From the Sea of Galilee: Iddo Netanyahu on Israeli Politics

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Hello, this is Victor Hansen for the Victor Davis-Hansen podcast.

Sammy Wink and Jack Fowler aren't with me today, but we have a special guest, Ido Netanyahu,

the well-known Israeli author, playwright, and columnist, also doing radio commentary.

He's a radiologist by training, but he's a polymath, and he's a public intellectual, both in the United States, but specifically in his native born Israel.

And of course, that name may sound familiar.

to you.

He's the brother of the war hero and now deceased, Yonatan Yoni Netanyahu and the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the son of the famous and probably greatest historian of the Spanish Inquisition and the Jewish diaspora that resulted from it, Benazan Netanyahu.

We'll be right back.

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And we're back.

I'd like to introduce everybody.

Ido, how are you?

You're speaking to me from where now?

Speaking from my home in a village called Kinneret, which is by the Sea of Galilee.

We moved here about two years ago and are very happy.

We loved Jerusalem, not we didn't like Jerusalem, but this is

even better.

Yes,

it's a beautiful home.

My wife and I, Jennifer, had

dinner.

You were very hospitable, you and your wife, Daphne.

Just ask, I think everybody might want to know.

So you were by training a radiologist,

your degree from Hebrew University, but you were at Mount Sinai in New York.

How long did you practice radiology in the United States?

States?

Well, in the United States, I did my residency training and fellowship, and then I moved back to Israel.

And then

because the reason I went into radiology is actually because I wanted to give myself a lot of free time in order to write.

So towards the end of medical school, this actually happened after my brother Jonathan was killed.

Yes.

Rescued to Entebbe.

I took a year off and

I thought, well, should I continue medicine or not?

And then I started writing and I liked doing it.

I thought it was stimulating.

And so then, when I decided on

what profession in medicine to

work in, I decided on radiology because I felt that would give me the most free time in order to pursue my writing.

And that worked out pretty well, you thought?

That's indeed what happened.

So

ever since then, I've been working

part-time after my training and quite often in America, going back and forth.

And now

I do

some radiology, but I do it from home by teleradiology.

And I devote most of my time to writing.

I recently have become a columnist.

I mean,

I guess

I felt that I had to pitch in various

issues that were

involving the country and actually

refrained for many years from appearing in public, but

when the sole sham of

litigation against accusations against Bibi about supposed bribery and nonsense like that, everything is now unraveling with the court.

I felt that I had to start appearing and discussing it and talking about it and attacking the prosecution for going after him

as an attempt to, of course, unseat him.

That's what was being done.

Let's

just after this brief introduction, let's go right to one topic, then maybe we can get back to

this persecution of Bibi that didn't work, obviously.

But here in the United States, all of these protests that there's a radical change in the Supreme Court, that the Netanyahu government is trying to rein in.

But for us who have a written constitution, and you're more like the British, correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't have a written

constitution, is the Supreme Court's authority vis-a-vis the tripart system of government the executive is it fluid and has it expanded out of control and is this kind of a return to normality that uh bb is trying to do if which point i don't think we understand it here

i know because it's not presented in a proper way that's uh you have the press that's yeah

erroneous way no what's of course the supreme court for the last I would say 25 years, almost 30 years, has

took on powers for itself that were not delegated by any law of parliament, of the Israeli Knesset.

It just unilaterally decided to take on more and more and more power to

an unheard of degree in any Western democracy.

It just does not exist.

I'll give you a few examples.

I mean, for instance, first of all, they canceled the rule of standing.

That is, there are no limitations to who can petition the court, anybody.

You don't have to be an involved side to petition the court against a government decision.

What happened is, of course, that a plethora of NGOs appeared, all on the left, and started petitioning the Supreme Court about every government decision that they did not like

and also every law that they did not like.

And so the Supreme Court is involved for most of its

time,

is involved in handling these petitions, which often it actually behind the scenes, of course, it

when he asked you, because Americans are going to say, well, wait, wait, wait.

Don't you have federal district courts and then federal appellate courts?

And then it has to work its way up.

You can't go right to the Supreme Court directly, can you?

Can you?

No.

On this matter, you go straight to the Supreme Court.

It's the first and only.

Yes, it's unbelievable.

How many Supreme Court justices are there?

Is that a static number over the years, or is that

as well?

Yeah, it's been 15, and that's not enough in order to handle the number of cases that are being, but what's happened is that the criminal cases, other cases are just put on the backstand because they're involving themselves in politics.

Now,

what this means when they're petitioning is that the court, since everything

can be petitioned to the Supreme Court,

then the Supreme Court is being petitioned about politics.

It's involving itself in Israeli politics from A to Z on everything.

And so the Supreme Court then decides, recently recently, it decided, I mean, this is unheard of in any democracy.

It decided that one of the ministers that Bibi appointed as minister in his government,

it was petitioned to cancel that appointment.

This was done in order to try to,

for somehow, the court, the coalition to dissolve.

And so that was petitioned, and the court said, yes, he was appointed as minister legally.

That's true.

But we think this is an unreasonable decision to appoint him as minister, and therefore you have to make him resign.

Does a Knesset doesn't in the United States,

the Knesset would have that power, right?

