Benjamin Netanyahu Quotes

If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more ‎violence. If the Jews put ‎down their weapons ‎today, there would be no ‎more Israel'‎

We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor

History has shown us time and again that what is right is not what is popular.

If diplomacy has any chance to work, it must be coupled with a credible military threat.

It doesn't matter if justice is on your side. You have to depict your position as just.

No other country faces both constant threats to its existence and constant criticism for acting against such threats.

In a speech at Bar Ilan university, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time endorses the establishment of a Palestinian state.

If there had been a Jewish state in the first half of the century, there would have been no Holocaust. And if there had not been a Jewish state after the Holocaust, there would have been no Jewish future. The State of Israel is not only the repository of the millennial Jewish hopes for redemption; it is also the one practical instrument for assuring Jewish survival.

Here were people who clearly wished Israel well, yet who did not know something so elementary as the fact that the Arab world is more than five hundred times the size of the Jewish state. They did not realize that the Israel they were incessantly hearing about and seeing every day on their television screens is all of forty miles wide (including the West Bank), and that if it were to give up the entire West Bank, it would be ten miles wide.

the art of politics and the idea of cohering interests.

… the Arab world is more than five hundred times the size of the Jewish state.

If the Arabs put down their weapons today there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel. BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

I am not one of those who believes—as Obama is said to believe—that a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring an end to Muslim resentment against the United States. (Incidentally, if he really does believe this, his lethargy and impotence in the face of Netanyahu's consistent double-dealing is even more culpable.) The Islamist fanatics have their own agenda, and, as in the case of Hamas and its Iranian backers, they have already demonstrated that nothing but the destruction of Israel and the removal of American influence from the region will possibly satisfy them. No, it is more the case that justice—and a homeland for the Palestinians—is a good and necessary cause in its own right. It is also a special legal and moral responsibility of the United States, which has several times declared a dual-statehood outcome to be its objective.

So you have a maniac who says he's representing all of World Jewry, and people say "okay, if he represents all of World Jewry, then the Jews are a problem

Although under Carter the United States had come close to endorsing the Palestinians’ national rights and their involvement in negotiations, the two sides found themselves farther apart than ever. Camp David and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signaled US alignment with the most extreme expression of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights, an alignment that was consolidated by Ronald Reagan’s administration. Begin and his successors in the Likud, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and then Benjamin Netanyahu, were implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood, sovereignty, or control of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Ideological heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, they believed that the entirety of Palestine belonged solely to the Jewish people, and that a Palestinian people with national rights did not exist. At most, autonomy might be possible for the “local Arabs,” but this autonomy would apply only to people, not to the land. Their explicit aim was to transform the entirety of Palestine into the Land of Israel.

It is a mystery to me how otherwise perfectly intelligent people could fall into the trap of buying the bogus Palestinian narrative. They persisted on refusing to recognize that the real cause of the “Palestinian Problem” was… the Palestinians themselves! Their refusal to accept a Jewish state was the heart of the conflict.

… if there had been an Israel earlier in this century, there surely would have been no Holocaust. There would have been a country willing to take the Jewish refugees when America, Britain, and the other nations refused. There would have been a country to press for their departure. And there would have been an army ready to fight for them.

But whereas previous U.S. administrations at least pretended to possess some degree of neutrality, Trump burst onto the scene fully embracing Israel’s right-wing policies and appointing Zionists to key positions. He tapped his bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, as his ambassador to Israel. Friedman threatened the International Criminal Court over a war crimes investigation into Israel and declared that the illegal settlements did not violate international law. Trump’s own son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, was a personal friend of then–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and even had financial ties to the illegal settlements. And this was the man Trump had tasked with leading the “peace process.

… for close to a century Arab society and Arab politics have been commandeered by an anti-Jewish obsession that has known no limits: It harnessed the Nazis, promoted the Final Solution, launched five wars against Israel, embarked on a campaign of global terrorism, strangled the world’s economy with oil blackmail, and now, in Iraq and elsewhere, is attempting to build nuclear bombs for the great Armageddon.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU WOULD do if tens of thousands of Israelis were being murdered by Palestinians? If heroin deaths in Israel suddenly tripled and 90 percent of the heroin was coming into Israel through the Palestinian territories—some of it through a tunnel the length of six football fields?1 If ISIS butchers were on Israel’s border? If you guessed, “Give them in-state college tuition, driver’s licenses, and free medical care,” you would be wrong. In 2012, Israel had sixty thousand illegal aliens, which would be the equivalent of a mere 2 million illegals in America. Warning that the illegals would overwhelm Israel and destroy the nature of the country, Netanyahu vowed to complete a border fence. Even opposition leader Yair Lapid supported a fence, as well as “the arrest and deportation of infiltrators.”2

In our age, when history is often either unknown or disregarded, it is easy for Arabs to plant the view in the West that if only Israel had not come into being, the Arab relationship with the West would be harmonious. But in fact, the Arab world’s antagonism for the West raged for a thousand years before Israel was added to its list of enemies. The Arabs do not hate the West because of Israel; they hate Israel because of the West.

Israel’s constant drone surveillance over Gaza also impressed President Vladimir Putin. Moscow needed reliable surveillance drones after it lost many planes during its war in 2008 against Georgia in South Ossetia. Tbilisi had used Israeli drones, and years later Moscow decided to follow suit. Having seen Israeli operations over Gaza, Russia licensed the Israeli Aerospace Industries Searcher II, renamed “Forpost” by its new owners, and it became a key asset in Russian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.33 Israel trained Russian pilots to operate the drones. Russia and Israel maintained a close relationship during the Syrian civil war despite the former supporting Assad and the latter worrying about the growing presence of Russian allies Iran and Hizbollah in the country. This led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Naftali Bennett) to routinely attack Iranian and Syrian military positions in Syria to stop the transfer of weapons to Hizbollah. However, Moscow usually turned a blind eye to these attacks, assisted by a de-escalation hotline between the two governments.

