English transcript

This is a longtime Israeli politician, leader, Naftali Bennett, explaining Israel's next step.

Here's where they're going next. Watch.

A new Turkish threat is emerging. I want to be very clear. Turkey and Qatar have gained

influence in Syria, are seeking influence elsewhere and everywhere throughout the region.

And from here, I warn, Turkey is the new Iran.

Erdogan is sophisticated, dangerous, and he seeks to encircle Israel. We can't close our eyes again.

He's sophisticated and dangerous.

And it's hardly an endorsement of Erdogan, the Turkish leader, hardly an endorsement of him to

say when Bennett says he's dangerous, what he really means is he's sovereign. We can't tell

him what to do. We don't fully control him. We can influence him. And it's clear that Israel

and Turkey did have some kind of relationship in the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria last

year, just to guess. But the real problem with Turkey is that it can't be controlled. So it is,

therefore, a threat to Israel. And again, not attacking Israel. That's true. That is true.

In the same sense that when we have hostile leaders in big countries in our hemisphere,

it really bothers us. And sometimes we kill them, regime change them. And we make up this

whole, no, it's really important. The people of country X need to be free. But really,

we need to be unconstrained because we're a great power. That's what it is.

It's important to say this, not to allege some sort of dark conspiracy by the Israelis,

but to explain that it's not unusual at all. It's the most usual thing in the world. What's unusual

is to live in a country that is so controlled, whose media environment is so precisely constructed

to keep you from knowing anything that matters, from seeing the most obvious things,

and that it has been constructed, it's not a conspiracy theory, over

the course of many, many years to keep you from not knowing.

Barry Weiss may run CNN. Whoever thought that would happen? Okay, now, but the point of these

moves is to, in the media, is to control the way things are described so you can't see things

clearly and to muddy the conversation with anti-Semitism, the Nazis. No, no, this is

classic great power competition, and we just can't see it because we have been so thoroughly

propagandized we think that this is some sort of effort to liberate somebody. It's not.

But then the question becomes, what is our role in this? So now that we know,

and by the way, it's perilous that we know, and one of the reasons I almost didn't do this,

not that I'm saying anything that isn't obvious, it's all very obvious, but to say it out loud,

it does not make things more stable. In other words, once you have a war going on,

and everybody knows that it's not being waged on behalf of the people who are dying in it,

or the families they leave behind, then, you know, things don't get more stable,

and no one wants to add to the present instability. But I just think it's important

to know the truth and to know what our leaders have planned because, as you already know,

they lie, and they have no scruples at all.