Israeli Opposition Leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his foreign policy philosophy Tuesday, contrasting his own beliefs with those of presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Speaking with the Christian Broadcasting Network Tuesday night via satellite for the release of his memoirs, Netanyahu challenged the Western foreign policy establishment’s positions on the centrality of the two-state solution to Middle East peace, as well as its approach towards Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“The founding of Israel came after centuries of exile, of pogroms, of massacres, culminating in the greatest massacre of them all, the Holocaust. The founding of the state was meant to do two things: to fulfil the biblical prophecy of the gathering of the exiles, and also the renewal of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.”
“That was achieved, but once it was achieved, it wasn’t necessarily permanently guaranteed unless we made sure that it was guaranteed.”
Netanyahu highlighted a key plank of his own foreign policy doctrine, achieving normalization with Arab states independently of final status talks with the Palestinian authority – a goal partially realized with the Abraham Accords.
“My father’s generation was charged with founding the state, my generation was concerned with its future. I dedicated my life to make Israel strong – economically strong, militarily strong, diplomatically. To create what I call the ‘Iron Triangle of Peace.’ That we’re so strong that the Arab countries around us, instead of seeking to destroy us, recognize that we are here to stay and so one by one we make peace with them.”
“We just made…the four historic Abraham Accords…with the help of Trump and his team. I think that that’s the future Israel – from being a tiny state on the eastern edge Mediterranean is now ranked as the world’s eighth power, with one tenth of one percent of the world’s population.”
“It is not something you can explain away, it is a miracle of faith and fortitude. And I think it is an allegory for all of humanity, what a free people with sufficient resolve and faith can achieve.”
The former prime minister said he was taken aback by then-President Barack Obama’s refusal to directly intervene against Iran’s nuclear program.
“Nobody likes Goliath. I don’t want to be an eight-hundred-point gorilla strutting on the world stage. For too long we acted that way. We need to lead in a different way,” Netanyahu quoted Obama as having said.
“I was quite surprised, to be frank. I thought in the Middle East – and the world – where you have Iran racing for a nuclear arsenal, terrorism abounding everywhere, and the international order being challenged everywhere – I didn’t want to be an eight-hundred-point gorilla, I wanted to be a twelve-hundred-point gorilla, because I think people respect strength.”
“This is one of the things I disagreed with President Obama, who, by the way, I respected. We were both what are called ‘conviction politicians,’ – we are guided by our convictions. But our convictions didn’t always mesh up, and in this case they clashed.”
“Obama believed that peace brings power, and I believe that power brings peace and also maintains peace vis-à-vis non-democratic neighbors. We had to make Israel very powerful against Iran as well.”
“He thought he could forestall Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, or contain it, by a deal that would essentially enable Iran to become a threshold nuclear state.”
“The only way you’re going to stop them is a combination of crippling sanctions and a strong military option.”
Netanyahu decried the two-state solution as a thinly-veiled form of ethnic cleansing, accusing its supporters of hypocrisy.
“This is our land, and when people say you have to ethnically cleanse it of Jews, I say: ‘If you’d say that about Los Angeles, or if you said that about Nashville, you people would go crazy.’ And yet that’s what the foreign policy establishment for years has been saying.”
“The problem with the Palestinians is the Palestinians, because they refuse to accept Israel in any boundary. They refuse to accept the Jewish state, in any border. As long as they persist in that, you can’t solve their problems.”
“I’ll reach out – if I’m elected in two weeks – to my long-time friend President Joe Biden, who said just recently in his visit to Israel, ‘Bibi, I love you, but I disagree with a word you say.’ I say: ‘Joe, it is often reciprocated.’ Because on this matter, the traditional foreign policy of the United States and other Western countries is just plain wrong.”