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The Rubin Report
Is the Total Collapse of Iran Near? | Naftali Bennett
00:27:25
Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks to former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett about why the government of Iran is a house of cards that could collapse at any moment; his time as Israeli Prime Minister; leading a diverse unity government of right,...
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- [00:00]
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- [01:12]
Dave Rubin
Okay. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett Tech bro. That's what it says in some of the articles about you. Here we are in your office, which is also your bomb shelter. You just noted to me. I know we're both on limited time here, so let's, let's max out.
- [01:27]
Naftali Bennett
Limited time and safe.
- [01:28]
Dave Rubin
And very safe. I just did a show in Tel Aviv that a minute before it started, you, we got, they got the alert and we were already in a bombshell.
- [01:35]
Naftali Bennett
My family comes here. Yeah. Once every two days at about three in the morning when we get those sirens of rockets from Yemen or whatever the heck. Yeah.
- [01:44]
Dave Rubin
But it is calming down a little bit.
- [01:46]
Naftali Bennett
It is, it is and it's fine.
- [01:48]
Dave Rubin
Yeah. Most countries, one rocket a month.
- [01:51]
Naftali Bennett
It's the cost of doing business, you know, it's already ingrained. It's baked in.
- [01:55]
Dave Rubin
Yeah. Well, thank you for taking the time. Thank you for letting us use your home for this. For anyone that just does not know anything about you, let's just do like a two minute bio and we've got a half hour here. So we're going to try to plow through as many things as possible.
- [02:07]
Naftali Bennett
Well, my parents were born and raised in San Francisco. They were left wing liberals who fought for black rights back in the 60s, after 1967, when Israel was about to be annihilated, but then defeated the Arab armies, they got on the first plane and came to Israel knowing not one word in Hebrew. Three brothers. I'm the smallest brother, born and raised here in Israel and served in Israel's elite unit called Sayeret Maal. Later on became a platoon and company commander in another commando unit called Maglan, doing a lot of operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. After the army, I studied law and like all Israelis, wall studied. Big mistake, by the way. Law no do something useful. But I, with three friends, started up a high tech startup and became the CEO, ran it for six years, failed miserably throughout those years, ultimately succeeded, sold the company, ran another company, also sold it, and then entered politics, was Minister of Economy, Education, Defense and Prime Minister of Israel.
- [03:31]
Dave Rubin
That is quite a bio right there. In two minutes. All right, so you become Prime Minister of Israel. It was fairly short term, right? At least shorter than probably you would have liked. But relative to what's happened in Israel over the last 30 years, you're pretty much one of about two guys that have done it. So how do you look back on that?
- [03:49]
Naftali Bennett
Well, it was a very unique moment. What I did was form a unity government where we brought in left and right, so bipartisan religious and secular Jews and Arabs into the coalition. First time ever. So while I hold the right wing values and opinions, I think the key challenge today is to work together because that's killing us. It's killing us in America. It's killing you, the polarization. And so I became very adept at getting people with very different opinions working together on the greed part, which is about 70, 80% of the issues are more technocratic. They're not ideological, right? Traffic, cost of living, security. It should be almost devoid of ideology. And that's what we did. And while it was short, it's considered even my detractors who say I lied, I betrayed, whatever the heck they say, but he ran a good government and we dramatically increased growth, reduced unemployment, reduced crime in the Arab sector, in the Jewish sector. Israel was good. What happened was though, the pressure on us because of this unity and we had a razor through in a margin of 60 to 59. So in a coalition based structure, it.
- [05:29]
Dave Rubin
Couldn'T hold in, in retrospect. But now we'll move on to some other things, bringing the Arabs on board, some of whom are anti Zionist parties. So not really for the State of Israel and its current makeup, to say the least. Do you regret it? Did you feel like you just had to do it because you guys had been through how many elections and how many years?
- [05:47]
Naftali Bennett
So that's a very good question. Look, we were at a point, we had been through four elections and on our way to the fifth and is.
- [05:55]
Dave Rubin
Was in chaos in about six years.
- [05:57]
Naftali Bennett
Or something, in less, in three years or two and a half years. It was crazy. It was like the weimar in the 20s, 30s. And I had a very tough decision which was, do I stick with my base and the comfort zone or do I take a very difficult decision, disappointing some of my supporters? And I decided that the good of Israel is to establish this government and approved itself at this time. I would say since we're at war, any government that's established in Israel has to be Zionist. So you can't rely on non Zionist.
