Bibi: You cannot build peace and security on lies

The following is a slightly abridged transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the inaugural JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem on Sunday.

I want to encapsulate some truths for you tonight because I think they explain where we are today.

In the founding of the State of Israel, 77 years ago, we faced a fairly united Arab world. It was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser who  promoted the idea of pan-Arabism. One of the sources of unity was to drive [out] Israel, [which] had no place right in the center of that great Arab domain. …

We’re here in Jerusalem, about a kilometer away from David’s capital, which was established 3,000 years ago. We are not foreign interlopers. We’re not the Belgians in the Congo. We’re not the Dutch in Indonesia. We’re the Jews in the Jewish homeland, Judea. That’s one truth, an important truth. …

At first, they didn’t try to actually annihilate our history, they just tried to annihilate us. And it wasn’t such a big task. We were very small, on a tiny strip on the edge of the Mediterranean. …

Having, from our point of view, miraculously defeated them in the War of Independence, they didn’t think it was over. And they arranged … themselves to choke us and drive us into the sea [in 1967]. ….

We were about to be finished. But in six days, we turned the tables on them. And of course, we came back to our ancestral homeland in full force. And by the way, we took the high ground and we will not leave it. It’s ours.

• • •

They still didn’t give up. They tried the War of Attrition. And then in 1973, a combined attack, this time by two Arab armies in the Yom Kippur War, they surprised us. Within three weeks, we were at the gates of Damascus and Cairo, and that ended that. …

The Arab world began to realize that Israel is here to stay and that they have to make their dues with it.

And so, we began a process — first with the peace at Camp David between Begin and Sadat, and later the peace with Jordan that was signed by Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein. … The Arab world was slowly coming to realize that Israel is a fact that cannot be removed, and they were beginning to make peace with us.

We couldn’t progress on that peace because one part of the Arab world resolutely remained against us. The Palestinians clung to the original opposition to Israel, that basically you do not recognize a Jewish state in any boundary, in any form.

Israel has to be annihilated. Israel has to be excised like a tumor. That was their position, and that was and remains the principal obstacle to a Palestinian-Israeli peace. …

They keep saying, “We want a Palestinian state in our ancestral homeland, in order to destroy the Jewish state.” They say it in Ramallah. They say it in Gaza. They teach it in Ramallah to their children. They teach it in Gaza. There’s no difference in the textbooks; exactly the same.

One pays-for-slay in Ramallah and operates the ICC, and conducts warfare against us. Lawfare. And you know all this by heart.

The difference between Hamas and the PA [is] Hamas says we will destroy Israel by terror and military conquest right away. And the PA says, no, you destroy it politically by driving it, through propaganda and lawfare, to the ’67 boundaries.

And then you can do the military thrust because you’re a few kilometres from the sea. That’s the difference between them.

• • •

But the persistent refusal of the Palestinian Arabs to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary is the source of this conflict. For 100 years and more, from the Mufti in the ’20s to today — no difference.

So, the idea that you’ll create a Palestinian state and that will produce peace — the idea is folly, nothing more than folly. We just tried a Palestinian state in Gaza. You saw what that brought, right? …

After we had these two peace treaties — historic peace treaties with Egypt and with Jordan — these are cold peace treaties, because there wasn’t really pacification of the population, but between governments. And that still holds. And that’s good, because a cold peace is a lot better than a hot war.

It took us another quarter of a century to get the next peace treaty, because everybody said, the only way you’re going to get it is you have to go through the Palestinians. That is, first solve the Palestinian problem, and then you’ll get peace with the rest of the Arab world. Remember that? Who said that? John Kerry? …

Of course, I didn’t think so, because if we had to go through the Palestinians, aside from creating a state that would spell the end of Israel we knew the Palestinians would not make peace. They don’t want a state next to Israel; they want a state instead of Israel. … So, we decided — I decided — to do something different. I chose to go around the Palestinians and went directly to the Arab capitals. In about two months, we made four peace treaties with four Arab states, expanding the circle of peace.

The main thing you can see here is that the number of Arab states that attacked us kept declining over time: five (arguably seven) states in 1948, three in 1967, two in the Yom Kippur War, and then one in the Lebanon War of 1982. Gradually, the Arab world began to normalize its relations with Israel. And that was the good news.

• • •

The bad news, however, was that the Arab world was being replaced by a much more potent force that had appeared on the horizon — Iran.

Beginning with the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran became the primary Islamist force in the Middle East, replacing the Arab world as the engine of attacks against Israel. They were committed to destroying Israel for a simple reason — they were determined to conquer the Middle East.

