Producers' Pick | Benjamin Netanyahu

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Shopify.com slash offer22. Mr. Prime Minister Netanyahu, welcome to The Brian Kilmeade Show. Good to talk to you Brian. So first off, when did you realize this would be the right time to put out your biography? When I went into opposition, you can't really write a biography when you're a prime minister or a finance minister. So I wrote all my books when I was in opposition. That's the only time that you can do it. But since I was working very hard to bring down the present government, I wrote it actually sometimes while I was in the plenary of our parliament, the Knesset, in endless budget debates or careening in the roads of the Galilee while I was going to political meetings.

It's crazy. You've written books so you know how odd that is, but I enjoyed it. I remember the first time I saw you was the Persian Gulf War. And Saddam Hussein was sending Scud missiles into Israel.

And I thought you were so composed and calm as, you know, we don't know what these Scuds were capable of, but I love what they were, what was in those rockets themselves. And I saw you were really the voice of Israel back then. Did you always have aspirations, even in the early 90s of becoming prime minister? No, actually, I had no idea and no conception that I would enter public life, but I did so after my older brother, who was the commander of the special unit that we both served in, died while rescuing hostages in the heart of Africa in Antebi in perhaps the most celebrated rescue mission in modern times.

So that changed my life. It steered it to the direction of public service and the battle against international terrorism. And from there I was asked to become Israel at a very young age to become Israel's deputy ambassador in Washington and then ambassador to the UN. It was only after that that I seriously contemplated entering politics, which in Israel is not a genteel sport.

It is not for the faint hearted. So I entered it out of a sense of mission and I made it in a sense of mission to protect the Jewish state, to give the Jewish people a secure future and prosperous future, but also to coalesce the forces of freedom, to make my contribution to coalescing the forces of freedom around the world, to preserve our common civilization, which is always at risk. What does the fact that you went to school here in America, what kind of perspective do you have being that you were here and lived here for a while when it comes to going back to Israel and running that country? Well, look, I think the most important thing is the understanding that America is our indispensable ally. It doesn't mean it's our only ally, but the alliance we have with the American people is like no other, because they recognize that Israel in many ways is the frontline of Western civilization and the heart of a very unstable Middle East, that we're fighting common enemies, especially Iran. The chance death to Israel, death to America and Israel is really the force that stands in their way, and I've made it, I would say, the cardinal issue of my premiership. But the other thing that I got in America was an appreciation for individual initiative, for enterprise, for free markets, and that in many ways shaped my decision to enact in Israel a free market revolution that made Israel one of the most developed and prosperous countries on earth, because we unleashed the inherent genius in our people to enterprise, to startups, thousands and thousands of startups which are helping countries around the world. In many ways, that's an American influence, without a doubt. No question, but you probably do it better.

You streamlined, have less institutional blocks, and I remember picking that up from Dan Senor's book, he wrote Innovation Nation, the time he spent over there. I also, in reading Jared Kushner's book, saw that you slept in his bedroom when you were coming through here. You know his dad quite well, correct?

Yes, yes, I spent some time, I think, in his house when he was a teenager, that's correct. Right, so how did that partnership work? Well, I think the larger issue was how to deal with changing American administrations. I had, obviously, my differences with President Obama, whom I respected, but fundamentally disagreed with, primarily on the question of the relationship between power and peace. He believed that peace brings power. I believe that power brings peace. And I think he had a great appreciation for soft power, and I always thought that soft power is great, but if it's not backed by hard power, it's largely useless, because we look at a very cruel world, and Martin Luther King said the arc of history bends towards justice.

Well, maybe so, but it's a brittle arc, and it is continually pounded by the forces of darkness, and unless you're very strong and willing to defend your values and your survival and your future, you can lose. You wrote some biographies, I think, including one of Lincoln, and Lincoln spoke of the better angels of our nature, but even he had to win a decisive battle in America's bloodiest war to ensure that the better angels of our nature triumph. So I had a difference of view with President Obama on this. Primarily, it was reflected in our different views on Iran, the Iran nuclear deal, and on some other matters. I had less of a difference, to put it mildly, with President Trump when he came into office and his team, and that enabled us to actually get peace through strength, because for 72 years Israel had two peace treaties with Arab states, and for a quarter of a century we had none. Yet when we applied this new approach that I believed in, we had four peace treaties with Arab states in four months, and that, I think, is what's significant not only for Israel and many of our Arab neighbors, but for history, for the future of the Middle East, and for the future of peace in the world. And part of the reason, first off, on President Obama, you came here and you spoke about this Iranian deal, and I can't even pretend that there's even another side to it.

It's the stupidest thing ever, it's so unbalanced, and they're so untrustworthy, and the fact that we're talking to them, I'm beside myself, I can imagine what it's like for you. But do you think it was personal? Do you think there was a personal dislike that he had for you? Because he seemed to be actually working for your ouster with the opposition, is that correct? Well, he wasn't the first. I mean, Clinton did it. And, you know, you couldn't dislike Clinton because when I ended up winning on the first time that he tried that, he called me up, I write it in my book, he called me up and he says, baby, I've got to hand it to you.

We tried to knock you down and you beat us fair and square. That's the Clinton charm of being so politically incorrect that it got him through a lot of minefields. But I thought we're not supposed to meddle in other people's elections. Yeah, well, I think they expect other people not to meddle in American elections, but they certainly meddled in mine.

And I took it in stride, but I think that you asked me if it's a personal thing. Well, it wasn't on my side. I mean, if President Obama would have gotten out of the Iran deal, would have recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, moved the embassy there, and recognized our sovereignty and the strategic goal on heights, I would have lauded him.