- [06:43]
Dave Rubin
Which just means that they believe that the state should exist.
- [06:46]
Naftali Bennett
That's correct. That's correct. Look, Mansurah Bassa, the word has been.
- [06:50]
Dave Rubin
Used in a very.
- [06:50]
Naftali Bennett
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Zionism is the belief that the Jews should have a homeland in their homeland and a home in their homeland. So yeah, at this point, what we need in Israel, Israel's in not only the security situation in the war, but domestically, it's just not being governed. Israel is not being governed. Our economy is not governed. Crime is domestic murders, domestic murders, good old criminal murders, are up more than 100% since my government. All right, so nothing's working. And we have this supposed right, right, right wing government, but it's failing. What we need is to put together, but this time really bring in all the major factions, calm things down, take out all the dramas and just get to work.
- [07:52]
Dave Rubin
So, all right, so putting the political part aside for a moment, what I'm sensing from everybody that I've talked to here is that, and I saw you give a talk not too long ago where you addressed this, that if and when Israel gets to the other side of this thing, there's this intractable problem, seemingly right now, but when it gets to the other side, you laid out a whole bunch of reasons why you think this country will flourish and thrive and all that. But first, let's do this part. How do you get out of this 7 to 10 front war that you're in at the moment?
- [08:21]
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- [08:55]
Naftali Bennett
The epicenter of all of this is Iran itself. My strategy is not necessarily a one off strategy. Knowing that Iran is the head of the octopus, I would apply an ongoing campaign to weaken and weaken and weaken Iran. Not necessarily with always kinetic action, forceful or hard power. But there's enough things that we could do because this regime is going to collapse. It's going to collapse. It's reminiscent of the Soviet Union in 1986. Very old, disconnected leaders, incompetent, corrupt and of course cruel. The whole thing is like hollow from within and I believe with sanctions, with a few other things of empowering opposition. Just like what Ronald Reagan did in the 80s to accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will collapse. And the Persians, the Iranians are great people. This is highly doable in the short term what we do.
- [10:04]
Dave Rubin
You feel like that's what's going on right now?
- [10:06]
Naftali Bennett
No, it's not for two reasons. My government's not doing it and has not attempted in a serious way to pull or work together with America on this. And again, this is a soft power thing because I get it, I understand there's no big appetite for wars, etc. I would point out everyone keeps on saying we're afraid of a regional war, but we just had the regional war so they've shot what they could and it's a very narrow window of opportunity. A once in a lifetime window of opportunity. Let's understand this. You have the epicenter of terror of the whole Middle east and you're in a boxing match and now I tell you that your opponent for the next five minutes is paralyzed, cannot move his arms, legs. That's the situation because they don't have air defenses because we took him out. They don't have Hezbollah as one arm and Hamas as another arm to protect. They are bear. And what do you do in that situation? You go in for the knockout. That's what I would do. I think we had a window, you know, at the end of between Biden and Trump. I thought and said that we should act at that time. We didn't. That was a lost opportunity.
- [11:32]
Dave Rubin
Do you think some of that though is just because the America, even though it was an outgoing administration, that it was just completely unreliable and no one sort of knew who was in charge?
- [11:41]
Naftali Bennett
Well, we don't need Necessarily America to help us. America could obviously give us ammunition and various arms that would help it be more effective. But we can do it on our own. So I don't think so. I think it's simply a missed opportunity. But it's not too late, though. Time is running out. I mean, our opponent is. They're rebuilding their air defenses. They're going to sit idle. So we have, we have this very unique opportunity in history, regardless of that. Yeah. What you need to do is focus on one front at a time, wrap things up. I think Gaza is taking way, way too long. We should have been able to do this in, you know, six to seven months. I thought there are better ways to go about it, more clever and less kinetic. But that's behind us right now. We have to bring the hostages home, defeat Hamas, calm things down, reach out to the Saudis, to the Emirates who are already our friends, and begin building a good future here in the Middle East.
- [12:57]
Dave Rubin
Okay, so let's try to do the best version of all of this. So somehow the Iranian threat is now gone, Hezbollah is largely gone in the north. The hostages are back, and Hamas is incapacitated, basically. So now you're on the other day of that thing, that thing that you've talked about, what starts happening to the country and to the region.
