One of the Most Hated Men in the World Disagrees With the Premise

Barely three minutes into the conversation, Lex Fridman puts a blunt question on the table. Netanyahu is loved by many in Israel and abroad, Fridman says, but also hated by many — "in fact, I think you may be one of the most hated men in the world." If a young person is listening with that hate in their heart, what would turn it into love? Netanyahu's first sentence is a refusal: "I disagree with the premise of your question."

He lists a different scoreboard. He has just given an interview on an Iranian channel to 16 million viewers; a short video from a few years earlier reached 25 million people in Iran — not the regime, he is careful to add. When he travels, he says, people want to hear from the leader of a rising power. The evidence he trusts most is the Arab world: four historic peace agreements, made with him, not with someone else. He corrects Fridman's word. He said respect, not love.

Pressed on people who do hate Israel, he answers with a catalogue of national virtues. Israel, in his telling, is a stellar democracy and one of the most advanced societies on the planet, exporting medicine, agriculture, environment, and telecoms, sending rescue teams after earthquakes in Haiti, the Philippines, Turkey, and Nepal despite being a tenth of 1 percent of world population. The hour is already set. Fridman wants to talk about hate, war, and historical lessons. Netanyahu wants to talk about achievements, threats, and strategy.

Fridman, calling him a student of history, asks what World War II teaches about hate and the rise of someone like Hitler. Netanyahu reaches for a Latin tag and then for plain speech: nip bad things in the bud. Deliberate hatred of one community, with the demonization and delegitimization that travel with it, is extremely dangerous. What started with the Jews, he says, soon spread to all of humanity.

The operational lesson is the one he will not sit out. "If somebody threatens to annihilate us, take them seriously and act to prevent it early on." He names Iran today beside Hitler then, and people who discounted both. Do not let them acquire the means, because by then it may be too late. Fridman asks how much of that hatred is antisemitism and how much is anti-Zionism. Netanyahu does not leave a gap: he does not distinguish between the two.

You cannot say you are fine with Jews but do not think there should be a Jewish state, he argues, any more than you can say you are not anti-American, you just do not think there should be an America. Anti-Zionism, in this frame, is a denial that the Jewish people have a right to a state of their own, and that denial unmasks what is going on. "Today, anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism. Those who oppose the Jewish people oppose the Jewish state." The logic is clean, and it flattens a large gray zone between criticizing a government's policy and denying the state's right to exist — a zone Netanyahu has no interest in mapping here.

The interview is happening inside the most serious internal rupture in Israel's history to that point. Hundreds of thousands are in the streets against a judicial overhaul that critics say would weaken the Supreme Court, concentrate power in the government, and make the prime minister a dictator. Fridman reads that charge aloud. Netanyahu calls it ridiculous. With this many demonstrations, he asks, this is a dictatorship? "There's a lot of democracy here. More rambunctious and more robust than just anywhere on the planet."

Asked to steel-man the fear that the coalition — not only he, but whoever follows — would get too much power, he calls it hogwash. Many protesters, he says, do not know what is being discussed; they are being sloganized. Social networks plus big data and big money can feed slogans into people's minds and manufacture mass mobilization. His own self-description is a nineteenth-century democrat, small d: democracy is the will of the majority plus protection of individual rights. You avoid mob rule on one side and dictatorship on the other the way British and French philosophers sketched and the American founding fathers encapsulated — a balance among legislature, executive, and judiciary.

That balance, he says, held in Israel's first fifty years and was then broken by "the most activist judicial court on the planet," which aggregated the powers of parliament and the executive over two or three decades. The reform is meant to bring the pendulum back to what is common in parliamentary democracies and in the United States: checks and balances, not unrivaled power; an independent judiciary, not an all-powerful one. He says he killed the sweeping override clause — 61 votes, a majority of one, enough to nullify any Supreme Court decision — soon after the package was introduced, and that most criticism still attacks a clause that has not existed for six months.

The second fight is how judges are chosen. Critics treat elected officials picking Supreme Court justices as the end of democracy; if so, he says, the United States is not a democracy, nor is France, nor is almost every democracy on the planet. In the Israeli system, sitting judges effectively hold a veto on new judges, a self-selecting court that perpetuates itself. He wants that corrected in a balanced way. Israel was a stellar democracy, remains one, and the arguing in the streets is the proof. What the frame does not answer is why this particular government, led by a prime minister on trial, chose this moment to push the pendulum.

Fridman notes that many tech companies are nervous about the reform. Netanyahu answers with an economic résumé. He takes credit for dozens of free-market overhauls that moved Israel from $17,000 in GDP per capita to $54,000 on the IMF's nominal measure, overtaking Japan, France, Britain, and Germany. The method, he says, was unleashing genius, initiative, and entrepreneurship that had been latent in the population, which required free markets. The second engine is the military and the security services: a permanent investment in knowledge workers who become knowledge entrepreneurs after they leave uniform.