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

TO ACHIEVE THE peace between Israel and Arab states we had overcome many obstacles, none more enduring than the obsessive belief in the centrality of the Palestinian issue and the need to achieve a Palestinian-Israeli peace before any other peace could be made. John Kerry, like so many others, had held that belief, and he expressed it in December 2016 during a conference in Washington attended by many of my political opponents, invited especially from Israel to hear it: There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying “Well, the Arab world is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.” No, no, no and no… There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everyone needs to understand that. That is a hard reality. When Kerry finished delivering his remarks, he received thunderous applause. It was only by breaking out of this flawed way of thinking, however, that true progress was made. In its first seventy-two years, Israel made peace with two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan. In the span of four months, Israel had made peace with four more. By building Israel’s power and challenging Iran, we had made Israel an attractive ally to our Arab neighbors. By bypassing the Palestinians, we could now achieve four diplomatic breakthroughs and sign four historic agreements. This was truly a New Middle East, one built on real strength and no false illusions.

In the past, the Israelis complained that the Palestinians were so fragmented that no faction could deliver on any peace deal. Now Abbas had a controlling position. Washington and Brussels backed him. Everything was in place for a package to bring Gaza back under the control of Abbas, to disarm Hamas, to reopen crossing points to Egypt and Israel, monitored by EU observers, and to pour millions of dollars into Gaza's reconstruction as a precursor to a viable Palestinian state. But instead of welcoming this sign of growing moderation, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, resorted to his old tactic of divide and rule. In June, three Israeli teenagers vanished in the West Bank. Netanyahu ordered a "hostage rescue operation", despite intelligence that the youths were already dead, which escalated into the onslaught against Hamas.

The rescue of the hostages, so far away from home, is about to become legend. But it has exacted a price: three of the hostages have died in the firefight. As has one soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

President Obama is fond of posing a false dichotomy: either you support his current Iran deal, or you want war. But, as Israel‘s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly observed, “a bad deal is worse than no deal.” As it stands, Corker-Cardin is a bad deal that paves the way for the President’s worse deal with Iran. In

He was the quintessential practitioner of Jabotinsky’s formula: Influence governments through public opinion, influence public opinion by appealing to justice, influence leaders by appealing to interests.

For three years I have been imploring you, Jews of Poland, the crown of world Jewry, appealing to you, warning you unceasingly that the catastrophe is nigh. My hair has turned white and I have grown old these years, for my heart is bleeding that you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spew forth its fires of destruction. I see a horrible vision. Time is growing short for you to be spared. I know you cannot see it, for you are troubled and confused by everyday concerns…. Listen to my words at this, the twelfth hour. For God’s sake: let everyone save himself, so long as there is time to do so, for time is running short.

Joel Kaplan had Republican affiliations in the United States; he had inflamed colleagues when he showed up to support Brett Kavanaugh during the future Supreme Court justice’s congressional hearing on sexual assault allegations against him. In Israel, the head of Policy was Jordana Cutler, a former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Facebook wanted friendly relationships with governments, so it hired people who already had them.

the Israeli state has used NSO to further its national security agenda, perhaps most prominently in securing the support of Arab dictatorships: Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. For example, in 2020, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman called then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to demand that his country’s access to Pegasus be restored when the Israeli Defense Ministry declined to renew the tool’s license after the Sunni theocracy had abused it.6 He was soon granted his wish because Israel viewed Saudi Arabia as a key ally against Iran in the Middle East.

We broke into tears. Our world collapsed. Yoni was an ardent scout leader and class president. Iddo and I would have to leave our classmates again. Our second journey to America had none of the excitement of our first visit. We knew America, we

A rare moment of Israeli political honesty came in October 2021 when far-right Israeli parliamentarian Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party and ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in the Knesset to the Arab members, “You’re only here by mistake, because [founding prime minister David] Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job, didn’t throw you out in ’48.” It was an acknowledgment that ethnic cleansing took place in 1948, albeit delivered by one of the most racist and homophobic Israeli politicians.

When Ehud’s force would ambush

ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday tried to recruit a delegation of 20 former NFL players who were visiting Israel to oppose a nuclear deal with Iran. The group on a trip led by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft included Curtis Martin of the Jets and Patriots, Thurman Thomas of the Bills and Tim Brown of the Raiders. Netanyahu used football lingo to encourage the players to oppose a nuclear deal the Obama administration and allies hope to strike with Iran. "Iran is one yard away from the goal line," he said.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday abruptly shelved a pilot project that prohibited Palestinians from riding home to the West Bank on the same buses as Israelis headed to Jewish settlements.

Could the Gazans join the Israelis to create a Riviera on their exquisite beaches, their glowing sands? To do so, they would have to leave behind a world of zero-sum chimeras and fantasies of jihadist revenge. And they would discover that their greatest ally is a man long portrayed as their most feared enemy, a man who, having led for decades the fight to liberate Israeli Jews from self-destructive socialist resentment, now offers to bring all of Palestine and perhaps all of Arabia on the same journey. The vision of Benjamin Netanyahu is an Israel that, as a global financial center, could transform the economics of the Middle East.

But when a Saudi owned media company is prepared to both publicly praise the words of Benjamin Netanyahu tells you just how bad a nuclear deal between the United States and Iran would be.

Netanyahu's speech: A former chief of Israel's Mossad spy agency rejected claims made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his address to Congress about Iran's nuclear program. In an interview aired on Channel 2 TV Friday, Meir Dagan questioned Netanyahu's claim that the emerging deal would allow Iran to create a bomb within a year or less. "Bull-" Dagan said. "The time is longer than what he describes.

אם כבר פוגרום, אז פוגרום

Biden and many of his aides were convinced it was also the result of the hubris of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the extremism of the right-wing coalition that he had assembled to cling to power.

Here in America my classmates don’t know what they are living for, but in Israel, we know.

Israel of apartheid, especially radicals on US college campuses, deliberately ignore the fact that it is the Palestinian Authority that openly and unabashedly practices apartheid. It will not allow even one Jew to live in a future “Judenfrei” (Jew-free) Palestinian state. Scandalously, the Palestinian Authority makes it a crime punishable by death to sell

… the philosopher Moses Maimonides declared that the return to Israel was the only hope of an end to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Arabs, of whom he writes that ‘Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.