But it doesn't anymore.

Of course, no.

They take away power both from the government and the Knesset.

They decide on everything and anything.

Who appoints the justices?

Well, that's the problem.

They appointed themselves.

What do you mean they appoint themselves?

How's that possible?

It's possible because this is how it's been.

It was a self-propatriating club and it became more and more leftist with time.

And they appoint people of similar ilk.

Right now, the rules were changed a little bit a few years ago, but they still have the judges have veto power.

Okay.

Are you trying to tell me that 15 judges sit down and when one retires or dies, the other 15 select them?

Yes.

No, well, not the other 15.

There's a committee of selection.

A judicial committee.

Who appoints a judicial committee?

Well, it's three judges of the Supreme Court.

The three are appointed by the head of the Supreme Court.

And then there are two members of the Israeli bar who always go with the judges.

But you have no input from the Knesset or the Prime Minister?

Yes.

There's one from the coalition and one from the opposition, and there's one from appointed by the government.

That's all.

That's wow.

That's incredible.

And in order to appoint a Supreme Court judge,

you need 70%.

So that means they have total veto power over any new Supreme Court justice.

And indeed, they have a majority for any of all the other justices.

Their simple majority will do.

And so they, in effect, have a majority.

And so they appoint all the judges in Israel, of all courts in Israel.

So you can understand, first of all, the Supreme Court has become a self-propriating club.

of people on the left, some of them are on the radical left.

Here and there, you have, of course, a token right-winger, but it's meaningless almost.

And so,

and by the way, all the

deliberations of the committee are

behind closed doors.

It's not open to the public.

What is your checks and balance?

So, in the United States, if you're

the judicial is one of the three branches of government, so the way our system works, the president nominates, but that has to be approved by, it used to be two-thirds of the Senate.

And then we had this nuclear option where you only need 50

votes in the Senate.

And then the Supreme Court can get back at the executive by ruling an executive order

unconstitutional.

And then the Supreme Court tries the president if he's impeached successfully.

And then they conduct the trial.

And then the legislative branch

then,

if the Supreme Court rules something is unconstitutional, they can override that and pass another law.

Not that it won't be declared again, but they can then, in reaction to that, pass a law on their own.

Or they can issue,

we've never done it, but they can impeach a Supreme Court justice as just as they do a president and then try him in the Senate.

So there's all these checks and balances.

Do you have any of those?

No.

No.

There's no check on their power?

No, there is.

That's the pendulum is tilted totally towards the, in effect, the Supreme Court also through the attorney general which who is beholden to them basically are the ultimate rulers of the country.

Doesn't the attorney general work for the power the political power and nope

is also appointed by committee?

There's no

BB doesn't have a Department of Justice

No, he does not control the Department of Justice Department of Justice is one thing attorney general is a separate body and he's appointed by committee and he's beholden to the Supreme Court, and he's beholden to the public.

So,

why don't you just give us an example?

So, what is when he was confronted with this?

And given that they hounded him in a sort of a, I don't know, an Orwellian

manner to go after him.

So, he's now in power.

His team is in power.

And what are the measures they're doing to try to bring normality back to our

Israeli judicial system into something similar to what was in existence for the first 40 years of the country, more than 40 years of the country, until the mid-90s.

So that

before the court uniaru took upon itself various powers, including the lack of limitation to standing, including the

fact that they can also declare laws illegal.

That is, they can cancel laws that they are

now to you it might sound reasonable, but it's not because Israel has no constitution.

And so, at one point in time in the mid-90s, this was all done through a very activist Supreme Court justice called Aon Barak.

He took activism to the

nth degree and to such a manner that it's unheard of in any court of law, in any Supreme Court in any country.

And he declared, he decided unilaterally that we have something called basic laws.

They're called basic laws for various reasons, it doesn't matter.

And he decided that this one of the basic laws allows him, even though it doesn't say it, allows him to declare a law

illegal.

That is, I don't accept this law.

And they've been using that in order to unilaterally, even though there's no such ruling by the member of parliament, to decide whatever laws are not,

should be cancelled.

Now, they've canceled maybe 21 laws, but more than that, they also decided unilaterally that the government has to abide by the decisions of the Attorney General.

And so

the Attorney General, who is beholden to them, when the government or the parliament wants to pass a certain law, the Attorney General gives an opinion.

This is not behind closed doors.

He does it openly in the press.

Says, well, I don't think this law will pass the Supreme Court.

And so there are many, many laws that are not passed because the Attorney General holds this kind of power.

When they declare a law invalid or they nullify a law, what canon of jurisprudence do they do?

In our case, we look at the Constitution and then a liberal judge says, you know, this is what the Constitution really could have, sort of, might have meant.

And a conservative judge says, no, this is what it actually says.

But they at least they agree on one small item, and that is they have a written constitution as a form of reference.

So what do the judges use as the criterion to reject?

They use the criterion as a basic law.

Now, what's happening recently is that they also declared that they can also

invalidate the basic laws.

They haven't done it yet, but they're threatening to do it, especially regarding the reform, the judicial reform that hopefully will pass.

Are these laws defined by jurisprudence or

were they passed by the Knesset and signed by the MIMS?

Passed by the Knesset in a simple majority.

