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.

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.

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.

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

the art of politics and the idea of cohering interests.

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.

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.

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

Will the money now given to Iran by this agreement cause this leopard to change its spots? A rule of thumb I learned in life is that when you reward bad behavior, it gets worse.

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

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.

flaw

Once you establish the principle that you withdraw to escape terrorism, terrorism will chase you,” I countered

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Israel’s international standing was boosted by the fact that I was repeatedly ranked by Forbes magazine among the most powerful people in the world, one of only four political leaders to consistently appear in each listing for over a decade.

… 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.

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

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.

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.

Though Hamas was aware that we had been building a subterranean wall equipped with sensors around the Gaza perimeter, its effectiveness at blocking the terror tunnels shocked them. The underground route through which they planned to penetrate Israel was gone.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Two weeks later, Sharon formally announced his plan to vacate a total of twenty-five communities—twenty-one Israeli communities in the Gaza Strip and four in Northern Samaria.1 Two weeks after that, he invited me to a meeting to try to mollify me. “When Israel withdraws unilaterally,” I said, “we know what Israel gives, but what does Israel get?” Specifically I raised the troubling likelihood that Hamas would take over the areas we vacated and use them to attack Israel.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Obama and members of his administration constantly disparaged the motives for my opposition to the deal in briefings to the press. To them, I was a narrow-minded small-time politician maneuvering for my personal political survival. One even briefed an American journalist that I was little more than a “chickenshit.” This from people who never risked their lives a day on a battlefield and whose political survival in America’s presidential system could be challenged only once in four years and not every week, as in Israel’s parliamentary system.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There is a wide gap between the hostile attitude toward Israel of those in the political class, who had become more radical, and the general sentiment of Democratic voters, whose favorable attitude remained stable. This stability of Democratic favorability toward Israel is often misunderstood because it is overshadowed by Republican favorability, which has skyrocketed in the last decade. While Israel faces a serious problem of vilification and slander on America’s college campuses, which have veered sharply to the far left, it’s worth noting that its favorability among the overall American public went up from 63 percent to a robust 75 percent during the twelve years I served in office from 2009 to 2021.

Often described as a transactional president, Trump would approach an issue by asking, “Why do we need this?” invariably followed by, “What do we get for this?” Often this attitude got to the heart of many absurdities and iniquities, but sometimes it overlooked basic truths. “Why do we need NATO?” a question that puts into doubt a critical foundation of the free world’s security, is entirely different from “Why are the NATO partners not paying their fair share?” a legitimate Trump question that had long waited to be asked. Trump’s insistence on reciprocity in trade was also well overdue. Why should some countries be allowed to insist on free trade for themselves while closing off their markets to American goods and services?

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.

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 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.

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

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.

TRUMP HAD MADE history. He was able to do so because of his inherent irreverence. He was bound by few conventions. This is why he could brush aside the traditional thinking of the foreign policy elite on such matters as the Iran nuclear deal and recognizing Jerusalem and the Golan. Yet, paradoxically, his initial fixation on that old axiomatic truth—that an Israeli-Palestinian peace would solve the problems of the Middle East and that the key to achieving that peace was overcoming Israeli intransigence—delayed the launch of the historic peace accords between Israel and Arab states to the end of his term rather than its beginning, as I had hoped. “By that time,” as Ron Dermer told Jared Kushner, we were “running out of runway to get more peace treaties,” which could have effectively ended the Israeli-Arab conflict.

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.

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.

On December 18, 2003, six months after I had passed my economic recovery plan in the Knesset, Sharon surprised the nation by announcing his plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip. His stated rationale was that Israel should rid itself of controlling this sizable Palestinian population, and would do so while giving up minimal territory. He argued that Israel’s security would actually be enhanced and that if a single rocket was fired at us, Israel would retaliate massively with full international backing. Gaza had no special hold on the public’s imagination. Many Israelis would have been delighted to get rid of it. Sharon’s move was aligned with this sentiment, even though it completely contradicted his campaign pledge a few months earlier never to uproot any of the Jewish communities built in the Gaza Strip during the previous four decades.

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.