Who can unravel destiny in the unpredictable twists of fate? I for one cannot, but I can say that I have clearly lived a life of purpose: to help secure the future of my ancient people who suffered so much and have contributed so much to humanity. This mission will continue to inspire me until the end of my days. I have been privileged to be guided by extraordinary parents, to be supported by a loving family, and to represent so many who shared my vision and followed me with open hearts through the turbulence of political life. But is there truly such a thing as a life of purpose? Every age has its Ecclesiastes and Lucretius, who tell us that all is ephemeral. “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity,”1 says the Bible. “What profit hath a man of all his labor which he hath taken under the sun?”2 Toward the end of his life, Will Durant, one of my favorite authors and a great admirer of the Jewish people, tried to comfort humanity by noting the value of human achievements, however temporary: We need not fret about the future… Never was our heritage of civilization and culture so secure, and never was it half so rich. We may do our little share to augment it and transmit it, confident that time will wear away chiefly the dross of it, and that what is finally fair and worthy in it will be preserved, to illuminate many generations.3 Durant was right. The rebirth of Israel is a miracle of faith and history. The Book of Samuel says, “The eternity of Israel will not falter.” Throughout our journey, including in the tempests and upheavals of modern times, this has held true. The People of Israel Live!

Using South African apartheid–era rhetoric to defend the Israeli occupation remains alive to this day. During the 2019 Israeli election campaign, opposition leader Benny Gantz criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for banning US Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering Israel and the Palestinian territories. Instead, Gantz said, both women should have been allowed to see “with their own eyes” that “the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is in Israel … and the second-best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is the West Bank.” This was reminiscent of South African apart-heid leader John Vorster statement to the New York Times in 1977 that “the standard of living of the South African Black is two to five times higher than that of any Black country in Africa.”14 One of the architects of apartheid in South Africa, former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, wrote in the Rand Daily Mail in 1961 that “Israel, like South Africa, is an apart-heid state” after taking Palestine from the Arabs who “had lived there for a thousand years.

This language matters because it displays a contempt for non-Jews that is carried into its relations with outsiders. It was common for Jews to be taught at school or in religious education, as I was told at home by my liberal Jewish parents, that Jews are the chosen people and have a unique relationship with God and society. We could and should help others (though there were set limits to this sympathy, namely excluding Palestinians). It is a belief system that allows racial supremacy against non-Jews to thrive and justifies disregard for their lives. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2010, referencing the phrase from verses in the Book of Isaiah, that Israel is “a proud people with a magnificent country and one which always aspires to serve as ‘light unto the nations.

The father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, wrote in his seminal 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish State, “There [in Palestine] we shall be a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against barbarism.”24 Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country between 1999 and 2001, used a metaphor with a similar meaning: Israel is a “villa in the middle of a jungle,” arguing that Israel was a civilized nation among Muslim savages in the Middle East. This language matters because it displays a contempt for non-Jews that is carried into its relations with outsiders. It was common for Jews to be taught at school or in religious education, as I was told at home by my liberal Jewish parents, that Jews are the chosen people and have a unique relationship with God and society. We could and should help others (though there were set limits to this sympathy, namely excluding Palestinians). It is a belief system that allows racial supremacy against non-Jews to thrive and justifies disregard for their lives. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2010, referencing the phrase from verses in the Book of Isaiah, that Israel is “a proud people with a magnificent country and one which always aspires to serve as ‘light unto the nations.

One hundred years later, President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying, “We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it anymore.” Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, “You won one point, and you’ll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place. I don’t know that it will ever take place.”2 The center of the Palestinians’ history, identity, culture, and worship was thus summarily disposed of without even the pretense of consulting their wishes.

But he also wrote, “I see with sorrow how a part of our people still clings to unrealistic hopes for peace. Common sense tells them that the Arabs haven’t abandoned their basic aim of destroying the state. But the self-delusion that has always plagued the Jews is at work again. They want to believe, so they believe. They want not to see, so they distort [reality]. It would be comic if it wasn’t so tragic.

The next day, muscles sore but spirits reinvigorated, we were asked to come to a big hangar. We assumed we would be issued our personal weapons but no weapons were to be seen. Instead we were given a pocket-size notepad and a pen with a string to attach to our shirt pocket. “This,” the commander said, “is one of your most important weapons. Write down every task you are assigned to do, and don’t tear off the page until every task is accomplished.” Half a century later, I haven’t shaken that habit. Every day I still write down tomorrow’s tasks and cross off what got done from yesterday’s list. Following through on details is not a pedantic compulsion. I know of no other way to get things done. Most of the people I have known who achieve big goals follow up on small details. The

Sooner or later, a false peace will crash on the rocks of Middle Eastern realities. The real foundation of peace in our area is hope that derives from strength, and the consequent realization by our neighbors that Israel is here to stay.

Death does not frighten me. I don’t fear it because I attribute little value to a life without a purpose. And if I should have to sacrifice my life to attain its goal, I will do so willingly.”3 Even though I would read this letter only after Yoni’s death, I sensed that same iron determination during those moments in the airport.

Asked in a 2011 television interview how I wished to be remembered, I answered simply: “That I helped secure the life of the Jewish state and its future.

Among the first to call and congratulate me on my election victory was President Clinton. “Bibi, I’ve got to hand it to you.” He chuckled. “We did everything we could to bring you down, but you beat us fair and square.” Quintessential Bill, I thought. He wasn’t telling me something I didn’t know, but here was the president of the United States admitting without batting an eyelash to a brazen intervention in another country’s elections. Clinton’s frankness was refreshingly politically incorrect. You could see how the famous Clinton charm carried him through a myriad of minefields. I let it go and said I looked forward to working with him.

Practical as ever, Clinton invited me to the White House a mere three weeks after the election. During the election campaign I had of course strongly criticized the Oslo agreements. This created an obvious dilemma for me. On the one hand, governments are guided by the continuity of international agreements. On the other, this agreement was seriously flawed and compromised Israel’s security. I resolved the issue by saying that despite my grave reservations, I would honor the agreements under two conditions: Palestinian reciprocity and Israeli security. As Oslo was to be carried out in stages, I would proceed to the next stage, known as the Hebron Agreement, only if the Palestinians kept their side of the bargain, foremost on matters relating to security. I insisted that the Palestinians live up to their pledge to rein in terrorism and to jail Hamas terrorists. If they did their part, I would do mine. “If they’ll give, they’ll get” was the way I put it, along with a corollary: “If they won’t give, they won’t get.”2 With the exception of the hard right who wanted me to tear up the Oslo agreement outright, most right-of-center and centrist opinion agreed with my policy. Israelis were tired of voluntarily ceding things to the Palestinians and receiving terror in return. I explained all this to Clinton when we met in the White House. He asked me if I would honor the Hebron Agreement. I said that under the twin principles of reciprocity and security I would.

