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Netanyahu: "Israel Will Always Remain America's Indispensible Ally"; Netanyahu: "Actively Engaged In Intensive Efforts" To Get Hostages Back; Netanyahu: Israel "Should Be Commended" For Avoiding Civilian Casualties In Gaza. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired July 24, 2024 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[15:00:00]

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: States and our Arab partners to transform a troubled region from a backwater of repression, poverty and war into a thriving oasis of dignity, prosperity and peace.

In this noble mission, as in many others, Israel will always remain America's indispensable ally. Through thick and thin, in good times and in bad, Israel will always be your loyal friend and your steadfast partner. On behalf of the people of Israel, I came here today to say thank you, America. Thank you for your support and solidarity. Thank you for standing in Israel, with Israel, in our hour of need.

Together we shall defend our common civilization. Together we shall secure a brilliant future for both our nations. May God bless Israel, may God bless America and may God bless the great alliance between Israel and America forever.

Thank you.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: All right. Dana, there he is, the Prime Minister of Israel, speaking for nearly one hour on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The joint meeting of the Senate and the House, making Israel strong case for U.S. support.

And you couldn't help but notice how he - effusive, Dana, he was in his praise for both President Obama - excuse me, President Biden ...

DANA BASH, CNN HOST: Mm-hmm.

BLITZER: ... and the former President Donald Trump. He was effusive in his praise for both.

BASH: Yes, absolutely. Look, I mean, this was - it looked like an American president giving a State of the Union address even in - and especially including the guests in the box, which I'll get to in a second.

But I just want to sort of give thematically what we just saw here was an Israeli prime minister trying to reconnect with its biggest ally, its biggest democratic ally in the United States of America, and doing it by touching on the most infamous days in American history. Like December 7th, like September 11th 2011, that was Israel's October 7th. And he even said the words, "It is a day that will live in infamy," standing in the same spot where Franklin Delano Roosevelt said exactly that after Pearl Harbor on December 7th.

So that was one of many connections he was trying to make about his - their war is the same as America's war. The other thing is the way that he tried to turn on its head the construct that we have seen emerge, particularly on the streets with protesters and college campuses and elsewhere, about the oppressed and the oppressor. The idea that Israel is the oppressor and the Palestinians are the oppressed, talking about the history of the Middle East, saying that Israel is historically a Jewish state and reminding people that it is - with Iran's help and funding that Iran is trying to oppress the - from his perspective and from history's perspective - the indigenous Jews who live in the state of Israel.

Those are just some of the broad takeaways that he is trying to push back on the narrative that has been going on here in the United States.

[15:05:00]

BLITZER: It's interesting, Dana, a lot of Democrats were boycotting and didn't attend the Netanyahu speech. But the crowd that was there and clearly mostly Republicans, repeatedly gave him various - very loud standing ovations from the moment he was introduced as he was walking in during the course of that entire nearly one hour speech.

BASH: Yes. I mean, he - as we said going into this, he is a politician through and through. He knows how to hold a room. He understands United States politics very well. As, Barak, you were saying, he can't do this in the Knesset for lots of reasons. We wouldn't get that kind of reception, but also they can't give those kinds of applause.

The other quick thing I want to mention is - and I know you all are going to get into the really big news here about the security alliance that he proposed - is the way that - just back to that sort of State of the Union-like address that he gave, the way that he had the Israeli soldiers rise. One of them was Ethiopian-born. Another one is a Bedouin.

Again, back to that oppressor versus the oppressed construct that he was trying to shatter, they're not all white people in Israel. They're not all Jews fighting for Israel. Certainly mostly Jews, but they are also of a - more of a diverse background than people in the United States who look at Jews and look at Israel, maybe understand.

BLITZER: He did say, and Barak Ravid is with us as well, Israel will not rest until all the hostages are home. He didn't go into a lot of specifics about these negotiations that have been going on over these past several days and weeks to try to bring those hostages home. But he said that goal remains priority number one.

BARAK RAVID, CNN POLITICAL AND GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Yes and but - there's a big but here - there was an Israeli delegation that was supposed to go to Qatar tomorrow to negotiate over this deal. They're not going.

BLITZER: The Qataris play a very important role because they talk to Hamas as well.

RAVID: Exactly. But this delegation is not going. It's not going because Netanyahu told them, don't go yet. I still need to speak to President Biden. And he's been slow walking this process for some time.

But, you know, Netanyahu didn't only speak to people here in America. He mostly spoke to people back in Israel. This - now it's 10 PM in Israel. It's prime time. I have - all the big TV networks were broadcasting this live and he tried to reassert his image to the Israeli people as the one who's the most influential politician in America.

Why is he doing this?