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

Trump’s unpredictability caused much discomfort among his frequently changing staff and among America’s allies, who were used to automatic, reflexive support from American presidents. But it had its uses internationally by putting America’s adversaries off balance and instilling fear in its enemies. As Israel’s prime minister, I saw it as my job to carefully navigate through the new reality Trump brought to Washington in order to advance Israel’s security and vital national interests and to forge four historic peace agreements. I could do so because Trump adopted an entirely new approach to peacemaking. He did not heed bureaucratic orthodoxy and was willing to go outside the box. For the first time in Israel’s history, peace was achieved without ceding territory or uprooting Jews from their homes. It was based on mutual economic, diplomatic and security interests in which all sides benefited. In

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.

The United States could afford to leave Afghanistan, albeit with tragic consequences for the Afghan people, who would again be subjugated by the Taliban, because that country was thousands of miles away from America. But an Israeli withdrawal from large areas in Judea and Samaria would place the Islamists a few thousand meters from all of our major cities. We would hand the hills around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Hamas. A terrorist organization supported by Iran and committed to our destruction would take over the heart of our homeland and threaten our survival. US officials repeatedly underestimated the power of the Islamists and overestimated the power of their non-Islamist allies. Unless you have forces with an equal commitment to fight and die to defend their country, the Islamists eventually win. As long as Israeli forces held on to territories adjoining Israel, the Islamists would be kept at bay. The minute we vacated those territories, the Islamists would take over, as did Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

In war, setbacks often divide; successes usually unite. Guardian of the Walls—thwarting the terror tunnel network and the naval and aerial capabilities that Hamas built over many years—was our most successful operation against Hamas to date. Cumulatively, the best indicator of the success of our operations was that in the five years after Protective Edge in 2014 up to the end of 2019, the population in the Israeli communities adjacent to Gaza grew by 15 percent, compared to 9 percent in the rest of the country.3 That robust growth continued after Guardian of the Walls. Yet during that operation, in addition to Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets on our cities, we faced another ominous threat. Israel has several cities with mixed Jewish and Arab populations. Normally they coexist peacefully and harmoniously. Now, in the midst of the fighting, groups of radicalized Israeli Arabs attacked their Jewish neighbors with automatic weapons, murdering them in apartment buildings and in the streets. The shooters, often an amalgam of Islamic radicals and criminal elements, were using illegal weapons rampant in Arab communities. This lawlessness was a festering sore for decades.

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.

The Americans had urged us to finish the Mavi Marmara affair. We had already reached a compensation agreement with Turkey for the families of the Turks killed in the operation. What was needed now was a carefully worded script for a concluding conversation between Erdogan and me. As extra insurance against a future abandonment of the agreement by Erdogan, I asked Obama to be in on the phone conference. He did so from a special mobile cabin at the airport. “Recep, how are you, my friend?” the president said to Erdogan. “How’s the wife, how’s the family?” The genuine camaraderie in his voice tallied with what I had heard: One of Obama’s closest friends among foreign leaders was the Turkish president, possibly because in Obama’s eyes Turkey was an example of a modern, successful and democratic Islamic state. Presumably this friendship later weakened when, following an attempted coup against him on July 15, 2016, Erdogan transformed Turkey into a rigidly authoritarian regime, locked up all his political opponents, and threw more journalists in jail than almost any other ruler on earth. Erdogan and I each read our lines. I thanked Obama. The Marmara affair was finally settled.

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.

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.

The fearful critiques came from within my government, too. A senior minister said to me, “You can’t stand up to America. Don’t fight a fight you are not going to win. You won’t stop the deal; you’ll only rupture relations with our most important ally. Ask for added defense appropriations, but don’t go.” Another minister argued that we should ask to be at the negotiating table. “You forget that we have been at the table with the Americans for the last two years,” I answered. “They listen politely to our comments, occasionally make minor modifications, but as far as making real changes—they haven’t done a damn thing. We’ve gotten to the point where even the French are tougher than the Americans, but they too don’t call the shots.” As the pressure mounted from abroad and from within, most of my staff joined in urging me to reconsider giving the speech or at least to do it at a later date. I was practically the only holdout. “Why don’t you push it beyond the elections? That way no one could say that it was political,” was the most common suggestion. “We may not be here after the elections,” I answered. As long as doubt lingered whether I would actually go through with the speech, I couldn’t focus my efforts on preparing it properly.

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 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.

