Ep 163 | The UNTOLD Story of Israel's Peace in the Middle East | PM Netanyahu | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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The news broke at dawn as the sun rose over Jerusalem.

Flags and banners shook in the air as crowds chanted about the return of the king.

This isn't a scene from the Bible.

It's a snapshot from last Wednesday when today's guest once again rose to power.

Israel has existed for 74 years, and he has ruled 15 of them.

He served as prime minister through three U.S.

presidents, Bill Clinton, Obama, Trump.

And now he will continue his lineage as Israel's longest-serving prime minister beginning in 1996 when he was 46 years old.

He was the youngest prime minister ever born in the state of Israel.

That's just one part of his incredible story, which he tells now in his autobiography, Bibi, My Story, which the economist called a fascinating study of power.

That is accurate.

The stories that are in the book and that you will hopefully hear today

will show you much, much more.

The man took breaks from his master program at MIT in order to conduct top-secret intelligence missions.

Somehow survived.

His story is nothing short of a political thriller.

It's a story of tragedy, faith, wisdom, and devotion.

devotion, most of all, to his people and his home Israel.

There are only about 9 million people in Israel.

It's a patch of land roughly the size of New Jersey.

Globally, there are only about 15 million Jews.

That 0.2% of the global population has changed the world.

It is hard to imagine a more embattled people.

Today's guest is devoted to protecting them.

His life's goal is to secure the life of the Jewish state and the future.

Please welcome one of my heroes and my friend Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Just text Glenn at 66866.

That's 66866.

Text Glenn.

Prime Minister, how good to see you again.

Hello, Glenn.

Good to see you, Glenn.

After all these years.

Yeah, I know.

And here you are on America's Biggest Anti-Semites podcast, as they usually call me.

Congratulations on becoming the Prime Minister.

And

it is

your career from start to finish, not just as Prime prime minister.

Your whole life has been remarkably lived.

Well, it's a life of purpose.

My purpose was to help secure the security, prosperity, and permanence of the one and the only Jewish state.

It's a hardware gift, a precious gift.

It's the realization of the dream of ages, the ingathering of the exiles.

But it's not guaranteed unless we guarantee it.

So I've devoted my life to doing just that.

Somebody asked you in 2011,

how you hope to be remembered.

And you said that I helped secure the life of the Jewish state and its future.

You're going to be remembered for much more than that.

But can you really secure

Israel without securing it as a Jewish state?

No, that's precisely the point.

You have to secure it as a Jewish state.

We didn't come.

Israel is in many ways like the United States.

It's a country based on an idea, on an ideal.

It's the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.

It's the dream of ages, as I call it, because

after we were exiled and left our land thousands of years ago, actually 1,500 years ago, if you want to be precise, when you cease to be a majority in our land, after the Arab conquest in the seventh century, we sought to return to our land and reestablish our independent life there.

And so for centuries, Jews could be anywhere.

They could be in a ghetto in Poland or a ghetto in Yemen or anywhere in the far-flung corners of the earth.

And they prayed next year in Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem.

And it took us almost two millennia to make our way back and reestablish our state, our united capital, Jerusalem, and

the rebirth of the Jewish people, the ingathering of the tribes and the wondrous country that we built.

But it is

one that is continuously challenged by those who want to extinguish the flame and want to annihilate us.

So, you know, we've learned through our torture and history that if somebody says, I'm going to annihilate you, you should believe them.

Isn't that a pretty good thing?

And take action.

Isn't that a pretty good rule of thumb?

I mean, I remember in 1989 pointing out Osama bin Laden to people and saying, he's threatening to kill people in the streets of New York.

I think we should just take him seriously.

If we're wrong, then great.

But

if he is serious,

won't we regret not taking him seriously?

Well, evidently.

But for us,

you know,

it's not exactly

an impossible thing to imagine, given that

Iran, for example, is trying to build atomic bombs with a means to deliver them to Israel.

And they say openly, we're going to destroy you.

by the way they chant death to israel and then uh simultaneously death to america because we're the little satan and you america are the great satan so i devote a good part of my book to my battle uh my diplomatic and political battle and some description not much but whatever i can officially say about the other operations that we did to roll back Iran's nuclear program.

I describe one such operation, which was made public by me because I thought it was important.

I sent the Mossad agents to the heart of Tehran to

break into the secret atomic archive that Tehran had.

And they brought back half a ton's worth of material.

They were given chase by Iran's secret police and thousands of Iranian policemen.

And if you saw the movie Argo, this is Argo on steroids, super steroids.

They made it out.

and this material enabled me to show the world that Iran was lying through its teeth when it said it wasn't seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

Of course it is.

And we have to do everything in our power to prevent it from getting them.

It seems as though there is a new evil.

You come from a family of Holocaust survivors, and

there is a new evil.

It's not new, but it seems to be rearing its head again.

And people are always surprised that, you know,

or saying how could you possibly say this about iran iran was named iran translation aryan

uh as kind of a gift to hitler was it not

well it had some common strands but iran has now been taken over by a gang basically a thuggery um

you know, these Ayatollah thugs who repress their people.

And you can see, I think, the nature of this regime has now been en masse for the entire world to see with the incredibly brave men and incredibly brave women of Iran who are taking to the streets to protest against the horrible suppression of rights.