- [13:16]
Naftali Bennett
Well, the most important thing is to have unifying leadership in Israel because we're killing ourselves again like we did in year 2023 with the Judicial reform. House divided can't stand. I believe Lincol House divided cannot survive in Israel. And so we're very talented people. But when you take the talent and energy of the people and direct it to an internal fight, they're very talented at that. So we're great at hitting ourselves. So if we unite Israel, then there's a few things of releasing the coils of springs and then you'll see this huge growth. I think phenomenal growth. I think the highest in the world. And I'll explain. Israel is a startup nation and we are based on innovation and more than innovation, entrepreneurship, just the distinction. Innovation is thinking of a brilliant idea. Entrepreneurship is getting stuff done much harder. I think there's too much premium on ideas and not enough premium on energy and entrepreneurship. We are really good, especially on entrepreneurship. And in the age of AI, you still need people to get stuff done in the real world. It'll be a while until optimists can also start companies. Right, but we were running out of talent. Our high tech sector was just eating everything. We have all the brilliant guys. So what we need is more talent and we have this huge reserve of talent called the Haredim, the ultra Orthodox Jews in Israel. Really smart people, but they're not working, not serving in the military. And that's gotta change. We've got this crazy situation. I gotta get into it. But once we get them into. So imagine pouring this talent into the high tech pool. So the machine is going to grow very strong. Another.
- [15:26]
Dave Rubin
I don't want to get too lost in that, but maybe for a minute. So how do you actually get that? How do you move them into that sector?
- [15:33]
Naftali Bennett
You stop paying them to not work, not serve and not learn.
- [15:36]
Dave Rubin
Yeah. And you think you can win an election potentially by doing that? Assuming that your future involves politics, which I.
- [15:41]
Naftali Bennett
Yes.
- [15:42]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, yeah, okay.
- [15:43]
Naftali Bennett
Yeah, yeah. Look, there's ultra Orthodox Jews in America and they work, they're part of the economy. I'm not aware that the American government subsidizes, you know, their studying of Torah. I'm religious, religious guy. I believe that it's important to study our heritage. But they gotta work. Come on.
- [16:06]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, there's just a number.
- [16:07]
Naftali Bennett
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when we get them in, it's gonna be this. And I think we're gonna get quite a few Jews once the war is over and once we're united and attractive, we got very talented Jews from all kinds of places in the world because there's tremendous amount of anti Semitism and, and here there's no antisemitism and it's a great place to live. So that's a second thing that we'll do. And I think the third thing is to reach out to our regional partners. There is so much that we can do, especially in the Arabian Peninsula.
- [16:43]
Dave Rubin
Does that seem like the future of where all the alliances will be? I mean, if Iran basically is gone and the proxies are gone, that then that all of these countries, Saudi Arabia will come in. Obviously there's been major moves with the Abraham Accords that could look like a very different.
- [16:57]
Naftali Bennett
Yes, yes, it's a great route to the east. And yes, I would see Israel, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, India, sort of like this line. And it would also be ultimately a physical line of trains, etc. There's a tremendous amount of things we can do. There's also another huge opportunity that people simply have not noticed unnoticed. Israel is a first world country and we are flanked by countries that, whose GDP is a 10th and sometimes 20th of ours. So there's a natural arbitrage and it's very rare, very rare. And if you think about it, there's a huge win win, you know, with Egypt, with Jordan, that could, could be very effective. And that's something I'd want to do. Our relationship with Egypt and Jordan, while we are formally in peace, it's a very cold peace. There's very limited trade going on. And we signed this in 1979. So it's been a while. This is another untapped opportunity when you take it all together. And finally, one more thing. Here's Bennett's formula of why Israel has an amazing future. So we're churning these really talented people, especially towards entrepreneurship, especially folks who came out of the IDF and at a very young age were assigned huge responsibility. And that builds your character in a way that nothing else does. So X is the quality, very high quality, times the number of kids in Israel. Israel is the only democracy in the world that's having kids. That's positive. So you need 2.1 per month to keep any population. Israel's at about 3 right now. And it's also secular Jews. It's everyone. So here's my formula. Really good kids times a lot of kids equals a great future.
- [19:17]
Dave Rubin
That's a positive spin right there.