Great empires throughout history, including the Romans and the Mongols, could rise and rule for centuries because they understood the need for overwhelming power. The United States, the most powerful force in modern times, could only ensure the constancy of its own superiority and the supremacy of its values if it continually nurtured its power and the will to use it when necessary. Obama’s extraordinary statement confirmed for me two things. First, he wanted to depart from the postwar American policy of peace through strength. He wanted peace through understanding. This wasn’t a result of personal weakness. It stemmed from his belief that the projection of American power had caused more harm than good. He truly viewed himself as “a citizen of the world.” As such he wanted to reach a broad international consensus on pivotal issues that he believed would be shared by all or most major powers. This necessarily detracted from America’s traditional global prominence and was interpreted as weakness by Iran and other powers that didn’t share his view. My second take from this conversation was that the chances of an American military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities under Obama were practically nil. Even if he built an American military option, he was unlikely to use it preemptively. And the Iranians would know it. This meant he would conduct negotiations with them on their nuclear capabilities without the most important card up his sleeve. Hiding

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.

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!

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.

called in Boogie Yaalon, whom I had recently appointed as defense minister, to hear the American proposal with me. Allen laid out a presentation of US technological monitors that would be placed along the border. He said this would obviate the need for permanently stationed Israeli forces along the Jordan. As for the internal policing against terrorism within the Palestinian areas, the US would train the Palestinian security forces to do the job. I responded that shortly after Israel left Gaza, those same Palestinian Authority security forces caved to Hamas terrorists. “This is different,” Kerry said. “These forces would be trained by us.” He then made an extraordinary proposal. “Bibi, I want to arrange a clandestine visit for you to Afghanistan. You’ll see with your own eyes what a great job we did there to prepare the Afghan army to take over the country once we leave.” Yaalon and I looked at each other. Our glances said everything. “John,” I said, “the minute you leave Afghanistan the Taliban will mop up the force you trained in no time.” Boogie concurred completely. In 2021, that is exactly what happened. Once the US withdrew its last forces, the US-trained Afghan military crumbled into dust in a matter of days. I remembered a similar discussion with another secretary of state, George Shultz, who made the same argument to encourage our withdrawal from Lebanon. The US was training the Lebanese Army to take over the country. I argued that once we left Lebanon, radical forces would grab control. Lacking the cohesive zealotry of the radicals, the American-trained forces would collapse or become irrelevant. That’s exactly what happened when we withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000. Hezbollah took over the country in no time.

It’s one thing to confront militant Islamists on pickup trucks, armed with Kalashnikov rifles,” I said, referring to the ISIS terrorist threat that still captured the world’s attention. “It’s another thing to confront militant Islamists armed with weapons of mass destruction. Imagine how much more dangerous the Islamic state of ISIS would be if it possessed chemical weapons. Now imagine how much more dangerous the Islamic state of Iran would be if it possessed nuclear weapons.”3 But there was a silver lining. “I believe we have an historic opportunity,” I said. “After decades of seeing Israel as their enemy, leading states in the Arab world increasingly recognize that together we face the same dangers, a nuclear-armed Iran and militant Islamist movements.” Foreshadowing the Abraham Accords, I said, “Many have long assumed that an Israeli-Palestinian peace can help facilitate a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world. I think it may work the other way around: a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world may help facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace. To achieve that peace, we must look not only to Jerusalem and Ramallah, but also to Cairo, Amman, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and elsewhere.”4 Two days later I repeated these themes in my meeting with Obama in the White House. As usual, my main emphasis was on Iran. “As you know, Mr. President,” I said, “Iran seeks a deal that would lift the tough sanctions that you worked so hard to put in place and leave it as a threshold nuclear power, and I fervently hope that under your leadership that will not happen.”5 While my warnings on Iran didn’t move Obama, they registered loud and clear in American public opinion and in Congress. This was soon to have momentous consequences.

But rather than deal with labels, I want to deal with substance. There are two prerequisites for peace. First, the Palestinians must recognize the Jewish state. They have to stop calling and educating their people for Israel’s destruction. Second, in any peace agreement Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River. If we don’t we’ll get another radical Islamic terrorist state in the Palestinian areas which will explode the peace and explode the Middle East. Unfortunately, the Palestinians vehemently reject both prerequisites for peace. They even deny, Mr. President, our historical connection to our homeland. Why are Jews called Jews? The Chinese are called Chinese because they come from China. The Japanese are called Japanese because they come from Japan. Well, Jews are called Jews because they come from Judea. This is our ancestral homeland. Jews are not foreign colonialists in Judea. LEAVING WASHINGTON, I realized I had a problem. The president of the United States opposed the Iran nuclear deal, as I did, but he had also become convinced that I was the obstacle to a Palestinian-Israeli peace that Mahmoud Abbas was ready for. I had to hand it to the Palestinians. They outflanked me by embracing a friend from whom I had grown apart, promising him that he would be the great peacemaker. Trump had known this person for many years and considered him a reliable source on the Middle East. How could I not see that coming? Admittedly, I wasn’t so much worried that Trump would cozy up to the Palestinians with the same vindictive zeal as Obama. Most of the senior officials in his administration did not buy the Palestinian line. Besides, I knew that Trump would come to appreciate the great support Israel and I had in the evangelical community, the most important element of his political base.

