Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke yesterday to a group of business leaders gathered in Washington at the Yale CEO Caucus. While discussions during the gathering were off the record, Herzog made his virtual remarks on the record. His main message was to convey a sense of regional solidarity around the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and what he described as the “NATO-like” response of Gulf neighbors to Iran’s widespread retaliatory bombing, while characterizing the offensive as a prerequisite for Middle East prosperity.
Herzog also spoke glowingly of America’s role as a partner, saying, “The incredible cooperation that we have between our militaries is unprecedented, compared even to some of the alignment of the allies in World War II.” While the president acknowledged the cost and controversy around the military strikes, which killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he underscored the urgency of the situation.
“Iran was recharging and reigniting its program, its nuclear program, in clandestine new sites that were extremely sensitive, and we could have missed the opportunity of taking care of them,” he said, adding: “Iran was rushing a plan of 20,000 ballistic missiles. They had 2,000 at the opening of this operation. Twenty thousand would have made a sea change of their power in the region for generation or so.”
As U.S. President Donald Trump has done, Herzog also pointed to Iran’s recent nationwide protests and the regime’s mass killings in response as further justification for the attacks. “Two months ago, they butchered 50,000 of their people,” Herzog said. (Iran put the death toll at between 3,117 and “several thousand,” while groups like Human Rights Watch say the toll is hard to calculate amid a government crackdown and now the war.) Added Herzog: “We also are hurting the government/military infrastructure substantially to enable the people to rise up. We don’t know if they will.”
Attendees asked Herzog about the allies’ long-term plan for Iran and criticism that the attacks were launched without one. “The grand plan is first and foremost to weaken them substantially, and that is what is being done,” he said, arguing that Iran’s “grand master plan” was a threat beyond the region. “Every American leader, every European leader, was talking to us about Iran. We understood that it’s a cocktail of extreme ideology, jihadist ideology, that does not accommodate moderate Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or anybody else.”
A plan for prosperity
The main message for CEOs, though, was that Tehran had been undermining an increasing spirit of cooperation throughout the Gulf region and beyond. “The real next big horizon in business is the connectivity between Israel and India through Saudi Arabia and the Gulf,” he said, referring to the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC, that was announced during the G20 Summit in New Delhi in September 2023. Weeks later, on Oct. 7, Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 civilians in Israel and took more than 250 hostages, sparking a war with Gaza that has killed more than 70,000 people, primarily Palestinians. That has slowed but not halted progress on the bold initiative to integrate energy, transportation, and digital infrastructure across the continents.
Prior to the “watershed moment” of Oct. 7, he said, about a million and a half Israelis had been working throughout the region, primarily in UAE and Bahrain—the first signatories to the Abraham Accords, a deal to normalize relations between Gulf nations and Israel that was negotiated under the first Trump administration in September of 2020. Sudan and Morocco later signed on to the accords, and Saudi Arabia had expressed interest in joining. Now, those aspirations for a regional bloc of cooperation are on hold, and Herzog largely blames Tehran: “We need to be steadfast, take a deep breath, and finish the undermining of Iran.”
The Israeli president acknowledged polls that show a growing number of Americans becoming less supportive of Israel amid ongoing violence in the Middle East, calling it a “very big strategic issue” that’s not unique to Israel. “Every nation is going to social evolution. There are changes, especially changes with the young generation,” said Herzog, who has a tense working relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Among other things, Herzog has resisted pressure from both Netanyahu and Trump to pardon the Israeli prime minister on bribery and fraud charges and end an ongoing corruption trial. “Israel is going through an election in about six months’ time. We’re a democracy. We feel and are confident that we are doing the right thing.”
That said, he also talked about the need to have “a bipartisan, open, and frank dialogue, explaining to the American people that we in Israel are serving their national security interest.” As he put it: “If you are the biggest empire in the world, there’s many advantages to it but also certain obligations that you’re meeting by fighting the empire of evil that wants to undermine you.”
