Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” (M-F, 9AM-12PM ET) Wednesday, June 3
PART I
SARA EISEN: Hi. Good morning, Carl, from Jerusalem this morning. I’m here in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, and joining me right now is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Thank you for having us today.
PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Good to be with you. Welcome
EISEN: Yeah, thank you very much. It’s good to be here. Wanted to start with the news, which is President Trump saying today that Iran has already agreed that it will not have a nuclear weapon. Do you trust that? Is that good enough for you?
NETANYAHU: Well, I think it’s a precondition, but you have to make sure that they actually don’t do it because they always lie and they always cheat, and therefore we have to have a way to get out the nuclear material and to dismantle the infrastructure that they have, the enrichment sites for uranium to make atomic bombs. I think all that is on the table, and I think the President believes that he can get this through diplomatic pressure and tough negotiations, and I think he should be given a chance.
EISEN: So, let’s talk about the call that you had with him this week, which is getting a lot of attention. The president confirmed that he, that he said, “You’re effing crazy.” How did you react to that? What really happened in that call?
NETANYAHU: Well, I’m not going to get into details of our conversations. We’ve had thousands, well, a lot, a lot of them. And if you think this is a crisis, you should be in some other conversations, but we’ve always found a way to, we have so many agreements. We agree on the main things. We want to get Iran, the nuclear program in Iran, finished. We want to make sure that Iran doesn’t pose a threat to Israel, to the Middle East, to America, that it doesn’t develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, not only to Israel and to every capital in Europe, but to every city in the United States. That’s our common goal. That’s what we set out to do, and to expand the circle of peace, as the President and I did in the Abraham Accords together. So, we have common goals. Sometimes we have, as in the best of families, you have these tactical disagreements. We always find a way to work them out, and we do so as great friends. We can disagree in the morning, and by the afternoon, we have common actions.
EISEN: So, I was going to say, has your relationship at all shifted with him?
NETANYAHU: No, no. This has been, this has been a great relationship because he’s been the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, and he, he respects me. I respect him. We always find a way to work out our differences.
EISEN: Did he say that, that you’d be in jail if not for me?
NETANYAHU: Look, I’m not going to get into the details, but he’s been very vocal about the absurdity of this fake trial that I’m going through. You know, they asked me, I don’t know if this came up with the last time you were here, but since then—
EISEN: Two years ago yeah.
NETANYAHU: Yeah, well, since then they’ve asked me in the court, you know, I’m supposed to be receiving gifts. So one of the first things they said to me is Prime Minister, 30 years ago, your five-year-old child received a Bugs Bunny gift from a friend, so this trial is ridiculous. The President understands what a, what a ridiculous trial it is, and he’s been very vocal about that and I appreciate it. So, but it’s unraveling on its own, it’s just so ridiculous.
EISEN: Okay, so I know you’re fighting that, but on the call, what is your expectation for what the president expects from you now when it comes to Lebanon and fighting Hezbollah?
NETANYAHU: I think he understands that Lebanon has been taken hostage by Hezbollah. It’s basically taken over the country. It’s an Iranian proxy that puts all the citizens of Lebanon at gunpoint, and uses Lebanon as a platform to launch terror missiles into our cities, to launch killer drones against our civilians, and so if we want to save Lebanon, if we want to get a Lebanese Israeli peace as I do, we have to disarm Hezbollah, and we have to demilitarize Lebanon, and I think that’s a goal that it’s not, I think I know that this is a goal that the President and I share, and that’s what we have to do. So, we, we’re trying to, how shall I say this, degrade Hezbollah, so that a free and independent Lebanon can emerge. We’re still working on it, but we’re on route.
EISEN: But did you, did you tell him that you would stop in order to get the peace talks going?
NETANYAHU: No, I think what we discussed is something else. They were firing, Hezbollah was firing these terror missiles into our cities. You know, they hide behind their civilians and they fire at our civilians, like Hamas in Gaza. They commit double war crimes, and we are responding, we’re targeting the terrorists themselves. The terrorist chieftains, many of them are in Beirut, so they’re giving orders to target our cities from Beirut, and we said, if you keep on targeting Israeli territory and our cities and our communities, then we’ll take out these terrorist chieftains in Beirut with surgical strikes, and an understanding was seemed to have evolved two days ago, really, that they will not target Israeli territory, and we will not target the terrorists in Beirut.
EISEN: Has that, has that helped?
NETANYAHU: I’m not sure because it looks like, we’re checking this, that they fired into our territory. In this case, we’ll, if that happens, we’ll obviously respond, but I think that on the whole that’s a beginning of a change, but ultimately the change has to be to disarm Hezbollah, you know. You can’t have these genocidal terrorists taking over the, this poor country of Lebanon, using it to try to invade Israel the way that Hamas invaded us, murder our civilians, decapitate our men, rape our women. It’s just, no country would accept that.
EISEN: And yet, you’re already facing resistance. I mean, President Macron of France this week said there’s no justification for the major escalation by Israel in Lebanon. How do you respond to that?
NETANYAHU: The escalation is from Hezbollah, we had a ceasefire, they violated it. Look, the way European leaders cater to radical Islamic minorities in their own countries is shameful because they know the truth. They know that when we act against Iran, that calls death to America, death to Israel, death to everything in between that is not part of their Islamic, Islamist radical ilk, they know we’re protecting them as well, but they don’t have the guts to stand up and line up with the right thing that will save our civilization against these barbarians.
EISEN: You think they’re just doing protecting themselves politically?