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 argued again for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. America could still stop Iran from developing atomic bombs that would endanger America, Israel and the peace of the entire world. An American action now would give an enormous boost to the standing of the US and its president. Obama’s response floored me and Itzik Molcho, who sat beside me. “Bibi,” he said, “Nobody likes Goliath. I don’t want to be an eight-hundred-pound gorilla strutting on the world stage. For too long we acted that way. We need to lead in a different way.” I was stunned. In the Middle East as I knew it, with Iran racing to nuclear weapons, and with the shifting geopolitical balance toward Asia, I would want to be a 1,200-pound gorilla, not an 800-pound one. Often when I met officials of the Obama administration they waxed lyrical about the marvels of soft power. Culture, values, even Hollywood can do wonders to change the world, they said. “Soft power is good,” I acknowledged, “but hard power is even better.” By hard power I meant the judicious use of formidable military or economic power, or both. The values of individual liberty and national freedom give meaning and strength to free societies. But they are not enough. Power has the unfortunate quality of not being limited to the morally superior and the well intentioned. If malign forces amass enough of it and have the will to use it, they will overcome the less well-armed forces of good, especially if the good lack the tenacity to fight. Being a moral people won’t save you from conquest and carnage, which was the history of the Jewish people for two thousand years. Being perfect victims who harmed no one, we were perfectly moral. Being utterly powerless, we were led to the slaughter again and again. The rise of Zionism was meant to correct this flaw by giving the Jewish people the power to defend themselves. Enhancing this capacity was the central mission of my years in office.

Israel was ahead of the curve, seemingly able to bring the disease under control while others could not. It was then that I made a cardinal mistake. Responding to public pressure, the government lifted restrictions on public gatherings, restaurants, bars, eateries, large parks, swimming pools, and public transportation too quickly. To make matters worse, I gave a press conference in which I thanked Israel’s citizens for their cooperation and then added, “We want to help the economy and ease your lives, to make it possible for you to get out, return to normalcy. Go get a cup of coffee, a glass of beer, have fun.”3 The public did just that and the infection rate soon began to rise again. “Prime Minister, are we out of it?” I was asked by my staff. “Of course not,” I answered. “As long as there’s even one infected person around, the disease will reappear and again spread exponentially.” “So what should we do?” “You ever play an accordion?” I asked. “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll open up and close down the country, depending on the infection rate and our hospitals’ ability to handle the severely ill, until we can get this damn thing under control.” The “accordion policy” was an attempt to strike a balance between keeping the hospitals from crashing and keeping businesses from collapsing. We shelled out billions of shekels to help small businesses, employers, and laid-off workers. This largesse was frowned upon by those who had previously supported my tight fiscal policies. Two prominent officials in the Finance Ministry unabashedly briefed reporters against the government’s economic aid policy. “Prime Minister Netanyahu is working against Finance Minister Netanyahu,” carped my critics. Not quite. Unlike in previous economic crises, the world was awash with cheap credit. The cost of an economic collapse from a general health breakdown would be far greater than the interest payments we would have to make to keep business alive.

