ISRAEL & THE WORLD – MARK REGEV

Mark Regev is currently the Chair of the Abba Eban Institute at Reichman University. Most recently, Ambassador Regev was the Israeli Prime Minister’s Senior Advisor for Foreign Affairs and International Communications. Prior to this appointment, he served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2016-2020 and as the Prime Minister’s Advisor and International Spokesperson from 2007-2016 during which he became one of Israel’s most prominent voices in the English speaking world. On Tuesday 1 September, Mark Regev addressed The Sydney Institute and focused on some of the more positive aspects of the state of Israel’s security position following the war with Iran, Hezbolah and Hamas. The paper which follows is an edited transcript of Mark Regev’s talk. Mark Regev’s visit to Australia was sponsored by the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).

ISRAEL & THE WORLD

MARK REGEV

I’d like to start off by thanking the Institute for inviting me. It is appreciated. I’d like to thank AJAC for facilitating the talk, and thank you all for coming and those watching at home.

I don’t think I’m telling anyone a secret when I say the last few years in the Middle East have been particularly tumultuous. That’s not a state secret. We’ve been through some tough times.

For Israelis, we had the terrible attack of October 7, which was both a horror for us, and a shock, and a surprise, and in many ways. We have no one to blame but ourselves because we took our eyes off the ball. We didn’t see the enemy as the enemy was preparing to attack us. And here there is this duality about the country that is my home. Israeli intelligence is good. We will know that on the third floor, on the right-hand apartment in Tehran is where the nuclear scientist is, and a missile will hit the target we detected. Remember the beeper operation in Lebanon. Intelligence services around the world, including in Australia, were saying, “Oh, that’s first-class work.” But Hamas took us by surprise on October 7. How was it possible that it happened? It was an amazing failure, an intelligence failure, a military failure.

Today, I want to suggest a thesis for you to think about. You can disagree or agree that, despite everything that has gone on and all the negatives, actually Israel has come out of the abyss of October 7, 2023. Not only have we survived, but as a country, as a society, we’ve bounced back with vigour. To use a word that might be unfashionable, though maybe not at the Sydney Institute, we’re actually winning. I will expand on that thesis.

Let’s look at this at a number of levels. Take the simple military level. Hamas crossed the border and they tried to kill us. They had a victory on the first day. Twelve hundred Israelis were killed brutally, among them people visiting Israel from different countries of different faiths. Not all of them were Israeli Jews. There were Thai agricultural workers who were killed and volunteers in some of the kibbutzim such as those many Australians who came to Israel to work in Kibbutzim in the 1970s and the 1980s. So, 1,200 people are killed in one day. It was the largest act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust. It was a shock. But we crawled out of the abyss, out of the ravine and we bounced back. Today, Hamas as a military force in Gaza has been largely destroyed. They still have enough power to maintain control over the Palestinian population in the part of Gaza they still control. But as a threat to Israel, as a threat to the civilians who used to live on the border, it’s no longer there.

Israel now controls the territory of the Gaza Strip adjacent to the frontier which means, unlike in the past when Israeli communities on the border would look across the frontier and see Hamas, today they see forward deployed IDF units. Today, the population of the Israeli communities, the farms, the kibbutzim and the city population is higher today than it was on 6 October 2023. That means people have not only returned to their homes, but more people have come and chosen to live there. That’s a sign. Once again, it’s not perfect.

Hamas is still there, controlling part of the Gaza Strip, but they control maybe 40 per cent of what was Gaza, and they’re fighting for their lives within their own Palestinian society because many of the people in Gaza are furious at Hamas for starting this war and bringing all its death and destruction. Is it perfect? It’s not perfect, but there’s no perfection in our world. Maybe that’s in the next world. But in the real world, don’t let the perfect stand in the way of the good. Is the situation today on the Gaza frontier better than it was beforehand, from an Israeli perspective, and the answer is yes. Our people are voting with their feet when they’re moving back to communities that suffered terrible, terrible violence and murder just three years ago. People are moving back, with young families.

In Lebanon, where we had huge problems. When I worked in government, which wasn’t that long ago, the intelligence people would brief the cabinet. They would talk about Hezbollah having 150,000 rockets delivered, of course, courtesy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They would brief and they would say, if they fire these rockets in volleys, they can overcome our air defences, and if they target Israel’s major population centers in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, they will succeed. This was their assessment. The killing of scores of Israeli civilians, maybe hundreds of civilians. This is why Israeli governments became very cautious in how they dealt with Hezbollah out of concern that they had this formidable ability to kill our people. Then came the beepers.