Surprisingly, this line of thinking didn’t change even after I left office. A succession of Israeli leaders who came after me—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert—offered the Palestinians and Syria unimaginable and dangerous concessions, even more than Rabin and Peres had offered before me. They all failed to get peace.

Surprisingly, this line of thinking didn’t change even after I left office. A succession of Israeli leaders who came after me—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert—offered the Palestinians and Syria unimaginable and dangerous concessions, even more than Rabin and Peres had offered before me. They all failed to get peace. Even then, the messianic diplomats in Washington still didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that the PLO, the so-called moderate faction in the Palestinian camp, would not abandon its goal of destroying Israel. It sought to first reduce Israel to indefensible boundaries by using American and international pressure. Once that was achieved, the ultimate goal—wiping out the Jewish state altogether—would be that much closer.

These “moderates” were challenged by the “extremists,” led by Hamas, who believed that this two-stage approach and the diplomacy that went with it were unnecessary altogether. Terror alone would do the job. They were encouraged in this view when they saw that Israel continued to implement the Oslo agreements without demanding a full stop to terrorist attacks. In the years after the Oslo Accords were signed, they concluded that terrorism paid off. One of the key goals in my first term as prime minister was to change the Palestinian perception that “terrorism pays” to “terrorism doesn’t pay.” I did this by insisting on security and reciprocity. I was open to measured concessions that didn’t endanger Israel’s security, but I insisted that these would not come about as a result of terrorism. The American negotiators’ most fundamental misperception of the region was that Israel was the problem in the Middle East. It was the solution. Its advanced technological society could help modernize the entire Arab world, if only Arab leaders deigned to recognize its right to exist and the security conditions that guaranteed that existence.

For too many years these Arab leaders waited for the Palestinians to make peace with Israel. This was a futile wait. The rejectionist Palestinian tail wagged the Arab world into political paralysis. The Palestinians were not interested in having a state of their own next to Israel. They were interested in having a state of their own instead of Israel. That’s why, when the 1947 UN Partition Resolution offered to create a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, the Palestinians rejected the state offered to them—while we accepted the one offered to us.

Time and again, the Palestinians galvanized the Arab world to try to annihilate the Jewish state, and their leadership never really gave up on that goal. But in successive wars, as Israel defeated one Arab state after another, some of the Arab governments began to make separate peace agreements with Israel. First Egypt in 1979 and then Jordan in 1994 made formal peace agreements with Israel, while other Arab countries developed informal ties with it. This led me to a far-reaching conclusion. The road to a broader Middle East peace between Israel and the Arab world did not go through the Palestinian seat of government in Ramallah. It went around it.

As far back as the 1990s, I understood that if we wanted a broader peace, we would have to go directly to the Arab capitals. As long as we kept going down the rabbit hole of seeking to first remove the Palestinian veto on peace, we would never get there. Palestinian politics are hopelessly mired in their extremist fantasy of annihilation. And there is always a Palestinian faction to out-Hamas Hamas.

To Clinton and his associates this was heresy, merely excuses and obstacles that I was piling onto the road to peace. Incredibly, as we will see, this view persisted in some quarters even after my government, working with the Trump administration, achieved four historic peace agreements with four Arab countries—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

After the Hebron Agreement there was the briefest of honeymoons with the Clinton administration. Clinton sent me a letter commending me for my “courage” for making a tough decision. He sent Arafat a similar letter. I thought that was peculiar since the only courage Arafat displayed was the courage to receive the Palestinian neighborhoods we had transferred to his control. But this was clearly as good as it was going to get. “Netanyahu and Arafat are both allies of the United States,” the White House briefed Israeli reporters.3 This was incredible. The democratically elected leader of the staunchest ally of the US and the leader of a terrorist organization that had murdered hundreds of Americans were put on equal footing. But such was the diplomatic mind-set of Washington in those days. The administration suffered from double-barreled myopia. First, it refused to see that the core of our conflict with the Palestinians was the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary. Second, it refused to really internalize that Israel’s government was dependent on a parliamentary system in which the prime minister could be toppled at any moment by the slimmest of majorities.

Har Homa was in the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem drawn right after the Six-Day War. Israel never accepted any formal limitation on building neighborhoods within these boundaries, including under the Oslo Accords. Nonetheless, the decision to build Har Homa was met with severe Palestinian and international censure. Arafat demanded that I rescind the authorization. I did not. As usual, loud protests ensued. The British foreign minister, Jack Straw, visiting Israel, literally joined hands with the Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini in a Palestinian march condemning the Har Homa project. He was supposed to have dinner with me that evening. I promptly canceled it. For me, I said, that was the last straw. The protests eventually died down; the Palestinian southern thrust into Jerusalem was blunted. Today Har Homa has forty thousand residents, a small city within a city.

I left the White House knowing that I was dealing with a US administration totally in the grip of the Palestinian Centrality Theory. It held that Palestinian grievances were the heart of “the Middle East conflict,” ignoring the conflicts in the Middle East that had nothing to do with Israel. White House officials simply refused to believe that Palestinian violations of Oslo were rooted in a refusal to genuinely recognize Israel, arguing instead that Palestinian grievances were rooted in the expansion of Israeli settlements, just as they believed that Syrian antagonism to Israel was rooted in our presence on the Golan. The overriding axiom was that the Palestinians would not make peace unless we withdrew from Judea and Samaria and Gaza and that Syria would not make peace unless we withdrew from the Golan. The conclusion of this line of thinking was not complicated: get Israel to withdraw from all these territories and you’ll have peace. But all this flew in the face of the facts. Palestinian and Syrian grievances against Israel were not rooted in Israel’s holding on to this or that territory. That’s why they attacked us from the Golan, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza when those areas were in their hands. Their grievances were directed against Israel’s very existence, in any territory. The inability of America’s diplomats to see this simple truth remains astonishing. But to face it they would have to chuck the sacred “territory for peace” equation.

You didn’t need to be a genius to understand that as long as the Palestinians and others clung to an ideology hell-bent on destroying Israel, Israeli withdrawals wouldn’t advance peace.

