‘Does Israel Have The Right To Exist?’: Benjamin Netanyahu (Transcript)

They never made it their own. It was a barren land. It really had — practically it was an empty land.

And in the 19th century, the idea of coming back next year in Jerusalem became a reality. By the way, in part because of Christian Zionist support for the idea of the Great Return. The Jews came back in the 19th century to the land of Israel. The result of this return was that we started building farms, factories, places of employment.

Arabs from nearby countries started emigrating, and they now became, they called themselves Palestinians. They reconstructed history and said, we’ve been here for centuries. No, they haven’t. They weren’t there at all, and they didn’t have a national consciousness. We came back, made it our land, and we said, ‘Okay, now we live together.’

We decided to establish a state in 1948. That’s 75 years ago. And we said, ‘Everybody can live here.’ The Arabs said, ‘There can’t be a Jewish state. You have no right to be here. It’s our land.’ It’s not your land. It’s been our land for 3,500 years. If you took over somebody’s apartment, knocked them out, dispossessed them, and they never gave up the claim. They said, it’s our claim. And you left this barren dump, okay?

And the families, the progeny of the people you kicked out came back, rebuilt the house. You cannot come back and tell them, you don’t belong here, we’re going to kick you out, especially since you’re latecomers who come to live in, you know, in part of the house, which is what the so-called Palestinians are, okay?

We say to them, ‘You can live here, we can live here, but it’s our land.’ It’s our state. And the reason this conflict continues is because the Palestinians, who represent the colonial powers, the Arab conquest of the Middle East and beyond, they’re saying, ‘You have no right for a Jewish state.’ Well, we do.

If any people have any right to a state, if any people never gave up their dreams of returning to their ancestral home, if any people rebuilt their home from nothing, from barren, wasted land, it’s the Jewish people. To tell them, you have suffered more than anyone else. You have never lost your dream of coming back and rebuilding your national life in your ancestral homeland. You have no right to be there.

But the Arabs who are trying to destroy you, they have that right. That is a complete perversion of history and also a complete perversion of justice. The Jews belong to this land. This land belongs to the Jews. The Palestinians are free to live here next to us, among us, but they’re not free to demand the dissolution of the Jewish state. That is not justice. That is injustice.

That’s the shortest lecture I can give you about Jewish history.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: So why do you think the claim that the Palestinians were somehow there in Israel first and have been displaced in a colonial occupation, let’s say, by the Jews, why do you think that idea has gained such cachet, not least in the West?

Response to the Palestinian claim

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Because of ignorance? I mean, what do you mean they were here first? Well, you know, you’re familiar with the story of Jesus, right? Jesus was a Jewish rabbi living 2,000 years ago. He was a rabbi from the Galilee, okay? He came to Jerusalem, he turned the money tables of the — the tables of the money changers on the Temple Mount. Where did that happen? Did it happen in Tibet? It happened here. Jerusalem was our capital. King David made it our capital 3,000 years ago.

So the Jews are here to try to — to say that they weren’t here and that the Palestinians were here thousands of years ago is ridiculous. Anybody, you know, anybody who can — you can actually Google this and find out how absurd this thing is. So as far as reinventing ancient history, that is, that is unpardonable because anybody can find out and understand that the Jews were here for thousands of years. The Palestinians weren’t here.

As far as modern times are concerned, what the Palestinians have said is, oh, and I write this in my book, and I show it because it’s so comical. What, what they say is we were here. Palestine was a verdant land in the 19th century teeming with the Palestinians until the Jews came in, took it over, and threw it out.

Okay, well, that’s what Arafat effectively said in his infamous speech in the United Nations blaming Zionism — equating Zionism with racism. Well, there’s only one problem with that. He said that the Jewish invasion of this verdant Palestinian homeland happened in 1881. Okay? The problem with that is that 12 years before, a famous visitor among hundreds of visitors named Mark Twain visited the Holy Land. And he describes a totally different picture. He describes Palestine, I’m quoting him, ‘is a vast wasteland.’ He said, ‘only imagination can grace this barren land with the pomp of circumstance and life.’

It’s just, he said, we traveled for a whole day. We didn’t see, in the Galilee, we didn’t see a human being, one single human being. He said, Jerusalem sits in sackcloth and ashes. And as he was saying that, it’s the Jewish return that began. The Jewish return that began building the land.

Well, perhaps, one could argue, it’s obvious that Mark Twain was not in the service of the Jewish state because it didn’t exist. He wasn’t in the service of the Jewish lobby because there wasn’t any Jewish lobby. He was just reporting what was there. Could there possibly have been a tremendous influx of Palestinians between 1869 and 1881, the year that Arafat says the Jewish invasion began and destroyed the Palestinian paradise? Well, alas, no.

Because in the year 1881, another famous visitor visits Israel. And he writes, visits this land. And he writes also his memoirs, okay? His name was Arthur Penryn Stanley. He was a very famous, very famous courtier of Queen Victoria’s court, okay? And he came here on a special visit. And he says, I looked south and I looked north. He says, I’m in Judea. And I see nothing. He says, a barren expanse.

And they both express — both Twain and Arthur Penryn Stanley say the same thing. When, when, oh, when will the Jews come back and bring this land to life? And the answer is, right then. We came back, brought it back to life. There were Arabs living here, but it was, as I say, a barren wasteland. But Arabs began to immigrate naturally because we created a rise in the standard of living that attracted Arabs from neighboring states. Those Arabs are now those, the descendants of those Arabs who migrated as a result of the Jewish return, many of them now are considered Palestinians.

So what I’m saying, and I’m saying this to you, Jordan, and to your audience, there has been a complete fabrication of history. It’s the biggest lie of the big lies that have permeated the 20th century and the 21st century is to say that the Arabs were here before, that is the Palestinians were here before the Jews, when we were here for thousands of years, that we are the colonials, when in fact it was the Arabs who were the colonials who dispossessed the original natives, and that is the Jews, that we came back to this land that was laid barren by the Arab conquest, brought it back to life, and allowed Arab immigration, what we call now Palestinian immigration, to come back in.

And now they say to us, in unimaginable chutzpah, they say, you don’t belong here. They recreate ancient history. They recreate modern history. And this is a lot of hokum. It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Some of it also seems to be, I would say, technically speaking, something like a time frame problem. I mean, you said the Arabs came in the 7th century, and that’s a long time ago, and so from the 7th century to now, you might think of that as being a time frame long enough to allow for a valid claim of sovereignty ownership, but the Jews rejoinder is, well, we have a much older claim than that, one that spans 3,500 years, and the problem I have with that conceptually, and then I’ll get to some other issues that are relevant to this, is that it’s not exactly obvious what time frame of analysis should be primary.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: You have a very important point.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: And I don’t really know how to solve that.