The bleepers incident took out the senior Hezbollah leadership. With this war, Israel has slowly but surely degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities. Hezbollah is still there and controls parts of Lebanon. But it’s a fraction of a fraction of its former formidable military capabilities. Once again, it’s not perfect. Hezbollah still maintains control of parts of Lebanon. But is it the threat to Israel that it was this time three years ago? The answer is clearly no. In fact, in Israel-Lebanon relations, there’s many things we can be optimistic about. For the first time, under the auspices of the United States, there’s peace talks between Israel and Lebanon and some dozen rounds of these peace talks already.

The government of Lebanon and the government of Israel signed a memorandum of understanding, where we recognised each other’s territorial integrity and the desire to make peace. The current government of Lebanon wants to make peace with Israel, and the truth is, the current government of Lebanon can only be in power precisely because Hezbollah lost its veto power over Lebanese politics.

Some of us in this room are old enough to remember there was a time that Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East. Today Lebanon is a failed state with a failed political structure and a failed economy. One of the reasons that Lebanon failed was because of Hezbollah. This Iranian Shia implant has dominated Lebanese politics. There’s a Lebanese ambassador in Canberra but, until recently, he or she represented a government that had no power, because Hezbollah called the shots in Lebanon. Their military forces greatly exceeded the forces of the official Lebanese army. Their police force was much greater than the Lebanese police force. They called the shots and they decided who was prime minister and who was president; they ran the country. There were situations where the Lebanese government would decide something and Hezbollah overruled them. That was the power relationship.

Hezbollah was Israel’s enemy, and we hit back against Hezbollah. We hit back over time and very effectively, slowly degrading Hezbollah’s military strength relative to the government of Lebanon. Israel has now changed the power relationship inside Lebanon, giving the Lebanese people the chance to get their country back, to get it out of the Iranian sphere of influence. I’ve met Lebanese who’ve said to me, “Thank you for helping us, for giving us a chance to get our country back.” The Lebanese government wants to make peace with Israel and wants to see Hezbollah disarmed. It wants to end the Iranian control of Lebanon. Israel supports that. And I’m optimistic about the trajectory of Israel-Lebanese relations.

We could have peace in Lebanon before the Trump administration finishes in two and a half years. Trump wants it. He wants to be seen as a peacemaker. He wants his place in history, and the Lebanese and the Israelis want it. It all depends on our ability to neutralise Hezbollah’s ability to oppose that historic peace. It’s possible. It’s doable. Once again, like in Gaza, in Lebanon, is it perfect? No. But are we on a positive trajectory? Yes. Is the situation imminently superior to what it was on 6 October 2023? The answer is yes.

In the first half of 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) put out a report saying “Iran is weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for nuclear weapon.” It could have been five weeks. It could have been seven weeks. It could have been 15 weeks. But they said weeks, What Israel and the United States did in 2025 and 2026 is change that timing dramatically. According to all the assessments of serious people that I’ve read, and the people I talk to who are still in government today, Iran is now years away from having enough enriched uranium for a bomb. I’m not happy that they’re years away, but it is a lot better than weeks away.

Now I don’t know how this Iranian operation will end. I’d like to see regime change. I can’t make it happen. That’s what the Iranian people have to do. But the Iranian regime, like Hezbollah, like Hamas, they have bravado. They talk big, yes. But, ultimately, they’re fighting for their own survival. We saw the people of Iran rise up against this regime in January. We know that 30,000 to 40,000 people were killed by the Iranian regime as they rose up against their tyrannical, theocratic dictatorship. And they rose up because of economics. Not only do they want their freedom, but the economy isn’t performing. There was electricity failure in Tehran. There wasn’t sufficient water flowing in Tehran, their currency was worthless, and all that has been intensified since the fighting. The regime still might cave into the demands of a popular revolution. It’s possible, we can’t build on it, but it’s possible.

Israel, in defeating its enemies, while we did it for ourselves, it was good for the people of Lebanon. Defeating Hezbollah was good for Israel, but also good for Lebanon. Defeating Hamas good for Israel, but it gives the Palestinians an opportunity in Gaza. They had an extremist Islamist government that called for the jihad or holy war against Israel, above and beyond the well-being of the people of Gaza. Do they care about schools and hospitals and infrastructure and jobs and economic development? The answer is no. If the 20-point plan for peace in Gaza, the Board of Peace, the international force, if all this works, everyone is a beneficiary.

The people of Gaza will finally get a government that is better for them, that worries about them, that actually worries about schools and hospitals and roads and employment and development. On all the vital fronts, the trajectory is positive. The results are good. Once again, not perfect, but good. And sometimes good news doesn’t get into the newspapers. Newspapers only like reporting bad news. But, from the point of view of defending our country, we have good news. A German chancellor from the Christian Democrat centre right in 2025 said, Israel is doing the dirty work for the West. In defeating Iran and preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Israel is not just itself. The Arabs appreciate it. The Gulf states do not want to see Iran with a nuclear weapon. Israel is serving a larger interest in defeating people like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranians. That’s the first point I wanted to make.