So this is the regime that people were going to give a nuclear deal that would effectively give them.

pave their way with gold with hundreds of billions of dollars of gold by lifting sanctions to establish this nuclear arsenal and to propel their aggression far and wide.

That was a bad deal.

And I describe also in my book how I decided, because it was a threat to my country, to go to a joint session of Congress and challenge this deal, which was advanced by an American president.

I had no choice.

My country's survival would lie.

Let me get into the presidential section then, since you kind of brought us there.

You have served with Bill Clinton in office, Barack Obama was in office, Donald Trump.

You've known Joe Biden for a long time.

You wrote

when you

first met with President Obama, and you came, maybe not the first time you met him, but when you came here, you said

Obama said something out of character that shocked you deeply.

You write, the Prime Minister of Israel was being treated as a minor thug in the neighborhood.

You don't say what he said, but what did he say to you that made you feel mistreated and disrespected?

Well, say that for the sequel.

Was it something about, because I remember

you were kept waiting for him for a long time, which I thought was extraordinarily disrespectful.

I think you were referring to something into another meeting, but

no, this was an exchange where, you know, Obama, whom, by the way, I respected.

I thought he was actually a strong president.

He just had, he and I had differing convictions on two important matters.

One was the Palestinians, and the second was Iran.

And I think there was a larger philosophical difference between us.

He believed that peace brings power.

And I thought that power brings peace.

And in our area, it not only brings peace, it maintains it, because if you're not powerful, you'll be devoured soon enough.

So

Obama sought to make a deal with Iran that I thought would endanger Israel.

And therefore, I had no choice but to

go to the joint session of Congress at the time when he was president and speak out against the deal that I thought could jeopardize the existence of Israel.

I thought it was also endangering the United States.

But nevertheless, it wasn't an easy decision.

I describe how I took it.

I also had a terrible, this was the most important speech of my life, Glenn.

And in the evening, as I'm about to prepare for the speech, I land in Washington and I go to the Wheelard Hotel.

And I'm going to, you know, shape, you know, write the speech, or rather, edit it, give it a final edit, and practice it because you have to practice a speech.

You know, often I don't.

Often I

extemporize, but this wasn't the case.

Well,

I couldn't do it because my nose

was stuffed, my sinuses were stuffed.

And I was using these nose drops, this nose spray, and it just got worse.

And I said,

forgive me, God damn it.

You know, the most important speech of my life.

And I can't, I was choking in mid-sentence, every sentence.

Oh, man.

Every sentence.

So I said, that's it.

I'm gone.

Well, my wife Sarah said to me, you know, just go to sleep and then you'll wake up in the morning, it'll go away.

Well, it didn't go away.

And I didn't sleep awake even.

I get up in the morning, I shave, I'm completely stuffed, and I'm going, we're driving to the Capitol building where I'm going to give the speech, and I'm just sniffing away, sniffing away, and lo and behold, a miracle.

My sinus is cleared.

I go smiling into Speaker Boehner's office.

I give the speech.

It stayed clear for until the evening.

Then it got stuffed again.

So let's say that Providence was with me because it's very hard to give a speech if you can't breathe.

Yeah, and it was a very good speech.

Soon we're going to get into some of his military service and what really motivated him.

And it is a life where you just cannot assume that everything is going to go according to plan.

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You said in your book, I felt like a boxer after a bruising fight.

But then thinking about your father and grandfather, it

revived you.

What was that revelation or feeling that revived you?

Well, I thought of the distance that the great odyssey that our people made, because remember that a mere 75 years ago, the Jewish people were slaughtered.

I mean, a third of our people, six million Jews were slaughtered.

burnt at the stake, in the oven, so to speak.

Not in the oven, so to speak, in the ovens

of Auschwitz, in the ovens of the death camps, the Nazi death camps.

And we were, you know, like a wind-tossed leaf over the ages, having lost our the land of Israel, scattered among the nations, massacred repeatedly, exiled, pogromed, and finally

subjected to the Holocaust.

And so it wasn't clear that the Jewish people would survive.

Yet we had a few years later this.

fledgling state of Israel, tiny state.

You could fit it into, the width fits into the Washington beltway.

And yet, we had risen from the death, from the ashes, and we formed this incredibly potent and vibrant state.

And here I was now able to stand before the most important political forum in the world, which is the U.S.

Congress, and speak to the American people, speak to the world

as

a leader of a proud nation that seeks to defend itself by itself against those who once again wish to annihilate us.

And yet we are so much stronger,

so vibrant and so determined and so resolute.

That I was thinking about both the Jewish people, but also my grandfather, who was a rabbi, who went to what is now the land of Israel,

you know, 100 years ago after he had been beaten

as a Hasidic, as a Jew.

And he vowed that this cannot happen.

This cannot be the the tragic fate of the descendants of the brave Maccabees.

And he vowed that he would take his family, his young family to the land of Israel.

My father will work to establish the Jewish state and to agitate with American leaders such as General Eisenhower, whom he met,

argued that Israel should, they should recognize Israel because it would be the strongest ally of America in the Middle East and prevent Soviet domination.

This was unheard of.

Eisenhower asked him,

You're only, my father was a young man at the time, it was in his 30s.