Newspapers back then still wielded a powerful influence over public opinion, especially their editorial and op-ed pages. I looked up the fifty top newspapers in the United States. Our ten consulates covered the areas in which they were published and distributed. If each consulate submitted an op-ed article to their local papers every few months, we could produce a critical mass of op-eds to influence the senators, members of Congress and other decision makers who read those pages. I set up a small cottage industry in the embassy to prepare and distribute the op-eds. Sharply crafted by writers I recruited, they were signed by Israel’s consuls. I allowed the consuls to insert changes to suit their particular audiences. If they submitted good op-eds on their own, I encouraged that, too. Soon we blanketed the key opinion markets of the United States with a steady stream of pro-Israeli op-eds debunking the vilifications leveled against us. Nothing on this scale had been done in America since my father published his ads during World War II. We started hearing the arguments and ideas we were seeding in print on television. When others repeat your ideas as their own, you are getting traction.

In February 1983, the commission submitted its report, which was immediately released to the public. It found that Israel had not had any involvement in the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. But the commission added a kicker: although Ariel Sharon had not been directly involved, and had not foreseen the massacre, he should have foreseen it. For this omission, the commission said, he should be removed from office. I thought this was preposterous and dangerous. You cannot expect leaders to foresee every possibility and punish them for not doing so. This hinders decision making, hampers risk taking and induces a “protocol” mentality, whereby decision makers cover their rear ends by endlessly explaining why they should do nothing. Iddo wrote a damning article in an Israeli newspaper against the commission’s conclusions and recommendations.3 He was among the very few who stood up in Sharon’s defense.

There, on July 4, 1984, eight years after the Entebbe rescue, Shultz made the following statement to the gathered diplomats and journalists: Many countries have joined the ranks of what we might call the “League of Terror” as full-fledged sponsors and supporters of indiscriminate, and not so indiscriminate, murder. Terrorists and those who support them have definite goals. Terrorist violence is the means of attaining those goals. Can we as a country, can the community of free nations, stand in a purely defensive posture and absorb the blows dealt by terrorists? I think not. From a practical standpoint, a purely passive defense does not provide enough of a deterrent to terrorism and the states that sponsor it. It is time to think long, hard, and seriously about more active means of defense—defense through appropriate preventive or preemptive actions against terrorist groups before they strike.5

This unusual television moment received much international attention, as did another CNN interview in which I displayed a large map of the Middle East. I “walked” through the Arab countries from Morocco to the Indian Ocean with the open palms of my hands. Then I covered Israel with my thumb.10 For many used to seeing the map of Israel alone on a full screen, a great Israeli Goliath “oppressing” the small Palestinian David, this demonstration came as a shock. It was Israel that was David. This was the best way I could think of to convey that the Arab world was hundreds of times the size of Israel. These interviews may have been seen by some unlikely viewers. When visiting Japan that year, singer Perry Como was asked by the Japanese government how to improve Japan’s image in the United States. He suggested they hire my services.

Arafat himself sometimes spoke even more candidly. On January 30, 1996, he said in a closed meeting to forty Arab diplomats in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, “We intend to destroy Israel and to establish a pure Palestinian state…. We will make the life of the Jews miserable and take everything from them…. I don’t need any Jews.”12 In a radio address on the Voice of Palestine on November 11, 1995, he said, “The struggle will continue until all of Palestine is liberated.” Lest anyone had doubts that by “all of Palestine” he meant not only Judea and Samaria and Gaza but all of Israel, he had proclaimed two months earlier, on September 7, 1995, “O Gaza, your sons are returning. O Lod, O Haifa, O Jerusalem, you are returning, you are returning,” in Arabic to a Palestinian audience. True to his deceptive character, he was careful not to mention places like Haifa and Lod, which were well within pre-1967 Israel and ostensibly not in the PLO’s plan for a state, when he spoke before Western audiences. On September 13, 1993, the day he signed the Oslo Accords, Arafat used more oblique language in explaining to a Palestinian audience that the agreement was nothing more than the PLO’s “Phased Plan.” This plan, calling for the destruction of Israel in stages, had been adopted by the PLO in 1964 and was well familiar to Palestinians. The unchanging and thinly disguised PLO strategy of destroying Israel in stages completely contradicted Oslo’s ostensible message of peace and reconciliation. So did the post-Oslo flood of official Palestinian exhortations dehumanizing Jews as pigs and teaching schoolchildren to glorify Palestinian suicide bombers. As usual, little of this entered the international discourse or caused governments to rethink the much-vaunted Oslo Accords. There was supposedly a honeymoon between the PLO and Israel under Prime Minister Rabin; Arafat and Rabin were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” It was inconceivable that the prizewinning Arafat could be swindling the entire world. Of course, anybody with a sober view of the facts could see that this was precisely what was happening. But what Yoni had written years earlier about some in Israel was now true of many in the international community: “They want to believe, so they believe. They want not to see, so they distort.”13

The cascading terrorist attacks emanating from PLO-controlled areas did not cease for a moment. This blunted the effect on public opinion of the White House signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords, in which Rabin was clearly seen uncomfortably shaking Arafat’s hand. Equally, Palestinian terrorism cast a dark shadow over the august ceremony in Sweden, where Rabin, Arafat and Peres were given the Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize was greatly devalued when, after Oslo, the arch-jihadist recipient of the prize, Arafat, steadfastly continued to foster terrorism. In my long tenure as prime minister I could never be tempted with a Nobel Prize to do things that I thought would endanger Israel. Posterity is a better judge of historic achievement than politically correct committees meeting in Scandinavia.

What happened then was an inversion of democratic norms. The action of one murderous criminal was used to delegitimize an entire sector of the public. In a democracy, you can argue and debate as much as you want, but you can’t cross the line into violence or the threat of violence. If you do, your action is illegitimate and derails democracy itself. Equally obvious, an attempt to silence an entire citizenry because of the actions of one murderous individual is not in keeping with how a healthy democracy functions.

Our honeymoon was cut short by my decision to build Jerusalem’s Har Homa neighborhood. I made that decision because of Palestinian designs on our capital. From nearby Bethlehem there was a steady encroachment of illegal Palestinian housing that sought to penetrate Jerusalem from the south and connect with the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods in the north.