Secondly – the economics. This doesn’t get talked about a lot, despite the turmoil, despite the fighting, despite the instability. Over the last five years, the Israeli economy has continued to grow at amazing rates. At the end of this year, according to IMF predictions, Israel will be close to $US 70,000 GDP per capita. That’s an increase of 33.5 per cent at a time of almost unprecedented military and political instability in the region. If a small developing country gets that sort of growth rate, everyone praises them. But it’s almost unprecedented that a country in the OECD, a developed country, has that level of growth.

What is Israel doing right? Despite all the challenges, Israel is increasingly prosperous and increasingly successful technologically. Israel must be doing something right. The answer is that Israel has become a centre for technological innovation. We live in a technological century. If in the past Israel was famous in Europe for exporting Jaffa oranges, today it is known not for our agricultural produce, though that is still good, but for high tech, for technology. Today, between 70 and 75 per cent of all Israeli exports are technology, either technological services or technological goods. And we are living in a 21st Century which is a technological century.

Israel is kicking above its weight. The economy is growing, and GDP per capita is growing. Today, Israelis are richer than the French, Italians, or Spaniards. I was the Israeli ambassador in the UK in 2017, where, according to the World Bank, we passed the UK in GDP per capita. Israel built its economy on the assumption it had no raw materials. When you don’t have raw materials, you have to invest in your human materials. There’s something in the Jewish tradition which has always stressed intellectual development and study and learning. And when you combine that with technology and innovation, you have a cultural thing that works. Israeli technology is this catalyst for economic development. Can I be optimistic about Israel’s economic future? We have five years of instability and conflict, and the economy grew by 33.5 per cent. The GDP per capita. That says something.

High-tech industries seem to be largely immune from any political and military crisis. I remember, as a child growing up in Melbourne, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the oil embargo that happened after that. As a teenager, I thought the Arab states have the oil. How can we win? Because everyone needs this product. And many countries adopted anti-Israel positions because of oil. Maybe in the 21st Century, Israel has the oil of technology; breakthrough technology is the oil of the 21st Century, and Israel has the advantage.

Thirdly, I’m optimistic. Israel has prevailed over very difficult circumstances. My third point is peace. How can I talk about peace? It’s not logical. But it is happening. We are seeing a convergence of interests between Israel and the Arab world. We’re seeing more and more Arab and Muslim countries recognising Israel, wanting to have good relations with Israel. During this recent round of fighting, there were a couple of periods of time, sometimes going for weeks, sometimes for months, where British Airways wasn’t flying to Israel because they were worried about the safety of their air crews and planes. Air France and Lufthansa were also not flying to Israel. Do you know who was flying every day to Israel? Emirates and their subsidiary Fly Dubai, and Etihad. They were flying almost every day without stop, when the Europeans weren’t. Our relations with the Arab countries is the future.

As I said before, I visited Israel for the first time when I was a teenager, when Israel didn’t have peace with a single Arab state. The whole Arab world was, in a way, united in hostility to Israel’s existence. Since then, in my lifetime, we’ve done peace with Egypt in 1979. We did peace with Jordan in 1994 and, in Trump’s first term, we got peace with the United Arab Emirates, with Bahrain, with Morocco and with Sudan. Sudan fell apart in civil war. But with the three other countries, the treaties are flourishing, and there’s a historical process underway of reconciliation between Israel and Arab states that is unstoppable.

Now I’m going to be frank. It’s not because our Arab neighbours read the Bible and discovered that Jews have a history and a legitimacy to be there. It’s not because the Arab states read Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism and decided, oh, the Jews are right after all. The Arab states are moving closer to Israel because it’s in their interest to do so. In the world that we live in, most countries act out of their own national interests. But it’s interesting that Israel’s enemies are also the enemies of many Arab states, if not most.

Imagine you are part of a royal family in one of the Gulf kingdoms. You’re a prince or a princess, and because of oil wealth, what used to be a barren piece of desert is now a metropolis, a thriving metropolis, and you are a global transportation hub. You probably have a very good airline, and you have built prosperity, and you’ve built a very successful society. Many of us have been to the countries of the Gulf. So, I ask, who threatens your stability? Who threatens your security? Who threatens your continued prosperity? Israel? No. What is the self-perception of the threat of these countries who threaten them?

They will often tell you. They’ll say extreme Islamist groups, Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, or it might be the Iranians and the Shia extremists like Hezbollah. Then you discover that actually Israel is not only not a threat to you, but Israel is an ally against these people. This and other factors are bringing Israel and Arab countries and Muslim countries closer together than ever before.

