Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Senator Tom Cotton are both delivering keynote addresses at this week’s largely off-the-record Tikvah Fund Hertog Forum in Tel Aviv. One event on the agenda was made public: a conversation between Wall Street Journal Global View columnist Walter Russell Mead and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Walter wrote a column for us about his own The Arc of a Covenant upon its publication last year (Walter’s column is posted here). Walter’s interview is geared in part to Netanyahu’s memoir Bibi: My Story. The Wall Street Journal has made video of the interview accessible and I have posted it at the bottom. I find it educational, timely, compelling. Jewish Insider provided snippets from their conversation in its email newsletter yesterday morning.
On China and international alliances: “China has interests everywhere,” Netanyahu said. “Everywhere. But especially with Iran, which is a source of energy and other other things that interest them. China also has an interest in Israel, especially technology, technology, more technology… What we need today in the world that we’re entering, this multipolar world where you do have cooperation between authoritarian dictatorial regimes who are developing formidable weapons, is we have to have an alliance of the like-minded smarts. This means countries that are like-minded, like-valued. You have the Five Eyes? [referring to the intelligence alliance between the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.K.] There’s a sixth “eye” and the sixth “eye” is an “I” and it’s Israel, and Israel’s value as a supplier of intelligence and other things is growing by the day as our capacities grow.”
On anti-Semitism: “The question of anti-Semitism I say, straight out: fight it, fight it, fight it, and fight it as forcefully as you can. When you have this rapper, Kanye West, who doesn’t represent the West. You stand up and speak against it and this should not be a left-right divide. That should be a common position. Because ultimately the fires of antisemitism consume all Jews and they go beyond the Jews. And I think that is not merely a Jewish issue. I think it’s an American issue. Will America prove to be another Vienna? The world that [Mark] Twain saw and the Jews were so proud of in 1900 Vienna went up in smoke and nothing remained. I mean, really the height of human cultural and scientific and literary activity, medicine, everything went up in smoke, nothing was left.”
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