FACING A TOUGH election, I also saw that the P5+1 and Iran were racing to a dangerous nuclear agreement that would pave Iran’s path to the bomb. Under the impending agreement, Iran would be able to freely enrich uranium within a few years. Becoming a threshold nuclear power with a nuclear arsenal, Iran would jeopardize the very existence of Israel. I had to fight this. But how could I possibly do it? The polls showed I could soon be out of office. On Friday, January 8, 2015, I received a fateful call from Ron Dermer from our embassy in Washington. He told me that Speaker of the House John Boehner had called him asking whether I would be willing to address a joint meeting of Congress on the dangers of the impending nuclear deal. It was a monumental decision. This would not just be another speech. I would be going into the lion’s den in Washington to challenge a sitting American president. Stirring up such a hornets’ nest on the eve of an Israeli election could have devastating political consequences. The nuclear deal was Obama’s top priority. Blocking it was my top priority. Placing this conflict on such a global stage would put me on a head-on collision course with the president of the United States. Yet I was given the opportunity to speak before Congress and the American people on a matter vital to Israel’s very survival. I felt the pull of history. Such an invitation could not be declined. “The answer is yes, in principle,” I said to Ron. That still left me time to think everything through. Dermer began working on the details with Boehner. We settled on March 3 as the date of the speech, to coincide with AIPAC’s annual conference. I would have six weeks to prepare the most important speech of my life. Word spread that I would be giving the speech just a few days after we picked the date, and a chorus of condemnation erupted like a volcano. Statements like “Netanyahu is destroying our alliance with the United States” and “an act of enormous irresponsibility” flooded the press, the media, and the Knesset. In the US, Dermer personally met with dozens of Democratic

I saw Clinton again during the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan in Israel’s Arava Valley in 1995. That year, I also sent him my third book on terrorism, Fighting Terrorism, and he sent me back a cordial letter. Notwithstanding his civility, I knew his administration would do anything to defeat me. In fact they did. Totally committed to the idea of a fully independent Palestine, they were not aware that Rabin himself had been opposed to such a state. Clinton sent his number one campaign strategist, James Carville, his pollster Stan Greenberg and his top team of experts to Israel to help tip the scales in Peres’s favor. Special envoy Dennis Ross would later say, “We did everything we could to help Peres,” and Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, would also later admit, “If there was ever a time that we tried to influence an Israeli election, it was Peres vs. Netanyahu.”23 Normally such an outrageous and systemic interference in another democracy’s elections would elicit outcries of protest from the press in America and Israel alike. No such protests were heard. Totally supportive of Peres, the press in both Israel and the United States was silent. Though the odds were stacked against us, we weren’t fazed. “About Carville,” Arthur said, “we can beat him.” Clinton and Peres organized an international peace conference in Sharm el-Sheikh a few weeks before the elections. Peres, Clinton, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, and Arafat all showed up and danced the dance. Yet a few months earlier, soon after Peres was installed without an election as replacement prime minister following Rabin’s assassination, King Hussein had sent me a message through his brother Crown Prince Hassan, asking: Would I meet Hassan secretly in London? In a London flat the crown prince and I hit it off immediately. I liked Hassan. Straightforward, with a humorous streak, he didn’t even attempt to hide his concern about a Peres victory. Though they wouldn’t admit it publicly, he and many Jordanian officials I met over the years were concerned that an armed Palestinian state could destroy the Hashemite regime and take over Jordan.

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.

The first phase of the war was led by the IAF. It targeted Hamas rocket launchers, commanders and command posts that Hamas deliberately embedded in Gaza’s densely populated civilian neighborhoods. It placed its main headquarters in a hospital and its stockpiles of rockets and missiles in hospitals, schools and mosques, often using children as human shields. Before bombing these Hamas targets, in an effort to minimize civilian casualties the IDF issued warning to civilians to evacuate the premises. Hamas continued to rocket Israeli cities. I instructed the army to prepare for a ground operation to take out the tunnels. Our soldiers would be susceptible to Palestinian ground fire, booby traps, land mines and antitank missiles, some fired by terrorists emerging from underground. As casualties would inevitably mount on both sides in this door-to-door warfare, I realized that Israel would face growing international criticism. But there was no other choice. I called Obama, the first of many phone conversations we had during the operation. He said he supported Israel’s right of self-defense but was very clear on its limits. “Bibi,” he said, “we won’t support a ground action.” “Barack, I don’t want a ground action,” I said. “But if our intelligence shows that the terror tunnels are about to penetrate our territory, I won’t have a choice.” I repeated this conversation with the many foreign leaders whom I called and who called me, thus setting the international stage for a ground action. Most accepted what I said. The same could not be said for the international media. It hammered Israel on the growing number of Palestinian casualties from our air attacks, conveniently absolving Hamas of targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians. The media also bought Hamas’s inflated numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties, and even its staging of fake funerals. We unmasked many of those being claimed as civilians as Hamas terrorists by providing their names, unit affiliation and other identifying data. I visited the IDF’s Southern Command to meet the brigade commanders who would lead the ground action. They were feverishly working on the means to locate and destroy the tunnels. They were brave, resolute and smart. They knew very well the dangers they and their men would face. So did their soldiers, many of whom did not return.