The basis for a claim

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I do. I do, and I’ll answer your question. It’s a valid question. Okay.

If the Arabs, having conquered the land in the 7th century, and dispossessed the Jews over the next two centuries, the Jewish farmers kicked them out and so on, if they established a viable state, a viable national identity there and so on, you’re right. These things happen in history. You’re supplanted by other people. Fine. But that’s not what happened.

The Arab conquerors themselves were replaced by others. First of all, they did nothing with the land. It’s just barren. They actually built one town. One town. It’s called Ramleh. That’s it. Even hundreds and hundreds of Jewish Biblical sites and hundreds and thousands of new sites that we built, the Arabs built one place, one town called Ramleh. That’s it. So they did nothing with the land.

Then they were replaced by other conquerors. Other conquerors came in. The Mamluks, the Ottomans, ultimately the British, a series of conquerors. In other words, they took over the land, lost the land, and did nothing with the land. So if they had done what you say, if they had created, if that house that we were expelled from was taken over by another people, another family, they built a family there. They had children, grandchildren. They extended the porch. They built a parking garage and so on. It’s gone. What can you do? You still have the ability to demand reclamations, compensation and so on. But, you know, tough luck. That happens in history.

But that’s not what happened. Once the Jews were conquered by the Arabs, the Arabs did nothing with it, lost the land to others. Now we come back and bring it back to life 13 centuries later and perform this miracle, and they fabricate a history where we were there all the time. It was a verdant homeland. It was built up. It was nothing of the kind. It was desert. It was nothing.

Now, it’s not merely Mark Twain and Arthur Penryn Stanley who say that. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of travelogues over the centuries of famous French poets, of Swiss travelers, of German theologians, of poets, writers, travelers, who describe exactly the same thing. There was nothing there. There was no Palestinian state. There were no Palestinians. The Arabs even didn’t call themselves that. They were calling themselves parts of southern Syria, whatever. There was no national consciousness. There was nothing to form the consciousness about.

In the 20th century, the Arab world and the Palestinians and their supporters in the West, among the intellectual elites, basically erased history and recreated a fake history, a fake history that deracinates the Jewish roots that are unparalleled. There is no other story in the history of nations where people fought for so long for their land, for thousands, 2,000 years, were dispossessed from it, came back to it, did not kick out an existing population with a national consciousness, rebuilt the land, and now are being told you have no connections to it. You are the colonials. No, we’re not.

We’re not just — to give this a fine point because this is so crucial, what we’re discussing. I discuss it at considerable length in my book because people are so ignorant of history. We are not the Belgians in the Congo. We’re not the Dutch in Indonesia, okay? We’re not the British in South Africa. We had been there all the time. We had been in the Congo. We had been, if you will, the equivalent in Indonesia. We were kicked out of the Congo, and nothing happened in the Congo, nothing. No other people there, no development, nothing, okay?

Now we come back to our land, build it up, enable immigration of Arabs who are now called Palestinians from neighboring lands, and they tell us, oh, you don’t belong here. You dispossessed us. This is essentially what Arab propaganda and Palestinian propaganda has done and what I labor not only in the present book, my own history, maybe my story, but in a previous book, A Place Among the Nations, to debunk.

And you know what? The interesting thing is this, you know, so far, it’s quite amazing. No fact that I put forward in any of these books has ever been challenged. No, not one, not one. Usually, you know, when people, A Place Among the Nations, my previous book, answering much of the questions that you asked, usually polemical books are challenged. You know, the critics, and in my case, critics from the left, they’d find, you know, some straggler, some factoid that is wrong, some formulation that is unfortunate, and so on, okay? Nothing.

Nobody ever challenged it. It got, in those days, rave reviews from the New York Times, from great writers like Conor Cruise O’Brien and Paul Johnson and others. These are great writers, and it wasn’t challenged, okay?

My current book has not been challenged on historical facts, nothing. People can argue about my opinions, but they don’t argue about my facts. I’m very, try to be very rigorous about the facts. This whole attack on the Jewish people’s right to live in their — in the Jewish homeland, the attempt to erase the Bible and to erase the history after the Bible, and to recreate, create a modern fantasy that doesn’t exist, based on the Palestinians who want to destroy us, who support terrorism, who are anti-democratic, who are anti, or basically neo-colonials, because they’re really the colonials. That is, that is something that I think has — it’s not merely folly. It has something fundamentally wrong morally, because it is both untrue and unjust.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay, so the claim so far, if I’m going to, say, lean in the direction of your argument, without leaning too far and too obviously, I would say something like this, and tell me if I’ve got it right.

There’s a host of competing claims to the territory that now constitutes Israel, and you could have some debate about perhaps technically about which of those claims should reign supreme. The additional case that you make, however, is that the Israelis, the Jews, have done a tremendous amount of work in improving this territory, and I know there’s a principle of ownership in Western common law, in English common law, and I’m not a lawyer, so I may muck this up to some degree, but I understand the principle.

If you own territory, a vast swath of land, and you’re doing nothing to it, and someone comes and squats on it and spends a lot of time improving it, at some point they actually develop a valid legal claim to the property itself. So, there seems to be something intrinsic to our notion of valid ownership that, if you’re going to occupy a territory, you actually have to do something with it that’s productive. And so that’s at least part of the claim you’re making at the moment, to buttress the notion that the Jewish people have a valid claim to the present territory.

There were a lot of movement back and forth, but the Jews have actually taken the land and made something of it.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, I’m saying something else, though. I’m saying that they held the land for 2,000 years, were kicked out. The Arabs came and conquered it and immediately lost it to others, and did nothing with it. The others did nothing with it, so it was basically, they took over my apartment, okay, a long time ago. The guys who took over, who basically kicked me out, were kicked out themselves. The apartment was left barren, and many decades, in this case centuries later, I come back to this barren mess, okay, this ruin, and I built it up back. And I not only improve it, I not only make my ownership based on improvement, but then nobody else did anything with it. There was no someone else. There practically were no tenants. That’s my argument.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Right. And you’re also making the case that when the Jews came to Israel, they were doing what they could to coexist with the people who were there, the sparse number of people who were there, but also to set up a state that would invite other people who weren’t Jewish to live there as well. So it wasn’t an oppressive regime in any sense of the word.

The refugee problem

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, we know what happened. We know what happened. We know that 75 years ago, when the State of Israel was declared, you didn’t have a single Arab refugee. I mean, the Arabs say now that their enmity to Israel, and the reason they went to war with Israel was because of the Arab refugee. But there wasn’t a single Arab refugee or Palestinian refugee when Israel was established.