And when he met Eisenhower, he was the head of the army right after the war, the Second World War.

He said, Well, you're only 600,000, you know, and your enemies outnumber you, you know,

by such a huge multiple.

How would you defend yourself?

How could you become the most powerful army and state in the Middle East?

And my father said to him, General, you've just seen in World War I and in World War II how we Jews fight for others.

Imagine how strong we'll be when we fight for ourselves.

And he was right, of course.

I thought about him and I thought of my brother who fell while leading perhaps the most

spectacular rescue operation in modern times, rescuing 103 Jewish hostages who were taken there by German and Palestinian terrorists into the heart of Africa and Menteby, Uganda.

I thought this was a vindication of the hopes of our people and frankly the hopes of my own family and the labor of my own family.

Because it's

not that the attacks on the Jews disappeared with the rise of Israel.

It's that Israel could now defend itself against those who wished to exterminate it.

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You were mentioning the birth of Israel, and

in my

study of the birth of Israel the State Department the US State Department wanted nothing to do with it in fact they threatened Truman I'm trying to remember Chaim his last name that Weichman what was it Weigzman yes Weitzmann

yes

and

Truman was convinced it was the right thing to do and the the

State Department threatened him.

We'll take you down if you do it and he did it anyway.

State Department was wrong then.

I think they've been wrong ever since.

But the same thing,

very similar, happened with Donald Trump, the State Department, and you.

I mean,

everyone said,

no,

you can't do it.

It'll be global war.

And no, you didn't.

No, you didn't.

I'm saying the State Department.

You're kind of playing the Feim Wiseman role here

as a well,

I'll tell you what happened.

The president,

first of all,

it's an absurdity.

I mean,

the president decided to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Now, if I told you that Washington is not the capital of America, you'd scoff at me.

Or if I said

to the British, that London is not the capital of Britain, they'd scoff at me.

And if I said the same thing to the French about Paris, they'd scoff at me.

And yet Jerusalem is a much older capital.

It was established as our capital by King David, for God's sake, 3,000 years ago.

3,000 years ago, 3,022 years ago.

He decided that it's our capital.

It's been our eternal capital ever since.

And yet, because of

Arab pressure over the years, over the decades,

governments refuse to admit this

inalienable historic facts.

It's also a modern fact.

That's where our parliament is, our Knesset.

That's where the prime minister's office is, the government offices are, the Supreme Court, and so on.

So, President Trump decided to put an end to that.

But before he did that, he was warned by the experts, the so-called experts, that this would entail terrible violence.

And

American embassies would be burned throughout the Middle East.

And so, I knew that

the American Defense Bureaucracy was asked to talk to their counterparts here, you know, in Israel,

and to see whether there is such a danger.

Well, I was heading over to a trip to Africa, and

I asked my national security advisor, when I learned that these calls would take place, I said, I know you prepared this trip.

I described this in my book, by the way.

I said, I know you worked hard for this African tour, very important one.

but I asked you now to

get off the plane, go to the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem, and talk to every one of the heads of our security services so that they tell their American counterparts exactly what they told me.

And what they told me was that there's no real danger inside.

Well, the president asked to talk to me directly, President Trump, and he asked, well, what do you think?

And I said, look,

I don't see it.

And my Intel guys tell me the same thing.

But I'll tell you, if there is a danger, it'll be directed first against us.

And we're willing to, you know, take the brunt of any attack.

But frankly, I just don't see it because I was giving him an honest answer.

Anyway, he decided luckily or gratefully that he would

declare Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

And of course, nothing of the kind that was described happened.

And then moved the embassy there.

And that was a very moving day because he punctured this myth and, frankly,

you know,

finally punctured this lie and just

did the simple thing.

It was a great moment.

I would have never thought, I mean, Reagan promised he was going to do that.

Every Republican president has promised they were going to do that.

I really didn't see Trump as the guy to do it, nor to make peace in the Middle East so much more of a reality.

How did this guy come about this?

And what role did you play

in putting these things

to rest?

I mean, honestly, it is like every common sense

American has said,

let's just do these things,

and it doesn't seem to be that hard, but the State Department and every president has made it so difficult.

Why Trump?

Well,

I think that it's because of his irreverence.

It's because he was willing to break away from accepted norms, although it took a while to persuade him as well.

And I'll tell you why it was difficult.

Because over the years, there's been this myth developed that you can't make peace with the Arab world unless you make peace with the Palestinians.

The problem with that is that the Palestinians don't want peace.

They don't even want a peace of Israel.

They want all of Israel.

They want to make peace.

They don't want a state next to Israel.

They want a state instead of Israel.

So if you keep waiting for them, we waited for a quarter of a century from the last two peace treaties, the first two peace treaties we had, one with Egypt and one with Jordan.

And for a quarter of a century, people said you can't make peace with the other Arab states

because you'd have to finish with the Palestinians first.

And if we went down that route, we'd wait another half century, you know.

No, I didn't.

I went directly to the Arab states.

uh and the reason i could get to them well before uh the abraham accords or even the trump presidency was because of and i'll tell you how it unfolded which again i described in detail in in the book it unfolded because of the rise of two powers the first power that rose arose was iran which was threatening the Arab countries as much as it was threatening Israel.

Perhaps not with annihilation in their case, but just the conquest.