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

In the first day of the fighting, America’s new president, Joe Biden, called me. We had known each other for close to forty years, from the time we both came to Washington, he as a young senator from Delaware and I as deputy chief of Israel’s embassy to the United States. Four days after the 2020 elections Biden was declared president-elect. In the twenty-four hours after that declaration I followed twenty other world leaders in offering my congratulations. This elicited the ire of President Trump, who to this day believes that I was the first to do so. Now in our phone call President Biden said that America stood by Israel’s right to defend itself. But in the coming days, as the fighting escalated and the press reported on mounting Palestinian casualties, he began to push for a cease-fire. “Bibi, I gotta tell you, I’m coming under a lot of pressure back here,” he said. “This is not Scoop Jackson’s Democratic Party,” referring to the strikingly pro-Israel senator whose long tenure ended in the 1980s. “I’m getting squeezed here to put an end to this as soon as possible.” I responded that I was getting squeezed by millions of Israelis in underground shelters who rightfully expected me to knock the daylight out of the terrorists. For this the IDF needed a few more days to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist infrastructure. Our intelligence could pick off more prime targets, especially since Hamas’s underground bunkers were no longer secure. Biden agreed but resumed the pressure to end the fighting the next day. As I did earlier with Obama during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, I asked and got from Biden during Operation Guardian of the Walls a commitment to fund the replenishing of Iron Dome interceptors, a defensive weapon system that enjoyed broad bipartisan support in the US Congress. Each phone conversation with the president brought the end of the fighting closer. I could buy a little more time, but it was clear that we would not have the seemingly unlimited time we had in 2014. Nor did we need it. Within a little over a week, the IDF’s main battle goals were achieved, but I had one more objective in mind. With some luck and a bit more intelligence work, we might be able to pick off Mohammed Deif, the Hamas terrorist chief who was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis and who had managed to evade all our previous efforts to target him.

Unlike during the previous Gaza operation in 2012, the Iron Dome supply did not run out. After Operation Pillar of Defense I had instructed the army to accelerate production of Iron Dome projectiles and batteries. We accomplished this with our own funds and with generous American financial support. I now asked the Obama administration for an additional $225 million package to continue the production line after Protective Edge. He agreed, and with the help of Tony Blinken, the deputy national security advisor who later became Biden’s secretary of state, the funding provision sailed through both houses of Congress. I deeply appreciated this support and said so publicly. I was therefore very disappointed when the administration held back on the IDF’s request for additional Hellfire rockets for our attack helicopters. Without offensive weapons we could not bring the Gaza operation to a quick and decisive end. Furthermore, as the air war lingered, the administration issued increasingly critical statements against Israel, calling some of our actions “appalling”2 and thereby opening the moral floodgates against us. Hamas took note. As long as it believed that we couldn’t deliver more aggressive punches, and that international support was waning, it would continue to rocket our cities. Unfortunately, it was aided in this belief by an international tug-of-war. On one side: Israel and Egypt. On the other: Turkey and Qatar, which fully supported Hamas. I worked in close collaboration with Egypt’s new leader, el-Sisi, who had deposed the Islamist Morsi a few months earlier. Our common goal was to achieve an unconditional cease-fire. The last thing el-Sisi wanted was a Hamas success in Gaza that would embolden their Islamist allies in the Sinai and beyond. Hamas’s exiled leader, Khaled Mashal, who escaped the Mossad action in Jordan, was now in Qatar. Supported by his Qatari hosts and Erdogan and ensconced in his lavish villa in Doha, Mashal egged Hamas to keep on fighting. To my astonishment, Kerry urged me to accept Qatar and Turkey as mediators instead of the Egyptians, who were negotiating with Hamas representatives in Cairo for a possible cease-fire. Hamas drew much encouragement from this American position. El-Sisi and I agreed to keep the Americans out of the negotiating loop. In the meantime the IDF would have to further degrade Hamas’s fighting and crush their expectations of achieving anything in the cease-fire negotiations.

