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PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes. (credit: Screenshot\/X\/@60Minutes)\u201cWe have a problem. I recognize it. And we have to get our act together\u201d<\/p>\nCBS\u2019s flagship news magazine show \u201c60 Minutes\u201d recently sat down for an hour-and-20-minute interview with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 14 minutes of which were aired by the network on Sunday.<\/p>\n
That segment generated headlines regarding the prime minister\u2019s assertion that Israel should wean itself off US military aid, that the war with Iran is not yet over, and that Iran is the scaffolding holding up Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — and that if it falls, they are likely to fall as well.<\/p>\n
But it was the full 80-minute interview, which CBS posted online, that was far more revealing — both for what the prime minister said, and for what he didn\u2019t say.<\/p>\n
Israel has now fought two rounds with Iran since last June and has — along with the US — inflicted untold damage on the country\u2019s military and nuclear infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Against that backdrop, it was striking to hear Netanyahu say that what he viewed as perhaps the most impressive operational achievement of both Rising Lion and Roaring Lion was not the damage done to Iran\u2019s physical infrastructure, but rather to the brain trust behind its nuclear program.<\/p>\n
PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes. (credit: Screenshot\/X\/@60Minutes)\u201cWe have a problem. I recognize it. And we have to get our act together\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the most pointed success is knocking out 20 top nuclear scientists who were working on the atomic bombs to be used against Israel, America, and anyone else,\u201d he said, noting that 12 scientists were killed in the first minute of the campaign last June, and another eight during the current operation.<\/p>\n
Taking out that amount of know-how, he said, doesn\u2019t eliminate the knowledge, but it does significantly set back the nuclear program.<\/p>\n
That Netanyahu treated the elimination of key Iranian scientists as the most important operational success of the war reflects Israel\u2019s long-standing doctrine that human capital — whether scientists in this case or political or military leaders in others — and not hardware, is what matters most.<\/p>\n
The interview was also revealing in another respect: how Netanyahu continues to frame the question of accountability for October 7.<\/p>\n
The interviewer, Major Garrett, asked Netanyahu point-blank what his \u201clevel of accountability or responsibility\u201d was for October 7, and he responded — as he has done consistently — that \u201ceverybody bears some responsibility. Yeah, from the top, from the prime minister down.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then, after repeating that he wants to establish a bipartisan commission — rather than a state commission of inquiry — to look into October 7, he pivoted to what is sure to become a recurring Likud theme in the upcoming election campaign: What about everything that happened after October 7?<\/p>\n
Extracting Israel from the \u201chorrible noose of death that Iran put on us\u201d was also his responsibility, he said. In other words, don\u2019t fixate solely on October 7; look as well at the sea changes in the region wrought by the decisions and actions he took afterward.<\/p>\n
That same pattern — acknowledging a problem while sidestepping personal responsibility for it — surfaced elsewhere in the interview as well.<\/p>\n
While unwilling to accept direct responsibility for the failure of October 7, he did admit that Israel had failed miserably in the public diplomacy battle, saying this was due in large part to an army of bots that simply took over on social media.<\/p>\n
He candidly acknowledged that Israel was overwhelmed by the social media landslide and did not act in time to prevent it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we were fighting the physical, military battle on seven battlefields, seven fronts of war, we were completely exposed on the eighth front, the media war, and really the social media war.\u201d<\/p>\n
What he didn\u2019t do, however, was take any responsibility for the failure on that front, while never being shy about taking credit for success on the others.<\/p>\n
He said the way Israel fought the social media battle – where \u201cseveral countries\u201d tried to break American sympathy for Israel by using \u201cbot farms\u201d and \u201cfake addresses\u201d – was akin to the Polish cavalry fighting F-35s.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a problem. I recognize it. And we have to get our act together,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
While stopping short of taking responsibility for the failure, it was still an unusually explicit recognition that Israel has strategically failed in the digital arena. More significantly, he did not dismiss the issue; rather, he framed it as a genuine national security challenge.<\/p>\n
The interview also offered insight into how Netanyahu currently views the Iranian threat and the timeline that drove Israel\u2019s military decisions.<\/p>\n
He repeatedly stressed that the urgency in striking Iran was not only about the nuclear issue or the ballistic missiles themselves, but about ballistic missile factories that Iran wanted to move underground.<\/p>\n
This suggests that Israel\u2019s clock was tied not just to a nuclear breakout timeline, but also to an Iranian industrial survivability timeline. Once the Iranians moved missile production capabilities underground, Israel feared it could lose the ability to significantly degrade Iran\u2019s missile production capacity for years.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu\u2019s answers regarding both Russia and China were also telling because they highlighted not only Israel\u2019s security concerns, but also its diplomatic balancing act.<\/p>\n
Garrett offered up questions about both countries that provided Netanyahu with an easy opportunity to slam them for their support of Iran, but he demurred, clearly wanting to keep the door open to ties with both.<\/p>\n
Asked whether he was disturbed that China had provided, as Garrett put it, a \u201ccertain amount of support and particular components of missile manufacturing\u201d to Iran, Netanyahu replied: \u201cWell, I didn\u2019t like it, but I think that if China weighs its interests, does it really want to have Iran controlling the waterways that supply the energy that China needs?\u201d<\/p>\n
Regarding Russia, he was even more restrained, saying \u201cthere\u2019s not been that much support\u201d for Iran from Moscow.\u201c<\/p>\n
\u201cRussia maybe thinks that some of the things that Iran does are not necessarily in its interest,\u201d he said, clearly leaving himself diplomatic wiggle room by adding that the Moscow-Tehran relationship is \u201ca mixed bag\u201d rather than \u201cblack and white.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the most revealing aspects of the interview was not what Netanyahu said, but what was largely absent from the discussion: the broader Palestinian issue.<\/p>\n
Hamas and Gaza were discussed extensively, but almost entirely through a military and security prism \u2014 disarmament, demilitarization, smuggling, and deterrence \u2014 with virtually no discussion of the Palestinian issue in a broader political or diplomatic context.<\/p>\n
Garrett did not bring up the issue, nor did Netanyahu volunteer anything about it. That an 80-minute interview with the prime minister did not include any mention of the Palestinian Authority or Judea and Samaria or the settlements is revealing, showing just how much those issues have been subsumed by something far larger: Iran.<\/p>\n
This reveals much about the prime minister\u2019s current worldview: the conflict is framed almost entirely around Iran, its proxies, and the broader fight against radical Islam.<\/p>\n
It was perhaps the clearest articulation in a mainstream American interview of the post-October 7 paradigm \u2014 namely, that the Palestinian issue is no longer viewed as the core problem, but rather as a secondary front within a much broader struggle against the Iranian axis.<\/p>\n
That hierarchy of priorities came through clearly when Netanyahu was asked whether Israel would disarm and dismantle Hamas in Gaza.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it comes down to us, then we’ll have to do it, but we’ll choose the time and the circumstances in which to do it because, you know, we’ve got a few other things.\u201d<\/p>\n
The takeaway was unmistakable: first things first. Hamas and the broader Palestinian issue are no longer at the head of the line. Not, if this interview is any indication, by a long shot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CBS\u2019s flagship news magazine show \u201c60 Minutes\u201d recently sat down for an hour-and-20-minute interview with Prime Minister Benjamin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66728,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16469],"tags":[244,8222,2535,381,5280],"class_list":{"0":"post-66727","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-benjamin-netanyahu","8":"tag-benjamin-netanyahu","9":"tag-interview","10":"tag-iran-israel-war","11":"tag-prime-minister","12":"tag-television"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116557837958207016","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}