BICOM

BICOM Director of Research Toby Greene spoke with Anat Berko, a candidate on the Likud party list. Anat is a new entrant to Israeli politics, coming from a career as a senior IDF officer and an internationally renowned expert on terrorism, who is the author of ‘The Path to Paradise’ and her latest book, ‘The Smarter Bomb – Women and Children as Suicide Bombers’. Listen to the podcast here.

Likud is traditionally the leading party of the right-wing bloc in Israel, but there are a number of smaller parties today competing for votes on the right. What today remains distinctive about what Likud is offering?

I met the Prime Minister many years ago, when he was not the Prime Minister, and I interviewed him for my PhD dissertation that dealt with the moral infrastructure of the dispatchers of suicide bombers. I was very impressed by his knowledge in the arena of terrorism and combating terrorism. When he asked me to join the Likud party, because of my expertise in terrorism, I decided to go, because I really believe in his leadership and his deep understanding of the challenge that the West needs to deal with, as well as Israel and all the other states in the Middle East.

The Likud party is a liberal and national party – it’s not on the far right, it’s right-wing with respect to the safety of the State of Israel and the deep understanding of the challenges that we have when we are surrounded by states that declare [they want to] combat Israel. We are also surrounded by many terror organisations and a very sensitive security situation, so the challenge is huge and I think that the Likud party, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, can deal with that in a very responsible way.

The main attack of the opposition Zionist Union party, led by Herzog and Livni, is that Netanyahu had failed. They say that after six years of Netanyahu’s rule Hamas is stronger, Iran is closer to nuclear weapons, Israel’s international position is weaker, and economic gaps are worse. How do you respond to these kinds of challenges?

It’s just slogans, it’s not serious, because I don’t think Hamas is stronger. I think Hamas will be in the position that Hezbollah was after the Second Lebanon War nine years ago. Hamas started this aggressive behaviour, Netanyahu was very responsible and gave Hamas the opportunity to stop that, and gave them the time to stop, and only after that confronted them, because the first thing that a state needs to do is to protect its citizens.

I think it was Tzipi Livni who was responsible for negotiating with the Palestinians. I don’t see anything that came out from this negotiation. So I don’t think they are right, I don’t think that they have something better to offer. We see that in the West the economy collapsed – I was a visiting professor at George Washington University in 2008 and 2009 and I saw what happened economically in the US at that time. And now we see that in Israel the situation is much better. The Southern border was closed with a security fence, and now infiltrators and terrorists cannot cross the border. There are less terror attacks than ever inside Israel, so I don’t think that they can say anything.

I think that we need to focus on housing, and we are doing that for the youth, especially those who finish their military or national service. When you look at the railways and infrastructure, it’s a revolution led by Prime Minister Netanyahu and by the Likud, so all the suburbs are much closer to the centre of Tel Aviv and other cities, so people can work and travel. There are a lot of activities, like open skies, low-cost flights, and grants for people of the periphery for tuition and other things.

Zionist Union just promises things. They cannot even call themselves Hamaḥane Hazioni (Zionist Union) because there are a lot of leftists in the party that do not actually define themselves as Zionists. So, I think that the Likud party is the big change party in Israel. I was not in politics, so I can say that they did a lot for the country. I think that the Hamaḥane Hazioni just makes a lot of promises, like giving land for free for housing, when in fact they can’t deliver.

You mentioned the Palestinian issue and Tzipi Livin’s negotiations. There has been controversy recently about Likud’s position on the Palestinian issue. Likud, of course, is traditionally against giving up territory in the West Bank, but since 2009 your party leader, Prime Minister Netanyahu, has been in favour of the two-state solution and has even spoken about the need to avoid a bi-national state. Can you clarify if Likud is in favour of a two state arrangement or not?

The leading point must be security, security, and security. Why? Because Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, and we got missiles on our citizens. If Israel withdraws from Judea and Samaria (the  West Bank), we will get the same. You cannot leave any border that won’t be protected by IDF soldiers because we saw what happened with the borders on the Gaza-Egypt border. They dig tunnels and smuggle weapons, missiles, and money from Qatar and other places. They smuggle weapons from Libya, Sudan, and Iran, and they send weapons to the Gaza Strip. We saw also last summer that Hamas started working inside Judea, Samaria (the West Bank), and they could have this resolution there also. If Israel leaves those territories now, Hamas will take over, ISIS will take over, and Jordan will collapse.

Now the Palestinians have their autonomy; they conduct their own affairs and they have their own institutions and identity. The main thing that they declare is that they want the right of return. The so called ‘refugees’ after 70 years will come to Israel and will ruin the state from the inside. I am of Iraqi origin, and my family fled from Iraq in the early 1950s when Israel was established, and the Iraqi regime took their IDs. There were Jews in Iraq for 2,000 years, a long time before Islam arrived there, and now there is nothing left. But, I am not going to go back to Iraq, and they are not going to come to Israel because there was a war, in which they were the aggressors, and they did not want to accept the 1947 UN partition resolution and now it is over. We need to have regional agreement that will settle those people who left because they [and their descendants] cannot be refugees forever. Only the Palestinians have that status because of the unique international approach to this issue. I cannot forget that one of the terrorists I interviewed told me: ‘We will fight forever and we will ruin you from the inside because you can never do to us what we can do to you. You are a state and we are a bunch of people who can do whatever we want.’

I think that we need to conduct negotiations with the Palestinians and try to achieve an agreement with them that does not leave them in control of any borders because it will be very sensitive. We have to disarm them, because they are still speaking about the destruction of Israel. They do not raise their own children for peace. We raise our children for peace, they do not.

Turning to the campaign, until now most polls have shown Likud and Zionist Union more or less equal, but we do see reports in the field that Likud activists are struggling to mobilize support and a poll just published today, from Channel 2 news, gives Zionist Union a four point lead. What is your feeling about how the campaign is going?

I sit on many panels that deal with politics and what the agreement with the Palestinians will be, the economy, and other things. I feel like a lot of the left parties, especially Hamahane Hazioni (Zionist Union), make promises just to win the election. I know that people in Israel know, and they saw last week, how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struggled for Israel in Congress, and made the case against the Iranian nuclear weapon that could endanger the whole area.

If they results of the election look anything like the current polls, some are speculating that the end result will be a national unity government. What do you expect to see after the election?

The prime minister has declared that he would like to have right-wing parties, because in Israel agreements are much easier to do with the right in office. The last government was very fragile and they couldn’t do anything. Because of this, after less two years we went to another election. We cannot afford, in these sensitive situations, to have an election every two years. So I think that the Israeli president will try to do his best to find a solution for a stable government in Israel.