In fact, the refugees are the result of Arab aggression and not its cause. And in fact, the Arab onslaught, five Arab armies that attacked the tiny Jewish state in its inception, these five Arab armies created two refugee problems. One, the Palestinian refugees who fled before the advancing armies being promised that they could come back in a few days because the Jews would be annihilated, driven to the sea. That didn’t work out, thank God.

But in those five Arab states, there lived many Jews. Those Jews were summarily kicked out after our war of independence. So the Arab onslaught on Israel’s inception produced two refugee problems. One, Palestinian refugees, Arab refugees, we call them Palestinians.

And the second is Jewish refugees. Now Israel, with less than 1% of the total land mass of the Arab states, takes in the same number of refugees, Jewish refugees, as you had Palestinian refugees. You don’t see them here. They’re integrated into our society, into our government, into business, into everything. We solved, without the cornucopia of Arab oil, we solved our refugee problem caused by the Arab onslaught on Israel.

The Palestinian refugee problem is kept alive by the Arabs that have 100 times more land, infinite oil resources, they keep it alive as a battering ram to produce exactly the propaganda that you say. So basically what the technique of Arab propaganda has been, and I describe it to some extent in my present, in my biography too, because you have to understand it, you have to see it to believe it, is to turn the results of Arab aggression against Israel into its cause. They first did that with the refugees when Israel was established. They then didn’t accept Israel’s right to exist, even though we’re a tiny country. They tried to attack us again 19 years later and destroy us. That’s called The Six-Day War.

In six days we pushed back the Arab countries and took over our ancestral lands of Judea and Samaria. And again what the Arabs did is exactly the same thing. They said that our occupation, our so-called occupation of the heartland of the Jewish people, Judea and Samaria, that produced the war. No, that didn’t produce the war. It was the result of their attempt, their second attempt, to annihilate us. So this technique of reversing causality, that is, accusing Israel, basically turning the results of Arab aggression into its cause, is again one of these ways of creating the delegitimization of Israel.

The reason we have not had peace with the Palestinians is not because of the Arab refugees. There weren’t any when they attacked us. The reason is not the territories. We didn’t control these territories. They were in Arab hands before the Six-Day War. All of these things are a result of the Arab aggression.

And what is the cause of the Arab aggression? It’s the persistent Arab refusal to accept a Jewish state in any boundary in our ancestral homeland. And if you remove that, you get peace.

Now how do we know that we get peace? Because this persistent Arab refusal has dissipated. It’s dissipated over time. As the strength of Israel, as I describe in my book, as Israel becomes not merely a fact, but a permanent fact in the Middle East, so they know they can’t get rid of it. So Arab countries begin to make peace with us. And I had the privilege, which I describe again in my book, of forging four Arab peace agreements, four peace agreements with Arab states, because that barrier, that obstacle of refusing to accept a Jewish state at any boundary has disappeared.

Where does it persist? In the Palestinians, who are one to two percent of the entire Arab world, wagging the, you know, it’s the tail wagging the dog. Or they tried until recently, they were quite successful wagging the dog. They, Palestinians, cling on to the fantasy of eliminating Israel, denying us our historical and present rights to live anywhere in this land, refusing to any kind of practical compromise, refusing to accept the Declaration of Israel and the UN, the partition resolution, we did, they refused, refusing any kind of realistic negotiation for peace.

What has happened, and here’s what happened, Jordan, for the last quarter of a century, after the initial peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, for 25 years we had no peace treaties with any Arab country. Because the elites, the foreign policy elites and the experts and the intellectuals explained, you cannot make peace with the rest of the Arab world, unless you make peace first with the Palestinians. There’s a problem.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Right, right.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, you can’t, because the Palestinians are not interested in peace with Israel, they’re interested in the peace without Israel. They’re not interested in a state next to Israel, they’re interested in a state instead of Israel. So if you wait for the Palestinians, you’ll wait another quarter of a century, another half century, another century. You’re not going to get anywhere.

I had to break that logjam, and describe how I did that in my book. I had to go around the Palestinians, go to the United Arab Emirates, go Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and make peace with them. Why did they change their attitude towards Israel? They changed it because of the result, the growth of Israeli power. As Israel became more powerful technologically, we made a free market revolution that released the genius in our people. Israel became the innovation nation. You can’t do that if you’re paying 75% marginal tax rate, right? We cut tax rates, put in basically a capitalist economy, and Israel exploded.

But it also became very powerful militarily, because we could now afford to fund it. The combination of economic power through free markets, and military and intelligence power that combined to give us diplomatic power. And with that, Arab leaders in the area began to see Israel not as their enemy, but as their indispensable ally against a force that was threatening both Israel and them, and that’s Iran, Iran’s aggression.

And secondly, they saw the innovation nation, that is Israel, as a font of tremendous technology that could better the lives of their people. And therefore, we made these historic peace agreements in record time, because now we were no longer bound by the Palestinian straitjacket that you’re familiar with in Toronto, in New Zealand, and so on. The Arab world is not there. Some of it is, but a lot of it is changing.

So my idea is, how do you solve the Palestinian problem? Anytime they want to truly sit down and negotiate, be my guest. I’ll be happy to do that, and I’ve tried that in the past. But in reality, I took a different track. Instead of saying, first we’ll solve the problem with the Palestinians, then we’ll solve the problem with the Arab world, I actually reversed it. I said, let’s go to the Arab world, and let’s get peace with the Arab world, and then circle back to the Palestinians. If they’re ready to come before, fine. But if not, let’s get peace with 99%, and then try to make peace with the 1%, as opposed to let’s try the implacable 1%, and wait until we get to the other 99%. That’s a complete reversal of concept. It’s still being challenged. You’ll see some of the old guard still saying, no, no, we have to go to the Palestinians before we go to the Arab world, and we’ll never get peace.

The Balfour Declaration, Hitlerism

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: So I want to divide this into two tracks now. I want to first of all investigate some of the history behind the willingness of other states to support the Jewish claim to a homeland in the Middle East because I think that’s quite interesting. And then I want to speak more about the Abraham Accords which you discussed.

So one of the things that fascinates me, well historically, but also in your book, is your discussion of the Balfour Declaration. And so that’s obviously before the utter catastrophe of the Holocaust and the catastrophes the Jewish people ran into in the middle of the 20th century. Already by the time of the Balfour Declaration, there was some sense, at least in Great Britain, that the claim that Herzl had put forward, for example, that the Jews and the world would benefit from a Jewish homeland in the Middle East had some validity.

So why do you think that developed? And then how do you think it extended? Because you got bipartisan support for the notion of a Jewish homeland from the Americans by 1944. And then of course there was the UN 1947 Declaration. So it’s not as if the Jews imposed this vision on the Middle East by themselves. There was support all over the world. And so could you walk us through how that support developed and why you think it developed?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Yeah, it developed because certainly in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, there was — the propaganda that I’ve described, rewriting history, had not taken root. And most educated people knew the history of the Bible, the history of the Jewish people, their dispossession, what they thought were the horrors the Jews suffered in their exile and dispersion, which was nothing compared to what was going to come later in the Holocaust. But that was enough for them.