None of these simple facts had registered with generations of foreign service specialists. Now it was the turn of a new slate of Clintonite aides, mostly Jewish, to take on what US envoy Aaron Miller called “a mission” to bring about a historic peace.4 They didn’t let the facts get in their way. The reason withdrawals didn’t produce peace, they argued, was not that the underlying Palestinian goal was to eliminate Israel but that there hadn’t been enough withdrawals. This led to their second inescapable conclusion. To get more withdrawals they needed to overcome the real “obstacle to peace,” namely, me. American policy was therefore geared to place maximum pressure on me to withdraw from territory or to remove me from office, something they had failed to do in the recent elections but would seek to do again next time around.

which

I tried to speak my mind, speak my heart, and above all speak plainly. I avoided jargon assiduously. In addition to The Elements of Style, Peter Lubin had also given me Stanislav Andreski’s hilarious book, Social Science as Sorcery, and after I read his indictment of “pretentious nebulous verbosity,” I could never look a “paradigm” in the eye or garble a sentence with “parameters” and other such imprecise patter again. If I occasionally used one of these expressions, I now offer a belated apology. Throughout my public career I fought a resolute war against jargon used by government officials—with only partial success. I could usually control what came out of my mouth and out of my office, but generally not much more than that.

Everyone understood that a Rubicon had been crossed. Here was an architect of US policy saying that the US should not merely respond to specific terrorist attacks but pivot to preemptive action. And he aimed his comments at the state sponsors of terrorism.

In 1984, I had another conversation that had underscored this point to me. Herb Okun, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, had come to his post after serving as US ambassador to communist East Germany. “What’s it like there, Herb?” I had asked him. “Oh, nothing much,” Herb answered. “They live in dilapidated housing, drive funny little Trabants, drink vodka all day while watching eight hours of West German television.” “What!” I asked in disbelief. “What did you just say?” “They watch eight hours of West German television every day and then drink themselves to sleep,” he repeated. “You mean to tell me that watching eight hours a day of West German television doesn’t have any effect on them?” I asked incredulously. “None that I can see,” Okun answered. “Herb,” I said, “that can’t be. It’s just a question of time until the cracks will appear.” The conversation made me recall an engineering course I took at MIT. We loaded a small model bridge with steadily increasing loads and photographed the process. The bridge held fine, until it suddenly collapsed. Yet upon closer examination of the film we could see tiny cracks propagating in the structure well before the fall.

In A Place Among the Nations, I drew a distinction between two kinds of peace: that between democracies and that between democracies and dictatorships. With few exceptions, democracies tend toward peace. You don’t get reelected if you continually start wars and send your sons and daughters to die on foreign battlefields. Dictatorships, on the other hand, get to power by practicing aggression against their own people. So what will prevent them from practicing aggression against their neighbors?

As the diplomats are fond of saying when they have little else to say, the importance of the Madrid Conference was the fact that it convened. If anyone expected that sitting around a common table with all the world to see would temper the proceedings, they were soon proven wrong. As expected, everyone played to the gallery, their gallery. The speeches were largely wooden and flat. The conference concluded with a decision to continue bilateral talks between the delegations in Washington, some of which I later attended. They didn’t get very far either. During

Throughout these long centuries, no people claim the land as their distinct homeland except the Jews. Alone they cherish Jerusalem as their eternal capital, proclaiming on each Jewish New Year “next year in Jerusalem.” Dispersed for centuries, suffering unparalleled persecution in their rootless sojourn among the nations, the Jews never lose hope of returning to the Promised Land. Individual Jews continue to return throughout the ages, joining the tiny Jewish communities that never left. But the land is barren, sparsely populated and undeveloped. Visiting the Holy Land in 1867, Mark Twain echoes many contemporary travelers when he says, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… the desolate and unlovely land is hopeless, dreary and heartbroken.”17 A century later, Arab propaganda depicts things differently. It describes Palestine in the nineteenth century as a lush land teeming with a flourishing Arab population. “The Jewish invasion began in 1881,” says Arafat at an infamous United Nations speech in 1974. “Palestine was then a verdant area.”18 It wasn’t. Visiting the Holy Land in 1881, the famous British visitor Arthur Penrhyn Stanley reaffirms Twain’s observation fourteen years earlier: “In Judea, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.”19 In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigration brings the fallow land back to life. The Jews build farms, plant orange groves, erect factories. This induces immigration of Arabs from neighboring countries who join the indigenous Arab population. From 1860 on, the majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants are Jewish. Even so, by the turn of the twentieth century the total population in the Holy Land doesn’t exceed four hundred thousand, less than 4 percent of the present population. As the visiting German Kaiser notes in 1898, “There is room here for everyone.”20

At home in Warsaw, Nathan and Sarah made a point of only speaking a renascent Hebrew with their children, brought back to everyday usage only a few decades earlier after being used almost exclusively for liturgical purposes for centuries on end. This linguistic revival has no parallel in the annals of nations. It was led by the likes of Professor Klausner and most prominently by the trailblazing linguist Eliezer Ben Yehuda, whose great-grandson was one of my classmates in Jerusalem.

As twenty-seven-year-old Father wrote about Herzl in 1937: Herzl knew that even if it were possible to conceive of rescue operations whose implementation requires hundreds of years, world Jewry did not have those hundreds of years at its disposal. He heard the thunder rumbling from a gathering storm of Jew hatred coming closer and closer. It was clear to him that the Middle Ages would be revisited upon the Jews in all the states of Europe, and he repeated this observation time and again. Herzl wrote that “the stone is rolling down the mountain slope,” and he knew where it would stop, “at the bottom, the absolute bottom! Will there be devastation? Will there be confiscation ? Will they expel us? Will they murder us? I anticipate all of these things and more.”8

The US administration constantly sought to advance its misplaced messianic quest for a magical peace via “courageous” acts on the part of Israel’s leaders, even if these acts meant political suicide. Would American presidents consider taking “courageous actions,” such as, to use a historical example, far-reaching concessions to the Soviet Union if Congress could remove them from office the next day? Of course not. Yet this didn’t prevent American presidents and their envoys from attempting to tutor Israeli prime ministers, especially me, about the need for “courage” and “leadership.” I was being lectured about courage from people who had neither risked their own lives in war nor their political lives. When such “leadership” wasn’t forthcoming from me, this was proof of a clear failure of character by a politician guided solely by cynical and personal interests. The conflict between national necessity and political survival is as old as democracy itself, but it didn’t apply here. What stood in the way of the concessions I was pressed to make was simply my belief that they would greatly endanger Israel. So why make them? This too has eluded many American pundits. They might have noted that when I did believe certain measures were vital for Israel’s future, I didn’t hesitate to take them.

