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Hello everybody watching and listening. I have... I'm always excited to talk to the guests that I'm talking to,

which is why I bring them on the podcast to begin with, but today we have something that I think is unique. I'm going to be speaking with Ben Yamann Netanyahu,

who was recently elected as Prime Minister of Israel. This is a very interesting development as far as I'm concerned. It's the first time I've had the opportunity to speak with someone who is a sitting head of state or soon will be,

and I think the reason that that's relevant and worthy of note is because it's one of the markers for the development of a new kind of political dialogue.

We're in a situation now where it's possible to sit with a political leader and have a genuine conversation for a long period of time,

and in a period of time we'll go at least 90 minutes, unscripted so that there's no sound bite quality or editing to it. You just get the unvarnished words of someone who's in a position to make decisions that affect all of us.

I'm very excited about this. I'll read the bio and then we'll go on to the interview. Ben Yamann Netanyahu, as I said, was recently reelected as Prime Minister of Israel,

having previously served in the office from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021.

From 1967 to 1972, he served as a soldier and commander in Sayer at Matt Gull, an elite special forces unit of the Israel Defense Forces.

A graduate of MIT, he served as Israel's ambassador to the UN from 84 to 88, before being elected to the Israeli Parliament as a member of the LaKud Party in 1988.

He has published five previous books on terrorism and Israel's quest for peace and security. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife Sarah. In his newest book, Beebe, My Story, the newly reelected Prime Minister,

tells the story of his family, his people, his path to leadership, and his unseacing commitment to defending his country and securing its future.

Hello, Prime Minister Netanyahu, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me tonight. I've been reading your book, your new book, Beebe, My Story, and it weaves an interesting personal tale, familial tale, and political cultural tale altogether.

There was one particular element of it I wanted to begin discussing with you that's I think of broad interest. One of the things I realized when I was reading was just how ignorant I am in some fundamental sense about the history of the development of the Jewish state of Israel.

I know that there's tremendous constant noise about issues as fundamentalist, Israel's right to exist even, and you start by talking about in your book, you embark on explaining that, at least in some part, by talking about hersel, and his terror that anti-Semitism, that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe was going to cause a catastrophe, which was obviously a justified terror.

Would you be kind enough to walk me and my viewers and listeners through your rationale for the moral justification for Israel, the political justification as well, and I'm going to do what I can to my limited ability, let's say to push back, I've heard the arguments of often young people who are more prone to give credence and sympathies, say to the Palestinian viewpoint.

I'd like to rectify my ignorance and maybe help my viewers and listeners do the same thing, so would it be useful to start with hersel?

Well, I'd actually start, hersel was what I call our modern Moses, but I'd actually start with the original Moses. The Jewish people have lived in the land of Israel, what is now the state of Israel.

They've lived here and been attached to this place for about 3,500 years, three and a half millennia. Now, for the first two millennia roughly of that time, we were living in what is described in a text commonly known as the Bible.

So the Bible describes how the Jewish people lived on this land, were attached to this land, fought off conquerors, sometimes were conquered, but stayed on their land. And that continued for a very long time until roughly the six seventh century actually after the birth of Christ.

Okay, roughly for 2000 years, we were conquered by the Romans, we were conquered by the Byzantines, they did a lot of bad things to us, but they didn't really exile us contrary to what people think.

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