CBN.com – While he was in Israel, Pat Robertson interviewed former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Today, in Part Two of that interview, they talk about the future of Israel's economy, and how both Israel and America are involved in fighting the war on terror.

PAT ROBERTSON: You have done a marvelous job of trying to take Israel out of the socialism of East Block countries, to bring it into the free market. Are you succeeding?

Benjamin Netanyahu: Yes, by and large, we are. You know, we have a very cohesive government. I mean the cabinet, and the coalition and the Knesset, and our Parliament is very solidly for free market, so we’ve been able to do a lot of things. We’ve cut welfare, cut government expenditure, had wage cuts in the public sector. The unions actually took wage cuts, smaller work increase but wage cuts, lowered taxes, took the pension funds away from the unions, balanced the books, appointed new management.

ROBERTSON: They let you do that?

Netanyahu: They didn’t let us, we legislated it.

ROBERTSON: Are they fighting? Are they going on strike?

Netanyahu: They tried, but it’s over with. It’s behind us. We already have new people running these things. And thank God.

ROBERTSON: I understand your welfare was going up, at what, 600 percent, as opposed to the growth of the population?

Netanyahu: The number of welfare recipients, from 1990 to the year 2002, 12 years, grew by 600 percent. Population grew by 30 percent. That’s with the influx of the Russian immigrants. So, this is 20 times more than the population. And you know a lot of people are cheating. And of course this creates this part of this Bermuda Triangle, it just rips up the economy. [unintelligible] People could be working right now, and are staying home and collecting fake money, real money for fake reasons. Then you’ve got these monopolies that take a huge drain off the economy. And then you’ve got high taxes to pay for it. And then what you get for it, you get high taxes drive more businesses out of business thereby creating more people who go into welfare. This just seals the trap. So what we’re doing is just the opposite of every one of these things. We’re cutting welfare, busting open the monopolies, bringing down taxes. And the result is, the economy has turned, and the financial markets understand it. So, capitalism in the Holy Land.

ROBERTSON: And my next question, what’s next for Bibi [Netanyahu]?

Netanyahu: When the time comes, I will run again. But at the moment I’ve got my hands full -- this major transformation of the Israeli economy. But I think the larger issue is not what will happen to me or even what will happen to Israel. We are doing all right. The larger question is what will happen to America, what will happen to the West? Because the forces that are aimed at us are merely an appendage of this large unrelenting fanaticism, this Islamist militancy that wants to reverse history, wipe away the last thousand years, especially the last 500 years of Western ascendancy and destroy the main engine of the West, which is the United States. Now they don't have the weapons to do it, but you have no doubt that say, bin Laden or the Taliban regime had a nuclear bomb, New York wouldn’t exist, and Washington wouldn’t exist. So these people are a palpable threat to our common civilization and to our future. They hate everything we cherish. They hate our freedoms, our conceptions of liberty. They hate the fact that women and men are equally enfranchised. And individual choice and individual freedom is something they absolutely abhor. They will use any weapon they have to destroy us. And the question is, what are we going to do over time to deal with that? Now we here are dealing with one extension of that diseased phenomenon and we have done a pretty good job, and the Israeli people have stood very strong. They haven’t cut, they haven’t run. And have been able to do, I think, a remarkable job in rolling back this cascade of terror. I think the American people have done a remarkable job under President Bush, and I was very pleased to see that, as they call him, the head of the snake has been found in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's capture is very symbolic and very important psychological pivot in the Middle East because these tyrants see that their day comes. And I think the root question is can the free world, and it just doesn't include Israel, and the United States, or being led by the United States. Not even Britain, where the government is with the United States but the people are divided. In Israel the people and the government are with the United States. And it is a question of whether the free countries, Western Europe which lags behind…Eastern Europe, which seems to get it a lot better -- will [they] summon the forces to bring down the regimes that threaten our future? Democratizing. I use the word democratizing instead of the word democracy, because that is a much longer process than it is in Japan, or in Germany. And stand their ground? And so far we have reasons to be optimistic not only on the Israel scene, but on the world scene.

ROBERTSON: This is a message that America needs to hear. Thank you so much. It’s always good to see you. God bless you.

Netanyahu: Good to see you.

GORDON ROBERTSON: It is a reason to be optimistic, but it’s also a reason to stand strong for Israel. I’ll give you one big reason right now. It’s out of Psalm 102. The servants of God are commanded, we are supposed to love the very stones of Jerusalem and to show favor to her dust. We are living in fulfillment of Bible prophecy right now. What Jesus said, the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Jews and Jerusalem will be trodden under the foot of the Gentiles. Once that stops -- and it stopped in 1969 -- so we are in the set time. And then your servants – that includes you and me – are to cherish her very dust and favor her stones. We need to stand with Israel in these tough times.