And they basically knew that the land was practically empty and that, I mean, there were people there, but it was practically empty. And it made sense that both from a Biblical prognostication for those who had a religious orientation, and also a humanist view, that this evil of history, this injustice of history would be corrected, that this long-suffering people, the Jews, who contributed so much to civilization and to history, and to morality, the idea of morality, the Ten Commandments that became the moral code of the world, and so many other things, the birth of Christianity, many of the ideas, the moral ideas that we have, originated on these hills where I’m sitting in right now, this tiny, dusty edge of Asia, where this tribe, strange tribe, lived here and talked about man, the fact that people should not remain slaves, that there should be a law that applies to all of them, that kings are not divine, that they’re subject to moral authority and censure, and all sorts of other crazy ideas like that, that’s all originated here.

And so, the educated leaders that met in World War I, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, they had to decide who gets what. And they came upon the idea of self-determination, that is that people should have the ability to govern their nations, obviously with civic rights for other peoples living in their midst, and they concluded, knowing the history that I just described, that is so unknown today on college campuses, among so-called intellectuals or anything but that, that the Jews deserved this right to rebuild their national life and their ancestral homeland. And that’s how it developed.

But the first one to actually bring it forward, you mentioned in the beginning of your comments, was Theodor Herzl. Theodor Herzl was a giant of history. He was a journalist. He was a Jewish journalist in the late 19th century. He was born in Hungary, but worked for a very prestigious paper in Vienna. When he was dispatched to Paris as a correspondent, he saw the infamous Dreyfus trial, where a Jewish officer in the French army was falsely accused, as it later turned out, of espionage and betrayal, and was sentenced to Devil’s Island and other horrible things.

And he said this, ‘If this can happen to the Jews in the apex of Western civilization, then it could happen anywhere.’ He predicted that within a few decades, the fires of anti-Semitism would consume the Jews of Europe, that they would be slaughtered. He actually saw that. He wrote these things in 1900 roughly and before, and of course the Holocaust came less than half a century later.

And he said there’s only one solution for this. The solution is to have the Jews — the solution is not going to be to integrate the Jews in societies, because that’s not going to work. The solution would not be to eliminate nationalism through communism and other cosmopolitan internationalism. That’s not going to work either. And in fact he was right, because so much of anti-Semitism came from Stalinism and so on. It’s not merely Nazism, it’s Stalinism too. So either thing, it’s not going to work.

He said there’s only one solution. The Jews should have a nation of their own, that is a country of their own. And he sought to persuade first the German Kaiser, and after that the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, to give the Jews a state of their own, and he didn’t succeed. He died after eight years, that’s it, eight years.

But in these eight years he launched this movement that turned the dream of ages, century after century, next year in Jerusalem, he turned it from a prayer, from a dream, into a practical plan. My grandfather, Nathan — Nathan Mileikowsky Netanyahu, he was enthralled by Herzl. He became a tremendous speaker at the age of 20. Thousands of people crowded to hear him throughout Europe, Eastern Europe, Poland. There were records, press records, of how people fought each other, they broke windows, they fought physically to hear this young man speak about the Jewish, about Herzl’s vision, coming back to the Jewish homeland.

Well, Herzl died, he died too early. And his followers continued the dream even though he was dead. My grandfather was one of them, my father was one of them, but they didn’t succeed. So now we fast forward, in 1917 they succeed partly, because the British Empire, which now after the defeat of the Ottomans, controlled what is now the land of Israel, decided to give the Jews a homeland. They didn’t say state yet, but they said a homeland. It was clear it was a corridor to a state. This was met by fervent Arab opposition.

By many of the Arabs who had immigrated to Israel, to what is now the land of Israel, they said, stop, can’t come anymore. They decided we’re just going to oppose any Jewish land. And the British backed down. They backed down from the so-called promise they gave, it’s called the Balfour Declaration, where they promised a Jewish homeland. They backed off, okay.

And now the Jews are stuck, they’re in Europe, they can’t migrate because Jewish immigration was effectively blocked by the British, who betrayed their promises to the Jewish people.

And now Hitlerism rises. 1933, Hitler rises to power. My father, who later became a great historian of the Jewish people, he’s all of 23 years old. And here’s what he writes with the rise of Hitler. He says: ‘Hitlerism will annihilate all the Jews of Europe, and it’s racial anti-Semitism that would consume every last Jew. And the only way we can fight it is to persuade the civilized world that it is not only the Jews who will be annihilated or threatened, it’s their civilization too.’

This young [Benicio] Netanyahu, 23 years old, writes in 1933, if more people had heeded what he wrote, then perhaps we would have avoided a tremendous catastrophe that occurred to my people, but also to the 60 million who lost their lives in World War II. Well, they didn’t.

Now, my father saw this coming, and a few years later he went to the United States in World War II, and he sought to recruit American public opinion. He’s a young man in his early 30s. He’s trying to recruit American public opinion to recognize that it’s not merely for the sake of justice, doing justice with the Jews who are being incinerated in Europe. It’s for American interest and Western interest to have a strong Jewish state.

And finally, he makes his way up the ladder because one official hears him, brings him to another, because he argued something that no Jew had argued before. No Zionist leader argued before. They all argued the moral case, which we’ve been discussing at some length in this book. But my father, he didn’t abandon the moral case. He argued it with great passion.

But when he talked to statesmen, as he taught me, when you talk to public opinion, you talk about justice. And you have to argue the justice of your cause. Those who are unjust do the same, so you may as well do it, to protect yourself against the people who lie, the people who cheat, who present themselves as moralists while they blow up babies deliberately.

Speak of human rights while they trample human rights. You have to argue justice and speak the truth. But when you speak to statesmen, as my father told me, you have to tell them you have to speak of interest. That is what my father did.

And at the end of World War II…

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, that seems to be what you did with the Abraham Accords.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Exactly right.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Also by allowing or by facilitating Israel’s development into an economic powerhouse, you also made the country, you helped build the country into something that could be practically allied with, as well as, let’s say, making them simultaneous.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, exactly. And that’s really, you hit exactly on the vision. Because my purpose in life, inherited from my grandfather and from my father and my fallen brother, my brother who fell while leading the most celebrated rescue mission in modern times, the historic rescue of Entebbe where he died. I described that moment when I learned about it in some detail and also what happened there, which is not fully known.

But I inherited from them a life of purpose. And the purpose was to assure the prosperity, security, and permanence of the Jewish state, insofar as you can offer anything permanent in our world. And to do that, I realized that Israel had to be not only to fend off the false claims that try to deny its legitimacy as a state and our historic rights and our ancient homeland, but quite separate, or complementing that, is to make Israel very powerful.

