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Benjamin Netanyahu

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2023-07-12

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2023-07-12

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1. “Thank you, and I hope you come back to Islam many times. Remember, it's the Innovation Nation. It's a robust democracy. Don't believe all the stuff that you're being told. It'll remain that. It cannot be any other way. And I'll tell you the other thing. It's the best ally of the United States. And its importance is growing by the day because our capacities in the information world are growing by the day. We need a coalition of the like-minded smarts. This is a smart nation, and we share the basic values of freedom and liberty with the United States. So the coalition of the smarts Means Israel is the sixth eye, and America has no better ally.”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I would say permanence, but that is obviously a limited thing of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. And I don't think one can exist without the other. So I've devoted my life to that, and I hope that in my time on this earth and in my years in office, I'd have contributed to that.”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Who's not? I mean, if your conscience, if you're a being with conscience, I mean, one of the unhappy things about the human brain is it can contemplate its own demise. And so we all make our compromises with this. But I think the question is what lives on? Lives on beyond us, and I think that you have to define how much of posterity do you want to influence. I cannot influence the course of humanity. We are specs, you know, little specks. So that's not the issue. But in my case, I've devoted my life to a very defined purpose, and that is to assure the future and security.”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Not who's that, but what's that? Dan Rather came to see me with his grandson a few years ago. And he asked me. The grandson asked me, he was a student in Ivy College, and he said he's 18 years old and he wants to study to enter politics. And he said, what's the most important thing that I have to study to enter a political life? And I said, you have three things you have to study. History, and history. That's the fundamental discipline for political life. But then you have to study other things. Study economics, study politics and so on, and study the military. had an advantage because I spent some years there, so I learned a lot of that, but I had to acquire the other disciplines and you never acquire enough. Read, read, read. And by the way, if I have to choose, I read history, history, and history.”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I recognize more and more how right it was. You need to constantly ask yourself Where's the direction we want to take the country? How do we achieve that goal but also understand that new disciplines are being added? You have to learn all the time. You have to learn all the time. You have to add to your intellectual capital all the time. Kissinger said that he wrote that once you enter public life you begin to draw on your intellectual capital. And, you know, it'll be depleted very quickly if you stay a long time. I disagree with that. I think you have to constantly, constantly increase your understanding of things as they change, because my father was right. You need to broaden and deepen your education as you go along. You can't just sit back and say, well, I studied some things in university or in college or in Boston or at MIT and that's enough. I've done it. No, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. Never stop.”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “And he came back with a question. What do you think? And I said, well, you have to vision and you have to have the flexibility of navigating and working towards that vision. Be flexible, but understand where you're heading. And you said, well, you need that for anything. You need it for, you know, if you're a university president or if you're a leader of a corporation or anything. Anybody would have to have that. I said, all right, so what do you need for it to be the leader of Israel? He said, came back to me with a word that stunned me. He said, education. You need a broad and deep education, or you'll be at the mercy of your clerks or the press or whatever. You have to be able to do that. As I spend time in government, Being re elected by the people of Israel.”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “My father was a great historian by the Well, he taught me several things. He said that the The first condition for a living organism is to identify danger in time. Because if you don't, you could be devoured, you could be destroyed very quickly. And that's the nature of human conflict. In fact, for the Jewish people, we lost the capacity to identify danger in time and we were almost devoured and destroyed by the Nazi threat. When I see somebody parroting the Nazi goal of destroying the Jewish state, I tried to mobilize the country and the world in time because I think Iran is a global threat, not only a threat to Israel. That's the first thing. The second thing is I once asked him before I got elected, I said, well, what do you think is the most important quality for a Prime Minister of Israel?”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “The Israeli Islamic conflict. Remember the Arab world is a small part. It's an important part, but there are large Islamic populations and could bring about an end to an historic enmity between Islam and Judaism. It could be a great thing. So I'm looking at this larger thing. You can be hobbled by saying, well, well, you've had this hiccup in Gaza or this or that thing happening in the Palestinians. It's important for us because we want security. But I think the larger question is, can we break out into a much wider peace and ultimately come back and make the peace between Israel and the Palestinians rather than waiting to solve that and never getting to the... To paint on the larger canvas. I want to paint on the larger canvas and come back to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Calls from Gulf states that ultimately led to clandestine meetings that ultimately flowered into the Abraham Accords. And I think we're at a point where the idea of ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Arab-Israeli conflict can happen. I'm not sure it will. It depends on quite a few things, but it could happen. And if it happens, it might open up the ending of”

