PM Netanyahu speaks at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Conference of Ambassadors and Legation Heads

Following is an excerpt from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks, yesterday (Sunday, 7 December 2025), at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Conference of Ambassadors & Legation Heads in Jerusalem [translated from Hebrew]:

“Israel has shown itself to be not just a very powerful country, but an exceptionally powerful country. Now we need to keep increasing our military and security power. We are making an effort, which some of you will see in the countries you work in, to increase our own power in our armaments industries. We have the spirit, but we also need the material resources: the ability to produce our own defensive systems, including defense armaments, and offensive armaments, and other very sophisticated things. We must be as independent as we possibly can. That doesn’t mean we can’t form alliances.

First of all, our strongest and most important alliance is with the United States – there is no alternative for that. But who says it has to be the only connection? There are other countries. Today the Chancellor of Germany was here; he wanted to discuss that. There are many other countries as well, that want to discuss that. I want to tell you, that if you run a deep analysis of the security establishments in the countries you serve in, you will see that all of them would be interested, whether they admit it or not, and some of them may not be saying it, but they’re still coming. We are flooded with requests. Our guiding principle is first and foremost increasing our independent capabilities, but in many instances that can also be reinforced by partnerships with other countries.

We want to take advantage of these opportunities, but we also want to attend to the campaign which you enlisted for, and which has yet to see many innovations – the public diplomacy campaign and the struggle against the harsh propaganda that we face.

In the second stage in Gaza we’re moving towards demilitarization and disarmament. Now that raises a question: Our friends in America want to try and establish a multinational task force to do the job. I told them I welcome it. There are volunteers here? Be my guest. And we know there are certain tasks that this force can perform, I don’t want to go into details, but some things are beyond their abilities, and perhaps the main thing is beyond their abilities, but we will see about that. But as President Trump said, and I said the same thing as well: it can be done the easy way, or the hard way, but eventually it will be done. And we are now at that stage. You can be quite certain that I will be discussing this with President Trump at the end of the month. 

The greatest opportunity that presents itself to us is also the agreements for normalization and peace. Not everything is clear at this point, or more precisely, not everything is clear in the public discourse. There are many declarations, it is always said to be impossible without this, or that, or that other thing. The same things, more or less, were said about the Abraham Accords. ‘This can’t move forward without the approval of the Palestinian Authority’. There is just one problem with that, let’s say, for the Abraham Accords: If we had waited for the approval of the Palestinian Authority, they would have never given their approval. Never. I would be cautious with my analysis today as well: The opportunities are there because of the tectonic shift we created in the Middle East balance of power. That doesn’t mean that the Axis will not attempt to reorganize, or that there won’t be challenges. We do have challenges: We are active in Lebanon, active in Gaza, active against the Houthis, as necessary for each of the fronts. We no longer have a policy of containment. We identify a threat and we take action against it. 

When you’re talking with the public and the leaders of your countries – and this is true always, I say there’s a difference: Talk about interests with the leaders, and talk about justice with the public. First of all, the justice: We are fighting the war of the civilized world, of civilization. We are fighting against barbarians. Those barbarians are not only on our southern border; we have seen them on our northern borders as well. What they’ve done to our allies, the Druze, is what they will do to the moderate countries in the region, and to the free countries, to the democracies. If they only could, they would do it in Europe and they will do it everywhere. And that is why our fight is not ours alone – it is that of the entire world, in terms of justice. It’s a hard battle, and we need to talk about it. If you’re unconvinced, you won’t be convincing. But I am certain all of you are convincing. Fight out of deep conviction, people notice that. We are fighting for the side of truth. 

And the most important thing, in my view, is to clarify – to ourselves, first of all – that we have here a great opportunity to ensure our existence for the coming decades. The fight never changes and never ends. One power goes down, another comes up. But what matters is what we’re doing, how much do we consolidate our forces, and our nation has consolidated during crisis. That, also, was something they didn’t believe would happen. We were told that we’re broken up, that we’re divided, and that’s not what happened. What happened was the very opposite. Our strength – the strength of the people and also of the fighters, of all of us – all of that is the initial key to implementing our strength. And when we continue doing that, I believe we will be seeing some very good things here in the next few years.”