In an extended pre-Passover interview with journalist Itamar Segal, published this week in the Hebrew magazine Olam Katan, Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich spoke at length about the war against Iran, Israel’s goals in Lebanon, the state of the economy, and the miracle of his son’s survival. What follows is drawn from that interview.
Getting Betzalel Smotrich to sit for a comprehensive interview is no simple matter. There is, after all, a war against Iran and Hezbollah underway, and Smotrich sits in both the Security Cabinet and the inner Cabinet. He is also the Finance Minister, carrying a weight of responsibility that would consume any single person — and in recent weeks, something else has consumed him as well.
Just weeks before this interview, his son Benaya, a Givati Brigade fighter in the IDF, was severely wounded in combat on the Lebanese border. The injuries were life-threatening. During his son’s hospitalization, the Finance Minister spent his nights in a chair at the hospital bedside and his days running a wartime economy.
The interview was conducted on the day Benaya was discharged.
When journalist Itamar Segal asked Smotrich how he was doing, he moved without pause between the personal and the national, as if for him the two were not separable at all.
“We thank the Master of the Universe for His daily miracles. We are in a miraculous period. I don’t think anyone could have imagined such tight cooperation between us and a world power like the United States, unprecedented achievements in this campaign against Iran, which has not yet ended, with enormous divine assistance. I say constantly in our deliberations: ‘The Lord your God is He who gives you the strength to prevail’ (Deuteronomy 8:18). What is happening here is a great sanctification of God’s Name. We are a light unto the nations, a lighthouse in the region.”
Then he turned to his son. “And there are also daily miracles with us at home. We received him back through miracle upon miracle. He was wounded by three shrapnel fragments; one broke his ribs and caused a tear in his lung, and one tore his liver and stopped, miraculously, on the wall of the largest blood vessel in the body. He underwent abdominal surgery; they dismantled and reassembled a large part of his abdomen. We truly received him back by miracle. He is expected to return to full health after recovering from the surgery. He is a great hero, and he has a heroic mother.”
He described the weeks since the operation began: the family living out of suitcases, Smotrich at the hospital each night, the outpouring from the Israeli public. “We feel in this period the great embrace of the people of Israel — the prayers, the partnership, the care, the packages.” He expressed gratitude to the medical teams at Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya and at Hadassah Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, whom he visited personally in mid-March to thank the staff who saved his son’s life and to meet with Benaya’s fellow soldiers wounded alongside him.
“We are full of gratitude to the Holy One, Blessed be He, for His kindness, and to the many good messengers along the way. And Benaya is already preparing to return to combat. It will take him some time.”
The Economy That Shouldn’t Be Working
When Israel entered full-scale war after October 7, 2023, the economic forecasts were dire. Prominent economists predicted collapse. Rating agencies downgraded Israeli debt. The sustained military mobilization, the mass reserve call-ups, the displacement of entire communities in the north and south — by conventional analysis, all of it pointed toward severe economic contraction.
None of it happened.
“Look at the shekel, which keeps strengthening,” Smotrich said. “Look at the stock exchange, which has almost outpaced every other exchange in the world with fantastic returns. We delivered more than 100% in two years of war. Look at the investments flowing in, at the high-tech sector and the labor market. The deficit is also lower than expected, lower than the deficits of countries in Europe.”
He does not credit policy alone. “There is a wonderful nation here that gets up every morning and builds the Israeli economy,” he said — but the results, he argues, go beyond what human effort alone can explain. He reached for a saying common in medical circles: that an honest doctor, one who has seen enough of what the human body can do against all odds, cannot remain an atheist. The same logic, he said, applies to Israel’s economy. “Every forecast said the economy would collapse under the weight of this war — and every forecast was wrong. The State of Israel today is much bigger and much stronger. Its geopolitical risks have shrunk considerably, so everyone wants to come and invest here. Whoever invests in the Israeli economy invests in a share called the State of Israel — which is large and strong.” He paused before adding: “That is the Master of the Universe working here.”
Invoking divine assistance as an explanation for budget outcomes made Smotrich a target of sustained ridicule from Israel’s economic and academic establishment. Throughout the war, forums of prominent economists issued grave warnings that his wartime spending would bring financial ruin; pronouncements delivered with the same confident authority as the previous generation of security experts who promised that withdrawing from Gaza would bring peace. Smotrich draws the parallel without hesitation: “All those invented forums of economists and professors — it is exactly like all the retired generals who promised that the withdrawal from Gaza would bring security.” The doomsday scenarios collapsed one after another, and the Finance Minister who invoked God’s Name in budget meetings turned out to be right.
Lebanon: The War That Is Not Over
As we speak, IDF forces are actively fighting inside Lebanon, with goals that Smotrich described with unusual candor.
Last year’s campaign against Hezbollah, the extraordinary pager and walkie-talkie operations, the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah, and the ground incursion into southern Lebanon inflicted historic damage on the organization. Hezbollah lost, by Smotrich’s estimate, 70% of its firepower. But the ceasefire that followed, accepted under pressure from a Biden administration threatening an arms embargo against Israel, left the strategic objective unmet.
“In Operation Arrows of the North we warned that we had not defeated Hezbollah,” he said. Now Israel is back, and this time, he says, the outcome must be permanent.
“The campaign in Lebanon must end with the Litani River becoming Israel’s new border. From the Litani south to Israel — a completely sterile zone, empty of all population. The Shiite villages in that strip must be demolished entirely: they are not ordinary civilian communities that happen to be near Hezbollah, but active terrorist infrastructure,” serving as weapons depots, launch sites, and command centers for the terror group.