In our case, it's annihilation.

But that's,

I would say, a good enough

meeting of interests.

Okay.

So they needed somebody to stand up to Iran.

The second thing is they also wanted to,

this was also coincided with the rise of Israeli power as Israel became a powerful country.

because I had led a free market revolution

in Israel and made it a jump.

I don't think most people know that you are the guy that really kind of brought the free market to Israel.

You changed the economy.

You changed everything in Israel, really.

Changed the landscape.

I'm sitting in my office in Tel Aviv.

When I took over as the head of the Likud and as prime minister shortly after, there were two high-rise buildings in Tel Aviv.

Now there's a forest.

Yeah.

It's become, we just passed the GDP per capita,

Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Germany.

But that was a free market revolution that required dozens and dozens of reforms.

But because Israel became more, Iran became more powerful, Israel became more powerful, more powerful economically, technologically, militarily, powerful with military and anti-terror intelligence, which we share.

first with the United States before any other country, but with many others.

So these Arab states said, you know, they began to look at Israel not as

their enemy, but as their indispensable ally, both as a bulwark against Iran, but also as a fountainhead of technology that could serve, civilian technology, that could serve their people.

So I went there, but when did the click happen?

It happened when I went to the U.S.

Congress to the joint session of Congress to challenge President Obama's policy.

And mind you, President Obama also assisted us with

military support, which

it happened later, and I was very grateful to that.

But on this, I had no choice but to challenge him.

While I was giving that speech,

there were calls from Arab leaders in the Gulf who said to my people, we cannot believe that your prime minister is doing what he's doing now.

that he's actually standing up to the president.

And that led to secret meetings in 2015,

subsequently to

overflights over Saudi Arabia

for Israelis.

Now hundreds of thousands have gone to Dubai and so on.

And this happens daily.

You can't add enough flights

to deal with the demand, and it's both ways.

But when President Trump came in,

I suggested to him that we have four peace treaties, I said, ready for the taking.

I suggested that he come with

an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea in the Middle East, invite me and the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates,

Morocco and others.

And I said there are four peace treaties to be had.

He wasn't convinced initially.

It took me a few years to convince him.

But once I did, we completed these peace deals, which we were working on secretly.

And then we had four peace treaties in four months.

And the American contribution contribution was essential.

The base, the foundation was made by, as I said, the rise of Israeli power and the secret diplomacy that preceded it for years.

But the American contribution was stellar and important to finish, seal the deal, if you will.

By the way,

more

will be coming.

I will tell you that this is,

you know, as I'm reading this in BB, I'm thinking that's not the story that that America got.

Well, it's the story.

I mean, I don't describe every clandestine that I had.

Right.

But what I'm telling you is that

I think it shows that when

an American president and an Israeli prime minister see eye to eye,

then sky's the limit.

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I know you are friends with, I mean,

you never speak ill of, or try not to, I've never heard you do it, of Republicans or Democrats.

You know, you stay out of American politics, et cetera, et cetera.

But you've known Joe Biden for a long time.

And

one of the first things he did was cancel the Iranian deal, which seems like total and complete madness.

What does he say about?

You mean the abrogation of the deal?

Yes, yes.

Yes.

Look, I think

there's a disagreement with successive administrations, beginning obviously with the Obama administration, that worked hard to achieve this deal, believing that it would somehow

domesticate this wild animal, Iran, this wild tiger.

And I argued in my speech before Congress that the opposite would happen.

You just pad them with billions of dollars and they just propagate more terror, more aggression.

And of course, it turned out exactly that way.

And yet there is a school of thought that says, well, you know, if we do this deal and we can get a delay of a few years or a commitment from Iran, which you'll violate anyway, and give them money in the process somehow they'll be lured into joining the family of nations.

And they weren't lured into joining the family of nations.

They just broke out of the cage and began to devour one nation after the other.

So

it's hard for me to understand how people fall into that trap.

But I think there's a change now

because of what has happened inside Iran.

I think that really put a break on the idea of making a deal.

Well, for the moment, I think it does.

And I certainly am going to pick that up with my meetings.

Right.

Well,

I'm, you know, we've never had, I don't think we've ever been weaker around the world than we are right now.

Our relationship with Saudi Arabia went south, I think, for the same, well, there's several reasons, but one of them is because there is great interest in keeping

Iran

on a leash,

not just Israel.

Yeah, well, I think, I hope people come around to understand that Iran is the enemy,

not only of Israel and the adjoining Arab states, but the principal enemy, a principal enemy of the United States.

For God's sake, they chant death to Israel, death to America.

Right.

We're the small Satan.

You're the great Satan.

Do you want these Ayatollahs who are

radically opposed to everything that our civilization stands for.

Do you want them to have nuclear-tipped missiles that could reach any city of the United States?

No.

Why?

Because they have

diplomats who fake it.

That's crazy.

I wouldn't do that.

And I think this is in a biding American interest as much as in Israeli interest.

Again, I think that this has been pushed aside for now, and it should be pushed aside permanently.

The only way you can stop Iran from becoming nuclear is through crippling economic sanctions coupled with a credible military threat.

If you don't have that, no deal that you sign, which they'll violate promptly, will make any difference.

Can we talk about Ukraine while we're here talking about war?