Because he came here as a very weak Israeli prime minister. Seventy- two percent of Israelis, according to several posts, said that they want him to resign. More or less the same number says he wants early elections. His favorability is 30 percent in all the polls - 30-, 32 percent on a good day.

You know what he did not say in that speech? A word that he did not say since the beginning of the war, since October 7th, he did not say it was under my watch. He did not say I'm taking responsibility. He did not say I will do whatever it takes to repair everything I've done and my - everything my government has done.

And a lot of Israelis were watching this tonight know exactly that. He used the soldiers as political props. He did a lot of his, you know, regular shticks during speeches. This, you know, I could have written the speech five days ago and it would look more or less the same.

So I think I'm not sure how much this speech will help him back home as he expects.

BASH: Yes.

BLITZER: We're going to go to Jeremy Diamond in Israel in a moment. But David Sanger, what was your reaction?

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, a few things. First, as Dana pointed out, this did look and feel like a State of the Union speech. He played the audience. He played the applause lines. He did the bit with the Israeli soldiers in - up in the upper seats the way Ronald Reagan did these.

Second, he did lay out a group of adversaries, the protesters on the streets who he mocked. The ICC, which, of course, had declared him ...

BLITZER: The International Criminal Court.

SANGER: ... International Criminal Court. The college presidents who he noted said that he mocked for their statement that anti-Semitic references needed to be examined in their context. And then he said, so let me give you some context. And, of course, Iran.

What did he not do?

He didn't explicitly say that Hamas needed to be destroyed.

BASH: Mm-hmm.

SANGER: He basically suggested that degrading them was enough, which is more the American position than his past position. And then, of course, he talked about building an alliance out of the group of countries that had come together on that night in April when Iran launched its missile attacks.

[15:10:04]

And turning that into - he didn't quite say a Middle East NATO, but that was clearly his implication.

And then he said he even had a name for it. It was going to be the Abraham alliance. Building on the accords that President Trump's administration put together.

BLITZER: And very thankful to President Trump for those Abraham accords which brought diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates among them, Bahrain also among them.

He did say that those who attack Israel will pay a very heavy price. And he made it clear that when he was looking to a future in Gaza, he said this, and I think - I thought - I think this was significant: "Gaza should be run by Palestinians," he said, "but Palestinians who are not determined to destroy Israel."

RAVID: Yes, he's been saying this for a while. The only problem is that when people tell him, okay, we just fought against Hamas, we want them destroyed. We don't want them to continue to rule Gaza. There's another faction in Palestinian politics that's called Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Let's bring them in.

BASH: Yes.

RAVID: They're, I don't know, more moderate, less extremist, any way you want to put it. But he says, no, I don't want them. So Netanyahu wants in Gaza Palestinians that do not exist. That's his problem. I don't know where he wants to bring them from, maybe from Norway, Switzerland, somewhere else. They do not exist.

BASH: Alex, go ahead.

ALEX MARQUARDT, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: And can we just emphasize where things stand right now? We are almost 10 months into this war, and Netanyahu has said that some 14,000 Hamas fighters have been killed. Even if we take that number to be true, and of course there's almost no way of verifying, that's only half of the Hamas fighting force.

When you look at the leadership, there's only one of the top three leaders who has been confirmed killed. There's possibly a second - likely a second Mohammed Deif, the head of the military wing who has also been killed. Yahya Sinwar, the overall leader of Hamas, remains alive.

We are 10 months into this war and a significant portion of Hamas is still on the battlefield. So I think it's very interesting to see that evolution of the Netanyahu language there. For months and months, he defined total victory as the eradication, the erasing of Hamas. And now he's talking about it in a way that we've heard some American officials talking about it, degrading them militarily, taking away their ability to govern. They are not governing the Gaza Strip right now. No one's governing the Gaza Strip.

And in fact, U.S. officials believe that Yahya Sinwar and Hamas are ready to relinquish the control of Gaza. But I think one of the greater concerns is going to be in the long run, you are inevitably going to have a strong ideology in Hamas that is only growing more popular, both within - among Palestinians and in the Arab world because they are seen as resistance, and thousands of fighters left on the battlefield and a large pool of Palestinians who have been facing what we - this utter devastation for the past 10 months, who will be ripe for recruiting in - as future militants.

BASH: Which is why he continued to bring it back to Iran, the country that is, by all accounts, funding and supporting not just Hamas in Gaza but Hezbollah in the north, in Lebanon and the Houthis. So this is - this was another really important overarching theme, you know, that Netanyahu understandably has been obsessed with the growth and the strength and the determination of Iran to eradicate Israel. And what he did here was to continue to connect for an American audience and an Israeli audience, but Israel doesn't need to be educated on this, but more for an American audience, that Iran isn't just out for Israel. Iran is out for American - to topple American democracy.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: No, that's right. And he called the protesters Iran's useful idiots. He relished going after the protesters, saying that they didn't realize, didn't know the history, know the context, know how oppressive the Iranian regime is and he relished it.

