“We’re fighting a war against total evil,” former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett told Piers Morgan in an appearance on "Piers Morgan Uncensored" on Thursday.
Following the high-profile assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, many international figures have warned that further retaliation from either Israel or Iran could lead to all-out war in the Middle East.
Morgan questioned Bennett on the “catastrophic consequences” of such a conflict, to which Bennett replied that Israel was merely “hitting back” at a warmongering regime.
“This wider war has been waged by Iran for the better part of the past 30 years,” Bennett said.
“Iran has developed a very smart strategy of creating an octopus of terror whose head is in Tehran, sending its tentacles all across the Middle East: to Iraq, to Yemen, to Lebanon, to Hamas, and building these proxy armies that serve Iran by creating chaos, hitting Western targets and targeting Israel.”
Bennett added that the war has been “waged on a one-sided basis” by Iran, and Israel is responding to defend itself. This war has been waged on a one-sided basis: the new part is that Israel is hitting back.
When asked whether he felt the Iranian regime should be toppled or if that could lead to worse problems for the region, Bennett said he believed the regime should be destroyed.
'The epicenter of terror'
“Iran's regime, the Iranian Islamic Republic of Iran, is the epicenter of terror. It's the source of about 80% of the terror in the Middle East and beyond, and it's destined to fall.”
He compared the regime to the Soviet Union’s regime and influence in the 1980s, calling both “corrupt, old, unconnected regimes, incompetent, despised by their people.”
“This regime will fall, and the Iranian people will be free again; the question is how soon? Will it be in two years, five years, or 30 years?” Bennett added. The West, he continued, has an important role to play in this downfall, especially through economic action (such as embargoes and sanctions), which he said can “accelerate the demise” of the regime and consequently pave the way for a better future for the Middle East.
Bennett also spoke more on the killings of top commanders of Iranian proxies - Ismail Haniyeh from Hamas, and Fuad Shakr from Hezbollah - saying that these actions could not be seen as the “cause” of the issues but rather the “result.”
“We are fighting back on a war that they started,” he explained. He criticized Piers Morgan’s phrasing at the beginning of the discussion, saying Morgan made the situation appear “symmetric” which Bennett said it was not.
“We have no issue whatsoever with any of our neighbors,” Bennett said. “We don't want to dispose of them; we don't want to annihilate them.”
“But Iran wants to annihilate Israel. Hamas wants to annihilate Israel. Hezbollah wants to annihilate Israel. So what we're doing is a defensive war against Iran, against its proxies, in order to defend ourselves.”
He compared Israel to the “wave breaker in the middle of a big wave of radical Jihadi terror that in a sense is defending the West from this wave.”
Bennett reiterated the stance of many Israeli officials that the country has no choice but to fight back: “when someone says we want to annihilate you, shoots rockets and arms from about seven different proxies to kill you, you got to fight until you win and that's what we're going to do.”
Post-war Gaza
Piers Morgan questioned Israel’s ethos of total victory, asking Bennett what that meant and whether the concept translated into an actionable future for post-war Gaza.
Bennett said that, for him, victory meant “Hamas surrendering, raising a white flag, releasing the [hostages] and Israel taking all the Hamas leaders and fighters, putting them on a ship and shipping them away from Gaza, and then we can begin rebuilding a new Gaza.”
He added that he was “unhappy” with the pace at which Israel’s war against Hamas is being fought, calling it “very low intensity.”
"I would call it 5 to 10% intensity - that's not how you win wars, you have got to fight all in.” Bennett continued by criticizing the speed of fighting, saying it was not happening quickly enough, but acknowledged that the “tremendous” international pressure on Israel might be a factor in the “slowing down.”
Speaking on the death toll of the war, which Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry numbered at 39,699 on Thursday, Bennett said that the “actual numbers [of those killed] are factually very low compared to other urban warfare.”
“I don't believe the Hamas reports,” he continued, “but let's even assume that they're anything near reality, we're at about a 1:1 ratio of combatants to civilians, which is incredibly low in urban warfare.”
He made the comparison of Israel’s war against Hamas to the Allies’ war against Nazi Germany and Japan in the second world war, saying that, just like how the West “knew that they had to defeat Japan, and Germany at whatever price,” Israel must defeat Hamas at any price.”
“We're fighting a war against total evil that wants to annihilate us and wants to annihilate your way of living, the free world.”
“I can tell you that we are resolute,” he stated. “We're not going to sit with a stopwatch and say, you know, it's been 10 months now we stopped, and we let a genocidal regime continue trying to kill Israel.”
Piers Morgan ended by asking Bennett what Israel planned for Gaza’s governance in the absence of a Hamas leadership. Bennett said the post-war plan would involve Israel “retaining security and defense responsibility for the foreseeable future, so Hamas cannot arise again” but emphasized that Israel had no desire to govern Gazan civilians.
“We're in the process of identifying competent local leadership that'll take care of governing Gaza. We will bring in highly qualified people from the Gulf, Saudis, UAE, whoever wants to fix it and primarily Egyptian involvement, and we’ll begin rebuilding a new Gaza clean of terror.”
However, he concluded that this “bright future” would only be possible once Israel defeated Hamas.