Benjamin Netanyahu: evaluation

Transcript context

…What does it take to do that with Saudi Arabia, with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 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 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, 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 then 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 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 I’ve been involved in a few, I told you the conceptual battle is always the most difficult one. And I had to fight this battle to convert a semi-socialist state into a 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- … free markets. So we also had to fight this battle that said you have to go through the Palestinian straight, S-T-R-A-I-T, 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 soundbites and so on, but 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 only one that will work. So expanding the circle of peace, just to linger on that requires what? Secretly talking man-to-man, human-to-human, to leaders of other nations and-…

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