The main law, the basic law that they're using to invalidate laws, was passed by only

the majority of the, because it was midnight session, and it was passed, I think, 32 to 22.

There was not even

a majority of parliament members present at that time.

It was a plurality.

And this is what they, but then they say,

well, our right derives from the basic laws.

But now they say that they can also unilaterally declare the basic laws invalid.

Let me ask you at this point.

So all of this judicial

runaway power or overreach, what do you think

prompts it?

What part of Bibi's legislation?

Is it foreign policy?

Is it opening up as he did before in 2006 and deregulating the economy?

Is it cultural?

Is it all of it?

When they see that and they want to expand their powers into new territories and they're doing doing it against him.

What areas are they trying to focus on?

Or is it just a scattershot everything he does?

No, not everything he does.

If they agree with something that he might do in an economy, they don't bother with it.

They actually can say, well, we're not touching this, you know, when somebody petitions.

But they do deliberate on whatever they want to deliberate on.

and it can do with you know what when we develop the gas fields or try to develop the gas fields of the Mediterranean, which is a boon to our economy.

And our oil prices are very low compared to Europe.

I mean,

had we not developed these

oil fields, we would have been in dire straits.

Well, you know,

the left was against developing oil for various reasons I won't go into.

And the Supreme Court then decided that the government

the deal that they struck with one of the oil companies to develop one of the major fields,

While it's legal, it's unreasonable.

They also use the criterion of unreasonableness, which also has nothing to do with law.

Because the government wanted to make a 20-year deal and they said, no, you can't.

It's unreasonable that the government will agree to 20 years.

Well, what oil company would agree to less time?

Okay, they're putting in billions and billions of dollars to develop this oil field.

And

somehow, Bibi and the Minister of Energy convinced the oil company to continue, even though it was only a matter of much less than years, I forget what it was, that they allowed.

I mean,

they could have

prevented, almost tried, almost succeeded in preventing, because they were sure that the fields would not develop if they strike down the 20-year

agreement.

So they almost prevented that.

They go into everything.

I mean, when

they had a situation where the Supreme Court was so egregious and said

this law is invalid or this area in this law or not you cannot do, then that there was a pushback?

And if there is a pushback against a ruling, who's the ultimate R-biter?

Well,

that's the constitutional question that might come into play once they pass this new reform of the legislation.

Until now,

the government and parliament decided not not to just to obey the rulings of the Supreme Court in order not to reach this constitutional crisis.

Because

don't forget that Israel, the Israeli government is composed of a coalition.

Yes.

It's always a shaky coalition.

Until now, now it's the only time there's a firm coalition that is

willing to tackle for the first time the

power of the Supreme Court.

People felt that, okay, well, time after time and again, we elect a right-wing government, but we get

left-wing agenda.

Yeah, because it's same here.

We call it the deep state, it's different, but we call it the deep state.

That no matter what we do, there's a permanent bureaucracy that has judicial, executive, and legislative power all in one person.

Yep.

Well, here it's compounded because here it's there's also the deep state, of course.

And in point of fact, you have Bibi going into court and being accused of criminality.

That's pure deep deep state.

Luckily, luckily.

What is the politics breakdown?

So, when we hear in the United States, and if anybody's listening, and many of our thousands of listeners don't read the New York Times or the Washington Post, so

we don't get an accurate view.

Once in a while, Real Clear Politics, I think, had an essay.

Peter Berkowitz had a so-so essay on it.

But

how does it break down politically?

Is it just simply left-right there?

And when you see these protests, these are leftists that feel they lost the election.

They don't have power,

and they don't want to give up their final chance to have unelected power because their agenda doesn't appeal to the majority of the people, and this is the one way they can still exercise it.

I would say it's not only one way, it's the way in which they have been exercising power all these years.

What happened is that in 1977,

Begin came to power.

By the way, I remember just before he came to to power, the same

sort of accusations were hurled that he's going to be a dictator, that he's a fascist, that he will destroy democracy.

It's the exact same thing that you hear now.

Yeah.

After hearing it.

No difference.

Yeah, of course.

They're actually copying the playbook of the post-Trump, the first Trump election, and everything was in their hope to create this sort of mass,

I would say, even violent.

Some of them, anarchists, want to create violence and to bring the government down.

I would say it's composed, those are protesting composed of three basic groups.

Those who do not want to lose their hold on the functioning machinery of the state, both the political, cultural, everything.

It's more than the deep state in America.

They really control everything, whether it's the theater, whether it's

committees that decide which movies will get

funded or not, and of course,

many other things to do with the

economical power.

That's sort of the elite that do not want to lose their control.

And they're also mostly on the left want a leftist agenda of some of this one sort or another.

Even though even the left now is not even talking about peace with the Palestinians because, you know, after you get struck on the head so many times, they themselves realize it.

that or they realize that this is going to go nowhere for the time being or they realize at least that

the population

understands it will go nowhere, and so they don't want to create

trouble for themselves.

What's your gauge of political opinion?

Have there been polls in Israel that poll the election?

We just had an election.

We just had an election

in November 1, and that election was very clear, very much.

And that issue was part of the campaign.

