For much of the world, Benjamin Netanyahu is a right-wing nationalist zealot, but for many Israelis he is too centrist, too soft on the Arabs, and backs down too easily in a fight. One thing is clear; Netanyahu has become a hugely polarizing figure in Israel, the Middle East, the United States and the wider world.
The story of Netanyahu’s meteoric rise to power, his ability to survive scandals and political crisis that would have finished off most leaders, as well as his famed capacity for making political comebacks, all makes for a fascinating narrative. His story is also the story of our times, and Netanyahu himself is a product of these times.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been at the centre of Israeli and Arab–Israeli politics since 1990, when he became the Israeli voice for CNN and its coverage of the Persian Gulf War and the preceding political crisis. His night-time interviews (prime time in the United States), sometimes given when Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles were falling on Israel, coincided with the television news revolution that made 24/7 broadcasting the norm.
With his soft American accent, sound bite answers and telegenic face, Netanyahu became an overnight international star. He even had a memorable nickname, ‘Bibi’, that made him all the more engaging to presenters and audiences in the United States.
For decades, Israel had been crying out for a spokesman who could articulate its point of view in a manner that would be easily digestible for an international audience. In 1990, Netanyahu’s boss, Yitzhak Shamir, a veteran from the pre-state Jewish militias, spoke heavily accented English (and heavily accented Hebrew for that matter) – with a slow, quiet, flat voice which was only occasionally punctuated by rises in intonation (more often than not in the wrong places).
Although not in the government at the time, the former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was always keen to put himself forward to deal with the foreign media. While more articulate than Shamir (in both English and Hebrew), Rabin spoke as slowly and quietly as a grandfather trying to coax a grandchild to sleep. The list could go on, but suffice it to say that the arrival on the international media stage of Netanyahu was a hugely important moment not only for him, but for Israel and its efforts to get its message across to an often sceptical international press corps.
Netanyahu’s appearance on the centre stage represented part of a wider cultural revolution in Israel that ushered in an Americanization of its politics, media and business. In many ways, Netanyahu was the catalyst for these changes and for the shift away from the East European-influenced culture of the founding fathers (and mothers) of the State of Israel, towards a more modern style of politics.
Television studios soon replaced smoke-filled rooms. American spin doctors were hired to guide their candidates through the maze of new media, and direct on style and manner when communicating with the electorate.
Later came American-style primary elections that were meant to reconnect Israeli politicians with the voters, but instead highlighted the new centrality of money, and the ability to raise it in staggering proportions. With money came corruption, and with corruption came prosecutions, and eventual loss in belief of the political system. As for Netanyahu, it is worth remembering that he helped usher in this political revolution even before he had held a cabinet post or any local leadership position.
Netanyahu was given television time that was well beyond his rank of a deputy Foreign Minister (Shamir had appointed him to the role so that he could keep a close eye on the Foreign Minister who the PM didn’t trust). He never seemed to be far from a television studio. His aids recount that he carried up to six shirts each day (all the same colour) and was always carefully groomed as if he were living on the small screen.
On Israeli television, his Hebrew language sound bites were just as tight and well delivered as his English ones, and called for a new domestic political agenda. The centre of this was a proposal to change Israel’s election system to allow separate votes for Prime Minister and for the Knesset (parliament). Early on in his political career, and perhaps a tad vainly, Netanyahu thought of himself as being more popular with the Israeli public than the Likud party of which he was a member.
For a time, the story turned sour. Events ganged up on Israel’s young rising star as he started to make basic political mistakes. ‘All talk and no substance’ said a veteran member of Netanyahu’s own Likud party. And the charge was repeated across the country as Netanyahu struggled to come to grips with new political realities in Israel, the Middle East and beyond.
The Likud party lost to Yitzhak Rabin’s Labour Party in the 1992 Israeli elections and found itself out of power for the first time since 1977. The old guard of the Likud was ushered away, either willingly or with a firm push. Many Likud party members saw Netanyahu as the man of the hour, the youthful, charismatic politician who could lead the party out of the political desert of opposition and back to its rightful place at the centre of power in Israel.
For the first time in its history, the party allowed all of its members to select its leader – and Netanyahu won a comfortable victory. Two important veterans of the party leadership, Ariel Sharon (who didn’t run, rightly believing that Netanyahu would win) and David Levy, refused to accept Netanyahu’s legitimacy to lead the Likud. They promised to challenge his leadership at a later date, and both were true to their word.
To make matters worse, Netanyahu became a victim of the political revolution for a while. Soon after he arrived at Likud party headquarters in Tel Aviv to start the revitalization of the party, he discovered that the Likud was effectively broke. The party had blown large amounts of cash it didn’t have, but had borrowed from banks on the failed 1992 election campaign. Fundraising, as a result, in both Israel and abroad became a key part of his job and this impacted upon his own political strategy for positioning the Likud at the political centre-right of Israeli politics.
The most well-funded of the major political groups were the settlers – with groups such as Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful) able and willing to help Netanyahu. Naturally, there was a political price involved in this, and the Likud leader moved closer towards the settlers, and further away from the political centre-right he knew he needed to dominate if the Likud were to return to power.
The disconnect between the financial needs of the party and its political needs was exposed by the signing of the Oslo Accords by the Rabin government and Yasser Arafat’s PLO in September 1993. To the outside world, the Oslo Accords were the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down – in that it was widely welcomed, but nobody was particularly sure what lay at the end of the yellow brick road.