There seems to be an appetite for war among some,

and especially in Ukraine.

And while I think most Americans feel for the Ukrainian people

and know that Russia, what they did, was horrendous, came in, most likely committed some really bad war crimes, and none of that should stand.

But this could become a very frightening war quickly.

What are your thoughts on this?

What should Americans know about it that we might not see in our press?

Well, I think everybody sees that something could unravel.

And if it unravels, it could go to a place that could jeopardize the peace of the world in an unprecedented way, really, especially

the slippery slope of tactical nuclear weapons and so on.

So when the war began, which I thought was a tragedy,

I thought that the risk of

such a development was small.

That is, that it would not necessarily take on global consequences because of the

constriction of the supply of wheat, the hunger that that would cause protein shortages because animals eat wheat, you know, in one form or another.

And all that has happened and the economic consequences.

But I didn't think it would, that this risk was

realistic.

But,

you know, as the war progresses with all its horrors,

that horror

is not completely out of the question.

And I think that one of the things that I will look at once I get into office, which will will be in a few weeks.

So this is one of my last interviews on

the

you have a you have a law in Israel that as prime minister you can't write a book or sell a book, right?

Correct.

Yeah, so you

that was the advantage of the opposition.

Don't knock it.

I mean, I was given a free year to write my book.

That's right.

Very grateful to my political adversary for giving me this opportunity.

I also work less, you know.

Yeah.

But I worked hard hard to write the book while toppling this government yeah i wrote it in the most crazy places like endless budget uh deliberations in the knesset and i'm writing this book missing some votes in the process because i'm trying to edit what i wrote funny

but it happened but you know once i get in I will look into this issue very closely, not only on Israel's specific policy, but whether there is anything that can be done or that I could do to

bring an end to this horror.

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Russia has not been a friend to Israel, to say the least.

How concerned are you with the relationship of Russia and Turkey and now Iran?

It's not a good alliance.

It's not good that they band together, but Russia, you'd be surprised to hear, actually changed its relationship with us

in many ways for the better, because I remember still as a young soldier along the banks of the Suez Canal.

Our pilots,

when

we were in a war of attrition with Egypt at the time before the historic peace that Prime Minister Begin made with President Sadat of Egypt.

So we were fighting it out and our pilots shot Russian pilots out of the sky.

Their anti-aircraft batteries in Egypt shot Israeli pilots out of the sky and we were actually confronting military to military.

Now

our relationships had changed but with the

breakout of the Syrian civil war, which is right next to our border, our northern border, Russia sent its military forces there to buttress the regime of

Assad.

So did Iran.

Iran decided that they would use this opportunity to turn Syria into a second front, like Lebanon,

which is controlled by their proxy, Hezbollah.

They wanted to create another Lebanon in Syria and to emplace their 80,000 Shiite militia commanded by Iranian generals with lethal weapons right next to our door.

So I ordered the army to prevent that in every way.

And the way they prevented it was bombing Iranian military installations and Iranian forces and Iranian proxies.

And this required hundreds and hundreds of sorties, air sorties, over the skies of Syria.

Well, the problem was that our pilots were flying literally within spitting distance, I mean that, spitting distance, of Russian pilots.

And so we could have a repeat of what had happened

50 years earlier along the Suez Canal.

And so I made it a point of securing an understanding between Israel and Russia

that would

enable us to continue these sorties because Iran, because in Syria, effectively, Russia and Iran were competitors.

They weren't necessarily collaborators.

I got that freedom of action and maintained it and it's still important for us.

So we have a complex relationship a nuanced relationship with russia yet what i said before

the this

question of the possible unraveling of ukraine into a global catastrophe uh

is something that should occupy every leader and anybody who can contribute to preventing this or somehow ending this tragedy should do so

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Do you think that

how important is the most people don't know your background?

You were in the SAS, not the SAS.

What do you call your special forces?

Well,

it's a unit called Sayerat Matkal.

It's basically a combination.

How can I describe it?

It's a combination of,

I suppose, the SEALs, Delta Force,

the rage.

Very small unit.

Yeah, but very, very elite, one of the best in the world.

And you were a member of that.

And I don't think most people,

you talk about it in the book.

You talk about your brother.

Can you take us,

there's one point that you're

at the airport, you're about ready to go onto a plane to rescue hostages.

Can you just take us through that part of the book where, so people can understand

your background militarily?

Well, I joined the Special Forces Unit,

which

is a very tough unit.

I mean,

I think they value brains over brawn, but

they take a lot of effort on brawn.

So, you know, people get windowed away because it's very tough, very, very tough, but very smart, very smart.

And I joined this unit.

And

my brother had been, my older brother had been

a lieutenant in the paratroops in the Six-Day War.

He was already actually a veteran.

He was all of 21.

And

he went into the war.

I was still in high school then.

And he was wounded in the last three hours of the war.

And his elbow was shattered.

And when I visited him in the hospital, I was very, very glad because

I had always had a premonition that he would die in battle.

He's a very brave, inordinately brave,

just indescribably brave and

smart commander.

And here he was.

He was out of it.

His elbow was smashed.

He was

a war invalid, and he would never face the

death again on the battlefield.

So I was very happy.

And he went to Harvard to study

and came back a year later.