The main issue was the political, was the judicial problem so you could make the art bb has the people behind him absolutely and obviously not the press or the media though am i right about that

obviously not yeah look what happened is that because of the trial

things that have been coming out from the trial of the various uh doings of the the attorney general and of the prosecution and of the police and how they got witnesses to testify falsely.

These things have been coming out every day.

Every prosecution witness so far has become a de facto witness for the defense.

I mean, unheard of things that

you would think that this does not belong to a normal country, a democracy.

It's

not in a journal.

As you know, here, this is very eerie because here,

after the Mueller investigation folded, And then we learned that the FBI had altered a document, for example, Kevin Kleinsmith, and then we found out that it wasn't that the steel dossier was

unreliable, but it was completely

fabulous.

There was nothing, a fable.

There was nothing there at all.

Then we had the laptop that the FBI suppressed for a year right on the eve of the election and

50 intelligence operatives that were retired under.

Sounds familiar.

What can I tell you?

Yeah, Brunt.

But the point,

it seems,

it seems, and then, of course, they went after Trump.

and now we're learning even more about the January 6th.

Not that anybody supported the break into the Capitol, but we're learning things that nobody had learned about, that there was videotape that was not released.

There was nobody armed in the Capitol, as people had alleged.

Officer Sicknick did not die.

I could go on and on.

But what I'm getting at is

what is it

about the international leftist Western

movement or the mentality or the ideology because it's so that

they feel they're almost so morally superior that any means necessary to advance this agenda is justified because they're better than we are.

But it's so eerie.

It's almost as if our luxury and our affluence that capitalism and constitutional government create, they Xerox this mentality.

You see it to the most extreme degree in Europe, but then in the bi-coastal elite in the United States.

And then you would think that Israel would be a special case because you're under an existential threat daily and you could ill afford this

bothersome luxury of suicidal impulses that we contain

because we're.

But what's happened is that because the economy has become so strong thanks to the reforms that my brother instituted many years ago,

we've become

per capita GDP has just surpassed Germany, you know,

and we will become one of the richest nations in the world with time, it's just a matter of time, and so

as a result of that, we of course, you know,

you as a as a of course historian of the of the of the war, of the what is it called?

I'm sorry,

historian of the

warfare.

Yes,

understand the importance of

machinery and

everything that to do.

That costs a lot of money.

Yes.

The machinery of war, we've become so strong because we can afford it.

It's very simple.

And so, except for the problem of Iran,

everything has been put on the backburn.

We don't feel threatened anymore to our existence by the Arab countries.

That's gone by the wayside.

Yes.

The Palestinians are a problem, but it's not really a military problem.

It's more a terrorism problem.

The only thing that remains remains is Iran, and that's sort of a okay, looming danger out there.

Of course, nuclear bomb, that's you don't want to ever get.

But because the immediate threat, except for Iran, which is the ultimate threat, has sort of gone by the wayside, they allow themselves, of course, to

do whatever they want right now.

It seems like there's some urgency to get the matter settled because while there's not an existential threat now, as you point out,

the Iranian danger and and then the fallout from the Ukrainian war and

whether or not it would be nice to see these moderate Arab countries join the protocols of the Abrams.

All of these

would require, I mean, it would be,

if these reforms passed, they would give BB a lot more, what would be the word, operational laxity or control to deal with these things, wouldn't they?

Or does it not affect foreign policy?

No, foreign policy, I would say, is not affected by the Supreme Court so far.

Who knows what they might do?

But that's more or less the only thing that they don't intervene in.

They intervene in everything else.

I won't give you all these examples because

you'll think I'm exaggerating.

You'll think I'm making it up.

But what you mentioned, of course, is the end justifies the means.

To the left, it's always been that way.

The end justifies the means.

And this is what they're doing here, and this is what they're doing in America and probably in Europe.

I'm not an expert in Europe.

But it's, by the way, it's not only the elite that are

behind these demonstrations with a lot of money, but also, of course, anarchists who want to topple the government.

And also, and most of the people demonstrate are just naive citizens who indeed believe what the press says, that democracy is in danger, and that in two, three months there will be here a dictatorship.

They believe it.

Well,

this is ridiculous.

Everybody, we're going to take a little break and hear from some people, and then we'll be right back.

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And we're back now with Ido Netanyahu, and we're talking about a lot of domestic politics in Israel, specifically this, for us Americans, this bizarre nature of Supreme Court power that seems to override executive and legislative consensual government in Israel and the effect it's had in trying to really destroy Benjamin Netanyahu, through, I would guess you'd call him here, bogused or false judicial writs, et cetera, and which all failed.

And now he is prime minister with a strong

majority.

I would say that as a result of the trial, what has been revealed in the trial, not with the mainstream press they actually stopped sending the reporters because god forbid they start to report on what's happening in the trial but it's been filtering to the public through the internet you know as usual and as a result of that people became aware of the grave problem to do with the whole judicial system you think it helped you think it helped bib's political uh

able his ability to get a coalition and the knesset this the egregious overreach of the the courts in in the last elections before that well, you know, he's being accused of bribery, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so he lost, of course, he lost support, which is why there was a standstill for two or three years.

A lot of the standstill was had to do, by the way, with the Supreme Court annulling one of the laws of the parliament, but we won't get into that.