The Syrian civil war was raging at this time. When we faced the press in the prime minister’s residence, Obama was asked point-blank about reports that the Syrian government had possibly used chemical weapons against opponents of Assad’s regime a day earlier. “Is this a red line for you?” a journalist asked. “I have made clear that the use of chemical weapons is a game changer,”1 he said, a reaffirmed threat heard round the world. He had first drawn a red line on this issue a few months earlier in a White House statement. Would he make good on it if it were proven that chemical weapons were actually used in Syria? Time would tell. And it did. Five months later, Assad’s forces carried out a horrific chemical attack that killed 1,500 civilians. Obama called it “the worst chemical weapons attack of the twenty-first century.”2 The entire world was shocked by the footage of little children suffocating to death. All eyes were on Obama. He was scheduled to make a dramatic announcement. Minutes before going on-air, he called me. “Bibi,” he said, “I’ve decided to take action but I need to go to Congress first.” I was astonished. American law did not require such an appeal. Syria was not about to go to war with the United States but Congress was unlikely to approve military action anyway. I hid my disappointment and rebounded with an idea that Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz had raised earlier with Ron Dermer and me in the event that Obama wouldn’t attack. The Russian military was in Syria to shore up the Assad regime and protect Russian assets in Syria, such as the strategic Russian naval base in Latakia. That was a fact we could do little to change. But Putin shared with us and the United States a desire to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who posed a threat to Russia, too. “Why don’t you get the Russians with your approval to take out the chemical stockpiles from Syria?” I suggested to the president. “We would back that decision.” This is in fact what transpired in the coming months, though some materials for chemical weapons were still left in Syria. Yet, despite these positive results, the lingering effect of Obama’s last-minute turn to Congress was the impression that red lines can be crossed with impunity and that Obama would not employ America’s massive airpower even when the situation warranted it. I should have expected this. The second important and telling exchange between Obama and me during his visit to Israel happened in private, and gave me a heads-up on how he viewed the use of American power. The day after the intimate dinner at the prime minister’s residence we met at a King David Hotel suite overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

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.

As Hamas’s rocket stockpiles dwindled, it reduced the number of rockets launched nightly but increased the range to Tel Aviv and beyond. Several of my conversations with Obama were interrupted by sirens. “Sorry, Barack,” I’d say. “I’m afraid we’ll have to resume our conversation in a few minutes.” With the rest of the staff I had forty-five seconds to go into underground shelters, returning after getting the all-clear sign. These live interruptions strengthened my argument for taking increasingly powerful actions against Hamas. And so we did. The IAF destroyed more and more enemy targets. Hamas panicked and became careless. Our intelligence identified the locations of their commanders. We targeted them and delivered painful blows to their hierarchy. Hamas then shifted their command posts to high-rises, believing they would be immune to our strikes. Using a technique called “knock on roof,” the air force fired nonlethal warning shots on the roofs of the buildings. Along with phone calls to the building occupants, these warnings enabled them to leave the premises unharmed. The IDF flattened several high-rise buildings with no civilian casualties. The sight of these collapsing towers sent Hamas a powerful message of demoralization and fear. This was literally “you can climb but you can’t hide.” Desperation was seeping through Hamas ranks. Arguments began to flare between Mashal in Qatar and the ground command in Gaza, which was suffering the brunt of our attacks. Eventually they caved. In the talks with Egypt they rescinded all their demands and agreed to an unconditional cease-fire that went into effect on August 26, 2014. After fifty days, Protective Edge was over. Sixty-seven IDF soldiers, five Israeli civilians, including one child, and a Thai civilian working in Israel lost their lives in the war. There were 4,564 rockets and mortars fired at Israel from Gaza, nearly all from civilian neighborhoods. The Iron Dome system intercepted 86 percent of them.4 The IDF killed 2,125 Gazans,5 roughly two-thirds of whom were members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups. A third were civilians who were often used by the terrorists as human shields. Colonel Richard Kemp, the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said that “the IDF took measures to limit civilian casualties never taken by any Western army in similar situations.” At least twenty-three Palestinian civilians were executed by Hamas over false accusations of colluding with Israel. In reality many had simply criticized the devastation of Gaza brought about by Hamas’s aggression against Israel.6 Hamas leaders emerged from their bunkers. Surveying the rubble, they predictably declared victory. This is what all dictatorships do. They are not accountable to the facts or to their people. Less predictably, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas admitted that Hamas was severely weakened and achieved none of its demands.7 With the