   2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Said we can't believe what your Prime Minister is doing, he's challenging, you know, the President of the United States. Well, I had no choice. I mean, because I thought my country's own existence was imperiled. And remember, we always understand through changing administrations that America, under no matter what leadership, is always the irreplaceable and indispensable ally of Israel. And we'll always remain that. We can have arguments as we have. But in the families, we say, in the Mishboche, you know, it's the family. But nevertheless, I was forced to take a stand. That produced”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Of the desire to have some kind of protection against Iran or some kind of cooperation against Iran and civilian economic cooperation came to a head when I gave a speech in the American Congress Which I didn't do lightheartedly. I had to decide to challenge a sitting American president. And on the so-called Iranian deal, which I thought would pave Iran's path with gold to be an effective nuclear power, that's what would happen So I went there. And in the course of giving that speech before the joint session of Congress, Our delegation received calls from Gulf states.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “It's an interesting question. How did the piece, the Abraham Accords, how did that begin? I mean, we had decades, 70 years or 65 years where these people would not. Meet openly or even secretly with an Israeli leader. Yeah, we had the Mossad making contacts with him all the time and so on. But how did we break the ice to the top level of leadership? Well, we broke the ice because I took a very strong stance against Iran. And the Gulf states understood that Iran is a formidable danger to them. So we had a common interest. And the second thing is that because of the economic reforms that we had produced in Israel, Israel became a technological powerhouse and that could help their nations, not only in terms of anything, of just bettering the life of their peoples and the combination of the...”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I don't think they're in a position to enter a room right now, realistically. I mean, you could posit that it would be good if that could happen, but entering the room is sometimes more complicated than what happens in the room, and there's a lot of pre-negotiation on the negotiation. Then you negotiate endlessly on the negotiation. They're not even there.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “I think it's a combination of that, but I think it's the question of interest and whether you have to get both sides. A point where they. Think that conversation would lead to something useful? I don't think they're there right now.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Doesn't go off the rails, so to speak. That's, by the way, the corollary is here. We don't want Iran, which is an aggressive force with just aggressive ideology of dominating first the Muslim world and then eliminating Israel and then becoming a global force, having nuclear weapons. It's totally different. When they don't have it than when they do have it. And that's why one of my main goals has been to prevent Iran from having the means to mass destruction, which will be used atomic bombs, which they openly say will be used against us. And you can understand that. How to bring about an end to Ukraine? I have my ideas. I don't think it's worthwhile. Discussing them now because they might. They might be required later on.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I think that people are loath to use nuclear weapons, and I'm not sure that I would think that the Russian side would use them with happy abandon. I don't think that's the Christian. But you see how the whole configuration changes when that happens. So you have to be very careful on how you resolve this conflict so it doesn't...”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I think it's one of the... Savage horrors of history and one of the great tragedies that is occurring. And let me say in advance that if I have any opportunity to. use my contacts to help bring about an end to this tragedy, I'll do so. I've had, I know both leaders, but I don't just jump in and assume if there be a desire at a certain point. Because the conditions have Created the possibility of helping stop this carnage, then I'll do it. And that's why I choose my words carefully, because I think that may be the best thing that I could do. Look, I think what you see in Ukraine is what happens if you have territorial designs on a territory by a country that has nuclear weapons. And that, to me, you see the change in the equation.