Even though he made the dean's list, he was an exceptionally able student.

And he decided, I have to be in Israel because the war of terror, including these battles along the Suez Canal, which I described.

were taking place and he said i have to be in israel while my friends who were not uh

war war disabled veterans were fighting in the reserves, the Israeli reserves, I have to be in Israel.

Okay, he was.

In the meantime, I joined the special unit.

And

I am asked by the commander of this unit, who was to die in another rescue attempt, hostages in a Tel Aviv beach years later, but he asked me.

to go to officer school.

And I said, I'm not going to officer school.

He said, why not?

I said, well, because Yale University, after I finished in American high school, Yale University accepted me three years in advance, something they never did.

Nobody ever did.

All these schools, even though I had very good grades, to put it mildly, but they wouldn't accept me.

They said, come back when you're free from the army.

And I said, well,

I'm going three years into the army.

Please accept me.

No, Yale did.

So I said to the commander of the unit, I'm going to Yale University.

That's what,

that's what, you know, this is whatever, 50 years ago, more.

And

he said, look, I'm telling you this.

You can go to a weekend pass,

but if you don't come back at the beginning of the week and tell me that you're going to officer school, I'm going to throw you out of the unit.

Well, that was a fate worse than death, you know?

Yeah.

And so I went over the weekend to Jerusalem and decided to consult with my older brother, you know, my disabled veteran brother, who was studying in the Hebrew University at the time, mathematics and philosophy.

So I said to him,

what should I do?

What do I do?

It's going to throw me out of the unit.

And he thought for a moment.

And he said,

tell him I'll go in your place.

And I said, you, you're old.

By the way, it was all of 23 at the time.

You're married.

And above all, you're a disabled veteran.

You're your elbow.

You

can't use your elbow fully.

And he said, just tell him to pull my file

from

Army Archives.

Well, I go back

Sunday, that's the beginning of our workday, go into the commander's office, and he says to me, so have you decided?

And I said, well, I'm not going, but my brother can come in my place.

Who's your brother?

I said, his name is Yoni, Jonathan.

Pull his file.

Take a look.

He did.

You saw that Yoni was the outstanding cadet in his officer's school.

He had unbelievable recommendations from his commanders.

And he said, okay, bring him over.

And he brought him over.

And now the problem they had was how do they get this disabled veteran through the medical examination in the induction day?

Well, somehow they found this immigrant doctor from France who didn't know Hebrew that well, and he thought that the word elbow and the word

joint is very similar, I think.

And he looked at Yoni's right knee for some reason, saw it was good, no problem, said, okay, you're in.

And that's how he became, he took the team that I was good to command in the unit and

he became a commander there.

And he was senior to me now.

A few, about half a year later, I did decide to go to

to officer school and sent an apology to Yale University.

I ultimately went to MIT, but I don't want to, you know, I couldn't go to New Haven for years because of that.

But

they were very kind to me, and I really appreciate it.

But

now we're both officers in the unit.

Yoni's a senior commander.

He's responsible for several teams.

And I'm the senior team commander.

And a Belgian airline.

en route to Tel Aviv is hijacked.

The hijackers land in Tel Aviv Airport and Ben-Gurion Airport, and they're going to blow up the plane unless Israel releases 300 terrorists to be flown to a country, an Arab country of their choice.

Hang on, this 1972, isn't that the same year of the Munich?

No,

that happened a year later.

A year later.

That happened a year later.

Okay.

So nobody ever stormed a hijack aircraft before.

As a senior team commander, I was allotted with a few soldiers of mine to

break through the wing.

We would be dressed along with altogether 16 unit soldiers dressed as mechanics.

The Moshe Dayan, who was the defense minister,

negotiated a fake negotiation with the terrorists.

We would prepare the plane for takeoff

and come and fix the plane, fix, fake fix, but fix the plane.

And we had to practice on a...

on a similar aircraft in a hangar in the airport.

We were given pistols.

We never used pistols.

We used Kalashnikov Assault rifles.

They were Uzi submachine guns, but we couldn't hide them in our boots.

And anyway, they would kill the passengers with their firepower.

So we stuck these Beretta pistols in our boots.

We're all ready to go on this baggage train of mechanics approaching the plane.

And just before we leave, my older brother Yoni

comes to me and he said, well, I'm going too.

And I said, well, you can't go.

He said, why not?

He said, because I'm going there with my soldiers.

And they're not your soldiers.

They're my direct soldiers under my direct command.

And he said,

so we'll both go.

And I said, Yoni,

think of mother and father.

I mean, what would happen if one of us, both of us got killed?

And he said,

He said something I'll never forget.

He said, baby, my life is my own and my death is my own.

And faced with this iron determination, we went in sharp disagreement to the unit commander.

He sided with me.

He only was left out because you wouldn't send two brothers into such close quarter fighting.

Anyway, I got wounded in this operation.

I describe it.

Some of it is actually quite funny.

But it wasn't funny when I was shot in fire and

it felt like a sledgehammer hit me.

And I was taken off the plane.

It took all of two minutes to kill the two

male terrorists

and

subdue the two women terrorists.

And the plane wasn't blown up.

We succeeded.

One woman passenger right where I broke into the plane was shot in the forehead and died by one of the terrorists.

And now I'm lying on the tarmac.