They correctly identified Israel as the only real force standing in their way in the region. …  If we were not here, the neighboring countries would collapse on the spot. I won’t give you all the details, but I could—there are many. The ones who don’t need the details, though, are the Iranians; they know this very well.

So, they embarked on a campaign from the very start that targeted Israel. And it wasn’t just about conquering the Middle East; their ambition was larger: to subjugate all Muslims to their fanatic creed, as written in their constitution, and to export their revolution worldwide.

Their chant from the beginning was clear:

“Death to Israel, death to America.”

To get rid of us, they designed two main forms of attack.

The first attack was to try to develop, over the last two decades, nuclear weapons. We’ll talk about that in a minute. The second line of attack is something they developed piece by piece, step by step, which was to choke Israel by conquering pieces of the Middle East, both for their own reasons [and] as a noose of death around us.

And you could see them moving from Iran to Iraq to Syria to the Mediterranean and Lebanon. They control Lebanon completely. They control Syria in many ways. They control Iraq. So now they have a continuum right to the sea. And then in the south, in Gaza, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and then further south, the Houthis.

And they have other plans. They would like to conquer the Arabian Peninsula. They would like to topple Jordan. They want to complete the conquest of the Middle East. But what stands in their way? Israel. So, if you have this noose of death, tighten the noose. And the plan that they hatched is something that became much clearer to us in the course of the war.

• • •

We were attacked savagely, horribly, on October 7. Chancellor Scholz, who visited me in the beginning of the war when he saw the film “The Horror” and visited the sites, said they’re exactly like the Nazis. And I said, well, they’re different. Not in intent, not in savagery. But the Nazis tried to hide their crimes; these people carry GoPro cameras, live, they’re ecstatic about the blood they shed, the people they butcher, the women they rape, the men they beheaded, the babies they burned. They’re ecstatic about it. 

So, they took 250 and some hostages. … We intend to bring back all of them.

But the most important thing we had to do was to stop the invasion, which we did. And as we stopped the invasion and continued to take the fight into their territory — and of course, into Lebanon, where Hezbollah joined the day after — we learned one simple truth: that Sinwar jumped the gun. He deviated from the plan that the noose of death had planned in advance — and that plan was that there would be simultaneous invasions from Gaza and from Lebanon.

The distances to the center of the country are very small. Simultaneous bracketing Israel [and sending] barrage after barrage of ballistic missiles and rockets into a tiny country was meant to basically erase Israel. That was the plan.

But Hamas didn’t wait, couldn’t get over themselves. They fired too quickly. In fact, Hezbollah was surprised. “They said, why did they not tell us? They were supposed to tell us, but they didn’t.”

And so, we had time to prevent a similar ground invasion that would have been much more potent; there’s no comparison of the power of Hezbollah compared to the monsters who attacked us [from Gaza; Hezbollah was] much more potent.

But by that time, we could move our army to the north [and] we stopped that invasion …

• • •

I said, we will change the face of the Middle East. We first had to go into Gaza; [we told] our American friends who came here. And I appreciate the fact that President Biden came here at the beginning of the war and gave his support the beginning of the war.

But they said, “Don’t go in, don’t do the ground invasion. Do it from the air.” And I said, “Joe, we tried that.” I myself, as head of the government, [had previously] authorized three attacks, three major operations, against the Hamas terrorists.

After they had attacked us [previously], we killed thousands of terrorists. We killed their military commander, Jabari. It made a dent. It stayed them. They had to rearm again and so on. But it didn’t stop it. 

I said, “It’s not going to work this time. We have to go in.”

So, against their better advice, we went in and, well, very soon the propaganda war began to work against us [and] the diplomatic support we had at the start of the war turned against us. And now we are facing pressure to mitigate the fight and very soon to stop the fight.

We went into Gaza City. They didn’t like it. We went into Shifa Hospital. They didn’t like it. We went into Khan Yunis and then we reached the outskirts of Rafah. And there the Americans said, “Don’t go in, don’t go in. And if you go in, we’ll put an arms embargo on you.”

And I said to President Biden, look, I respect you. You’re the president of the United States. Please respect me, I’m the prime minister of the one and only Jewish state and we are going in. Secretary of State Blinken came in a few days later and he said, “The president is serious.” I said, I know he’s serious. He’s going to do it. I know he’s already done it.

And he said, “So what do you say?” I said, Tony, we will fight with our fingernails if we have to. And we did. But we had more than fingernails. I said in the Cabinet that the weapons will take care of themselves. We’ll fight with what we have, but we will survive.

