https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PRfHsoZYmj8
Well, part of the reason you were able to offer something attractive to the Arab countries with whom you signed a peace accord was because you had something to offer, as you mentioned before, in relationship to Iran. And so let’s talk about the Abraham Accords a bit more. Now you’re going to be moving back into office in the upcoming weeks in all likelihood, and you indicated your continuing interest for obvious reasons in expanding the Abraham Accords. When you mentioned Saudi Arabia, can you explain a little bit about your vision of the most likely pathway forward on the Abraham Accord front? Are the Saudis next to sign, so to speak? Is that beckoning on the horizon? I can’t speak for them, and the Saudis are tremendously important. I think it should be understood it’s not just another country that would be added to the roster of peace. This is by far the most significant and influential Arab country, although there are some remarkable examples of achievement in the United Arab Emirates and other places in the Arab world. But the Saudis undoubtedly are in a category of their own. And yes, I would like to have peace with them, certainly begin with normalization. But you have to, the answer is, will they be there? First of all, where are they? This is an interesting question. There’s no way that we would have been able to achieve the peace accords, the normalization accords with the Emirates and Bahrain without tacit Saudi approval. There’s also no way that we could fly above the skies of Saudi Arabia without Saudi approval. There’s no way that I could speak the other day, as I did, when the election results were known with my Saudi friend, Mohammed Saud, he’s the, I call him the Likud branch manager. He speaks on Saudi internet, okay? And he congratulates me and he says, Bibi, we’re for you, speaks Hebrew, by the way, we’re for you. He visited Israel. There’s no way that this is done without approval. Why did this change take place? And that could be an indication of where we go from here. The quantum leap in our relations with the Gulf States took place in 2015 when President Obama, when the United, or rather, a joint session of Congress invited me to speak before it on the impending nuclear deal that President Obama was going to sign with Iran. Even though I knew that I couldn’t reverse it, I couldn’t get two thirds majority in the Congress to resist it, I thought I could get a majority to oppose it and I did, consisting not only of Republicans, but quite a few Democrats. But I knew I couldn’t get two thirds. I can’t get two thirds in our parliament. I certainly couldn’t get it in the American Congress, but I went to speak there. And I spoke, by the way, Jordan, I described the speech. I never prepared for a speech like this in my life. And I prepare my speeches right up to the podium. I change them on the podium. I’m stickler for the precise word. So, well, I came into, just as an aside, I came to Washington. You’ll read this in the second part of the book. But I came to Washington to challenge a sitting president. It’s a very, very difficult thing to do. And even though Obama was the quintessential example of a leader who was there not for power itself, but for purpose. He had an ideology. It’s just that his ideology clashed with mine. He believed that peace will produce power and I believe that power produces peace. And if you ask me to do a peace treaty that will basically leave me shorn of my power, it won’t last for five minutes. So we had a difference of views. But it clashed, literally clashed with the question of the Iran Accords, which I thought merely paved the way for Iran to become a military nuclear power which will threaten all of us. So I not lightheadedly, but after considerable deliberation went to Washington. I arrived in Washington the evening before. I’m going to go over the speech and I try to practice the speech. And my sinuses are clogged. I have that condition and I put more and more nose spray and they’re getting clogged. They’re both clogged. And I try to practice the speech and I’m stopped in mid-sentence, every mid-sentence. And I say to my wife, this is the worst thing that could happen. The most important speech of my life. And I’m stuck because of these horrible nose drops and I fling them in the air and they try to give me bowls of steam. They bring a medic. Nothing happens. She says, well, sleep it over and pass by morning. Well, it didn’t. And I didn’t sleep a wink. I get up in the morning, we make our way towards the Capitol building and I say, what in God’s name am I going to do? I mean, I can’t deliver a line of the speech. And as we see the steps of the Capitol, lo and behold, like a biblical miracle, the sinuses cleared, the waters recede. And I go in and I give the speech, which was very well received, very well received. And here’s what happened, and this is the relationship to Abraham Accords. As I’m giving the speech in a joint session of Congress, my delegation receives calls in real time from these Arab states, some of them, and they say, we can’t believe what your prime minister is doing. He’s challenging a sitting American president, the most powerful man in the world. That led to clandestine meetings between me and these Arab leaders. And I won’t itemize where. They were in the Gulf, they were in the Red Sea, they were in a yacht. I landed in a helicopter on a yacht, if you can believe it. My security people said, that’s too dangerous. I said, skip it, we’re doing it. And this led to the Abraham Accords that were later culminated with the help of President Trump and he had an important role here. And I value and appreciate that. I’ll never stop appreciating this because I think it was very important. But it took me a while to persuade him. He got very little credit for that too, by the way. Well, he got all the credit for me. But it took me three years to persuade him because he was going down the Palestinian rabbit hole. Ron Dermott, my ambassador to Washington, tried to say the difference between, he said, look, he said, getting a peace treaty with, I’m not a golf player. So he said, getting a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates is a 15 foot putt. Getting a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia is a 30 foot putt. Getting a peace treaty with the Palestinians is a 150 foot putt through a brick wall. So it took me about three years to persuade the president what I said to him. And I also described this in my book. I say, in the very first meeting I had with Trump in the White House as president, I said to him, Donald, there are four peace treaties waiting to be plucked, ripe, you know, plums, ready to be plucked off the tree. And I itemized the country. And I suggested that he bring an aircraft carrier to the Red Sea, invite me and these Arab leaders there to discuss Iran’s security. I said, that will produce peace treaties right off the bat. And he didn’t buy it. He thought I was trying to evade the Palestinian track. And I said, okay, we’ll try the Palestinian track. And we worked on that. And of course, we produced a template, which I think is very productive. But the Palestinians wouldn’t come. Just as Arafat couldn’t make peace any more than he could fly to the moon, the present leadership can’t do it because they’d have to give up what is really guiding the Palestinian national movement, which is not to build a state, but to destroy one, the Jewish state. So they didn’t go, that didn’t go anywhere. And so we tried the other track, the track of peace through strength, the path of peace for peace, the peace for economy, peace for other things. And boom, it exploded.