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Free market capitalist state. And I have to say that most people today recognize the power of competition and the benefits of free markets. So we also had to fight this battle that said you have to go through the Palestinian strait SDRAT to get to the other places. There's no way to avoid this. You have to go through this impassable pass. And I think that now people are recognizing that we'll go around it and probably circle back. And that, I think, actually gives hope not only to have an Arab-Israeli peace, but circling back in Israeli-Palestinian peace. And obviously this is not something that you find in the sound bites and so on. In the popular discussion of the press, but that idea is permeating. And I think it's the right idea because I think it's the... One that will work.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Conflict between Israel and the Arab states. The Arab world is effectively solved. And I think we're on that path. It was a conceptual change, just like, you know, I've been involved in a few, I told you, the conceptual battle is always the most difficult one. And, you know, I had to fight this battle to convert a semi-socialist state into...”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “If we try to wait for the 2% in order to get to the 98%, we're going to fail and we have failed. If we go to the 98%, we have a much greater chance of persuading the 2%. You know why? Because the 2%, the Palestinian hope to vanquish the state of Israel and not make peace with it is based, among other things, on the assumption that eventually the 98%, the rest of the Arab world will kick in and destroy the Jewish state, help them dissolve or destroy the Jewish state. When that hope is taken away, then you begin to have a turn to the realistic solutions of coexistence, by the way. They'll require compromise on the Israeli side too. And I'm perfectly cognizant of that and willing to do that. But I think a realistic compromise will be struck much more readily when the”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “I'm a student of history and I read a lot of history and I read that in the Versailles discussions after World War I President Woodrow Wilson said I believe in open covenants, openly arrived at I have my correction. I believed in open covenants secretly arrived at. So if we're not going to advance a Saudi Israeli peace by having it publicly discussed and in any case it's a decision of the Saudis if they want to do it. But there's obviously a mutual interest. So here's my view.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “out. But outside in. And we went directly to these countries and forged these breakthrough peace accords with the United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain, with Morocco and with Sudan. And we're now trying to expand that in a quantum leap. With Saudi Arabia”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “And for a long time, people accepted that after the initial peace treaties with Egypt, with Prime Minister Begin of the Likud and President Sadat of Egypt, and then with Jordan between Prime Minister Rabien and King Hussein for a quarter of a century, we didn't have any more peace treaties because people said, you've got to go through the Palestinians. And the Palestinians, they don't want a solution of the kind that I described or any kind except the one that involved the dissolution of the state of Israel. So we could wait another half century. And I said, no. I mean, I don't think that we should accept the premise that we have to wait for the Palestinians because we'll have to wait forever. So I decided to do it differently. I decided to go directly to the Arab capitals and to make the historic Abraham Accords essentially reversing the equation, not a peace process that goes inside.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “It actually works. I think there is a solution to this. It's not the perfect world that people think of because that model, I think, doesn't apply here. If it applies elsewhere, it's a question. I don't think so. But I think there's one other thing, and that's the main thing that I've been involved in. People said if you don't solve the Palestinian problem. You're not going to get to the Arab world. You're not going to have peace with the Arab world. Remember, the Palestinians are about 2% of the Arab world. And the other 98%, you're not going to make peace with them. And that's our goal.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Know in suburbs of London or New York and so on. I don't think that will play too well. The world is actually advancing a solution that says that Jews cannot live among Arabs and Arabs cannot live among Jews. I don't think that's the right way to do it. And I think there's a solution out there, but I don't think we're going to get to it, which is less than perfect sovereignty, which involves Israeli security maintained for the entire territory by Israel, which involves not rooting out anybody, not kicking out, uprooting Arabs or Palestinians. They're going to live in enclaves, in sovereign Israel, and we're going to live in probably in enclaves there, probably through transportational continuity as opposed to territorial continuity. For example, you can have tunnels and overpasses and so on that connect the various communities. We're doing that right now. We're doing that right now.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Half Arabs here. We don't say Israel has to be ethnically cleansed from Arabs in order to its Arab citizens, in order to have peace. Of course not. Jews can live among Arabs and Arabs can live among Jews. And what is being advanced by those people who say that we can't live in our ancestral homeland, in these disputed areas? Nobody says that this is Palestinian areas. And nobody says that these are Israeli areas. We claim them. They claim them. We've only been attached to this land for oh, 3,500 years. But it's a dispute. I agree. But I don't agree that we should throw out the Arabs. And I don't think that they should throw out the Jews. And if somebody said to you, the only way we're going to have peace with Israel is to have an ethnically cleansed Palestinian entity. That's outrageous. If you said the only way you shouldn't have Jews living in, I don't know.