- [19:19]
Naftali Bennett
It's not a spin.
- [19:20]
Dave Rubin
It's not a spin. It's a positive vision.
- [19:21]
Naftali Bennett
You know, I'll tell you, so I won't name the country. I will. I was in South Korea and I heard that they have 0.8, 0.9 kids. And as I flew back, I thought, you know, Israel's got a lot of problems. Would I replace. Would I swap our problems? And my short answer is no, because the fundamentals of Israel, which I just said, that formula, are really good. And yeah, we have huge problems with Gaza, with the Palestinians, et cetera. But we can figure them out. And then the underlying trend, the fundamentals are great.
- [19:58]
Dave Rubin
Do you think the world will let Israel win? To get to the things that you're talking about, like, in some sense, the world likes keeping Israel in this intractable problem, this slow thing that's going on with Gaza and everything else. Even if you would have managed the war slightly differently, like there's some version of the PR angle that just likes keeping Israel in this thing and churning it and squeezing it.
- [20:19]
Naftali Bennett
It's a good question, and I don't know the answer, because Israel is sensitive to our relationships with others, because we are an island, in a sense, a geopolitical island. And we trade with Europe. 40% of our trade is with Europe, about 35% with America. And the rest is the rest of the world. And we're export leaning country, especially technology. So we cannot be an autarky. Autarky, or however you pronounce it, autocracy. We can't. We need those connections. And I am very cognizant of what's going on. And it does seem that sometimes they don't want to let us win and they stop us in our tracks. But I think good leadership here needs to take that into account, act more quickly and make a distinction between areas you fight on and things you don't fight about, like choose your battles. So be focused on what we need to achieve and get it done. And I would also recommend that our ministers just shut up. They just, you know, don't be stupid. Right. A lot of our problems are just because of stupid, stupid remarks.
- [21:46]
Dave Rubin
Right. They get one random guy to say something.
- [21:48]
Naftali Bennett
Yeah. And it's not as if it's actually happening, but when you say it, it's out. And hey, the minister of whatever the heck said this and that and then I have to go and explain all this nonsense.
- [21:59]
Dave Rubin
When you were prime minister, did you get a sense and you tried to do something with Russia, Ukraine to kind of close the gap there real very early on. It didn't work, but you did try. Did you sense that your European counterparts, that any of them were hopeful for what's going on in their parts of.
- [22:14]
Naftali Bennett
The world in terms of the Ukraine.
- [22:17]
Dave Rubin
Russia, just in terms of their own countries. Of their own countries and the demographics and just all of the immigration problems and well, things that we're seeing all over the place. Because here you come from this tiny little country.
- [22:30]
Naftali Bennett
Yeah.
- [22:31]
Dave Rubin
You're going to Europe where they have these huge countries.
- [22:33]
Naftali Bennett
Huge countries.
- [22:34]
Dave Rubin
And they seem to be kind of floundering.
- [22:36]
Naftali Bennett
Well, I sensed in many cases that the leaders are focused on fairly short midterm goals of whatever. Their goals are usually economic related. There was not a lot of talk of the demographic decline in Europe and the long term trends. So that is not something that they would talk about. And I'm not going to raise it.
- [23:02]
Dave Rubin
Right. Is your hope, though, ultimately that you could model something here that then they could look at and say, boy, we could fix some things in our country?
- [23:10]
Naftali Bennett
Well, in a sense, in many ways, I think Israel, one of Israel's core missions beyond existing and being strong is to some to sort of be the pilot of all the messiest problems in the world. And how do you deal with it? All right, so how does a country deal with no water? All right, so we are the country.
- [23:33]
Dave Rubin
That was the thing.
- [23:33]
Naftali Bennett
That was the thing for the first hundred years of Zionism, we didn't have water, so we built all these smart ways and moved water from one place to another. And now we're the highest water generating country per capita in the world.
- [23:49]
Dave Rubin
Right. So you export water now?