Global high-tech investment has dipped, he grants, mostly because of interest rates, but he does not think Israel's reservoir of talent is going away. The country used to be telecoms, because people came out of military intelligence; now the same fermentation shows up in medicine, biology, agritech, "everywhere." Nvidia has decided to build a supercomputer in Israel. Intel, he says, has decided to put $25 billion into a new plant. He does not wonder why. "The talent is here and the freedom is here, and it'll remain so."

Fridman asks about conversations with Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Netanyahu will not pretend to understand everything they understand, but he understands one thing: AI is developing at a geometric rate, and people in political life have no intuitive grasp of geometric growth. They think in linear increments. The image of walking up a ski slope is foreign, which is why they are taken aback. His conclusions: there is no option of not entering AI with full force; regulation is needed; global regulation is not guaranteed; and it is not clear where any of this ends. If the systems come to control us — he does not know whether they will — that shared threat is probably the only chance of universal rules, because he does not see any country leaving the race to cooperate without it. Domestic regulation can still happen, but it will have a ceiling if the other side does not sign on.

A decade earlier, a scientific adviser forced a novel on him, against Churchill's preference for fact over fiction: a book about a future Chinese–American cyber war. He read it in one sitting, called in a team, and said Israel should become one of the world's five cyber powers, quickly. They did. AI, he thinks, is bigger than that and joined to it. The country will move on AI as it moved on cyber, including by hanging a genetic database on medical records that already cover 98 percent of the population. The question he cannot answer is jobs. The agricultural and industrial revolutions are assumed to have created more work than they destroyed. That is not obvious to him at all. He used to have the comfort of a telecom story — one state company went from 13,000 workers to 7,000, and competition created 40,000 jobs elsewhere — and of markets spreading wealth down the ladder. He no longer has that comfort. If Musk's "end of scarcity" arrives, a few people will produce enormous value, you will have to tax them to support everyone else, and if you tax and another country does not, capital leaves. Even if you solve the transfer, the first question after hello is still "What do you do?" People define themselves by a profession. If he has to bet, AI annihilates many more jobs than it creates, and it will force a structural change in economics and politics. Fridman is the optimist and offers to write it down. Netanyahu says they will not have to wait a lifetime. They will see in a few years.

Six terms, more than fifteen years in office: does he worry that power has corrupted him? "Not at all." What drives him, he says, is a mission to assure the survival and thriving of the Jewish state — prosperity, security, and peace with neighbors. Israeli voters keep sending him back even though he wields no power in the press. He recalls Silvio Berlusconi asking, about fifteen years earlier, how many of Israel's television stations he had. None, Netanyahu said, and they were all against him. How do you win with both hands tied? "The hard way." Until recently, he says, one side of the spectrum dominated Israeli media and vilified him as the stand-in for a conservative majority. The idea that he is an omnipotent dictator is, in this telling, ridiculous. The concentration of power, he says, lies elsewhere.

Fridman does not stop there. Netanyahu has been involved in several corruption cases; how much corruption is there, and how does he fight it? He asks a different question: what has happened to those cases? They are collapsing before our eyes, he says. Three judges in his case called in the prosecution and told them the flagship bribery charge was gone — before a single defense witness had been called. Even the mainstream press covered it, because it was an earthquake. He does not claim exemption from the legal process. He says the truth is coming out.

Then the numbers and the pictures. About a quarter of a billion shekels spent to scrutinize him, scour bank accounts, send people to the Philippines, Mexico, Europe, and America, and use the most advanced spyware on the planet against his associates. Witnesses, he says, were told to think about their families and to say what investigators wanted to hear. Most people, including opponents, are no longer asking what Netanyahu did, "because he apparently did nothing." They are asking what was done to him, and what was done to Israeli democracy in an attempt to put down someone who keeps winning elections.

The heaviest images are the ones he wants corrected: spyware on a politician's surroundings, people held in flea-ridden cells for 21 days, an 84-year-old mother invited to investigations without cause, mistresses brought into the corridor and shaken down. "That corruption is what they want corrected." The statement has to be heard, and heard as one party's account of a case that was still being tried. What it puts on the table is larger than one man's guilt or innocence: a state using counterterror tools on political opponents.

What is the top obstacle to peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians? Netanyahu's answer is the one he has given for decades. The conflict has lasted about a century, he says, because of a persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish nation-state in any boundary — before Israel existed and after; before Israel held the West Bank and Gaza and after. A territorial dispute is something else: you live on this side, we live on that side, we argue about the line. That is not, in his account, the argument. Palestinian society is fragmented, but the factions agree there should not be a Jewish state anywhere. Hamas would remove it by terror; others would dissolve it by political means as well.