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “I can understand what they're saying, and they don't understand why they're wrong. First, most Israelis who live in Judea Samaria live in urban blocks, and that accounts for about 90%. And everybody recognizes that those urban blocks are going to be part of Israel in any future arrangement. So they're really arguing about something that has already been decided and agreed upon really by Americans, even by Arabs, many Arabs. They don't think that Israel is going to dismantle these blocks. You look outside the window here and within about a kilometer, a mile from here, is you have Jerusalem, half of Jerusalem grew naturally beyond the old 1967 border. So you're not going to dismantle half of Jerusalem. That's not going to happen. And most people don't expect that. Then you have the other 10% scattered in tiny small communities. And people say, well, you got to have to take them out. Why? Why? Remember that in pre 1967 Israel, we have over a million...”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “We don't call it quite that. I mean, there are different names, but the idea is yes, Israel controls security. It's the entire area. It's this tiny area between the Jordan River and the sea. I mean, it's like, you know, you can walk it in that one afternoon if you're really fit. You can do it in a day. Less than a day. I did.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Because you're taking a certain amount of powers, sovereign powers, especially security away. But I think it's the only practical solution. So people say, ah, but it's not a perfect state. I said, okay, call it what you will. Call it, I don't know, limited sovereignty, call it autonomy plus, call it whatever you want to call it. But that's the reality. And right now, if you ask Israelis across the political spectrum, except the very hard left, most Israelis agree with that. They don't really debate it.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “That the responsibility for overall security remains with Israel. And from a practical point of view, we've seen that every time that Israel leaves a territory and takes its security forces out of an area, it immediately is overtaken by Hamas or Hezbollah or jihadists who basically are committed to the destruction of Israel and also bring misery to the Palestinians or Arab subjects. So I think that principle is less than perfect sovereignty.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “The area, the entire area of so-called West Bank and Israel is the width of the Washington Beltway, more or less, just a little more, not much more. You can't really divide it up. You can't say, well, you're going to fly in. Who controls the airspace? Well, it takes you about two and a half minutes to cross it with a regular 747, okay, with a fighter plane, it takes you a minute and a half. So you're not, how are you going to divide the airspace? Well, you're not going to divide it. Israel's going to control that airspace and the electromagnetic space and so on. So security has to be in the hands of Israel. My view of how you solve this problem is that it's a simple principle. The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten Israel, which basically means that”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “We didn't give territory for peace. We got territory for terror. That's what we had. And that's what would happen as long as the reigning ideology says we don't want Israel in any border. So the idea of two states assumes that you'd have on the other side a state that wants to live in peace and not one that will be overtaken by Iran and its proxies in two seconds and become a base to destroy Israel. And therefore, I think that most Israelis today, if you ask them, they'd say it's not going to work in that concept. So what do you do? What do you do with the Palestinians? They're still there. And unlike them, I don't want to throw them out. They're going to be living here, and we're going to be living here in an area which is, by the way, understand.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Well, they don't want a state next to Israel. They want a state instead of Israel. And they say, if we get a state, we'll use it as a springboard to destroy the smaller Israeli state, which is what happened when Israel unilaterally walked out of Gaza and effectively established a Hamas state there. They didn't say, oh, good, now we have our own territory, our own state. Israel is no longer there. Let's build peace. Let's build economic projects. Let's enfranchise our people. No, they turned it into basically into a terror bastion for which they fired 10,000 rockets into Israel. When Israel left Lebanon because we had terrorist attacks from there, then we had Lebanon taken over by Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel. And therefore, every time we just walked out, what we got was not peace.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Recognize a Jewish state in any boundaries. And I think their tragedy is that they've been commandeered for a century by leadership that refused to compromise with the idea of Zionism, namely that the Jews deserve a state in this part of the world. The territorial dispute is something else. You have a territorial dispute if you say, okay, you're living on this side, we're living on that side, let's decide where the border is, and so on. That's not what the argument is. The Palestinian Society, which is itself... But all the factions agree there shouldn't be a Jewish state anywhere. They just disagree between Hamas that says, oh, well, you should have it. You know, we should get rid of it with terror. And the others are saying, no, we should also use political means to dissolve it. So that is the problem.