I mean, this was - you know, he was going after these protesters, going after the leaders of some of these schools. He called them befuddled academics. We're 10 months into this conflict. We're a hundred days out from a presidential election. In some ways, the conflict has fallen off the radar of many Americans. It's going to start back up, right? If you think about what's happening in the context of some of these campus protesters.

They're going to go back to school. There's going to be a DNC convention in Chicago, expected to be a lot of protesters there. So this is very much going to be top of mind heading into this election. And we don't quite know. We don't have, you know, an idea yet of what Trump would really do in office. It's something he hasn't really detailed. And we also don't know what a Kamala Harris administration would do and how that would be different from a Biden administration.

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BLITZER: What do you think of that reception he received in the Congress though? That was powerful.

HENDERSON: It was powerful. Listen, and these are Republicans. Mostly, a lot of the Democrats didn't come, although someday that would be different from a Biden ministration. Think of that reception he received in the Congress. So that was powerful. It was powerful. Listen in these are Republicans.

Mostly, a lot of Democrats didn't come, although some Democrats were there and they were standing up and cheering.

And listen, there is a sense that Americans do need to be more educated on what's going on there, on the history of anti-Semitism, on the ways in which anti-Semitic tropes led to the Holocaust. And so there was teachable moments, right, when he was trying to educate people in terms of the history.

BASH: Jeremy Diamond is in Israel.

And Jeremy, I wanted to ask you about the hostages. And I talked to, right before this speech, to the parents of one of the Israeli and American hostages, Edan Alexander. And there were - they - the parents were there. Other family members of hostages were there. We didn't - we did see the Prime Minister call out some of them, acknowledge some of them. And then when it comes to the big question that they all have, when are my family members going to come home, he did promise that.

But just like David and Barak were saying, not a lot knew that we heard from him about getting to that point with a deal with Hamas, with the help of Qatar and America.

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. That's right, Dana. I think the Israeli prime minister paid a lot of lip service to the issue of the hostages. He talked about it during a section of his speech. But if you look at the overall context of the speech, the overall content of what the Israeli prime minister said, he talked far, far more about achieving victory in this war against Hamas, about destroying Hamas' military capabilities and vowing we will fight until we achieve victory.

He said some phrase like that a few different times throughout the speech. He talked about that far more than he did this ceasefire agreement, which U.S. officials as well as Israeli officials have indicated to me in recent days is very much within reach. One official actually told me that it's now up to Israel, that it's now up to the Israeli prime minister effectively to decide whether or not he actually wants a deal. And as Barak was saying there, the Israeli prime minister has told his delegation to hold off on traveling to meet with the mediators and share Israel's latest response until after he meets with President Biden tomorrow, effectively pushing off that trip by the delegation, most likely until after Shabbat. So that would probably be on Sunday.

But I think beyond that, Dana, I think what we also need to do here is fact check a few key things that the Israeli prime minister said, because he made several claims here that it tempted to not only defend the Israeli military's conduct in Gaza, but that also flew in the face of many of the facts on the ground.

When he was talking about the ICC's claim that Israel is starving people of Gaza. You know, he talked about big numbers of aid getting in, but there is just very, very clear evidence. You talk to any humanitarian organization that actually works on the ground in Gaza, the United Nations and even when you look at Israel in the way that they have turned on and back off the faucet of aid to Gaza, there is clear evidence that Israel has not always allowed enough aid in, that they have not done enough to de-conflict militarily to provide safe routes for that aid to get in.

And you also have to remember that ministers, members of Netanyahu's own government, called for starving the people of Gaza in the earliest days of the war. Then he also made this, frankly, laughable claim that there are practically no civilians who were killed in Rafah. I can think of several strikes in which civilians were killed. So that just doesn't even pass the smell test.

And then he once again cited this West Point expert, John Spencer, claiming that Israel has the lowest civilian casualty ratio. You talk to any other expert on the conduct of militaries and warfare, including how the United States has carried out its campaigns, and they will all say that Israel has not taken nearly as many precautions as most modern militaries do in warfare in Gaza.

BASH: All right. Jeremy, thank you so much. That includes David Petraeus, that former retired general and former CIA director. Thank you so much for that. Everyone stand by.

Joining me now to discuss is Ghaith al-Omari. He served as an advisor to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and he is a senior fellow for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Thank you so much for being here.

What is your reaction to the Prime Minister's speech? And, if you will, specifically the notion of what he is calling the Abraham alliance? Is that something that is realistic?