The medic gave me some

morphum to ease the pain,

and I see Yoni running towards me with a terrible look of distress on his face.

You know, he's just worried, terrible anxiety.

And as he gets closer, he looks, he hovers above me, and he sees this red splatter of blood on my shirt sleeve, the white overalls of the mechanics.

He sees this red splatter of blood.

This broad grin spreads on his face, and he said, See,

I told you you shouldn't go.

Your brother played a

he's a driving force in your life.

Oh, very much so.

And your

much of your determination.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Well, what happened was this was 1972, the Sabino airline rescue in Tel Aviv Airport.

I left the Army right afterwards and went to study

in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT.

And Yoni stayed on and became the commander of this special force unit.

And four years later in 1976, July 4th, 1976, the American Bicentennial, he led his soldiers into Entebbe Airport in the heart of Africa and Uganda and rescued

another plane.

and other hostages of a hijacked plane.

This time the terrorists thought, well, you know, we're safe.

We won't take it to Tel Aviv where Israel storms us.

We take it into, you know, thousands of miles away.

Israel can't do a damn thing about that.

Well, they were wrong.

So Yoni landed with his forces, his force in the dark of night,

killed the terrorists,

killed the Ugandan

soldiers who were supporting them, who were helping them.

destroyed the MiGs that could give chase to our aircraft going back to big fighter planes

that could give chase to the planes

where they were released hostages.

But unfortunately, in storming the terrorists, he was shot and killed.

And I thought at that point that

my life ended.

I went into, I don't know if I describe it in the book, but

I

went into kind of shock because I lost a sense of taste.

for a week.

This is the week of mourning that we have in Jewish tradition.

And I didn't know if I could live.

I didn't know

how I could live or whether I would live at all.

And yet

I describe in the book how I emerged from this inconsolable grief with my parents, who were incredibly courageous,

and my younger brother,

how we summoned our spiritual forces, our

the inner core core of our beings to

continue not merely to live, but to continue Yoni's battle against terrorism,

which I believe was not purely military.

I thought it was above all else civilizational.

That's how he saw it too.

The forces of light against the forces of darkness, the people, these

wild animals.

you know, prowling our airways, our waterways, our cities, blowing up children, blowing up anything in sight, erasing the basic distinction between combatants and non-combatants, which is at the heart of the laws of war, basically committing war crimes left and right.

And I thought that the way to fight that is to mobilize the free world to the battle not merely against the terrorists, but against the forces that stand behind them, which are sovereign,

dictatorial, and totalitarian states.

And so I was swept into that public policy battle and from there into politics, into diplomacy.

I was asked to serve in Israel's embassy in Washington and then into politics itself.

And that, I suppose, Yoni's sacrifice and heroism has always

been before my mind,

before my eyes, and will continue to be so until my very last moment.

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Well, I tell you,

you have gone on to inspire a great deal of people, including me.

I have lots of friends that have

dual citizenships in many countries.

And if things get tough, and

I've said, and I can't get one to Israel, but I've often said, if I was going to have a dual citizenship, I would

only be a citizen of the United States and Israel because

only you're welcome to try.

I think I've tried, I think, a few years ago.

Why do you say that?

I say that because the people of Israel will stand.

You know,

you know who you are.

You know who you face, what you face, and you will stand.

And I don't want to, you know,

in difficult times, I don't want to go out sitting on my hands.

I want to go with people who are standing.

And whether that's literally fighting or fighting with words, I just have so admired you and the people of Israel

for the courage that you have always shown.

I'm a very big fan of yours, as you know.

Well, it's very kind to hear that.

And I'm

genuinely moved by that.

I have to say that I was

also deeply moved by the support of millions of people around the world,

including including Christian Zionists, evangelicals,

people, but also secular people who

see,

as you do,

in Israel, a parable for all humanity, you know, because if we could overcome

the horrible tragedies, catastrophes that

the Jewish people had to ford from

you know, from virtual annihilation to salvation, ford that raging river and and create this vibrant, successful, modern, powerful state,

then maybe that says to

all people everywhere that you can overcome the most dreadful odds, however threatening, however seemingly overwhelming, if you have enough resolution and enough courage and conviction.

You,

and I'm just with that being said, you are a great friend to Christians, and hopefully someday the story will be allowed to be told.

But

I know some things that you have been directly involved with in

Christians who are in need and in trouble around the world.

And

thank you for that.

Thank you.

Can I take you back to America here for just a second in our last couple of minutes?

People don't seem to know what an anti-Semite is.

And

we are having this discussion now here in America

where

it's just being thrown around everywhere.

And I think I know what an anti-Semite is.

We have Kyrie Irving, we have Kanye West that has just been

banned from absolutely everything.

Can you describe

what an anti-Semite really is and

how you define it?

Well, I think it's the opposition to Jews, period, regardless, as a collective body and desire to do away with the Jewish people.

That's, you know, the culmination of that is obviously Hitler, but

there have been smaller Hitlers in history who They don't care about individual Jews.

They don't differentiate.

I always say, you know, for the capitalists, the Jews were communists.

For the communists in Soviet Russia, the Jews were capitalists.

So you have a problem.

You blame the Jews categorically, which is absurd.

You wouldn't do that with any group.