Because history is very unkind.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: And productive. And productive. Not just powerful, right? Because the other advantage you had with the Abraham Accords was that you could present Israel as a compelling partner in economic development to Arab states that were actually hungry for a pathway forward out of their unidimensional dependence on oil wealth, for example.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Exactly right. When I say powerful, I don’t mean militarily powerful. And that’s exactly what I point out in the book. And I said, normally, if you ask Israelis before that, what is powerful? Well, powerful means having a strong army. I concluded very early on, having served in the army, I served in a special unit, an elite unit, and I described my brushes with death and clandestine missions and far into enemy, beyond the lines of enemy lines and many firefights that I was in, and one I nearly drowned in the Suez Canal, and one I was shot while rescuing, while taking part in a rescue of hostages in a hijacked plane, and so on.

So I had intimacy with the military, obviously, because I also served for five years in this special unit as a soldier and officer. And it’s quite a big adventure story, as you must have read. But I understood early on that to have military power, you have to pay for all these things. You have to pay for F-35 aircrafts. You have to pay for submarines, for tanks, for drones, for cyber, for intelligence, all very expensive. How are you going to pay for it?

Oh, well, in Israel, semi-socialist Israel that I grew up in, it’s very obvious. You tax the rich. Well, the problem with that is you don’t have enough rich people, and they’re all going to leave to other places with lower taxes. So I figured that the way you can actually enable Israel to be strong militarily is you have to make it strong economically. But to make it strong economically, you have to completely overhaul Israel’s economic system from semi-socialism to free-market capitalism.

And I entered public life, essentially, with that view. And I became first prime minister, then finance minister, and again prime minister. And I led a free-market revolution that turned Israel from basically a supplicant to one of the most advanced economies on earth. Just to give you an example, when I was first elected prime minister, Israel was well behind all the Western European economies, certainly the United States and Canada, in terms of per capita income.

Well, as a result of the changes that I put forward and I described in the book, Israel became, in per capita income, wealthier than Japan, France, Britain, Germany. It’s actually outstripped them all. And the power, my vision was that the fusion of free markets and technology, which we invest in all the time in our military, that produces this tremendous economic efflorescence, and that gives you the power combination. The power combination is not merely the military, which you can now afford. It’s the civilian technology, which you now develop.

And so Arab states could see, well, Israel is a strong country, and with enough resolute leadership, it will oppose Iran that threatens both of us. But Israel also produces fantastic desalinization. Israel produces tremendous developments in energy, tremendous digital developments, tremendous developments in health, and so on.

We were the first to leave COVID because of our databases that we developed for the population and so on. We were the first to exit COVID and rebuild our economy very quickly. So the combination of civilian technology and military and intelligence capability produced this desire on the part of the Arabs to make peace with us.

And, you know, the attitudes, those ingrained attitudes, anti-Israel attitudes that are still rife in the Arab world, begin to change because here’s what happened. Because I could make these peace treaties with the Gulf states, hundreds of thousands of Israelis now fly over the skies of Saudi Arabia, land in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Bahrain, and Arabs there embrace the Israelis who are coming there, and Arabs and Jews are dancing in the streets.

Now they’re making joint ventures together. You know, they have economic interests, but also the views, the cartoonish absurdities of Arab propaganda are dissipated with this human contact. So the new kind of peace that we have, a peace based on power and interest, is actually changing the previous assumptions about Israel in many parts of the Arab world.

PM Netanyahu’s goal, the three pillars of peace

My goal, and I say this openly, my goal, if, as I hope, I’ll form a government very soon, is to continue the expansion of the circle of peace to the rest of the Arab world. But I don’t think it’s going to be actually a quantum leap again, a quantum leap again, because there is a country there that is a close neighbor that is extraordinarily important, and that’s Saudi Arabia. If I can achieve a Saudi-Israeli peace, we will be well on the route of ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, and we’ll be left with a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But it will be a lot more manageable, and we will have changed history.

The idea is peace through strength. It’s an old idea. I didn’t invent it. But the strength that I’m talking about is the combination of economic, military, and diplomatic strength. I call it the three pillars of peace.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Could you walk us through what you did on the economic front? I have two questions there. What did you do on the economic front to move Israel from a relatively far left leading socialist state to a free market economy? So I’d like to know the details. And second, why do you think that, given the radical success of your free market maneuvers, that the more socialist vision was so attractive to Israelis for such a long period of time?

So let’s start with the first one. Tell us what you did on the economic front to allow for the emergence of this Silicon Valley-like miracle in Israel that’s unfolded over the last, what, about 15 years, something like that?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: 20 years, yes, exactly 20 years.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: 20 years.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, the first thing I did was, if I can borrow a phrase from the Clintonites, never let a good crisis go to waste. We had a tremendous economic crisis when I took over as finance minister in 2003. Horrible things. And the country was still along semi-socialist lines. And I decided, and most people thought it was because of the collapse of the dot-com markets, if you remember that, which it was, but it was a tiny factor of it. It wasn’t a really important one.

Or they thought it was because we had terrorist attacks, which was also part of it. But I thought it was a structural problem. Why were we, before the dot-com collapse, before this or that explosion of terrorism, why were we, a gifted people, a people with a pretty good educational system, how come we were trailing all the countries of Western Europe?

And the idea was, well, education is enough. If we have good education, we’ll get well. That’s hogwash. I mean, the Soviet Union had tremendous education. And they had tremendous mathematicians, tremendous physicists, tremendous metallurgists. They were dirt poor. And yet when any one of these people was put on a plane and someone managed to smuggle himself to Palo Alto, they were producing wealth within days because you had a free market there.

So technology by itself doesn’t produce wealth. Free markets and technology — free markets do produce wealth. But free markets with technology produce unbelievable, unbelievable spurts of growth and wealth. And that was my vision for Israel. I had this crisis now. And I said in a crisis I could do imponderable things. I could do things which were never accepted.

So what I did was, you know, I spent, first of all, I was told by my advisors, having been prime minister before and now being a finance minister in Sharon’s government, they said, who was in his 70s, they said, look, if you want to be prime minister again, whatever you do, don’t take on the finance ministry because you’ll have to cut budgets, you’ll have to do horrible things, and you’ll never be prime minister again.

And I said, well, what do I want to be prime minister for? It’s to put off, push back the Iranian threat, including their quest for nuclear weapons, and to liberate the Israeli marketplace, so the Israeli economy. So if I achieve at least one of those goals, that’s a pretty good thing. They said, okay, but remember, you’ll never be prime minister again. This is 20 years ago, okay.