GHAITH AL-OMARI, FORMER PALESTINIAN NEGOTIATOR: Look, first of all, my general reaction is nothing really surprising. I'm relieved that he did not try to do what he did in 2015 to drive a partisan wedge. But, as Barak said, this was primarily addressed to an Israeli audience, less to an American audience.

To the point of the alliance, look, that is for sure. There is actually in reality now an alliance.

[15:20:00]

We saw it on April 13, 14, when Israel - when - sorry - Iran fired drones and missiles into Israel and it was the Jordanians who actually shot down some of these missiles. It was the Saudis who gave a lot of the intelligence.

However, what he did not say is the one thing that the Saudis and others actually want to hear to formalize this alliance, which is a pathway towards a Palestinian state.

You know, I was in Saudi recently. I talk to Saudi officials all the time. They say they want to normalize with Israel. They want to get into not only security alliances, but also civilian, diplomatic, et cetera. But they want something from Israel. They want Israel to lay out a pathway to a Palestinian state, not today, not tomorrow, not next week, but a credible pathway. He did not talk about that.

So, yes, it's a nice aspiration. But unless he does the kind of necessary political heavy lifting and, frankly, to deal with his own politics about it, this will remain simply either an ad hoc notion or just a pie in the sky.

BASH: Yes, that is definitely one of the many main differences that he has with President Biden, the notion of a Palestinian state, at least this aspiration of having one. On that, you did - you were an advisor to Mahmoud Abbas. And my question for you is the question that Netanyahu posed, which is, is it possible to have a Palestinian self- run government at this point in time, given what we're seeing right now, that is committed to the viability of the Palestinian people, but not the extinction of the Israeli people?

AL-OMARI: Look, I mean, the Palestinian Authority right now, if you look at it, it is committed to a two-state solution. As we speak, there is security coordination between Israel and ...

BASH: And can they go back into Gaza?

AL-OMARI: Now, this is the main question. Right now, they are not capable to go into Gaza. They're not capable both because of just physical lack of capabilities, but also they are corrupt. They need reform. They need a lot of fixing up to get to that point.

The main question is the following and I think Barak did allude to it. Will we start in a process that will say, when the Palestinian Authority is reformed, is capable, they will run Gaza, in which case we can start the process of reform today? And this is, by the way, what President Biden talked about when he talked about the regionally united Palestinian Authority.

Now, this is not only essential for getting the Palestinian Authority into Gaza, but it's also essential about something else that actually Bibi himself, Netanyahu himself, mentioned, which is bringing Arab forces and Arab countries to help rebuild Gaza. Every Arab official that I spoke to in the Gulf, Jordan, Egypt, et cetera, will tell you we will not come in unless we're invited by the Palestinian Authority and if we are seen as a step towards bringing in the Palestinian Authority.

So I think in some ways the Palestinian Authority today cannot do it. But unless we put - bringing the Palestinian Authority back as an objective, unless we start today to reform the Palestinian Authority, to fix it up, to deal with the corruption, but also to build the capabilities, we will not have the regional coalition that will come and rebuild Gaza.

So this is another point that I suspect will be very much on the agenda tomorrow when Bibi meets with the President and with the Vice President.

BASH: I suspect you're right. Gaith Al-Omari, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.

AL-OMARI: Thank you.

BASH: And stay with CNN special coverage. We'll be right back.

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[15:27:40]

BLITZER: And welcome back to our special coverage, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu just wrapped up his address to Congress. It was a nearly a one hour long speech. In it, the Israeli leader emphasized the importance of close ties between the U.S. and Israel.

His goal he said was to shore up support for Israel's war in Gaza. We also heard him repeatedly defending actions taken in the war. I want to discuss the speech with the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, who's joining us right now.

Prime Minister, thank you so much for joining us.

What was your reaction to what Prime Minister Netanyahu had to say?

EHUD BARAK, FORMER PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: You know in Israel a stable baritone and a perfect English cannot compensate for the absence of courage after an integrity indeed not just in words. And the Israeli collective expect from his leader to project strength, competence and optimism indeed not just in words. And under his watch, which he never mentioned, the worst event in the history of the Jewish people or Zionism already happened, followed by the worst-led, strategically-led war in spite of the courage, devotion and sacrifice in the battlefield.

So this gap between deeds and words caused him to lose totally the trust of the Israeli people. Four out of five Israelis see him as the main responsible for the blunder of 7th of October and the war afterwards. Four - three out of four think that he has to resign. And two out of three Israelis believe that his motivations are private, has to do with his politics, with his court case, whatever, not with the interests of Israel. And the same two out of three believe that he deliberately torpedoed the hostage deal.

So with this level of trust, he becomes illegitimate. He's legal prime minister. He was elected freely with no one stole the election. But he's totally illegitimate. He perceived as being patently unfit to keep leading us into the new chapter.