He draws a sharp distinction between this and the security zone Israel maintained until Ehud Barak’s withdrawal in 2000. That arrangement embedded Israeli forces within a hostile population — a grinding guerrilla war of roadside bombs and ambushes with no clean resolution. What Smotrich envisions is categorically different: the southern tip of Lebanon that borders on Israel must be depopulated and controlled with a single rule of engagement. “Anyone who moves, dies. Period. We do not allow anyone to return — both in order to create a different security reality on our borders, and in order to deter, to broadcast throughout the region that you do not mess with us.”
The same logic extends northward. The Hermon ridge, now in IDF hands, must remain so. A buffer zone in Syria must be maintained. “The current border was not built as a border facing an enemy state,” Smotrich said. “It is a border drawn with a pencil. The border needs to move so that the enemy is far enough away. We must burn into the enemy the consciousness of defeat and the price of defeat. The enemy does not count casualties or a collapsing economy — you need to take its territory.”
Iran: “We Are Landing Thousands of Blows”
The war with Iran — Operation Roaring Lion, launched on the last day of February — is, in Smotrich’s framing, the strategic center of everything. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the other Iranian proxies are tentacles. The decisive question is the head.
“We are landing thousands of blows — regime targets, military targets, armament targets, personnel targets, nuclear targets, and economic targets,” he said. “Because we need to impoverish this regime. It is like a boxing match in which one boxer hits the other — hits and hits and hits — and at some point he falls.”
He does not claim to know precisely when that moment comes. But the direction is clear. “Either it falls now, or it will emerge from this campaign weakened, licking its wounds with difficulty, completely impoverished, and it will fall shortly afterward. And when it falls, this world will be a much better world.”
The decision to launch the operation, he said, was not made lightly. “There are moments when not acting is not an option. When you face an existential threat, you understand that Iran did not get the hint after the previous campaign — and on the contrary, within a few months it was going to move its missile industry and nuclear industry underground. Sometimes there is no choice, and you must act.”
He also noted that Operation Rising Lion — Israel’s twelve-day war against Iran in June 2025, which Israel launched alone before the United States joined on the tenth day — had fundamentally changed the strategic landscape. That campaign established both Israel’s willingness to act unilaterally against the Iranian homeland and, once America came in, the template for the current joint operation.
“Today everyone understands that Iran threatens not only us but the entire world. Iran has demonstrated that its missiles can reach anywhere in Europe — and once such a missile carries a nuclear warhead, the entire world understands that this threat must be removed.”
The Critical Term
Asked to look a year ahead, Smotrich’s answer moves between hard strategic calculation and open theological conviction without any tension between them.
“I hope and pray that in another year there is no Iranian axis that has been threatening us for decades, no threat called Hezbollah, no threat called Hamas, and we are in Judea and Samaria with de facto sovereignty.” He wants to see the Palestinian Authority dismantled, the Abraham Accords expanded, the idea of a Palestinian state buried forever, and Israel’s borders extended at minimum to the Litani in the north and the Hermon in the northeast. “A Palestinian state is an existential threat no less than the Iranian threat,” he said. “Every resident of Kfar Saba understands today that without strong settlement, without our full control over Judea and Samaria, the pickup trucks with Kalashnikovs are a matter of time, God forbid.”
All of this, he stressed, depends on the next Israeli election — which he calls the “critical term.” Ten justices will be appointed to Israel’s Supreme Court in the coming years. A new Attorney General will be named. A new State Attorney. The judicial and political landscape of Israel for a generation will be shaped by whoever holds power after the next vote.
“If, God forbid, the left comes to power — even by the slimmest electoral margin — they will act as if they have a sweeping mandate and systematically undo everything we have built. They will appoint the Supreme Court justices, appoint a new Attorney General, appoint a new State Attorney. We will be licking those wounds for decades to come.”
For Smotrich, the military campaigns, the judicial reform, and Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria are not separate political battles — they are all part of the same unfolding story. He reaches for the prophet Micah: “As in the days of your coming out of Egypt, I will show you wonders” (Micah 7:15). This, he says, is the category of moment Israel is living through right now. “I am convinced that we are in days parallel to that prophecy — and perhaps even greater than that, as our Sages said regarding the future redemption.” He sees the evidence everywhere he looks: on the battlefield, in the economy, in the diplomatic arena, and in something harder to quantify — a visible drawing of the Jewish people back toward God. “There is a potential that one can see with one’s own eyes — in security, in the political situation, in the economy, in the return of the people of Israel to the Master of the Universe, and in tremendous processes of repentance. But to complete this, tremendous action is still needed.”
He is clear-eyed about what comes after. Even if Iran falls and Hezbollah is finished, Israel will face the Sunni axis — led by an increasingly aggressive Turkey under Erdogan, which has positioned itself as the champion of an alternative Islamist order in the region and makes no secret of its hostility toward the Jewish state. “I do not think we will reach complete rest and inheritance,” Smotrich said, “because after the Shiites, the Sunni axis awaits us.” But the direction of history, in his assessment, is no longer in question — provided Israel does not squander the window it has been given.
“We must use these two years of President Trump wisely. [The Oslo Accords handed large parts of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority — and that framework has failed catastrophically.] We must establish a completely different alternative, put it on the table at the diplomatic level, anchor it in American recognition, and make it the new reality before that window closes. The next two years will determine the outcome on every front simultaneously — Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Judea and Samaria. The next term will determine whether we complete this or lose what we have built.”
And over all of it — the economy, the war, his son recovering from surgery, the borders that must yet be secured — he has made the same declaration to God. “I said to the Almighty: I am making You my partner. I invoke Heaven’s Name over everything — now it is Yours. Everything that succeeds is Your great Kiddush Hashem — a sanctification of God’s Name.”