• • •

We are not a vassal state. We’re the independent state of the Jewish people. And we will do what we need to do to protect us. So, we went into Rafah. The Americans told us that we can’t go into Rafah because there’ll be thousands of casualties. Some said [there would be] 20,000 casualties [and that] don’t have a place to go.

Well, I said, they do have a place to go. They can go two kilometres westward to the beach. There’s a safe zone there. And they did. Within six days, 1.4 million people moved to the beach because we kept moving them out of harm’s way.

I visited the extraordinary brigade commander there in the Rafah crossing, saw our soldiers and asked him, so, Itzik, how many terrorists have you killed? And this was in the middle of the fighting — he said, “At this point, 1,203.” I said, how do you know? I said. “Body counts. We see them there.” And I said, how many civilians have you killed? You know what he said? “None. None. Because they all left.”

They ended up killing 2,000 terrorists and practically no civilians. In fact, the only civilian deaths that are recorded are in the beginning of the fighting, as far as I know, because we dropped a stray bomb before we actually went in, and it hit an ammunition dump that Hamas had placed among civilians, and 20 terrorists died and 20 civilians died.

But in the course of the fighting, the assumptions that were broadcast around the world were untrue, that we would create extraordinary civilian deaths or that they had no place to go. They were proved to be wrong. And now we got the Philadelphia route. And so, we surround Gaza. We hold the perimeter inside Gaza, in the Philadelphia corridor. 

The sea is on the other side, so they can’t smuggle weapons now. They can’t do anything about that. Having done that, having destroyed most of the organized battalions of Hamas, they still have remnants. They still fight there. And we still have a job to do. And the only reason we’re not doing it in such a short time is because of the hostages. Otherwise, it would be over long ago.

But in the course of doing that, what is a battalion? A battalion means there’s a Hamas chief and he says attack. And 100 people come out of the tunnels and attack. And when you destroy a battalion, three people come out, two people come out. Unfortunately, a sharpshooter can come out, but there’s no organized military structure.

• • •

So, having done that, having removed the threat of invasion from Gaza or the threat of serious rocketing from Gaza, having also done away with Sinwar — remember him? Remember Deif? Remember Haniyeh? —  having gotten rid of them, we turn north. And having turned north, we had this small thing, you know, the beepers. You remember the beepers, the pagers?

So, we had a little debate. Should we use the beepers? Some of the people said, “We have to tell the Americans.” I said, No, no. And we didn’t because I don’t read the New York Times that often, but why give them the advance? I mean, it would be on the net. It would be, you know, that doesn’t make any sense.

We had to bring up the beepers a bit because we decided that we’d go into Lebanon in October. Why October? Well, obviously, because it’s one month ahead of November. You’ll figure that out. Okay, okay.

But in late in the third week, I think of September, we learned that Hezbollah had sent three beepers to be scanned in Iran. We had previously bombed a scanner they were going to bring in. So we got rid of that and the guy who operates it.

But now they had these and, you know, they have this minuscule amount of TNT. And when the Mossad guy showed it to me a few months earlier, he’s giving me an update how many we’ve got inside. And I said, is that really going to do the job? I mean, how much TNT you have there? So, he says, I don’t know, nano nanograms, something like that. And I said, it’s not going to do anything.

He said, oh no, it’ll do it.

But now it turns out that they are scanning this. … Could take a day. I said, well, we have to do it right away. So, we did it.

And that meant that we brought up the shock and the beginning of the great campaign in Lebanon.

[In preparing for action in Lebanon, one option] was targeting the main stock of missiles that Nasrallah had built over the years in private homes. He was relying on the fact that we would not attack private homes. And he was right. We didn’t over the years. But we set a goal for the Army — attack these homes, but get the population out. 

And they came back 48 hours later with a brilliant plan. They commandeered Lebanese television and radio. Can you imagine this is the IDF telling you if you’re a resident of somewhere — leave because they had a missile in every garage and a rocket in every kitchen. They would open the roof and out it comes and so on.

And that was done. So, in six or seven hours we destroyed the bulk. Not all, but the bulk of the main weapons directed against us that Nasrallah had built over 30 years.

• • •

Now, in the course of those weeks, we had targeted and killed many of the Hezbollah’s commanders, military commanders.  But there was still one person there, and he was running the war independently; he was doing it quite well, I have to say. And that was Nasrallah himself. We knew where he was. And the question was, do we hit him or not?

And that wasn’t a simple answer, because he was the number two in the Iranian axis. He was the second most admired Shi’ite leader in the Shi’ite world. He was the beloved son of Khomeini. You know, he treated him like a son. And what does that mean?

I received a big thicket of intelligence reports. I read it, all about Nasrallah. Then I read it again, 80 pages. I said he has to go.

