In a wide-ranging interview conducted via videoconference for the 2016 Saban Forum at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised his country’s relationship with the United States, reiterated his continued concerns about Iran’s destabilizing behavior, and expressed frustration that Palestinian leaders have refused to return to the negotiating table.
The state of Israel has “no better friend than the United States of America,” Netanyahu told his interviewer Haim Saban, the media mogul who sponsors the annual conference. “But as someone in the region, I can say that the United States has no better friend than Israel.”
Netanyahu thanked President Barack Obama for the recently signed $38 billion, 10-year Memorandum of Understanding of American defense aid for Israel, saying that the deal “reflects the strong bipartisan support for Israel in the Congress and the broad support for Israel in the American people.” Netanyahu also expressed confidence that President-elect Donald Trump “has a clear vision of America’s role and dominance in the world.”
Echoing an argument he made in his speech to Congress last year, Netanyahu expressed worries that because of the nuclear deal, within a decade Iran “can just walk in to industrial scale enrichment of uranium to make the core for an arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Netanyahu claimed that if Iran were to follow its current trajectory, it will eventually threaten the United States, due to the Islamic Republic’s continued development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. “They’re not developing these ICBMs for us, they’re developing it for you, for America,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu said that he remains committed to a two-state solution with the Palestinians, but proffered that the main obstacle to peace “is that the Palestinians persist in refusing to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary.” Instead of agreeing to meet with Netanyahu without preconditions, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas keeps “trying to go to the UN in a vain effort to try to impose a solution.”
Netanyahu cited Obama’s speech before the UN in 2011 as proof that this approach “will push peace further away.” Obama pledged that the United States would veto a Palestinian attempt to have the UN Security Council impose terms of a peace deal, saying, “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations.”
“This was the right policy then and it’s the right policy today,” Netanyahu commented.
The Prime Minister also criticized the anti-Israel boycott movement, but noted that “If the idea is that Israel will be isolated, Israel will be sidelined, it’s failing miserably.” He cited a recent article in The Economist that claimed that “Israel under my tenure has never been more sought after and more powerful than today.”
In fact, Netanyahu boasted, “Small countries, big countries, superpowers, they’re all…coming here for technology.” He pointed out that 20 percent of the world’s private investment in cyber-security is made in Israel. “Given that we’re one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population, we’re punching two hundred times our weight,” he said.
At the end of the conversation, Saban asked Netanyahu how he would like to be remembered. Netanyahu responded that he brought prosperity to Israel, by making “many, many dozens of reforms to make Israel more market-friendly, a freer market economy. The result has been that Israel has become economically and technologically a significant global actor.”
This has allowed Israel “to be able to expand our defenses” by improving its cyber-security capabilities, as well as being able to afford military hardware. This has been necessary, Netanyahu said, because “on the peace front, nobody makes peace with the weak, you make peace with the strong.”
A recording of the complete conversation is embedded below.
[Photo: Brookings Institution / YouTube ]