I countered that Syria would have to first dismantle the headquarters of the myriad terrorist organizations housed in Damascus, just as the PLO would have to fight and jail Hamas terrorists, cancel its Covenant, which called for Israel’s destruction, and stop their terrible antisemitic indoctrination of Palestinian schoolchildren, who today are still being taught to seek our annihilation. This last point, which exposes a major reason the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lingers, is seldom covered by the media or discussed by Western elites. My

In the American media you are given one chance to make a first impression. If you don’t perform well, you will rarely be invited again.

Terrorism is a phenomenon that tries to evoke one feeling: fear. The one virtue most necessary to defeat terrorism is the antithesis of fear—courage. Courage, said the Romans, is not the only virtue, but it is the single virtue without which all the other virtues are meaningless. Confusion and vacillation facilitated the rise of terrorism, clarity and courage will ensure its defeat.

EARLY IN 1986, I learned of a rumor that Kurt Waldheim, a former United Nations secretary-general and a candidate for Austria’s presidency, had a file as a Nazi war criminal—in the United Nations no less! There were always whispers about Waldheim’s past but a UN file was something new. “Do you have such a file?” I asked the United Nations Secretariat. “We don’t know,” came the answer. “Why not?” I asked. “Because we’re not allowed to open the archives.” During World War II, Churchill had established a tribunal of the sixteen Allied governments (some in exile) to document Nazi war crimes for future prosecution. The tribunal’s findings were handed over to the United Nations when it was established. The files were stored in one of the UN buildings in New York. I asked once more to see them. “You can’t,” a UN official explained. “When the archives were deposited in the United Nations, it was agreed they will be opened only with the unanimous consent of all sixteen countries.” “What the…” I muttered, outraged. In the face of such obstinacy I set out on a yearlong public and diplomatic campaign to convince these sixteen governments to give their consent. In this I was greatly helped by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress. It was like peeling a diplomatic onion. One layer led to another, and then to another, until at last all the countries had agreed. We had opened the padlock. When I walked into the unlocked storeroom, I saw rows and rows of cardboard boxes containing yellowing files. Picking up a box marked with the letter W, I started going file by file. Sure enough, there was a file marked WALDHEIM KURT. It detailed acts of wanton murder that this Austrian Nazi officer’s unit carried out in the war. Declassified documents later showed that the CIA had been aware of some details of Waldheim’s wartime past since 1945. They didn’t publish the information and Waldheim was able to assume the august post of United Nations secretary-general, in which he was warmly welcomed around the world.

Soviet Jews would be released because the Soviet empire was in tatters. That was certainly my view, one that I had developed over the previous decade through telling conversations. In 1979, at the first Jonathan Institute conference in Jerusalem, I had spoken with the great Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. “Benjamin,” he had said, “please understand, the Soviet regime is desperate. Everything is rotten inside. Nothing works. It’s one big rotten core held together by the façade of invincibility provided by nuclear ICBMs parading in Red Square.” He predicted that within a decade the Soviet Union as we knew it would collapse. He was right on the

The answer is… nothing, except the force of deterrence. Peace with a dictatorship, or at least nonbelligerence with it, is achieved not by debilitating concessions but by powerful deterrence—not by weakness but by strength. The dictatorship that I was most concerned with was actually not Syria but Iran. On February 19, 1993, I published an article titled “The Great Danger.” “The greatest danger to Israel’s existence is not found in the Arab countries, but in Iran,”3 I wrote. I consistently argued that we must take action to prevent Iran from realizing its nuclear ambitions. All these arguments, based on history and common sense, were dismissed by the foreign policy elites in both Israel and Washington. The election of Rabin was seen as an opportunity to break the logjam and make a historic peace, beginning with Syria. But first one obstacle had to be removed. The Ford administration had given Israel a commitment that the Golan Heights would effectively remain in Israel’s hands. President Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was dispatched to Israel to change that. Christopher devised a new secret agreement by which the US would receive from Israel “a deposit”—an advanced promise to cede the Golan Heights in exchange for a future peace deal. This was required because Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator, insisted on first receiving such an Israeli commitment before he would even consider moving forward with any political negotiations with Israel. As would later become evident, Assad actually had no intention of making a formal peace, but the Rabin government nonetheless agreed to a full withdrawal from the Heights in exchange for a peace agreement.

Emerging from these predictable televised jousting matches, I thought I could do something different. I arranged an Israeli press conference for all the Arab journalists covering the conference. This was thoroughly unconventional at the time. Most of the journalists came, and I let them fire questions at me. One by one they leveled the usual vilifications, and one by one I rebuffed them with factual counterarguments. But I tried to do so in a noncombative way. Having met several Arab diplomats in the United Nations, I was shocked to discover a simple truth: They didn’t know even the most rudimentary facts about the history of our conflict or of our historic attachment to the contested land. For decades they had absorbed the lies of Arab propaganda and believed them to be true. The fact that this propaganda was taken for truth was typically explained away by American diplomats as deriving from different narratives, another piece of jargon used to denote that each side’s arguments are relative and beyond any objective examination of the facts. Competing “narratives” have been very much present in the Knesset, too. In a late-night debate in 2013, an Arab Knesset member was debating a Likud member about who preceded whom in what is now Israel. The historical facts are not that difficult to establish, since the Jews appeared in what became the Land of Israel roughly 3,500 years ago and the Arab conquest of this land occurred some two thousand years later, in the seventh century CE. The Arab member of the Knesset summed up his speech with a sharp, double-edged barb: “We were here before you, and we will be here after you.” At two in the morning I had had enough. I asked to use the prime minister’s prerogative to speak and gave my shortest speech in the Knesset: “To the Knesset member who just spoke, I say this: The first thing you said didn’t happen, and the second never will.” 13

