Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently held a lengthy interview with Jordan Peterson about the ongoing struggle against IRan and its various proxies throughout the Middle East.
"The Islamic Republic operates as an “octopus of terror” with its arms all across the Middle East," Bennet declared. "Every country it touches it It ultimately destroys. It empowers, funds, and arms terror, and ultimately commands proxies to generate terrorism, locally against Israel, but not exclusiveley. We need to topple the Iranian regime."
He explained the flaws in the attempts to do so thus far: "We have expended and and exhausted ourselves fighting those fingertips of the octopus and instead of directing our energy to topple the head of the octopus. How do you topple the regime, though? I looked at the Cold War as an analogy. America never bombed Russia. We need America and Israel and the West to apply tremendous diplomatic and economic pressures to accelerate the demise of Iran."
Bennett is confident that the task is doable. "The regime is incompetent and corrupt. It will fall because it is spending too much time keeping its own citizens in line and does not watch its enemies enough. The Iranian government is despised by its people, and when I met with the Biden administration, we outlined about thirty different areas where we could take soft action against the regime. For example, one of their strategies is to turn off the internet to prevent protests spreading; we could instead promote the use of things like Starlink to get around that."
The international community, Bennett says, is part of the process - but must do more. "Other states have already started to help, like with the Abraham Accords. Iran tried in every way to dismantle the Abraham Accords. Evryone in them hates radical Islam, but they need Israel to step up to the plate and show them the way forward in choking off the regime."
Regarding Iranian proxies near Israel, Bennett declared that there needed to be a conceptual change for world leadership. "This was like Stalin with Operation Barbosa. he had massed great numbers of troops on the border, but was still surprised because he has the concept of Peace with Germany. There is no peace with terrorism."