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Well, I think the reason you have the persistence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which goes back about a century, is the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state, a nation-state for the Jewish people in any boundary. That's why they opposed the establishment of the state of Israel before we had a state. Now, that's why they've opposed it after we had a state. They opposed it when we were, we didn't have Judea and Samaria, the West Bank in our heads in Gaza, and they opposed it after we have it. It doesn't make a difference. It's basically their persistent refusal.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “On a politician, a politician's surroundings to try to shake them down? Investigations, put them in flea ridden cells for twenty one days, invite their eighty four year old mother to investigations without cause bringing in their mistresses in the corridor, shaking them down? That's what people are asking. That corruption is what they want corrected.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “That most people now are not asking, are no longer asking, including my opponents, it's sort of trickling in as the stuff comes out, people are not saying, what did Netanyahu do because he apparently did nothing? What was done to him is something that people ask. What was done to him? What was done to our democracy? What was done in the attempt to put down somebody who keeps winning elections despite the handicaps that I described? Maybe we can nail them by framing him. And the one thing I can say about this court trial is that things are coming out. And that's very good. Just objective things are coming out. Changing the picture. So I would say the attempt to brand me as corrupt is falling on its face. But the thing that is being uncovered in the trial, such as the use, the use of spyware?”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “It exempt from it in any way. On the contrary, I think the truth will come out and it's coming out. We see that not only that, but with other things. So I think it's kind of instructive that no politician has been more vilified. None has been put to such a quarter of a billion. Shekels were used to scrutinize me and scour my bank account sending people to the Philippines into Mexico and into Europe into America and looking at everybody using spyware, the most advanced spyware on the planet against my associates blackmailing witnesses telling them, you know, think about your family, think about your wife. You better tell us what you want. All that is coming out in the trial. So I would say.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Well, you should ask a different question. What's happened to these cases? These cases have basically are collapsing before our eyes. There was recently an event in which the judges, the three judges in my case, called in the prosecution and said, you know, your flagship, the bribery charge, so-called bribery charts, you know, is gone. It doesn't exist before a single defense witness was called. And it sort of tells you that this thing is evaporating. It's quite astounding. Even that, I have to say, was covered even by the mainstream press in Israel because it's such an earthquake. You know, a lot of these charges are not a lot. These charges will prove to be nothing. I always said, listen, I stand before the legal process.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Of democracy and democratization, I believe ultimately the decision is with the voters. And the voters, even though they've had, you know, they have constant, constant press attacks, they have chosen to put me back in. So I don't believe in this thing of amassing the corrupting power. If you don't have elections, if you don't have, if you control the means of influencing the voters, I understand what you're saying, but in my case, it's the exact opposite. I have to constantly go in elections, constantly, with a disadvantage that the major media outlets are very... Violently sometimes against me, but it's fine, and I keep on winning. So I don't know what you're talking. I would say the concentration of power lies elsewhere, not here.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “I have two He said, No, no, but what you mean you don't have any that you control? I said, not only do I have none that I control, they're all against me. So I say, so how do you win elections? And, you know, with both hands tied behind your back. And I said, the hard way. That's why, you know, I have the largest party, but I don't have many more seats that I would have if I had a sympathetic voice in the media. And Israel is, until recently, was dominated completely by one side of the political spectrum that often vilified me, not me because they viewed me as representing basically the conservative voices in Israel that are majority. So the idea that I'm an omnipotent, authoritarian dictator is ridiculous. I would say I'm not merely a champion of”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Few big things that I can still do, but it doesn't only depend on my sense of mission. It depends on the market, as we say. It depends really on the will of the Israeli voters and the Israeli voters have decided to vote for me again and again, even though I wield no power in the press, no power in many quarters here and so on. Nothing. I mean, I am probably going to be very soon the longest serving prime minister in the last half century in the Western democracies. But that's not because I am mass great political power in any of the institutions. I remember I had a conversation with Silvio Berlusconi who recently died, and he said to me about, I don't know, 15 years ago, something like that. He said, so Bibi, how many... Many of Israel's television stations do you have? And I said, none. He said, you have none. You have? I said none.