Benjamin Netanyahu: belief

Transcript context

…As you write about in your book, what have you learned about life from your father? My father was a great historian and well, he taught me several things. He said that 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. So when I see somebody parroting the Nazi goal of destroying the Jewish state, I try 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?” And he came back with a question, “What do you think?” And I said, “Well, you have to have vision and you have to have the flexibility of navigating and working towards that vision. Be flexible, but understand where you’re heading.” And he said, “Well, you need that for anything. You need it if you’re a university president or if you’re a leader of a corporation or anything, anybody would’ve to have that.” I said, “All right, so what do you need to be the leader of Israel?” He 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.” Now, as I spend time in government, being reelected by the people of Israel, I recognize more and more how right he 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 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 it’ll be depleted very quickly if you stay a long time. I disagree with that. I think you have to 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. Never stop. And if I may suggest as part of the education, I would add in a little literature, maybe Dostoevsky, in the plentiful of time you have as a prime minister to read.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.