From the majority of Israelis who watched the White House signing ceremony transfixed to their television screens, there was at least tepid support for the peace deal. For Netanyahu, however, the sight of Yasser Arafat hugging an Israeli Prime Minister was almost too much to bear. And here, his personal narrative of his childhood, upbringing and family history comes to the fore – as an expression of the moral as well as political disgust and distress that Israel could have let Arafat into the peace process.
This profile uses the juncture of the Oslo Accords to take the reader back to Netanyahu’s formative early years. Among ordinary Israelis there is a disjuncture between Netanyahu the leader and, when the lights go off and the camera is not running, Netanyahu the man.
You can ask most Israelis to name three aspects of the personal life and history of their second longest serving PM and they will probably respond with information about his wife, his fondness for Cuban cigars and that his brother was Yoni Netanyahu.
Put simply, Israelis know very little about their PM’s personal history and what makes him tick. In addressing this disconnect the book looks at the two key Netanyahu family members to help explain his strong ideological and personal incomprehension towards the Accords: his father, Benzion, a scholar of Jewish history and the Zionist political movement, and his elder brother, Yonatan (Yoni), one of Israel’s most decorated soldiers.
Both family members had a profound influence on the character of Bibi the politician, and, a point that is most often overlooked, his sense of detachment and loneliness at being a perennial outsider even in his own party. Benzion Netanyahu helped shape his son’s hawkish views towards the Arabs.
Central to Benzion’s scholarly work was the traditional Revisionist Zionist ideology as articulated by the Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In essence, the Jews faced racial discrimination and any attempts to try to reach compromise with the Arabs were futile. In other words, the Arabs would never come to accept the existence of the State of Israel.
From his father’s thinking his son developed a sense of self-sufficiency and need to plan for a permanent existence, as Israelis are fond of saying, ‘in the dangerous neighbourhood of the Middle East’. He also inherited from his father a strong belief that Israel could only achieve successful relations with stable democratic states where regimes were changed by the ballot box and not by the gun. Much to the disappointment of his son, Benzion never achieved mainstream acceptance for his work on Jewish history, and remained on the fringes of international academia.
Yoni Netanyahu was charismatic and a brilliant soldier and officer, who served in and commanded one of the most elite units in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), known in Hebrew as Sayeret Matkal (Israeli special forces). Like many older/younger brother relationships, Yoni was a hero to Bibi – and the man he most wanted to emulate. Bibi followed in his brother’s footsteps joining Sayeret Matkal, but was not considered to be senior officer material.
He did, however, take part in one of the most famous Sayeret Matkal operations, the storming of a Sabena passenger airliner at Lod Airport that had been hijacked by members of Yasser Arafat’s Black September group on route to Tel Aviv in 1972. His Sayeret Matkal commander that day was Ehud Barak, who later succeeded Netanyahu as Prime Minister in 1999, and subsequently served as Netanyahu’s Minister of Defence in his second government.
In 1976, Yoni’s death during another daring Israeli mission to rescue over a hundred hostages held at Entebbe in Uganda left a deep void in his younger brother’s life. Yoni was the only Israeli casualty of the operation, which was later retold in two Hollywood films. His younger brother placed the blame for his brother’s death squarely on the shoulders of the PLO, and its leader, Yasser Arafat. Following Yoni’s death, his younger brother became the guardian of his memory and the protector of his name.
It also helped motivate him to become a self-taught expert on international terrorism, publishing books and articles that called for Israel and the Western Powers to take a tough line against terrorists. This expertise proved to be the catalyst for Netanyahu’s initial political ambitions and decision to devote himself to politics rather than business.
When Netanyahu witnessed Rabin shake Arafat’s hand in 1993, his response was a mixture of political disgust and personal anguish. Moreover, Netanyahu vowed, at the time, that he would never be put in a position of having to deal with or meet Arafat, who he saw as the unrepentant and unreformed godfather of international terrorism.
The toxic mixture of abhorrence and distress at the signing of the Oslo Accords can partly explain why the Netanyahu bandwagon derailed in the period from September 1993 up until the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. This book recounts in detail the events of 1995, Netanyahu’s annus horribilis. During the course of that year Netanyahu’s political immaturity, inexperience and apparent superficiality were all ruthlessly exposed, as suicide attacks from Hamas and Islamic Jihad killed Israeli citizens.
As is traditional in Israel, when the country is under attack Israelis shift to the right politically speaking. This quickly translated into a large lead for Netanyahu’s Likud over Rabin’s Labour Party in opinion polls. Unless Rabin was willing to abandon or freeze the implementation of the Oslo Accords (and there is evidence that he was considering such moves), Netanyahu looked likely to achieve his aim of becoming Prime Minister.
The book recounts, in chapter four, the events surrounding the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 and the reasons why many Israelis felt that Netanyahu was partly to blame for creating the conditions that allowed an extremist right-wing Jew to kill the Prime Minister. The rise in political violence prior to the assassination was put down to Netanyahu’s fiery oratory and harsh anti-Rabin remarks at anti-Oslo political rallies.
The assassination of Rabin proved to be Netanyahu’s darkest moment, both as a man and a political leader. He survived calls to resign as head of the Likud for largely two reasons: the alternative leader, Dan Meridor, dithered at this key juncture, and both Sharon and Levy felt the timing was wrong.
Both Netanyahu and the Likud took a hammering in the polls throughout December 1995 and January 1996. When the radical Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad carried out a new wave of suicide attacks in February and March 1996, however, the polls in Israel showed the parties once more neck and neck.
This book shows how Netanyahu came to power in the 1996 elections and how his government lurched from crisis to crisis before collapsing in 1999. It then focuses on his years in the wilderness and his return to power. Its key aim is to fill the void, by presenting a clear picture on this complex man, who is viewed as being both strong and weak at the same time.