With regards to Iran, I can only tell you that

although the other,

what are the parties that are now in opposition opposed Bibi's approach to Iran

when Obama was president, and they criticized it very much.

In truth, they are now all behind doing something with Iran.

And that's the honest truth.

And they no longer are against a military option if such an option has to be.

I think the Iran deal is dead here, too.

Not that they didn't.

Robert Mali, as you know, and the Biden people were trying to resurrect this insane Obama formula of empowering Iran and by by extension, I suppose, Lebanon and Hezbollah and Syria and Hamas is sort of a foil against Israel and the Gulf Straits and out of that creative tension,

then

Israel could be controlled or could be repressed as Saudi Arabia could be repressed as the Emirates as Kuwait.

And that thing blew up.

And now

because of Ukraine and Russia and Iran.

Yes.

And now this unrest in Iran.

And this is very strange because the same thing happened during the Obama administration, the so-called Green Revolution.

He came in in 2009, immediately was confronted with this mass uprising of democratic fervor, millions, and he did nothing.

And it was against, I guess, his revolutionary fervor, his own, that he felt

almost as if he was saying, now, listen, you Iranian reformers, just stop it because here in the United States, we feel guilty of what we've done about Iran.

So we're going to work with a theocracy.

And the same thing is now repeating again.

We haven't heard any strong Biden administration encouragement for reform.

And so the result of that is, I think a lot of people here,

I can't see any pathway at all for the Iran deal, which doesn't mean that

Iran won't.

After the Iran deal, the major danger of the Iran deal was to allow Iran to be economically strong and to

pursue

its desired goals in the Middle East, in the Arab countries, in the entire region.

Let me ask you another question.

But

they won't stop their attempts to create a nuclear bomb.

That's not going to stop them.

Whether the deal goes through or does not go through,

it'll continue.

And that's the major problem.

And who's going to stop them?

Yeah, I don't know who's going to stop them.

I think, being a cynic, I think that Israel

will have to stop them.

And then all of a sudden, I think you will get

free operational support from the moderate Arab world.

They'll offer you airspace, intelligence, even weaponry,

to the degree they have any that's useful in their stocks.

And then the same will be true of the United States.

And then the moment you do it, you will be condemned wildly and broadly and fervently.

Well, we were condemned every time when we bombed the nuclear reactor of Iraq.

America suspended its

weapons shipment to Israel for quite a long time.

We were condemned then as well.

And then the picture of the

damaged reactor was on Dick Cheney's wall.

And so I guess, let me ask you, though, there's something that I think is kind of dangerous, and I'd like to see your take on it.

So we have this

Ukraine war that's becoming more and more Verdun-like, stalemate, World War I type of meat grinder, maybe total dead, civilian and military on both sides, 250,000.

And all of the West, understandably, and Israel, I think, too,

objected to Putin's aggression.

They want him to stop, maybe go back to the 2014 borders and then adjudicate the borderlands in Crimea by methods other than war, but I don't have to get into that.

But

there is something

that's going on as we, as the Europeans via the EU and NATO, and us pour $200 billion of sophisticated weaponry as if they can match the overwhelming population area and GDP of Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine.

This thing is

getting very dangerous, especially with the nuclear cyber routing.

And here's Israel,

and it's watching this.

It has, by the way, as our listeners know, it has a history.

The Jewish people in World War II in Ukraine, it was sort of the embryo of

death,

if I should say that, under the auspices of German-Russian fighting, especially in 1941 and 42.

But aside from that,

you have,

they're not, I guess you would say, as an observer looks at it, you have protocols with Russians who in various degrees are in Syria Syria vis-a-vis when you're confronted with an act of aggression from Hezbollah or Syria or whomever works for them, then you have to retaliate to maintain deterrence.

And that raises the issue, are you going to bump into Russians?

And I don't want to get into

ask you anything that's classified, but

you have things that are

You have protocols, you meaning the Israelis with the Russians.

And then in the wider sense,

it's in your interest

that there not be a new coalition of China, Russia, Iran.

And

it seems to me that we're drifting into not only that, but India is buying Russian oil and has made it very clear it does not want to punish Russia.

And Turkey,

Turkey is a special case.

It can be very anti-Israeli or can under the table or stealthily be very helpful, but it does seem that it is gravitating away from the United States at least and closer to Russia.

Is Israel concerned that there is a coalition building?

It would be almost, I suppose, 40 or 50% of the world's population, given India and China and Russia and Iran and Turkey.

But insidiously, it's not favorable if Israel is

put into our camp.

Does it need freedom of operating in a realistic sense?

Is what I'm saying from your observation.

I don't know if that was pretty clumsy.

There are attacks in Syria mostly to do with the Iranians trying to bring into Lebanon, attacks in Syria and Lebanon, trying to bring through Syria, into Lebanon,

weapons, precise weapons, precise missiles to rain on Israeli cities.

Right now, yeah, Lebanon has a

huge number of missiles that can cause harm, but they're not, for the most part, they are not precise missiles.

The big danger is the precision missiles.

And that is what we've been working against for all these years with the Russian acquiescence.

We won't attack you.

Do whatever you want.

And this, of course, the Russians controlled the Syrian airspace, and as a result, also, of course, the Lebanese airspace.