I became finance minister, used the crisis. After three weeks of working 20-hour days, I put forward my vision to Israel, which answers your question. I said, I fell back on a vision because people were living exactly as you say, in semi-socialist Israel. We were awash with false economics, basically saying, divide the pie, divide the pie, don’t increase the pie, okay. That was basically what they all grew up with. And unless you get mugged by reality, it’s very hard to change it.

But we were being mugged by economic reality again and again and again, and we didn’t change. Now comes my opportunity. Three weeks into my taking up the finance ministry, I give a press conference. And I fell back on my first day in the military, in basic training. It’s a long line. The company’s put in a long line on a big square, and the commander points to me, and he says, you, Netanyahu, look to your right. Put the man on your right on your shoulder. I did.

He then looks at the next guy, puts the guy on his right on his shoulder, and so on. Well, I had a pretty big guy on my shoulders because the commander blows the whistle, barely took a few steps together. This is a race called the elephant race. The guy at the bottom is the elephant. The guy at the top rides the elephant.

The next guy was the smallest guy in the platoon in the company, and he had the biggest guy on his shoulder. He collapsed on the spot. The third guy was a big guy, and he had a relatively small guy, and he shot off like a rocket and took the race.

And I said to the Israeli public, all national economies are pairs of a private sector — of a public sector sitting on the shoulders of a private sector. The private sector is the one that produces the wealth, or most of it, okay, the added value in the economy. And in our case, the public sector became too big, and we were about to collapse. We were about to collapse like the guy next to me.

So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to put the fat man, this became known as the fat man, thin man example, and taxi cab drivers and comics spoke about it. It actually went into the Israeli psyche. If you ask people now in Israel, fat man, thin man, they know what I’m talking about. The fat man at the top, okay, we’re going to put on a strict diet. Very hard to do politically. You’re going to cut government budgets, okay?

And the thin man at the bottom, we’re going to put a lot of lungs, a lot of oxygen in his lungs. And what is oxygen? Well, many things, but number one, number two, and number three is low taxes, low taxes, low taxes, because that’s why people risk, you know, that’s why they work, because they don’t want to pay to the fat man at the top. They want to have it themselves.

And once we have that, we have to — the guy can race forward, right? Run forward and take the race compared to other economies. Well, not true, because as he begins to run, he hits a ditch, and then he hits a wall, and then he hits a fence, and these are called barriers to competition. We have to deregulate the excessive regulation that semi-socialist Israel had, and still has to some extent, but we’ve done a lot there.

So it’s three things, compress the fat man, lower taxes, and do other things to make business very attractive and easy, and remove barriers to competition. And frankly, that’s what I did. I don’t describe the 80 or so major reforms that we did, but I did them in a crisis. And the reason I could get away with it in a crisis is because, you know, things are so bad. They were so bad that they’ll let you do it, but I paid heavily, and I almost disappeared from politics.

When I later ran for, you know, as a leader of Likud, my party compressed to 10% of the Knesset, that’s it. Right now, we’re the biggest party. But I was merely destroyed. So my advisors who told me, don’t take the finance ministry, weren’t that wrong. I was declared dead. Having survived several brushes with death as a commando soldier, I now survived a brush with death politically. So I was eulogized. People said Netanyahu did great things in the economy, but he’s dead. He’s down to 12 seats out of 120 in our parliament. Finished. Thank you for what you did. Go away. Okay.

I recovered from that, and I was reelected.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: So why did you pay the price?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Oh, why?

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: What was it about your reforms that made that price inevitable?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Because the part, first of all, the most important part is that in order to put the fat man, the public sector on a diet, I had to cut back Israel’s lavish welfare system, which encouraged people to live on the dole and not to go out and work. Okay?

So when I cut child allowances, which in Israel were extraordinary, they’d go up with each successive child. So, you know, by the time you got to the sixth child, you know, and you had like the Bedouins in the Negev, they had 60 children from multiple wives. They could drive the BMW Jeep as their second car in the stans of the Negev. I mean, and this was leading to demographic and economic collapse. Okay?

And the same thing was happening in other sectors, the ultra-Orthodox community and so on. They didn’t work. They just had a lot of children, which the others, you know, the public, the private sector had to pay for. And when you cut that, well, Jordan, I can tell you, you don’t become very popular. Okay? It’s not — cutting government money.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, there’s a lot of short-term pain there. There’s short-term immediate pain that’s concrete for a lot of people when you cut. And if the benefits only kick in in the medium to long term, then you have a – well, then you have obviously a problem of emotion.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, I’d like it to –

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: The cost is upfront and the benefit’s later.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: You’re absolutely right. And you have to be prepared for that. That’s what leaders do. If you want to lead, you have to have a purpose. And your purpose has to be beyond yourself. And you have to be ready to shed political blood, your own. You have to be ready. Otherwise, you can’t lead. Otherwise, it’s meaningless. You’re always looking at the polls. You’re always looking. Do you have a vision of what to do? I had a clear vision. And I wanted to make Israel a power among the nations. And the things – and I paid for it. And I nearly died politically.

In fact, I was eulogized twice because you’ve got to realize that I checked – you know, somebody showed me the statistics the other day. So I’m the longest-serving prime minister of Israel, 15 years. And in a year, if I – as I anticipated, we’ll form a government in a few days. In a year’s time, I will be the longest-serving leader of a democratic country in the last half century. But I’m already beating the odds in a different way because a lot of people came back once from political death. That’s happened. Winston Churchill is an example. Yitzhak Rabin of Israel. The late Yitzhak Rabin was another example. And you can find him in other places. Not that often, but you can find him.

But the last time somebody came back twice — to do a comeback twice was 75 years ago, three-quarters of a century ago. And the reason that’s happened is because you’re quite right. If you’re able to survive political death, then people appreciate what it is you did for the country and for them. Even though, you know, you could be swept by tremendous hostile presses, as is the case in Israel, but you can overcome that.

And in Israel’s case, in my case, in the story of my life as I described it, it was to bring into effect this vision of Israel, of a powerful state that has this tremendously creative economy, along with a powerful military, opening the door to peace with its neighbors, and also fighting what is a global threat. Iran, with nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach Canada and the United States and anywhere, is a threat to all of humanity.

Bibi: My Story

And by protecting Israel, by fending them off, I of course protect Israel, but I think we protect the larger international community. People appreciate that. That’s why I’m sitting with you a few days before I expect to go back into office, because we can have this free-ranging conversation now. I can talk about my book, which I unabashedly am trying to plug in this conversation, and I urge you to read it for two reasons.

