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March 20, 2024

MUST-SEE VIDEO: Netanyahu concisely describes Israel’s accomplishments, goals, and commitment

By Andrea Widburg

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is the un-Biden. He’s brilliant, articulate, a proven warrior on the battlefield, a proven leader in politics, and a passionate patriot who believes in his country, its people, and its values. The other day, Bibi gave a concise speech explaining why Israel must fight its war, how it’s fighting its war, what it has achieved, what it has yet to achieve, how it’s handling and will handle Gaza’s civilian population, and why anti-Israel news broadcast in America is false (and deliberately so). It was a masterful exposition.

Here’s the video. Don’t be put off by all the Hebrew writing. Bibi is speaking in English, a language in which he is completely fluent. I’ve also included a transcript at the end of this post:

If you neither want to listen to the speech nor read the transcript, here are the key points:

  • The people of Israel know that they are facing an existential threat and are united behind the government in their desire to get the job done, with the “job” being the military defeat of Hamas and Hezbollah. (And, of course, they want their hostages returned.)
  • Iran is behind the war against Israel. Its goal is not only to destroy Israel but also to destroy the unity of the moderate Arab states, the United States, and Israel. Having done so, it can return the entire region to the most primitive, early form of Islam, with dire consequences for the world.
  • Israel has destroyed 20 out of Hamas’s 24 battalions so that none can carry out large-scale attacks. It is doing a mob-up job to destroy the remnants of those battalions and continues to destroy the 500 km of tunnels under Gaza, which are major military headquarters, storage areas, and launching points.
  • Israel is doing everything it can to protect civilians. This has meant relocating them to safety. Israel has also been sending supplies to Gazans. The main problem is to keep those supplies away from Hamas.
  • Israel would like to work with the citizens of Gaza, both now and in the future. However, that’s impossible unless Hamas is destroyed. Gaza’s residents know that, if Hamas remains, they will be executed if they are seen to have cooperated with Israel in any way, including distributing supplies.
  • Those who urge Israel’s restraint are urging her to lose the war, and she cannot lose the war. As noted above, it’s existential.
  • The United States (the government and the media) are spreading deliberate falsehoods about Israel’s motives, ability to wage war, accomplishments in the war, and treatment of civilians. Israel will not stand for that.

Two other points:

The contrast between Bibi—focused, forceful, informed—and Biden is staggering. You’ve seen Bibi, above. Now, here’s Biden, the man who is slow-walking ammo to Israel and trying to force a ceasefire on Israel, all in the name of getting votes in Dearborn and other swing state regions:

As an aside, these are some of the people whose votes Biden seeks, even if it means allowing Israel—a U.S. ally and a liberal democracy in a tyrannical region—to be extinguished:

Biden’s partner in this slow-walk genocide against Israel is the execrable Justin Trudeau, who is refusing to resupply the arms Israel needs. To put this in context, Trudeau’s government encourages its own citizens to kill themselves rather than get medical care, medical devices, or treatment for mental illness. Trudeau is a one-man death cult, so I guess it’s inevitable that he has Hamas’s back.

As has been the case for thousands of years, Israel and the Jews stand at the crossroads of geopolitics and morality. As God told Abraham 4,000 years ago, “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee,” and that’s invariably proven true.

At all places in the world and at all times in history, those who treated Jews badly fared badly. That’s because free societies support Jews (and, by extension, Israel), while corrupt, despotic societies don’t. Whether it’s Spain in the 15th century, Germany in the 1940s, or the Soviet Union throughout the 20th century, when they make the moral and/or geopolitical decision to turn on Jews, they reflect an internal evil that invariably leads to their own decline or destruction.

Image: X screen grab.

 

Transcript

We have to win this war. The survival of Israel, the future of Israel—in my opinion, the future of the Middle East and beyond depends on this victory. This victory is within reach. It’s within reach, first of all, because of the courage and incredible courage of our people and our soldiers. It is really something to behold. And you have seen it firsthand. It’s represented here in this hall right now too.

That courage is magnificent. I visited not only the families of fallen soldiers, but I visited wounded soldiers who lost their limbs, and they insist on going back to the units with artificial limbs. I was in Officer Training school [and saw] cadets who had been fighting there. There were 10 wounded soldiers among them, one with prosthetics. They want to go back in. 