I was particularly impressed by the fact that not only was he a capable leader, but also that his relationship with Iran was somewhat different from what I had thought. I would say he manipulated Iran much more than Iran manipulated him. He influenced Iran much more than Iran influenced him. And when I read this report, I came to the clear conclusion that he was the axis of the axis, and if we remove him, the axis would break.

And so, we went into a debate in the Cabinet. Do we take him out or not? And there were two things that were brought up. One, we have to tell the Americans; again, I say, no, no, no, we’re not going to do that. And the second was, well, you know, you have to really think seriously about the consequences.

I mean, Iran has a lot of ballistic missiles, as long as from where I’m standing right up to that wall. It’s like a bus full of tons of TNT. And you have many hundreds of these, and they would fall in Israel and they would do serious damage. So, you couldn’t quite dismiss that. And then the question was, do you do it, or don’t you do it?

• • •

The Cabinet was split not quite half and half; most wanted to do it, but some didn’t. And the senior echelon was hesitant. I could see that. So I called the then-Minister of Defense and then-Chief of Staff to a separate room. I said, look, the American thing is out of the question. At best, we could tell them when the planes are en route, give them the courtesy, but we’re not going to tell them.

But I want to think about your opinions, and I’ll come back to you. And there was a real sigh of relief there, because, you know, I’m going to the States to give a speech at the UN. I was a few hours away from giving a speech.

By that time, we had intel that Nasrallah would probably leave for another place, where we didn’t have access. So that would solve that dilemma. What I think they didn’t know is that I have what is called an Air Force One — it’s really Air Force minus one, kind of dilapidated but very serviceable because it has a bed and it has a secure line.

So, I slept for a couple of hours, two hours, got up, opened the phone and called the Chiefs in, and I said, okay, I’ve made a decision — we’re going to take him out. And I ask that you convene the cabinet on a phone line when I get to New York. I got to New York, went to the Regency Hotel.

I’m sure there have been many important conversations in the Regency Hotel, but I don’t think there was anything like this. We had a cabinet meeting in the Regency Hotel and decided on the attack. I still had to write my speech. …

Right after the speech, I was meeting some Israeli journalists. I don’t do that very often; there’s no point. And my military secretary came in and gave me a note with one word, “Done.”

Now, the collapse, the removal of Nasrallah, really broke the axis. It was a terrific blow. Some people are irreplaceable. And so far, he’s been irreplaceable. And so, having delivered that blow to Hezbollah, we also delivered a blow to Assad because Assad was relying heavily on Nasrallah.

He wasn’t relying on his army during the civil war. Every time he got into real trouble, Nasrallah would send thousands and thousands of fighters to help him. And now there was no one to send the fighters. So, there was an opening, obviously, which Al-Sharaa used. They didn’t understand how come they’re rolling into every place. There’s no one to fight. And they just kept moving from town to town with the full blessing, that’s a diplomatic word, of Turkey. But Iran[‘s] unbelievable investment in the axis [of resistance] … was going down the tubes. And so they had to rescue Assad. What they wanted to do was to send one or two airborne divisions to help them. 

And we stopped that. We sent some F-16s towards some Iranian planes that were en route to Damascus. They turned back. So, being shed of any support from the West and any support from the East, the Assad regime collapsed.

And just to make sure, we destroyed 90 percent of their armaments. And then improved our positions a bit, like taking the summit of the Hermon Mountain, a very beautiful place. That’s what we did.

• • •

If you summarize everything that I said up to now, what we did is we had peace going with the Arab world, Iran coming up, Iran putting a noose around our necks, and Israel turning the tables on them — from a situation where on October 7 people thought that Israel was doomed to making Israel the most powerful country in the region. Within a very short time.

We could do that because of the incredible courage of our soldiers and our commanders. They’re really the lions of Judah. They really fight. The are heroes, and the fallen are heroes and those who are wounded.

You should see the wounded. There’s a guy who lost both his legs, and he has these artificial legs and an arm. And he lifts another arm. You know, he says, I want to go back and fight — and he’s not alone. These are amazing heroes. 

So having done that, we’ve smashed the Iranian axis, but we didn’t finish the job. Remember, there’s still more to be done. We have to finish the war in Gaza, get our hostages back and destroy Hamas. Hamas will not be there and we’re not going to put the PA there.

Why replace one regime that is sworn to our destruction with another regime that is sworn to our destruction? We won’t do that. I can say that Israel, in any case, will control the area militarily. We’re not going to succumb to any pressure not to do that.

And I very much welcome President Trump’s plan to allow the voluntary relocation of Gazans who want to leave. And believe me, many of them want to leave.