Even as part of a two-state solution, Fridman asks, they are still against the idea? They do not want a state next to Israel, Netanyahu says. They want a state instead of Israel, and they say that if they get a state they will use it as a springboard to destroy a smaller Israeli one. He offers two unilateral withdrawals as evidence. Israel walked out of Gaza and, in his words, effectively established a Hamas state; the other side did not build peace and economic projects, it became "a terror bastion" that fired 10,000 rockets. Israel left Lebanon and watched Hezbollah take over. "We didn't give territory for peace. We got territory for terror."

The geography, as he draws it, makes a conventional two-state split physically hard. The whole of Israel plus the West Bank is about the width of the Washington Beltway, a little more. A 747 crosses it in two and a half minutes; a fighter in a minute and a half. You are not going to divide the airspace or the electromagnetic spectrum. Security, therefore, stays with Israel. The principle he offers is simple: "The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten Israel." Overall security remains Israeli. He admits this is less than perfect sovereignty — call it limited sovereignty, autonomy plus, whatever you like — and says that across the Israeli spectrum, except the hard left, most people no longer really debate it.

The new government's priority of expanding West Bank settlements is, Fridman notes, harshly criticized as a way to kill a two-state solution. Can Netanyahu understand that view? He can understand what they are saying, he replies, and they do not understand why they are wrong. About 90 percent of Israelis in Judea and Samaria live in urban blocs that everyone — Americans, even many Arabs — already expects to remain part of Israel in any future arrangement. Half of Jerusalem grew naturally beyond the 1967 line; you are not going to dismantle half of Jerusalem. The argument, he says, is about something already decided.

Then there is the other 10 percent, scattered in small communities, whom people say Israel will have to take out. Why? Inside pre-1967 Israel, more than a million and a half Arabs live as citizens, and nobody says Israel must be ethnically cleansed of them for peace. Jews can live among Arabs and Arabs among Jews. Those who say Jews cannot live in the ancestral homeland, in areas both sides claim, are advancing something he calls outrageous when reversed: an ethnically cleansed Palestinian entity as the price of peace, or a rule that Jews cannot live in the suburbs of London or New York.

The attachment, he says, is 3,500 years old. It is a dispute, he agrees. He does not agree that either side should throw the other out. The world, as he describes it, is pushing a solution in which Jews cannot live among Arabs and Arabs cannot live among Jews. His alternative is imperfect sovereignty, Israeli security over the whole territory between the Jordan and the sea, and no uprooting: Palestinians in enclaves inside sovereign Israel, Israelis in enclaves the other way, connected by transportation continuity — tunnels and overpasses — rather than territorial continuity. "We're doing that right now, and it actually works."

The most strategic stretch of the hour is the one Netanyahu is proudest of. For decades the accepted premise was that you could not reach the Arab world without first solving the Palestinian problem. Palestinians are about 2 percent of that world; the other 98 percent were supposed to wait. After peace with Egypt — Begin and Sadat — and with Jordan — Rabin and King Hussein — a quarter-century of freeze followed, because everyone thought you had to pass through the Palestinians, and the Palestinians, in his account, wanted Israel's dissolution. Wait another half-century, he decided, and you wait forever.

So he reversed the equation: not inside-out but outside-in, going directly to Arab capitals. That produced the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, and a hoped-for "quantum leap" with Saudi Arabia. He is a student of Woodrow Wilson's line at Versailles, "open covenants openly arrived at." His correction: open covenants secretly arrived at. A Saudi–Israeli peace will not be advanced in public, and it remains a Saudi decision. The logic is sequential. If you wait on the 2 percent to get to the 98, you fail, and you have failed. If you go to the 98, you have a much better chance of persuading the 2, because Palestinian hope of vanquishing Israel rests in part on the assumption that the rest of the Arab world will eventually kick in. Take that hope away, and realistic coexistence — which he says will require Israeli compromise too — becomes easier to strike.

How the ice actually broke is a story about Iran and about Congress. Gulf states saw Iran as a formidable danger; Israel had become a technological powerhouse that could better their people's lives. The two interests met when Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress to challenge a sitting American president over the Iran deal, which he thought would pave Iran's path to becoming an effective nuclear power. During the speech, the Israeli delegation took calls from Gulf states who could not believe a prime minister was challenging the president of the United States. He says he had no choice, because he thought his country's existence was in peril, and that America remains the irreplaceable ally even when the family argues. Those calls led to clandestine meetings, and the meetings flowered into the Accords. Ending the Arab–Israeli conflict, not yet the Palestinian one, could open an end to a wider Israeli–Islamic enmity. He wants to paint on the larger canvas and come back to the Palestinian file, rather than wait to solve it and never reach the larger canvas at all.