One, as you say, to understand the better, the history of the Jewish state, the Jewish national movement, Zionism, that led it, the reality of the Middle East and how it’s changing, by the way, for the better, the threat of Iran, all of these things. And my contacts with the successive American presidents, who are very different from one another, and I’ve had to deal with quite a few of them, and it’s an interesting story. But I think beyond that, I think it’s to live a life of purpose.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay. Well, you had to be guided by and have faith in principles that were outside of short-term advantage in order to do what you did. And that’s the story that you lay out in your book, and that seems to be in accordance with the facts on the ground. When you, in your political experience, no doubt you’ve dealt with political leaders who have a vision and who are abiding by principles, and then you have dealt with political leaders who don’t.

And one of the questions I have for you as a consequence is, what is it that you think that the leaders who aren’t guided by principle and vision, what is it that they’re pursuing? And in your experience, is that more common on the political front than guidance by vision and principle?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: In general, yes, it’s more common. And that’s why people don’t have high respect for politicians. They speak of principle, but they’re usually interested in personal power. For me, power by itself is meaningless. Power for what? I mean, I can make a better living outside.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, that’s what I’m asking. Well, that’s exactly what I’m asking. I don’t really understand. I don’t understand the drive for power, so to speak, or authority or influence outside of the realm of guiding principle. Because if it’s just a shallow hedonism, let’s say, or a desire for acclaim, I would think also there’s easier and more productive ways of pursuing that.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I certainly agree with you. You’re right, because Israeli politics isn’t exactly a walk in the woods. I mean, or a rose garden. It’s very cruel. And my family and myself are subjected to incredible calumny and slanders and lies. It’s horrible. So unless you have an overriding purpose, there’s no point.

To come back twice from political death, to have been eulogized, usually unfavorably, you don’t come back for the perks of power, which are absurd anyway. I mean, anybody who can earn a living will do better than what heads of state get in the Western world. You know, they’re forced into a draco. It’s nothing. I mean, believe me, you get better accommodations when you’re in the private sector. So that’s not the reason.

For me, as I said, I’ve lived a life of purpose to revamp, to assure Israel’s permanence. My father and my grandfather worked very hard, labored very hard to assure that the Jewish people would come back, would have a state. And I worked very hard to assure that they’d keep a state and that that state would become a power among the nations.

By the way, the University of Pennsylvania has this annual poll in which they ask 17,000 opinion leaders in, I think, 20 countries to rank the powers of the world. In the decade that I led Israel between 2010 to 2020, Israel was consistently ranked, consistently ranked as the eighth power in the world.

Now, you’ve got to understand, we’re one tenth of one percent of the population of the world. You know, we’re going to reach 10 million soon. Ahead of us are countries with a billion people, hundreds of millions of people, tens of millions of people. And below is the same. But we stand out this tiny, tiny country. And the reason that’s so is because I put this vision that is my purpose in life into being. But it’s the jury is still out. It’s not that you can sit on your laurels. I can’t say, oh, well, and I’m coming back in. I’ve done it. I wrote my biography of my autobiography. That’s it. No, you have to constantly work at it.

You have to constantly increase, increase the economic power, increase the innovation, increase the circle of peace, expand it, block those who would trample us. And, you know, it’s not automatic. It’s not obvious that history will be kind to the good. It’s not true. History has been kind to the bad. History has been kind to the worst people. I mean, the Genghis Khan ruled a good chunk of the world for over a century and created horrible, terrible horrors.

The Roman Empire, you could judge it this way or that way, but they ruled through the force of arms and subjugation for hundreds of centuries. OK, the history, you know, Martin Luther King said the arc of history bends towards justice. Maybe so. But that arc is very brittle and it could be broken by the most, the darkest force.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Lots of variability.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Lots of variability. And right now the darkest force in our immediate vicinity is this horrible regime in Tehran, in Iran, that everybody can see its horrors, what it’s doing to those incredibly brave men and incredibly brave women who are dying on the streets there. And that, if I say that the arc of history will bend towards catastrophe, if these ayatollahs, these thugs, these theological thugs would have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to every part of the earth.

So I’ve made it my life’s mission, so far successful, to prevent them from having that. But it’s an ongoing thing. The jury is still out. There are many things. It’s not guaranteed.

The Abraham Accords, Obama

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Right. Well, part of the reason you were able to offer something attractive to the Arab countries with whom you signed a peace accord was because you had something to offer, as you mentioned before, in relationship to Iran.

And so let’s talk about the Abraham Accords a bit more now. You’re going to be moving back into office in the upcoming weeks in all likelihood. And you indicated your continuing interest, for obvious reasons, in expanding the Abraham Accords. And you mentioned Saudi Arabia. Can you explain a little bit about your vision of the most likely pathway forward on the Abraham Accords front? Are the Saudis next to sign, so to speak? Is that beckoning on the horizon?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I can’t speak for them, but the Saudis are tremendously important. I think it should be understood it’s not just another country that would be added to the roster of peace. This is by far the most significant and influential Arab country, although there are some remarkable examples of achievement in the United Arab Emirates and other places in the Arab world. But the Saudis undoubtedly are in a category of their own.

And yes, I would like to have peace with them, certainly begin with normalization. But you have to — the answer is, will they be there? First of all, where are they? That’s an interesting question. There’s no way that we would have been able to achieve the peace accords, the normalization accords with the Emirates and Bahrain without tacit Saudi approval. There’s also no way that we could fly above the skies of Saudi Arabia without Saudi approval.

There’s no way that I could speak the other day as I did when the election results were known with my Saudi friend, Mohammed Saud. He’s the, I call him the Likud branch manager. He speaks on Saudi internet. Okay. And he congratulates me and he says, Bibi, we’re for you. He speaks Hebrew, by the way. We’re for you. He visited Israel. There’s no way that this is done without approval.

Why did this change take place? And that could be an indication of where we go from here. The quantum leap in our relations with the Gulf states took place in 2015, when President Obama, when a joint session of Congress invited me to speak before it on the impending nuclear deal that President Obama was going to sign with Iran, even though I knew that I couldn’t reverse it, I couldn’t get two-thirds majority in the Congress to resist it, I thought I could get a majority to oppose it, and I did, consisting not only of Republicans, but quite a few Democrats.

But I knew I couldn’t get two-thirds. I can’t get two-thirds in our parliament. I certainly couldn’t get it in the American Congress. But I went to speak there. And I spoke, by the way, Jordan, I described the speech. I never prepared for a speech like this in my life. And I prepare my speeches right up to the podium. I change them on the podium. I’m a stickler for the precise words.

So, well, I came into, just as an aside, I came to Washington, and you’ll read this in the second part of the book, but I came to Washington to challenge a sitting president. It’s a very, very difficult thing to do. And even though, you know, Obama was the quintessential example of a leader who was there not for power itself, but for purpose. He had an ideology. It’s just that his ideology clashed with mine. He believed that, you know, peace will produce power. And I believe that power produces peace.