And they have not

interfered.

And this was very important and still is very important for Israel.

Right now,

it seems like

Iran, in the guise of helping the victims of the earthquake in Syria, is indeed shipping dangerous equipment, dangerous from the point of view of Israel, to Syria that will go into Lebanon and Syria itself.

And

Iran is supplying Russia with

re-engineered drones.

Some of the people here

Russia is now dependent on Iran.

On the other hand, Russia has an agreement with us.

Has that altered your relationship with Russia vis-a-vis Syria airspace?

As far as I know, not yet.

And I hope it will continue to be this way.

But certainly, Israel cannot take a decidedly anti-Russian formal policy because

of our security needs.

No, you can't.

It's obvious.

I mean, Russia could

have.

And of course, we cannot supply, we have not supplied

Ukraine with weaponry of any substantial means, because once again, this will go against the Russians.

So all these things.

Are you worried that they could put Iran under its nuclear umbrella?

Who knows if they got angry enough?

I don't, yeah, well, I doubt whether Russia will open a nuclear war.

I don't think that's realistic.

But in Iran, I think Russia also

does not really want also Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

Iran has its own agenda regarding the Islamic world and regarding that.

What I mean, what I meant was that

if you got on the wrong side of Russia, they could say we do not want you to preemptively attack the nuclear installations in Iran.

And that would be a veil warning.

Yeah, they might say it.

And if they do say it, I hope we ignore it.

We have no choice.

We already encountered Russian pilots and troops when we were fighting with Egypt after the Six-Day War, and

they actually manned the planes in

Egypt and got clobbered and stopped it.

They truly don't want to mess with us, even though we're a tiny country.

But I don't think that this is something that they will actually give a nuclear umbrella to Iran unless they're desperate to frame, which I don't think they are.

I think look, if I, from my own two bits, I think this has been a mistake on the part of the West not to pressure

in some form or fashion

Ukraine to reach some sort of settlement with Russia, whether they can or not, I don't know.

But

I want to have to be realistic.

I mean,

I don't think Ukraine can win this war.

I think this is wishful thinking.

almost a dreamlike thinking.

And so the West should realize this.

They're You're not going to, this Russia will not stop as long as it is and what it's doing.

One has to be realistic.

You can't just live in a dream world.

Well, I mean, it's become here in the United States, especially where I work, but elsewhere, it's become almost a cause celeb on the left that was isolationists and anti-war.

And it's almost as if in their mentalities they've remeted they say themselves, well,

we failed on Russian collusion, we failed on Russian disinformation laptop, but now we finally got

Putin to show the world he's evil, just like he was when he interfered in our elections.

And everybody, you know, says that Putin is not a nice guy.

But this zeal that they've adopted this cause.

So if I walk around the neighborhood on the Stanford campus, to take one example, I see signs that we're saying this house doesn't allow racism or

this house is a sanctuary house, or meaning for open borders.

Now they've just gone with the with a blink of an eye for Ukraine.

They have Ukrainian flags and people I see at Stanford.

Here we don't have that for a very good reason.

You started mentioning it.

We have the Jewish people have a very long history with Ukraine.

Yeah.

Baba Yar was in Ukraine.

Not only Baba Yar, hundreds of years ago, horrible massacres and also massacres afterwards in the 19th century that actually were the catalyst to bring on just for the start of Zionism and the worst massacres before World War II were right after World War I yes there was a civil war in Russia and Ukraine and each side each side whether it's the Reds whether it's the Ukrainians or whether it's the whites when they took over a city of Jews simply massacred the population.

It's estimated that anywhere between 200 and 300,000 Jews were massacred as a prelude actually to the Holocaust, believe it or not.

This is our

horrible, horrible mini-holocaust, if you can call that mini-holocaust.

We don't remember the exact number, but

then in World War II, when they joined the

troops, many Ukrainians created an army of Ukrainians that joined the

the Nazi army and were very active in liquidating the Jews of Ukraine.

So you don't see signs of great, I mean, yeah, we support Ukraine, of course, okay.

But we don't have the sort of sentiment that I guess is there in America for Ukraine.

It just doesn't exist here.

We're going to take another break very quickly, and we'll be right back with Ido Netanyahu.

And we're back.

You mentioned, Ido, there has to be some kind of settlement.

What would be wrong about

the ideas that are being put forth?

Himney Kissinger had one or two.

He's changed some of them, but it goes something like this, that everybody deplores what Putin did,

but because he has, as you say, these advantages, and that would be 30 times the territory, 10 times the GDP, three and a half times the population, and of course, the oil weapon, that

they

look at these Russian majority-speaking areas, and I have a suspicion that most of them would want to go to Ukraine, but we don't know.

The borderlands and the Crimea, and we say we would like to return to we, the world, to the 2014 borders, which had been altered by Russia in 2014 through a war of aggression.

And then we say,

We,

great powers,

will arm or continue to arm Ukraine so it it will be able to repel,

and they won't be caught this time.

Now they will be armed, but they will not be part of NATO.

They will not be part of NATO,

but they will have enough wherewithal if they're attacked.

And then we adjudicate these areas through not the UN.

You can't trust the UN.

It's an evil organization.