NETANYAHU: Yeah, I don’t think they’re protecting themselves because I think ultimately people identify strength and they identify weakness. And leaders, real leaders, have to stand up to public criticism. They have to stand up to fake vilifications, and you have to do what’s right for the security of your country. That’s what I’ve been doing in Israel. I enjoy the not only the support of the people, but the support, the courage, the heroism of our young generation. Everybody said, this is a TikTok generation. They will not fight like you guys fought in your days when I was in the army for five years. They won’t do it. They’ve been amazing, amazing. They fight with such courage, they, with such sacrifice, and such heroism. So I think it’s the strength of our people, the strength of our army, and frankly, the strength of our government, and the ability that I’ve had to pass the decisions that were not popular in the international community, but are absolutely central to assure our survival, and you know, I’m not the first one to do this. People often talk about Churchill, yeah, Churchill was, hailed as a warmonger, an ambassador’s a warmonger. They said, why are you upsetting the peace of Europe? What’s this thing you want to fight the Nazis all the time, and so on. You said it’s the only way I’ll save my country, that’s the only way I’ll save Western civilization. Well, we’re faced with an enemy that wants to destroy our country, that wants to destroy your country, that wants to destroy free democracies everywhere, and spread their terrorist ilk around the globe. So, when we fight Iran and its proxies, we’re not only fighting our war, we’re fighting your war and, frankly, Europe’s war as well.
EISEN: And yet the war is so unpopular in the US.
NETANYAHU: Yeah
EISEN: Why do you think that is?
NETANYAHU: I think people don’t see the direct connection between the dangers they would face tomorrow with the actions that we’re doing today to remove those dangers. Democracies always have that problem, you know. They’ll always look at the moment, what’s the next election cycle, what’s the next headline, and so on. Dictatorships are usually immune to this because they don’t really have public opinion to answer to. And the question is, for leaders, it’s a big, it’s a big challenge, you know. How do you face, you know, attacks on you, political attacks, vilifications, and so on. Do you sort of cower under you say that there’s nothing I can do? I have to stop protecting my people because I’m going to get a bad editorial in the Western press, and the answer is no. No, I’d rather get a bad editorial than a positive obituary. You know, our people have died long enough, and what has changed for us is that the kind of recriminations and the kind of lies that are leveled at the Jewish people over the centuries are now being leveled at the Jewish state. There’s no difference, no difference. We deliberately kill children, we perform genocide, we’re poisoning the wells.
EISEN: The haters say there’s a difference between the anti-Israel and anti-some—
NETANYAHU: Oh, yeah they said we’re not anti, we’re not against the Jewish people, we just don’t think there should be a Jewish state. We’re not against Americans, we just don’t think—
EISEN: Or we just don’t like the Israeli numbers.
NETANYAHU: We just don’t like, yeah, we’re don’t like, we’re not against Americans, we just don’t think there should be an America, and it’s not the Israeli government. All Israeli governments will fight, or should fight, to protect our people, or we’ll disappear. So, here’s the difference now. In previous times, previous centuries, we were vilified, and then two things happened, we were either thrown out of a country or destroyed in that country, eliminated, and this culminated in the greatest horror of them all, the greatest massacre of the world, the Holocaust. Since the birth of the state of Israel, we’re still being vilified, but when they come to slaughter us, we say no more, never again. And we fight back, and we fight back, targeting the terrorists, targeting the aggressors, trying to save the people, trying to save those communities, and believe me, in the Middle East, contrary to what people think, many understand that, and in Iran, in Iran, you know, I’m embarrassed to say this, but they named streets after me—
EISEN: I know, you should say that before.
NETANYAHU: In public squares. Yeah, well I know, you should say it, but of course it’s taken down by the goons of the regime because they understand we’re fighting for the good guys.
EISEN: Why isn’t the regime weaker at this point—
NETANYAHU: It’s a lot weaker, it’s a lot weaker, the action the president—
EISEN: They still seem that they have leverage in this negotiation—
NETANYAHU: The actions that President Trump and I undertook, and that our brave militaries took together in closeness that we’ve never had before. And I have to tell you again, President Trump has been the greatest friend of Israel ever. We’ve never had such a friend in the White House. He’s outstripped everyone, and that partnership has degraded Iran and knocked out their army, knocked out their navy, knocked out their—
EISEN: But they still control the Strait.
NETANYAHU: Yeah, they control the Straits. But I’ll tell you what happened. We’ve done that, but I could say, you know, we’ve been, as the US themselves said, we’ve been the model ally, probably the only truly fighting ally that the United States has today, and we’ve wreaked a lot of damage to this regime, not destroyed it, but weakened it. We see the cracks propagating in the regime, we see them trying, they can’t hold down to their money machine, they’re afraid that they’ll lose the ability to even pay their goons, so that they’ve been weakened. It’s not over, but they’ve been weakened, and that’s why it’s possible to press them not only militarily but economically with this blockade that I thought it was a fantastic idea. So they’re still there, but they’re much weakened. I think Israel has never been stronger, Iran has never been weaker, and that’s due to the partnership between the United States and Israel, President Trump and myself.
EISEN: Okay, if you would just hang with us for a moment, we’re going to take a quick break, Mr. Prime Minister. I do want to talk to you a lot more about Iran, also about the Israeli economy, which is booming, and a lot more. We’ll be right back here from the Prime Minister’s office in Israel with Prime Minister Netanyahu on “Squawk on the Street”. Stay with us.