This is an amazing affirmation of the life force within the Jewish people, the same force that brought about the reestablishment of the Jewish state after the horrors that we suffered, including in the Holocaust. And it’s that same spirit today that animates the vast majority of the people, the army, the reservists. They want victory because they understand that victory is essential for survival.

How do we define victory? We defined it as the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capability. We define it also as the return of the hostages, which we’re working [on] right now. That’s why it was a bit late because we have to instruct our delegation that is going to Doha. And we defined it also as preventing the return of Gaza from becoming a threat to Israel at any time in the future.

This is important. There’s also the northern front, where we want to return our people to a condition of the security that requires that Hezbollah move back. We can get into that. That is also part of our goals, which we will not give up on. It’s very important.

And overall, if we achieve these goals, then we will also deliver a stinging blow to the Iran terror axis, which is behind everything that we’re seeing here today. That is something that we all have to understand, that this is not just Israel’s battle. It is a battle for our future. But it’s also the battle for the victory of the Israel-American moderate Arab axis against the Iran axis. 

And unless we have that victory that I talked about, then we have a defeat, and a defeat spells terrible things for our future and for the future of the Middle East and beyond the Middle East because this is a war of civilization against barbarism, those who want to bring back the Middle East to the Middle Ages, early Middle Ages and those who want to see it go into the century of progress and advance in the 21st century. That’s really the battle. It’s a very, very big battle.

Now, the people of Israel are united as never before. And this is something that is, I think, something that should inform everything that we discussed now. United as never before on the need to have that victory over Hamas. United as never before on the effort that adjoins the battle against Hamas to return the hostages, and united as never before on ensuring that Gaza doesn’t become a terror haven and a source of threat to Israel in the future.

And if you ask people, okay, how do you it? And the answer is, you have to finish the job. 

What does it mean to finish the job militarily against Hamas because I don’t think you’re going to have any potential for any civilian administration and so on? If Hamas is still there, nobody’s going to stand up to Hamas. No local Gazan is going to stand up to Hamas if they think that they’ll get a bullet through their heads because we’ll leave. [If] we didn’t finish the job, we left 4 battalions in Rafah, they’ll come back, reconquer the strip and, obviously, eliminate any opposition. And as they vowed, [they’ll] again repeat the October 7th massacre over and over and over again.

So how do we defeat Hamas? Well, it had 24 battalions. This is a battalion. [Pointing to the water glass in his hand.] Okay, 24 glasses like that.

When you smash these glasses, you eliminate the possibility of organized fighting terrorist battalions. So, you have to understand what that means. When you have a battalion, you have a commander, you have a hierarchy of command and orders, and the commander can tell 100 terrorists, “Go and attack Israel from that side or from that side, or from that side.” 

When you smash the glass, that’s eliminated. You cannot organize fighting formations. You can have individual tiers. You can have three, four, two, but you can’t have 100. You can’t have 20. You can’t even have 10.

You have small formations, very small. OK, so the first thing that we do is smash the glasses. We’ve smashed already 19 out of 24.

Four and Rafa—one plus—are still in what is called the central camps. We have to finish the job. Once you do that, you have shards of glass. You still have terrorists there, but they’re not in organized battalions in these structured formations. You smash the glass. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what we did today in Shifa, too, okay. You have to go back. You keep on doing it.

And you don’t need a division. To smash the glass, you need a division. OK, division strength. To smash the glass shards, you need much, much smaller forces and much smaller use of the ammunition of artillery, air power and so on. Much smaller. And after you finish...you do that too. You mop up the individual terrorists.

You have to still deal with the underground terror tunnels that Hamas has built there, so you have to go in. They’re about 500 kilometers because it’s very easy to dig in the sand over Gaza. That’s why you have such a big terror tunnel infrastructure. But what you’re really looking for are the main nodes in this underground terror system, which means command and control centers, communications centers, missile production sites, all underground cache, weapons and ammunition storage. That’s what we’re doing. We’re demolishing that systematically.