So, what’s left? Well, quite a few things and many opportunities, but obviously they’ll all go down the tube if Iran gets nuclear weapons.

• • •

The reason Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons is because successive governments, under my prime ministership, have led successive actions, which I won’t discuss here, forgive me, with the same detail over the years. And that set them back about ten years from where they thought they’d be ten years ago. They already thought they’d have a nuclear arsenal. They don’t.

We delayed them. But we didn’t stop them.

They moved very far on enrichment. They’re trying to move on weaponry. And the question is now what to do? Happily, we have a president in Washington who’s committed, as he says. And as he said to me many times, including just recently, we can’t allow Iran to have nuclear weapons. 

And I said, I absolutely believe that I devoted a good chunk of my life to prevent that. But there are two ways to do it. One is to get a deal that would prevent them from doing that by dismantling their nuclear infrastructure; that means not that they will not enrich uranium, but that they will not have the capacity to enrich uranium, which means you destroy the centrifuges.

You remove, of course, the nuclear material that is already enriched. And there are a few other things that you have to do. But that’s the crux of it. The real deal that works is the deal that removes Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. By the way, the only reason you enrich uranium is to have nuclear weapons.

There are dozens and dozens of countries that have civilian nuclear programs, and they don’t enrich uranium. So, Iran is constantly thinking, well, we have to find a reason why we’re putting these things in bunkers under mountains, maybe for radio isotopes, right, for medicine, or for nuclear submarines. Give me a break.

They enrich uranium for one reason and one reason only. And that’s to make nuclear weapons, which they intend to use to destroy my country and threaten America once they have the weapons of delivery. Ballistic missiles, ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, they will threaten every city in the United States. That is a palpable danger to Israel and to the free world. And it must be prevented.

The way to prevent it is to dismantle all the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program. That is the deal. We could not live with anything short of that, anything short of that could bring you the opposite result, because Iran will say, alright, I won’t enrich, wait, run out the clock, wait for another president, do it again. That’s unacceptable. 

Equally, I think we should bring in the ballistic missiles — the prevention of the development of ballistic missiles into the deal. I think these are the two requirements. I said to President Trump that I hope that this is what the negotiators will do.

But I said one way or the other, Iran will not have nuclear weapons. So, from a seven-front war, we have a one-front war with Iran and its proxies. We appreciate the fact that the United States is taking action against the Houthis. It’s very important. We appreciate the help that we’re getting from the United States. Arms are flowing in. 

• • •

It’s important we share the same goals, but we have to make sure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons. A bad deal is worse than no deal. We need a good deal. And the only good deal that works is a deal like the one that was made with Libya that removed all the infrastructure. I can tell you now, you should applaud that. That’s the main point.

We have another front. It’s called the deep state. You heard about that? You’re talking about the deep state in America. It’s very shallow. It’s a puddle. Ours is ocean deep, it’s very deep.

It threatens democracy. It abrogates the rights of citizens to choose their government that will make its own decisions, its own appointments. That has to be obviously resolved. But we have to understand that there is another threat on the horizon.

And with this, I’ll finish, because I think it relates to what JNS is doing and doing so ably. And that is, puncture the lies. The lies are disseminated in America by a systematic campaign that is funded, organized by governments, by NGOs, that are funded also by very wealthy individuals. 

There’s a lot of tourists in America. Yeah, a lot of tourists. There’s a lot of tourists in Israel, too. So, what do they do? They pay influencers. They use the social media in a very systematic way to attack the supporters of Israel. And I’m not talking about only the supporters of Israel on the left. I’m talking about the supporters of Israel on the right.

And that is a palpable threat to our future.

We do not ask others to fight for us. We don’t ask for boots on the ground, but we ask for that support. That support means that the UN Security Council does not make binding resolutions against Israel. It means that Israel is not sanctioned, is not choked by the international community, and that support is being threatened by the systematic public opinion campaign. 

And if there’s one thing that has to be done, it is to fight back. That’s what we do. We have to fight back, and you fight back. You fight back with the truth. 

So, I ask you to continue to fight for the truth. All of you do it in one way or the other. You should do it well. You should do more, more, more and more. Because we’ve learned in the long history of our people that if somebody says that they want to kill you — believe them.

And these people who want to kill us enjoy the support now of young Americans who support our killers and our rapists and our would-be destroyers more than equally as much as they support us.

That has to be reversed. As fast as it came up, it can go down. But like in anything in antisemitism, people respect you only if you stand up for yourself.

And the main thing is not to cower, not to cower before our enemies here, not to cower before lies that are spread here and there, not to cower, to stand up and fight back.

That’s my message to you.