Last year at the United Nations, at the General Assembly, the President of Indonesia got up. Indonesia is the largest Muslim majority country on the planet. You know him better than most because Indonesia’s your neighbour. He stood up and he said he wants to see peace with Israel. He used the word in Hebrew. He said shalom, peace. He was speaking directly to the people of Israel. That is almost unprecedented. Just before October 7, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman did an interview on American television. He said peace with Israel is close. In fact, one of the reasons Hamas did the attack on October 7 – we know this now from intelligence – is they wanted to stifle the chance of an Israel-Saudi breakthrough. Why? Saudi Arabia not only has an important status in the Arab world, it has an important status in the Islamic world. It’s the custodian of the two Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. If Saudi Arabia signs peace with Israel, and you’re a Hamas person, that’s your worst nightmare. That’s terrible. How can a religious Muslim country make peace with Israel, but Saudi Arabia was about to do it.

I believe the circle of peace will expand. The American president wants it to happen for the same reason he wants peace between Israel and Lebanon. He wants peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This president has an ambitious agenda. He wants to go down in history as a great peacemaker, and he’ll put the resources of his office behind that. He can’t make it happen by himself. But if the parties are ready and we’re close to it, and I think we are, he can push us over the finishing line. So, if Israel is prevailing militarily, if our economy is thriving, and if the circle of peace in the Middle East is expanding, can I be optimistic about the future of my country? Do I have the right to be optimistic about the future of my country? There are definitely things on the negative side of the balance sheet. But my opinion is that there is nothing that trumps those three positive elements that I talked about.

The United Nations never says anything very positive about Israel. You know that. I even saw the current Secretary General of the United Nations in a recent interview admit publicly that there are a lot of people in his organisation who have an anti-Israel agenda. He said, in his words, “they’re out of control”. But there’s one UN report that actually praises Israel. Every year there’s something called the Global Happiness Report. The Global Happiness Report makes a list of the happiest countries on the planet. Basically, 50 per cent of the report is Gallup poll type questions, identical questions, asked of people in UN member states across the planet. They don’t ask you if you’re happy because that’s a stupid question. But they ask you, do you feel safe to walk the streets at night? Do you have to bribe public officials to get a building permit? Do you feel safe drinking the water where you live? They take the data that people answer subjectively because they’re answering their own opinions. Do you feel safe to walk the streets at night? That’s your subjective feeling, right? So, half of the survey, half of the methodology, are questions that they ask people, and the other half, they take objective data.

They look at statistics, you know, economic standard of living, education, health services, and they build on this according to the The Global Happiness Index. The happiest country on the planet is Finland. I’ve been to Finland, and I can understand why the Finns are happy. The next in the top five are all Scandinavians, and then the Swiss. But consistently over the last decade, Israel is seventh or eighth on the happiness list. Think about it; it’s counterintuitive. Why are Israelis happy? Because we have every reason you would think not to be happy. We’ve got Hamas in the south. We have Hezbollah in the north. We’ve got Iran over the frontier. We’ve got all our problems, and yet Israelis, according to the UN, according to the Global Happiness Report, Israelis are happy.

One reason is because we’re increasing the affluent. But the Germans are richer than Israel, and guess what? We’re above them in the happiness index. The Americans are richer than Israel, and guess what? According to the UN Happiness Index, we’re happier than them consistently. Not one year in aberration, but consistently. What are Israelis doing right? It’s not because of our food. We’re happier than Italians and French, right? And so, there’s been analysis in Israel. Why are Israelis happy? And I would argue, and not just me, other people in Israel who are smarter than myself, have said, “Why is Israel successful? Why are Israelis happy according to the UN?”

The truth is the following. Israel is a pluralist, liberal, Western democratic society, entrepreneurial and capitalist, but with a social welfare safety net, and all that is positive. A lot of other countries have that as well. But Israel has something that some people in many Western countries have lost. Israelis have a sense of community. Israelis have a sense of purpose. Israelis have a sense of belonging. And Israelis have very strong family ties. Maybe we have that in common with the Chinese. And all that together provides a framework, where people feel that they belong. People feel a natural support mechanism.

When I just studied sociology at Melbourne University half a century ago. There was a concept which I’m sure some of you are familiar with called atomisation. The idea that you’re alone in the big city and you don’t belong to anything, and you’re at home watching television by yourself. And people are alone in this world. Israelis don’t have that, according to the information. Israelis feel a sense of belonging, a sense of community, a sense of family. So, maybe what you have in Israel is this successful synthesis between all the advantages of modern globalised economy, liberal democracy, and so forth, together with some of the good things from tradition, from heritage. I don’t know if there’s a lesson in there for other countries, but it’s something to think about.