Now, nobody believed that we could do this. People said to us, “You can’t, you can’t go into Gaza. You can’t go into ground action. You’re going to be hit, and terrible, horrible things will happen. You can’t go into Gaza City. You can’t go into Shifa. You can’t go into the tunnels.”

We proved that to be false. Our forces can go anywhere, so we have to complete the job of smashing the glasses. And then the shards and then the underground, and we’re doing all that.

When people tell us, “Don’t complete the job. Leave four or five terrorist battalions in place,” what they’re actually saying is, “Don’t win the war, which means lose the war.”

And why do they say it? They say—ostensibly, okay, ostensibly—they say it because they’re worried about these civilian population.

So are we.

You know, if you look at what has happened up to now, we moved the civilian population. They say everybody’s concentrated in the South. How come? Because we moved them.

We didn’t trap them in the north. We got them out of harm’s way, even though Hamas did everything in their power to keep them in harm’s way.

Okay, so we got them out. Well, we can move them back North, not necessarily to Gaza and so on. That’s not likely to happen now. It’s still a fighting zone.

It’s not going to happen now, but there’s about 65% of the Gaza Strip between Rafah and the the central corridor that we’re talking about.

65%. Just plenty of space.

We can move them and people say, “No, you’re going to trap a million people.” We’re not going to trap a million people.

We had a rescue operation. You know where we rescued two hostages a few weeks ago? You know where they were? Right in the center of Rafah. We did a surgical operation. Brilliant, by the way. 

OK, nothing. No application [sic], relatively minor, negligible use of firepower. You know what happened as a result?

We got the hostages out.

You know what else happened?

70,000 people left Rafah like that. For nothing.

So the idea that we’re going to trap a million two, we’re not going to let them go out, they’re not going to leave, we don’t have arrangements for them, that’s not true, and, in fact, it’s a flimsy excuse because they will leave, because we’ll make sure that they have somewhere to go. We’re going to move various international agencies that are in the south. We’re going to say, “Move here, move there, move there.” Precise locations.

That argument is fallacious. It’s repeated over and over again. Doesn’t make them true.

So we have now basically told the Army...the Army has presented plans to take over Rafah and destroy the remaining battalions, but, also, if you remove, enable the population to move and also, quite concurrently, [implement] the humanitarian plan that we’re doing.

And the problem is not getting the trucks into Gaza. That’s a problem, but not the big problem. The problem is how do you distribute? Because getting in everything that you see... The air drops—that’s us. The sea route—that’s with us. Actually, it started out as our idea that I presented to President Biden two weeks into the war. That’s us. And then alternative ground routes, that’s us. Karim Shalom. And now, in the center of what it’s called [unintelligible]. That’s us. We’re providing it.

The problem is, how do you prevent looting by Hamas and by others, so it does get to the civilian population? We’re working on that.

It’s important to understand.

Now, you ask the people of Israel. The people of Israel are united in finishing, getting into Rafah, finishing Hamas. And also they’re united in very large numbers of saying we don’t want the PA there because the PA will continue to educate the children of Gaza towards the destruction of Israel and towards terrorism and so on. We’ve been there, done that. We don’t want that.

We want Gazans. We’ve authorized to try to get Gazans to distribute the food. But those Gazans will only do it if they think that we got rid of Hamas. 

The picture that is presented in the last few days and weeks in the United States is completely different from what I described. It’s not the unity of the people—and you can go into any cab, go into a, I don’t know, go into a mall shopping mall, walk on the street, talk to people—and the great majority will tell you that they support what I just said, the goals that the government has set.

That’s not the description. The description is you have an outlier Prime Minister with some extreme, extreme fringe groups, and that’s what’s driving the policy. False. I would say deliberately false. They know it’s false.

But that falsehood is perpetrated and is wrong. There is unity among the people to achieve victory along the lines that I described. It is within reach, and we’re going to do it.

I’ve said this to the president. I’ve said it to the people that I’ve talked to. They keep saying that local politics is interfering with this.

They may be right. On which side of the pond?

We have to win this war. We have to stand together and win this war. We have to stand together here and we have to stand together there because it’s the right thing to do; because it’s the necessary thing to do; because it’s the one thing that will assure the viability, future and security of the State of Israel.

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