Fridman asks him, as a student of history, whether Middle East experience can be applied to the war in Ukraine. Netanyahu calls it one of the savage horrors of history and a great tragedy. If he has any chance to use his contacts to help end it, he will. He knows both leaders. He will not just jump in. He will wait until conditions create a possibility of stopping the carnage, which is why he chooses his words carefully. That, he says, may be the best thing he could do.

The analytical point is about nuclear weapons. Ukraine shows what happens when a country that has them has territorial designs on a territory: the whole configuration of the conflict changes. He does not think people use nuclear weapons with happy abandon, and he is not sure the Russian side would. That is not the question. Once the variable exists, you have to resolve the conflict so it does not go off the rails. The corollary at home is Iran: an aggressive ideology of dominating the Muslim world, eliminating Israel, then becoming a global force, which is a different equation with a bomb than without one. Preventing Iran from having those means is one of his main goals. How to end Ukraine, he has ideas he does not think worth discussing now, because they might be required later.

Does he believe in the power of conversation — Zelenskyy and Putin in a room? A combination, he says, but it is a question of interest, of getting both sides to a point where they think the conversation would lead to something useful. He does not think they are there. Fridman asks how much is ego and stubbornness, two human beings and a connected history. Netanyahu's answer is practical: they are not in a position to enter a room. Entering the room is sometimes more complicated than what happens inside it, and they are not even in the pre-negotiations on the negotiation.

Fridman turns to Netanyahu's book and to his father, a historian. The first lesson: the first condition for a living organism is to identify danger in time, or you are devoured. The Jewish people, his father taught, lost that capacity and were almost destroyed by the Nazi threat. When Netanyahu sees someone parroting the Nazi goal of destroying the Jewish state, he tries to mobilize the country and the world in time, because he thinks Iran is a global threat, not only Israel's.

Before he was elected he asked his father the most important quality in a prime minister of Israel. He offered his own answer first: vision, plus the flexibility to navigate toward it. His father said you need that for any job — university president, corporate leader. For the leader of Israel the word that stunned him was education. You need a broad and deep education, or you will be at the mercy of your clerks, the press, or whatever. The longer he has stayed in government, the more he thinks his father was right. New disciplines keep being added. You have to add to your intellectual capital all the time.

Kissinger wrote that once you enter public life you draw down intellectual capital and deplete it if you stay long. Netanyahu disagrees. You have to keep increasing your understanding of things as they change. You cannot sit back and say the university, Boston, MIT was enough. Learn, learn, never stop. Fridman suggests a little literature, perhaps Dostoevsky, in a prime minister's plentiful spare time. Netanyahu has read him, and thinks something is bigger. Dan Rather brought a grandson, an eighteen-year-old Ivy League student who wanted to enter politics, and asked what to study. Three things: history, history, and history, the fundamental discipline of political life, then economics, politics, the military. You never acquire enough. Read, and if he has to choose, read good works of history, not lousy books. The warning is specific: if a decision-maker's knowledge froze in his twenties, he will reason with other people's judgment — clerks, commentators, the last thing he read.

Last question. Netanyahu talks about the survival of a nation; he himself is mortal. Does he contemplate his death? Is he afraid of it? He turns it around: aren't you? Fridman says yes. Who is not, Netanyahu answers. One of the unhappy things about the human brain is that it can contemplate its own demise. Everyone makes a compromise with that. The real question is what lives on, and how much of posterity you want to influence. He cannot influence the course of humanity. "We are specks, little specks."

The purpose he claims is narrower and, he says, the work of a life: to assure the future, security, and — he almost says permanence, then corrects — of the Jewish state and the Jewish people, which he does not think can exist without each other. He hopes that in his time on earth and his years in office he has contributed to that. Fridman closes the stroll from MIT to a sixth term, and Netanyahu plugs the innovation nation, a robust democracy, and Israel as America's growing ally in a "coalition of the like-minded smarts," a sixth eye that shares the values of freedom and liberty.

After the conversation, Fridman leaves a line from Gandhi: "An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind." It sits at an angle to the hour. Netanyahu's through-line has been to crush threats while they are small, to stop trading land for terror, and to walk around anyone who will not recognize Israel's existence. That is a survival logic, and reconciliation is not inside its range. The planned three hours were cut to one because of the protests; they agreed to talk longer another time. Off mic, Fridman tries to force a pick in a Musk–Zuckerberg fight. Netanyahu says he will tell him outside. It is the one question he will not answer on the record.