And if you ask me to do a peace treaty that will basically leave me shorn of my power, it won’t last for five minutes. So we had a difference of views. But it clashed, literally clashed, with the question of the Iran Accords, which I thought merely paved the way for Iran to become a military nuclear power which will threaten all of us.

So I, not light-headedly, but after considerable deliberation, went to Washington. Arrived in Washington the evening before. I’m going to go over the speech. And I try to practice the speech. And my sinuses are clogged. I have that condition. And I put more and more nose spray. And they’re getting clogged. They’re both clogged. And I try to practice the speech. And I’m stopped in mid-sentence. Every mid-sentence.

And I say to my wife, this is the worst thing that could happen. The most important speech of my life. And I’m stuck because of these horrible nose drops. And I fling them in the air. And they try to give me bowls of steam. They bring a medic. Nothing happens. She says, well, sleep it over. It’ll pass by morning.

Well, it didn’t, and I didn’t sleep a wink. I get up in the morning. We make our way towards the Capitol building. And I say, what? What in God’s name am I going to do? I mean, I can’t deliver a line of this speech.

And as we see the steps of the Capitol, lo and behold, like a Biblical miracle, the sinuses cleared. The waters receded. And I go in and I give the speech, which was very well received, very well received. And here’s what happened.

And this is the relationship to Abraham Accords. As I’m giving the speech in a joint session of Congress, my delegation receives calls in real time from these Arab states, some of them. And they say, we can’t believe what your prime minister is doing. He’s challenging a sitting American president, the most powerful man in the world. That led to clandestine meetings between me and these Arab leaders, and I won’t itemize where. They were in the Gulf. They were in the Red Sea. They were on a yacht. I landed in a helicopter on a yacht, if you can believe it. My security people said, that’s too dangerous. I said, skip it. We’re doing it.

And this led to the Abraham Accords that were later culminated with the help of President Trump, and he had an important role here. And I value and I appreciate that. I’ll never, never stop appreciating this because I think it was very important. But it took me a while to persuade him.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: He got very little credit for that, too, by the way.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, he got all the credit for me. But it took me three years to persuade him because he was going down the Palestinian rabbit hole. Ron Dermer, my ambassador to Washington, tried to say the difference between, he said, look, he said, getting a peace treaty with, I’m not a golf player. So he said, getting a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates is a 15-foot putt. Getting peace treaty with Saudi Arabia is a 30-foot putt. Getting a peace treaty with the Palestinians is a 150-foot putt through a brick wall.

So it took me about three years to persuade the president. What I said to him, and I also described this in my book, I said in the very first meeting I had with Trump in the White House as president, I said to him, Donald, there are four peace treaties waiting to be plucked, ripe, you know, plums ready to be plucked off the tree. And I itemized the country. And I suggested that he bring an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea, invite me and these Arab leaders there to discuss Iran’s security. I said, that will produce peace treaties right off the bat. And he didn’t buy it. He thought I was trying to evade the Palestinian track.

I said, okay, we’ll try the Palestinian track. And we worked on that. And, of course, we produced a template, which I think is very productive. But the Palestinians wouldn’t come, just as Arafat couldn’t make peace any more than he could fly to the moon. The president leadership can’t do it because they’d have to give up what is really guiding the Palestinian national movement, which is not to build a state, but to destroy one, the Jewish state. So that didn’t go anywhere.

And so we tried the other track, the track of peace through strength, the path of peace for peace, the peace for economy, peace for other things. And, boom, it exploded. Now, will Saudi Arabia be next? It’s up to them, of course. But I think that this will be a worthwhile goal for me, I believe, for the entire world. And I believe for the leaders of Saudi Arabia, it could be a tremendous, tremendous change.

Why has the process stalled with Biden?

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: So why do you think the Biden administration hasn’t jumped on the Saudi Arabia opportunity, especially given that the Biden administration and the Americans in general would have benefited from closer relations with the Saudis, given the current state of energy, what you say, uncertainty that plagues the United States and the rest of the world?

I mean, it just seemed to me that that, again, that was low-hanging fruit that was just ready to be plucked, because I knew that the Saudis, for example, were on board, at least tacitly, behind the scenes in relation to the Abraham Accords. And it seems obvious beyond belief that a Saudi-Israel peace accord would be a benefit, obviously, not only to the Saudis and the Israelis, but to everyone in the world, especially given the threat of Iran. So I don’t understand why this process has been stalled. And so what are your feelings about that?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Well, probably for two reasons. Of course, I’ll have an opportunity to speak to President Biden, who’s been a longtime friend. 40 years, we’ve known each other since we were both young men. I came to Washington as a diplomat, a young diplomat, and he came as a young senator. So I definitely intend to take it up with him.

I think there are two schools of thought that push back this obvious opportunity that you described. The first is the Palestinian straitjacket that says, and it still lingers among the foreign policy elites. I mean, they’ve been at it for decades. They can’t let it go. They say, well, now you have to. Peace means peace with the Palestinians. Peace in the Middle East is not in the Middle East. It’s peace in the tiny part of the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. But peace with the entire world, that’s not peace.

Or you can’t get to it before you get through the 150-foot putt through the iron wall, which means you’ll never get to it. That’s the lingering thing among the foreign policy elites. It may be changing because the Abraham Accords sort of started shaking people up to see that there are other opportunities, broader opportunities for peace than they ever imagined.

The second reason is that for Saudi Arabia, I think, making that transition requires continually habituating Saudi public opinion, but also conforming to the broader Saudi interest. There are two interests that Saudi Arabia has. It wants to modernize Saudi Arabia. There’s no question that the current leader, Mohammed bin Salman, wants to modernize Saudi Arabia, propel it to be an advanced country. It doesn’t mean democratic country, not in the way that we think, but look at the United Arab Emirates, or look at Singapore for that matter. They’re not exactly European-style, Luxembourg-style democracies, okay?

But they have degrees of freedom in the economy and the life of the people that is obviously very different from what you have in Iraq or Syria. It’s a different thing altogether, okay?

So I’m sure that they want to go there, that he would want to go there, but for the Saudi leadership to go there, they would have to, I think, be assured that their national interests, and especially their national security interests, are protected. And that requires a certain flexibility on the part of those who want them to take this move. I’m talking about the United States.

So it may be that there’s a lot more to discuss. I’m loathe to be more specific. I obviously have given this some thought, and I’d like to have a go at it, obviously, very soon, I hope.

DR JORDAN B PETERSON: Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

For Further Reading:

Israel In The End Times: Derek Prince (Transcript)

Israel, Russia, China, Iran: The World in Conflict: Walter Russell Mead (Transcript)

The Natural Order of Money: Roy Sebag (Transcript)

AI, Man & God: Prof. John Lennox (Full Transcript)

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