- [23:51]
Naftali Bennett
We export water to Jordan. Yeah, but that's just one example. And then, you know, we're thrown at seven armies around us again. What do you do? And then what do you do when you have a big minority that belongs to, belongs to a nation that wants to destroy you, but they are citizens of the country. I'm talking about the Arabs. So how do you deal with that? And I think we've dealt with that in a good way. The Arab citizens in Israel enjoy full equal rights, vote for the Knesset Supreme Court's judges and generally speaking, it's looking good for them. The economy's growing better, et cetera. There's still a lot of crime and we need to deal with it. The next thing is asymmetric war. How do you do? And now it's going really tough. But I feel sometimes God is throwing all this stuff and you guys figure it out and show them how to do it. The one thing we can't teach the world is how to make kids. It's fairly known how to do that. I don't know. And I know everyone's working on it and nothing works. All these incentives are not working.
- [24:53]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, I think in Hungary it's working a little bit.
- [24:54]
Naftali Bennett
That's right. I've heard or about what they do there.
- [24:57]
Dave Rubin
They're doing a lot of things economically. Economically, I think if you have a child, woman never is, never will pay taxes again. There's like.
- [25:05]
Naftali Bennett
So that's smart because it's not a one off.
- [25:07]
Dave Rubin
Right.
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Naftali Bennett
All the others are one off. It's got to be like. Yeah.
- [25:11]
Dave Rubin
So let me ask you one other thing because we're short on time and I hope we can do this.
- [25:14]
Naftali Bennett
And I did my part. We've got four kids. You've got four kids more than ever.
- [25:16]
Dave Rubin
That's it. You're done.
- [25:17]
Naftali Bennett
We're done.
- [25:18]
Dave Rubin
You're done.
- [25:18]
Naftali Bennett
Okay, enough is enough.
- [25:19]
Dave Rubin
Let me just ask you one other thing because I've spent the last couple days in Jerusalem. It's, I've been here many times, but it's been quite moving. This, this time I think more than any other, just relative to what's going on in the country you mentioned, God just, just, you know, hands a lot of stuff to the Jews and they have to deal with it. We're wearing the Yarmulke the country's largely secular. You mentioned the stuff with the ultra orthodox. How has any of this changed your religious or philosophic views? And do you think what's happening here is just another continuation of all of the stories that we tell at all of the. At all of the holidays? You know, it got real tough, and then we survived and we ate and we move on and we tell the story.
- [25:53]
Naftali Bennett
That's a wonderful. And I. Yeah, I have changed. And the main development is moderation in the how you do stuff. All right. On the what? You know, I oppose a Palestinian state. I oppose handing over land to the Arabs. I think it's a mistake, et cetera, et cetera. And I have my opinions, but the how matters. And I have become an extreme moderate. I'm a huge believer in being pragmatic, being moderate, in how you run the country and just solve problems and create a big center. We need the center of Israel, which is a huge majority.
- [26:40]
Dave Rubin
But is that a spiritual thing or is that a political beast? That's right.
- [26:44]
Naftali Bennett
No, I'm trying to get to the deeper. It's not only. No, because I. My favorite pastime every Saturday is I read parts of the Bible, not only the Parasha, but. And I learn our history across history. The Jewish people have been plagued by internal strife, internal fighting, and it killed us. The current state of Israel that you see here, it's the third instance that we have an independent and sovereign state here. We had it twice before, and we blew it twice before. And in fact, as an independent and sovereign state, the first one went on for 80 years. In the 81st year, they divided into Judea and Israel. We are descendants of Judea. We lost 10 tribes. And the second time, it lasted for 76 years. The Maccabees who founded it, their great grandchildren screwed it and then called in the Romans. And Israel now is at 76 years. So it's the decade we've never passed. And this time we got to pass it. And the way to do it is not to sharpen ideological differences too much not to figure out. I'm not saying to lay down your beliefs, not at all. In fact, no one needs to lay down his beliefs. But we do need to find the common ground and focus on the 70, 80% that we do agree upon and figure out how to manage the disagreements. And sometimes decisions need to be made also on that. And it's really important for me. Unity above everything. This was not my view a decade ago, and this is my view. Unity above everything.
- [28:34]
Dave Rubin
That's how you end an interview. I appreciate your time. I know you've got a meeting and you're going to let me use your bomb shelter for another thing that I have to do. I appreciate it. You're safe.
- [28:41]
Naftali Bennett
But if there's sirens, I'm going to come down and join with with my dog.
- [28:45]
Dave Rubin
That'll be a heck of a show.
- [28:47]
Naftali Bennett
It will. That would be cool, huh?
- [28:49]
Dave Rubin
Thank you. Appreciate it.