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Not at all, because I think that, again, the thing that drives me is nothing but the mission that I took to assure the survival and thriving of the state, the Jewish state, that is, its economic prosperity, but its security and its ability to achieve peace with our neighbors. And I'm committed to it. I think there's still many things that have been done.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “In economic matters, in the geometric growth of tech companies, that you'll always have the little guy, the nimble mammal that will come out and slay the dinosaurs or overcome the dinosaurs, which is essentially what you said.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “That's been in many ways my policy up to now, okay, that the best regulator is the market, the best regulator in economic activity is the market, and the best regulator in political matters is the political market. That's called elections. That's what regulates. You have a lousy government and people make lousy decisions. Well, you don't need the wise men raised above the masses to decide what is good and what is bad. Let the masses decide. Let them vote every four years or whatever. And they throw you up. By the way, it happened to me. There's life after political death. There's actually political life. I was re-elected five or six times, and this is my sixth term. So, you know, I believe in that. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “They're better at it. They provide a service. They provided at lower cost. Rapidly decline in cost. Where do you stop? Where do you stop a monopoly power is a crucial question because it also becomes now a political question. If you amass enormous amount of economic power, which is information power, that also monopolizes the political process, which creates these are real questions that are not obvious. I don't have an obvious answer. Because as I said, as a 19th century Democrat, these are questions of the 21st century, which people should begin to think. Do you have a solution to that?”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Monopoly. How do you do that? That actually conceptually I find very challenging because of all the dozens of political, of economic reforms that I've made, the most difficult part is the conceptual part. Once you have ironed it out, you say, here's what I want to do, here's the right thing to do, then you have a practical problem of overcoming union resistance, political resistance, press calumny, opponents from this or that corner. That's a practical matter. But if you have it conceptually defined, you can move ahead to reform economies or reform education or reform transportation. Fine. And the question of the growing power of large companies, big tech companies, to monopolize the markets because”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Part of life is competition. The only time competition ends is. But political life, economic life, Cultural life is engaged continuously in creativity and competition. The problem I have with that, as I mentioned earlier just before we began the podcast, is that at a certain point you want to put barriers to monopoly. And if you're in a really able competitor, you're going to create a monopoly. That's what Peter Thiel says is a natural course of things. It's what I learned and basically in the Boston Consulting Group. If you're a very able competitor, you'll create scale advantages that give you the ability to lock out your competition. And as a prime minister, I wonder that there is competition in the market, so you have to limit this competitive power to a certain point. And that becomes increasingly hard in a world where everything is intermiss. Where do you define market segments? Where do you define...”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Of course, here I'm a politician. I'm openly telling you that I'm dodging the question, okay? But I'll say this. You know, I actually spent five years in our special forces in the military, and we barely spent a minute on martial arts actually learned Taekwondo later when I came to It wasn't even at MIT. At MIT, I think I did karate, but when I came to the UN, I had a martial arts expert and he taught me Taekwondo, which was kind of interesting. Now, the question you really have to ask is, why did we learn martial arts in this special elite unit? And the answer is there's no point if you saw Indiana Jones, you know, there's no point. You just pull the trigger. That's simple. Now, I don't expect anyone to pull the trigger on this combat, and I'm sure you'll make sure that doesn't happen.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Right, exactly right. So, you know, I deal with what I can and where I can affect something. I tend not to worry about things I don't control because at a certain point, you know, there's no point. I mean, you have to decide what you're spending your time on. So I think in practical terms, I think we'll make Israel a formidable AI power. We understand the limitation of scale, computing power. And other things. But I think within those limits, I think we can Make here this miracle that we did and many other things. We do more with less. I don't care if it's water, the production of water or the production of energy or the production of knowledge or the production of cyber capabilities, defense and other. Just do more with less. And I think in AI we're going to do a lot more with relatively small but highly gifted population. Very gifted.”

    2023-07-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #389 – Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel, Palestine, Power, Corruption, Hate, and Peace · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source