I COULD HAVE reminded the Arab Knesset member of other historical facts once known to many schoolchildren but which have since been forgotten—or distorted by anti-Israel propaganda. The history of the Jewish people spans almost four millennia. The first thousand years or so are covered in the Bible, and are attested to by archaeology and the historical records of other, contemporaneous peoples. As the centuries progress, the mists of time and the myths gradually evaporate and the unfolding events come into sharp historical focus. Reading the Bible from second grade on, I could easily imagine Abraham and Sarah on their long trek from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan almost four thousand years ago. Abraham envisions one God, unseen but present everywhere. He buys a burial cave in Hebron and bequeaths the new land to his progeny. The descendants of Abraham’s grandson Jacob are enslaved in Egypt for centuries, until Moses takes them out of bondage. He leads them for forty years in the wilderness to the Promised Land, giving the Children of Israel the Ten Commandments and a moral code that would change the world. The indomitable Joshua conquers the land, wily David establishes his kingdom in Jerusalem, and wise Solomon builds his Temple there, only to have his sons split the realm into two. The northern kingdom, Israel, is destroyed, its ten tribes lost to history. The southern kingdom, Judea, is conquered and Solomon’s Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians, by whose rivers the exiled Judeans weep as they remember Zion. They rejoice when in 537 BCE they are reinstated in their homeland by Cyrus of Persia, who lets them rebuild their destroyed Temple. The Persian rulers are replaced by Alexander the Great, one of whose heirs seeks to eradicate the Jewish religion. This sparks a rebellion led by the brave Maccabees, and the independent Jewish state they establish lasts for eighty years. It is overtaken by the rising power Rome which initially rules through proxies, the most notable of whom is Herod the Great. Herod refurbishes the Jerusalem Temple as one of the great wonders of the ancient world. In its bustling courtyard a Jewish rabbi from the Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, overturns the tables of the money changers, setting off a chain of events culminating in his eventual crucifixion and the beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition. When the Jews rebel against Roman rule, Rome destroys Jerusalem and Herod’s Temple in 70 CE. Masada, the last rebel stronghold, falls three years later. Despite the devastation, sixty-two years later the Jews rebel again under the fearless Bar Kokhba, only to be crushed even more brutally. The Roman emperor Hadrian bars the Jews from Jerusalem and renames the country Palestina, after the Grecian Philistines, who have long disappeared.

Middle East pundits, like most pundits, seldom bother to review their past political prognostications. But in this case it is clear who got it right and who got it wrong. As I predicted, the PLO’s Fatah did not stand up to Hamas and indeed often joined it in terrorist attacks. In 1994, shortly after Arafat was brought to Gaza from Tunis, an unprecedented wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israel began. After Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Fatah caved to Hamas, which has since used the territory to launch more than ten thousand rockets into Kiryat Gat, Ashkelon, Beer-Sheba, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and many other parts of Israel.

In the months following the assassination, any criticism of Oslo was henceforth deemed “incitement” and an attempt to kill “Rabin’s legacy.” Never mind that this “legacy” morphed into fantasy. For all my disagreement with Rabin, he was not what the left made him out to be. In his last speech to the Knesset, delivered a month before his assassination, Rabin spoke against a full-fledged Palestinian state. He specifically said that in a final peace settlement, the “Palestinian entity,” as he called it, would be “less than a state.” He insisted that Israel would maintain large settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria and in Gush Katif, in the Gaza district. He declared that Israel would maintain control of the Jordan Valley “in the broadest meaning of that term” as Israel’s security border in the east. All this meant that under Rabin’s plan, Israel would keep full control over sizable parts of Judea and Samaria. Rabin also made clear that all of Jerusalem and its settled environs would remain under Israeli sovereignty.

MY CRITICAL VIEW of American policy in the Middle East should not obscure my broader and enormous appreciation for America’s role in the world. It was the great misfortune of the Jewish people and all of humanity that the United States was not the leading world power in the first half of the twentieth century. Conversely, it was our great fortune that in the second half of the twentieth century the United States emerged as the greatest power on earth. Not accidentally, the first half century was marked by Western weakness, culminating in tragedies including the unimaginable Holocaust, while the second half was marked by American strength in defense of freedom, including the

I told Eagleburger that Prime Minister Begin would never agree to this. The inherent problem in our conflict with the Arabs wasn’t the absence of a Palestinian state, but the presence of a Jewish one, I said. The persistent Arab refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own is what had been driving this conflict since the beginning of the twentieth century. Not only did the Reagan Plan not address this critical issue. By putting the onus of the continuation of the conflict on Israel, it encouraged the Palestinians and other Arabs to continue to reject the very idea of a Jewish state, thus pushing the possibility of an enduring peace ever further away.

Since I usually agreed with these policies, this didn’t present much difficulty. I found that if I believed in what I said, and presented my arguments forcefully and thoughtfully, I could get my message through effectively.

Yossi Sarid, a leader of the left, wrote that I would soon discover that Israel is not America and that I would be a brief and passing phenomenon. Sarid made common cause with my opponents from Likud, explaining that I was “shallow,” a “sound-bite man,” “all show—no substance,” “soon to evaporate.”1 They relied on the overwhelming concentration of left-leaning journalists in Israel’s press, still largely unchanged today after thirty years, to drive this message home to the public. In Israel’s first decades, the country’s press was fairly balanced. Although the ruling Labor Party controlled the monopolistic state radio (it is said that Prime Minister Ben Gurion actually dictated news headlines), the three major dailies represented a broad spectrum of news and opinion from right to left. This began to change with the introduction of the single-channel state television in 1966. Television gradually overtook the newspapers as the main source of information and entertainment for the public. State TV was largely a closed shop dominated by the left. It was a main breeding ground for media personnel who would percolate into the two state-regulated commercial channels that were later launched. Legislation made it exceptionally difficult to introduce any additional broadcasters and effectively impossible to launch competing news channels. While it is common that the mainstream media is dominated by the left in most Western democracies, these countries also have alternative media, such as cable news and talk radio, that reach large segments of the population. Israel has none of that. Most Israelis get their news from just two left-leaning nightly news channels. This monopolistic stranglehold on information and opinion has only recently begun to loosen with the spread of social media that enables other voices to be heard. Though there have always been a sprinkling of right-leaning journalists, most of the newscasters, editors and program producers hail from the left. Especially since the historic election of 1977, when Likud elevated Begin to prime minister, the dominant media oligarchy has sought to maintain their power through legislative barriers to entry into television and radio. They see it as their mission to pull public opinion to the left.