Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Wednesday that he had strengthened Israel’s military and grown its birth rate by freeing its economy from “semi-socialist” policies.
In his biography, Bibi: My Story, Netanyahu recalled the changes he made as Israel’s finance minister, a post he held two decades ago before a temporary retirement from politics, and his eventual return.
Breitbart News asked him about that experience — and about how he helped Israel become the only Western society today, other than the tiny principality of Monaco, that has a birth rate above replacement (2.1 per woman).
Breitbart News: One of the fascinating things people may not know is the role you played in reforming Israel’s economy as Israel’s finance minister. And I wanted to ask you about that, because one of the things you did, and you describe it in [your biography], is you changed social policies in Israel in a way that actually encouraged family formation, that encouraged people to go to work, but also encouraged people to have children. Today, Israel is the only western country that has a birth rate above replacement. What can we learn in the United States and the West in general from what Israel has done?
Netanyahu: Well, look, you have broken families. If the parents, and especially the fathers, do not respect themselves, and they live on welfare, then you can say, “Oh, well, they’re getting welfare,” but you can’t live on welfare, really, and you certainly can’t give your children a real future. But when people join the job market, when they actually join the job market, and they earn a lot more when they do so than they would from welfare handouts, they have a sense of pride, they have a sense of of identity, they impart it to their children, who join the job market, too. And so the economy grows. And in fact, it was a very hard decision, because I cut our child allowances, which were very high. I mean, I cut it to a basic level and got people to join the job market, and their lives improved. And poverty went down.
But I also basically cut taxes, cut unnecessary spending, and did many other things to stop the monopolization of our economy — basically, semi-socialist policies that were in Israel for more than half a century. I did that. … I liberated our currency. You couldn’t take money out of Israel. You couldn’t take more than a handful of dollars out, and when you came back, you had to file it back in. And the central bank, the thing was ridiculous. Remember, there was this magazine called Newsweek. Remember that? … So if you wanted a subscription of Newsweek — so help me, God, Joel, I’m telling you the truth — you had to go to the central bank, [to] get authorization to spend the dollars on a Newsweek subscription. I mean, so I just eliminated that overnight. And people said to me, are you sure you’re going to do this? You’re going to lift foreign currency controls? And I said, “Well, yeah.” And they said, you know, but money will run out of the country. Well, money did run, but it didn’t run out of the country. It ran into the country — because money, investments, trade, goes to free economies. It doesn’t go to unfree economies. And that’s what happened.
So Israel, under these policies — which were politically very hard to do, I can tell you — Israel went from $17,000 GDP per capita to over $60,000, which is where are we at now, and still rising. … There’s ingenuity, there’s enterprise, there’s innovation in Israel that is almost unlike any other country except the United States, and that transformed the Israeli economy from a paralyzed and closed, socialist economy to a free market juggernaut of technology and innovation, and of course, we’re pushing that too, and cybersecurity — now in AI, I’m going to pass in the government now a program to stimulate AI, because we’ve got enormous talent here. So I’m very hopeful about the future.
And I think this is a component of our strength. It helps us shoulder our military burden.
Netanyahu added that Israel spends 4% of its GDP on its military — twice the requirement for NATO countries — even before factoring in the military aid that is provided by the United States.
Israel also provides generous child care and health care benefits, and various aspects of Israeli popular culture encourage childbearing, including religion, and even the constant threat of external enemies.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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