But he didn't. And as far as I was concerned, it was a policy difference. And when it came to things that could threaten the existence of the one and only Jewish state after the travails and odyssey of the Jewish people through the worst horrors of history, I had to state my case. And if that meant going to a joint session of the American Congress and speaking out against the dangerous Iran deal, then so be it. And if it also meant taking the brunt of many personal attacks, so be it too. I am here to defend my country and I will do whatever is necessary to defend it.

You seem to. You knew Donald Trump before he took over, and you guys seemed pretty tight when he was in power here. How would you describe your relationship with President Trump? Well, first of all, it produced the best years of the Israeli-American alliance. The Abraham Accords, especially. The Abraham Accords. It's historic peace treaties that were begun before that, actually were begun by my speech to Congress while I was speaking. Again, this is something I described in my book while I was speaking in Congress. At those very moments, my staff got calls from Arab leaders in the Gulf who said, we can't believe what we're seeing. We can't believe that your prime minister is willing to stand up against a sitting American president on something that he believes is wrong because they didn't do it. They spoke in back rooms, they spoke in corridors, they spoke in hot stones, but here I was before the entire world.

They said, if that's the case, we want to cement our ties. That led to secret meetings that I had with Arab leaders. One of them, believe it or not, on a yacht in the Red Sea. Who's that?

Who's that? Well, that's the next biography. It led to the foundations of the Abraham Accords because, again, it's peace through strength. It's peace from power. I had worked on that for many years. I had the Mossad in contact with their security agencies, but the breakthrough came when I actually met the leaders. I said, it's high time that we forged a strategic alliance with us. It took me a while, by the way, to persuade President Trump and his staff, but they were persuaded.

Once they joined in, we could finish this. I think that it's to our joint credit that we enacted these tremendous peace accords. But I think also it shows that if an American president and an Israeli prime minister work hand in hand to achieve peace through strength, you actually get both. Benjamin Netanyahu, our guest, I'm sure everyone recognizes his voice.

He's been on the national stage for a while. As you know, President Trump came out and, to paraphrase, said the American Jewish community has to get their act together because they don't care about Israel. Republicans have done more. He has done more for Israel than any other president. Is that anti-Semitic?

No, I don't think so. First of all, it's true that he has done an enormous amount for Israel, but I think it reflects a certain frustration and the fact that people vote on other issues as well. I'm not going to get into the American political divide, but in general, Israel enjoys the support of the American Jewish community, all of it, because some in the Jewish community join the progressives who are, the radical progressives who are not only against Israel, they're against, in my opinion, our common values, American and Israeli values. But on the whole, this is surprising for many people, the support for Israel has been fairly constant and strong among the democratic public, not the political class. But it's overshadowed by the fact that over the last decade or so, support for Israel among Republicans has skyrocketed. So that's where the gap is. The gap is not so much that support for Israel has gone down among the Democrats, but it's gone up among the Republicans. And of course, we welcome that bipartisan support, and the more we get it, the best.

So let me just bounce this off you exactly. He says the Jewish people in the United States either don't like Israel or don't care about Israel. There's people in this country that are Jewish, no longer love Israel. I'll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country, and he's getting a lot of Jewish leaders here criticizing that. He told that to AMI magazine, an orthodox Jewish publication. He said, so basically what he said, does that sound to you as something that the Jewish community should take offense with? Look, I think that the great majority of the American Jewish community supports Israel and supports Israel wholeheartedly.

It always has. There are those who have gone to the edge of radicalism who don't support Israel, because they don't support, in my opinion, basic values that shape our common civilization. They don't support Israel.

In my opinion, they also don't support many of the things that America needs. But they're the minority, a very small minority, the overwhelming majority of American Jews, wholeheartedly and unreservedly support Israel. It is also true that among the evangelical community, we've enjoyed enormous support.

I've expressed my appreciation. People don't know that there are historic roots that go back centuries for this support of believing Christians around the world. And part of the reason is that they see in the rebirth of Israel the realization of the biblical prophecies of the ingathering of the exiles and the rebuilding of, well, it's the old Jerusalem. America has often said that we are the new Jerusalem, and you are in one sense. But rebuilding the old Jerusalem is not bad either. So many, many evangelicals see in the rise of Israel a vindication of the biblical prophecy. And it really is a parable for all humanity.

And it says that if you are sufficiently determined, if you have the resolve and the will and the faith, then a free people can overcome the most horrible odds in history and create and shape a future, a wondrous future. And that's what Israel has happened. That's what has happened in Israel, Brian.

Israel has one-tenth of one percent of the world's population, and yet it is ranked by the University of Pennsylvania annual poll of 20,000 opinion leaders as the eighth most powerful country in the world. That is not just a rational... Well, you guys know how to fight and you all serve. By the way, if you want to get Bibi's book, and I know you do, bbmystory.com because there's going to be more. He's going to be running again for office. Imagine him not being able to get there. Final thought. The president of the United States is kind of vilifying and looking to isolate Saudi Arabia. Do you think that's a good move? 20 seconds? No. I think all these countries are not perfect.

That's an understatement. But I think that in the larger array of forces, we have to governize a working front against Iran. Iran threatens the United States. Iran wants to develop ballistic missiles against you armed with nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia and Israel, led by Israel, are the forces that will confront Iran in the Middle East. Pick it up, Bibi. My Story. It's a great book. Mr. Prime Minister, thanks so much. Thank you, Brian. Good to talk to you. From the Fox News Podcast Network, subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy Podcast. Former federal prosecutor and four-term U.S. Congressman from South Carolina brings you a one-of-a-kind podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcast.com.