Anti-Semites are just anti-Jews.

But you can be anti-Chinese or you can be anti-another group.

And you'd give it, it just happens to be a definition of the complete negation.

of the Jewish people, per se.

That's it, or whatever they are.

But I would say that anti-Semitism today has taken on a pernicious new form because, you know, it's not fashionable to say you're an anti-Semite.

So you say, well, I'm anti-Zionist.

You don't even say I'm anti-Israel.

You say I'm anti-Zionist.

Well, I'm not against the Jews.

I just don't think they should have a state of their own.

It's like, I'm not anti-American.

I just don't think they should be an American.

If you know anything about Israel, the point of Israel is so they can live.

So you can just live.

That's right.

And that's actually very, very telling.

It's a very perceptive observation because

the real purpose of the Jewish state is, first of all, to defend the lives of Jews who are subjected to this unforgiving and undiscerning hate.

I mean, people were, the Jews were, you know, kicked around and blamed for, I don't know, for any

cholera death, black death in the Middle Ages,

inflation, Jews,

war, Jews, and so so on.

And so we paid a horrendous price of massacres and displacements and exiles and pogroms and murder and ultimately Holocaust.

And, you know, if Israel wasn't strong, we'd have been destroyed, you know, many times over.

And so I think one of the things that Israel,

that the Jewish people rediscovered in Israel, was the ability to defend themselves.

And effectively, what I describe in the book is my quest and my own vision of how to give Israel the power, that power that turned it into, even though we're, you should know, I mean, people are amazed by this, we're one-tenth of 1% of the world's population.

But the University of Pennsylvania does an annual survey of 17,000 opinion leaders in 20 countries.

And Israel is consistently ranked as the world's eighth most powerful country.

Now, ahead of us are countries with a billion people, hundreds of millions of people, obviously.

And behind us, the same thing.

And yet, how do we achieve that?

Well,

I'd give you the simple answer and then the more complex one.

The simple answer is that we had to transform it

into a powerful military country.

But to do that, you have to transform it into a powerful economic country because F-35s and drones and tanks and intel cost a lot of money.

Well, where are you going to get the money?

We were a socialist state, semi-socialist state, and I led a free market revolution, which I described in the book, to make Israel

one of the wealthiest countries in the world today per capita.

We've just crossed,

as I think I said,

Japan, Britain, France, and Germany just recently,

because that's what capitalism and technology do when we wed them together.

So

here's the crazy part, though.

You bring capitalism in, you bring finance in, and you become successful, and suddenly you're successful because you're Jews.

It's this never-ending circle that you can't seem to get out of.

Well, the capitalism that I brought in, I very much learned during my high school years in America, as I studied and later in my years at MIT, as I could see the...

the tremendous inflorescence, the tremendous rise of high tech in America's free market system.

So I actually imported, as I was accused by my socialist friends, I was importing American methods into Israel and we did that.

But having had now the economic base, we made the military much stronger and military intelligence and cyber much stronger.

And that gave us diplomatic power.

Economic and military power gave us tremendous diplomatic power, which ultimately gave us this ability to reach out to our Arab neighbors and forge these historic breakthroughs for peace.

But if you ask me what is the explanation for this tiny country, one-tenth of one percent in the world rising to be a power among the nations, I would say that there has to be another component in that.

And you touched on it,

and I'll say it directly, not obliquely, it's It's the element of faith.

You

have to believe, because if you don't have a binding credo,

you know, the strongest countries collapse.

The Soviet Union collapsed when it stopped believing in communism.

And I think that in the case of America and Israel, we were both founded on an ideal.

Our ideal was to return to the promised land.

Your ideal was to create the new promised land of liberty.

And as long as the ideals hold, you have the most important

element.

we are i don't know

i don't know the last time you've been here but we are on the ropes on that it is we are

being

beaten down it's a challenge for all

it's a challenge for all of us i think i think america has been a gift to the world because i saw the 20th century in the first half what happened to the world when america wasn't leading the world and we had and

The world went through a terrible paroxysm, a terrible tragedy, two tragedies,

including the destruction of a third of my people.

But in the second half of the 20th century, America did become the leading power, the superpower of the world.

And I think this was a boon not only for Israel, but a boon for free societies everywhere and for the hope of freedom everywhere.

So I fervently hope that America will retain.

this leadership position.

And believe me, there are many people around the world who hope that

I wouldn't sell short America.

I know you have your internal conflicts.

All democracies do.

There's often polarization.

But I think the question is: do you

coalesce?

Not everything.

You always have fringe groups, radical groups.

We have them in Israel too.

But do you coalesce as a society after the dust of battle, political battle, settles?

Do you coalesce around

the basic values that guide your society.

And I fervently hope that you do.

Yeah, so do I.

Sir, it is always a good time to talk to you.

I'm thrilled that you're back as Prime Minister.

You really, truly give me hope.

When you were gone and Trump was not there, I thought, where is Churchill?

Because I've looked at you as today's Churchill oftentimes.

Thank you for your leadership and thanks for your time.

You're very kind.

I have to say, a lot of people are smiling in Israel and around the world, and they're smiling while I

am the horse that has to push, pull the plow.

So keep smiling.

Keep pushing.

Thank you.

I appreciate it very much.

Thank you.

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