"AMERICA IS SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN EASILY MANEOUVER AND MOVE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. THEY WON’T GET IN OUR WAY.”

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An astonishingly candid 23-year-old video captures Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasting about tricking America into supporting Israel, undermining an American-brokered peace treaty with the Palestinians and revealing his plan to use "unbearable" military force against the Palestinians in place of a negotiated settlement to the decades-old conflict between them.

"America is something that you can easily maneuver, and move in the right direction. They won't get in the way," Netanyahu says in Hebrew in the grainy video. 

The year was 2001. Netanyahu was out of political office at the time. He was visiting an Israeli settler family in the occupied West Bank town of Ofra. Israel seized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during its Six Day War against its Arab neighbors in 1967 and instituted a military occupation to control the indigenous population: the Palestinians. 

Citizen Netanyahu appears to use the meeting as a kind of campaign event, to gather support for a political comeback. 

From 1996 until 1999, Netanyuhu was Israel's Prime Minister. As Prime Minister, he was supposed to implement 1993's Oslo Accords, a peace treaty signed between his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat. The treaty was supposed to result in the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in those areas.

Instead, Netanyahu admits in the video, he intentionally undermined the treaty when he was Prime Minister so that Israel could maintain its military occupation of the West Bank. (It occupied the Gaza Strip until 2005, when it withdrew its soldiers and settlers voluntarily.)

"What happened to the Oslo Accords?," he asks his hosts rhetorically in the video. "The accords which were ratified in Parliament."

What happened, he boasts, was that "I gave my own interpretation to the agreements. In such a way that will allow me to stop the race back to the 1967 borders." 

Netanyahu explained he had an opening to do it because the Oslo Accords did not define "what 'military facilities’ are. So I defined them as 'security zones.' The entire Jordan Valley, for me, is a 'military facility.'"

Smirking at his successful deceptions, he bragged to his audience that it's "better to give 2% than 100% and this was the choice we faced. You give 2%, but you stopped the withdrawal, rather than 100%."

By killing the Oslo Accords, Prime Minister Netanyahu unleashed the Second Intifada: an armed Palestinian insurgency against Israel.

In the 2001 video, Netanyahu revealed how he intended to deal with the Palestinians since he would not negotiate with them: he would crush their revolt with military force.

"The main thing first of all is to strike them," he said. "Not once but several times, so painfully that the price they pay is unbearable."

He openly fantasized about "a large-scale attack on the Palestinian Authority." One that caused them "to fear everything is about to collapse."

"Hold on," one of his hosts interjected, if Israel did that "the world will say we're the aggressors."

Netanyahu fired back: "They can say whatever they want."

But, his inquisitor pressed, calling him by his Hebrew nickname, "aren't you afraid of what they'll say Bibi?"

The only country that mattered, Netanyahu answered, was America. 

That's when he bragged there was nothing to worry about because the president of the United States and Congress were in Israel’s pocket, that he knew "who they are." They were suckers "you can easily maneuver, and move in the right direction." 

"They won’t get in our way," Netanyahu insisted. "They won’t get in our way.”

And even if some tried, he said, "so what? Eighty percent of Americans support us. It's absurd."

Netanyahu was back in office in 2006, and re-elected Prime Minister in 2009. But for a year 2021-22, he's been Israel's leader since.

His strategy for the Palestinians remains a military one: bomb them into submission. Even legendary Marine general Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis disagrees with that strategy.

The video was first broadcast on an Israeli TV program called "This Week With Miki Rosenthal" in an episode titled "The Real (And Deceitful) Face of Benjamin Netanyahu" in 2010. Writing for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Gideon Levy called the video "pathetic and outrageous" proof Netanyahu "hides his real positions under camouflage netting."

The video never made a big stir in Israel and was more-or-less ignored.

Until now.

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