which were helped later of course by President Trump and his team.
But we couldn’t get there without making this shift in Israeli power. Israel becoming a power among the nations also allowed us to make peace with the surrounding nations, or begin to.
But the next step would be an extraordinary leap because it would effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict, not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that is, of course, peace with Saudi Arabia. And I believe we can get peace with other countries as well if we do that. It’s up to the Saudis. It’s their decision. But I think that that is one of the goals that I see. Stop Iran, expand the circle of peace beyond our wildest dreams, and continue developing Israel as the innovation juggernaut of the world.