But we have big power supervision of what we would call some kind of plebiscite.

And I don't know if the Russians would go for that or the Ukrainians, but that seems a lot better than just for the next two years killing hundreds of thousands of people for which is not, it's not going, I don't think that Russia has an expeditionary force to get to Kiev, and I don't think Kiev can push them out of the borderlands.

That's just a fact.

So it seems to me that would be the type of settlement that we should all be working for.

Well, whatever settlement is, the Russians have to agree to it.

I'm not sure.

They have to agree to it.

I'm not sure they'll agree to this.

It sounds a reasonable settlement, but I highly doubt that the Russians will agree to it.

What would they agree to do to you?

I doubt if they'll be willing to pull out of Crimea.

I remember even if they had a plebiscite.

In Crimea, look, I remember,

don't forget that in Crimea when they took over Crimea, I don't think a single soldier was killed.

I don't think any bullet was fired.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the Obama administration apparently didn't think that it was egregious at all because they gave it because it had been part of Russia

World War II

by Khrushchev when he changed the borders in some form or fashion.

It was always considered part of Russia as far as I know.

I can only tell you an anecdote that when a play of mine was appearing in Russia,

this was right after the annexation of Crimea, and they all made a point

after, you know, in the afterplay parties that they had

to drink only wine from Crimea as a point of

support for the Russian takeover of Crimea.

From what I could sense at that time, there's tremendous support in Russia regarding

the takeover of Crimea.

And I suspect also, although I don't know,

who knows what's going on in Russia, they don't really have a free press.

I suspect there's also strong support in Russia itself.

I think that's what's bothering Americans, that to the degree that Western journalists have been able to talk to people or

look at polls and see, even though they're rigged, that can decipher some element of

national belief.

It seems to us that the Russians are not against this war.

They're against the foolish way in which they've waged the war, but the ultimate strategic agenda that these areas have been traditionally part of Mother Russia.

So I don't think Russia will go for this

plebiscite or things like that.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Hopefully I'm wrong.

Then we're going to have to go back to the status on Tequo.

And that would be 2014.

And then I guess we would say to the Russians,

Ukraine won't be part of NATO.

And basically, you didn't get anything out of this war, but you didn't lose anything.

You lost, I mean, you lost terrible.

world opinion and you lost a lot of men and materiel, but you still have what you had in 2014.

That's the best you're going to get.

uh

yeah maybe the i think i think what they the miscalculation on the part of the west is okay we'll we'll keep this war going we'll supply ukraine with the weaponry etc etc and russia and then we'll put tremendous economic pressure on russia and it will acquiesce because of the economic boycott and pressure i don't think that's going to i don't think that's going to happen do you

it did not happen and will not happen because russia is not doing so well economically so badly economically yeah well so the west miscalculated okay let's change routes.

But this needs people who think

realistically.

Primarily, it has to be America.

If it starts thinking realistically, what it wants to achieve, what is achievable, what one wants is one thing, but what is achievable.

And I don't see that the people,

those in charge in America,

are really thinking things out to the end.

That's my impression.

No, I mean, we have a bi-coastal consensus in the Senate and the major think tanks.

Very nice, but you let these Ukrainians die.

I mean, who knows how many Ukrainians die?

I think we could be able to see the Ukrainians are empty.

I think 10 million people left Ukraine already.

I know.

I think our attitude of work.

I think our attitude of the bi-coastal elite is that we want to fight this war to the last Ukrainian.

It seems that way.

Yeah, it's very scary.

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and we're back with ito netanyahu in our final few minutes uh as you

can i just say make a comment here don't get me wrong i'm yes totally against the russian invasion of ukraine absolutely i just think one has to be realistic about what people know you've been very clear that you oppose it and i think

When I was in Israel this summer and talked to Israelis, they were all appalled at the aggression.

But like you, they wanted to know if there was an end or a solution that would save lives.

Or they didn't like the meat grinder that was already occurring in June this summer.

And I think everybody is starting to ask these questions.

And

it's kind of, you know, we're having all these stories now coming out.

We don't know who blew up the pipeline.

The conservative elements in the media on Fox News have made the argument that,

and I don't know if there's any evidence for it, but the Washington Post did a thorough analysis, very left-wing analysis, but they found there was no evidence that Russia did it.

And basically, they said Russia didn't have their fingerprints on any of this evidence that we do have, and it's not in their interest to blow up their main source of foreign exchange because they could just, Germany can just shut the,

you know, they can shut it off.

And then people thought, well, it's not in the interest of Germany because they've shut most of it off, but to permanently shut it off when their people,

older people, are in heat rooms and apartments in Germany right now to keep warm because they don't have enough natural gas.

And so what was the United States doing?

And then we had to collate some very mysterious pronouncements that in

January before the invasion, Victoria Newland, our Under Secretary of State, said one way or another, I'm quoting directly by memory,

they will not have the Nordstrom II pipeline if they go to war.

And then Joe Biden, a month later, but still on the eve of the invasion, said, if Vladimir Putin goes in there, there will not be a Nordstrom pipeline.

Then he was asked, well, how could you ensure that?

He said, we can do it.

We have the ability.

Then, after it was blown up, in a congressional testimony with Ted Cruz, Senate,

she said, again, when she was called, she said, like you, Senator Cruz, I'm so happy that the pipeline is now a pile of scrap metal at the bottom of the sea.

I never realized that all these things were said.

Yeah, and it was very.

And then we had Seymour Hirsch, who we on the conservative side have never trusted because although he was accurate about the terrible Mylai atrocities in Vietnam and the Abu Ghraib, he so embellished those stories that he lost some credibility.

But he comes out with this

substack.

I mean, my God,

it's based on one source, but the problem that everybody has with it, and the media didn't cover it all, they didn't want to talk about it, but it's so intricate and detailed.

And it involves Norway and Denmark.

And he has detail of the particular unit who did it.

And

what people haven't done is the hard investigative work of saying, no, Mr.

Hirsch, you're wrong because this unit was not at this place, or I can prove that this didn't.

They haven't done that.

They just said, this is false.

This is crazy.

This is.

But

it has to be investigated because

if that were to be true, I think people in the United States would think, my gosh, we attacked a nuclear power in a time of peace, at least with us, Russia, and we destroyed a multi-billion dollar asset, and then we attacked the property of a NATO ally,

and we did that, and then we broke domestic law because this was a covert action that had to be disclosed to the so-called gang of eight, the senators and representatives that have to approve covert military action.

So I think

the consequences are so enormous.

If it were to be true, we'd say

We can't even fathom what would happen if this were true.

Therefore, it cannot be true.

Therefore, we're not going to discuss it.

They won't discuss, and I doubt whether you'll ever find the truth.

No, I don't think we'll ever find the truth.

Not for the next 20 or 30 years.

No.

Let me just ask you one last question because we're talking about pipelines.

There was this,

as somebody who goes to Greece a lot and somewhat to Cyprus, there was this wonderful Greek Cyprus-Israel

East Med pipeline project that was going to deliver, I think it was 10 billion cubic

yards of

cubic feet of natural gas into, I guess, was it Trieste or Italy?

What happened to that?

Joe Biden said he didn't want it and it just vanished?

It just stopped?

So I think what's happening is that instead of that, for the time being at least,

we are liquefying the gas right now in Egypt.

Just, I think, today, first export to Europe in

boats and tankers.

Where is the gas found in Israel?

Is it southern offices?

All over the Mediterranean, our territorial waters.

It's in the territorial waters of Cyprus, Greece, and Israel in this particular.

And this pipeline, as it goes toward Europe, would pick up each country's natural gas.

It might come to fruition, but I think it's also a very expensive project.

Right now, I think they're talking about also liquefying a lot of the gas in Cyprus.

that Israeli gas in Cyprus, and shipping it to Europe.

And there'll be a tremendous amount of oil that will go to, or gas, that will go to Europe from the finds that we have in the Mediterranean.

But it won't necessarily be done through a pipeline, but through tankers.

Is Israel right now, would you, is it fair to say it's self-sufficient in oil and natural gas?

It is.

Yeah, we're still using coal,

even for

reasons of security.

Yes.

Because, of course, these installations in the Mediterranean can be blown up.

And so we're still burning some coal, not too much.

But

as of

a few months, we've become self-sufficient and we'll be completely self-sufficient without anything else.

We won't really need to use the coal except for a backup

in the very near future.

Just a closing observation, I was wondering, as I hadn't been there, the last time I had been in Israel was 2006,

And it was kind of, there was a suicide bombing, et cetera,

and they were building the wall.

But when I came back in 2022 in June, and I'm scheduled to go again this year for just for a few days, are Israelis aware that to the outside observer, the amount of construction, economic activity, development, wealth,

it's just stunning.

I mean, it doesn't look like the same country.

The country was wealthy in 2006, but I don't know if our American listeners realize that Israel is, it's almost, I mean, people talk about the transformation in China, but it seems utterly transformed.

And levels of wealth, cars,

disposable income, hotels,

it's amazing.

It's amazing.

It's the Jewish talent.

Look, the country was

under strict economic control by the government.

I would say we had probably

the greatest control in any non-communist country in the world at one time.

And all this changed.

It changed, first of all, it started to change when Begin was elected to power and changed completely once Bibi not only afterward elected to power, but then became also the Minister of Finance and did a revolution in the Israeli economy.

And still, there's many things to do still.

And then you have Jewish know-how, Jewish know-how and Jewish know-how.

And the other bookend is when you go to the Middle East today

and you talk to people from countries surrounding Israel, it's almost as miraculous that all of the old boilerplate anti-Israeli rhetoric in places in the Gulf,

especially, but in Egypt and other places, seems to have vanished at the popular level, not just the government realist level.

That seems almost incredible that...

Well, they need us because of Iran.

That's actually

one good thing about Iran is that it made the, like politics make strange bedfellows.

Well, Iran also made strange bedfellows.

It has.

Yeah, it has.

It's absolutely incredible.

Well, we're out of time, and I want to thank you, Ido, for taking so much time with us.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it very much.

And I hope our American listeners

will have received an inside view of what's going on in Israel, because I think it's our strongest friend in the Middle East and probably strongest friend in the world.

And the more we learn about it, the better it is for all of us.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

And it's Victor Hansen signing off.