Successful or not, all careers have decisive moments along the way, the importance of which is only understood in retrospect. On a cold, clear January night in Israel in 1991, Benjamin Netanyahu experienced his first decisive moment which would catapult his career into a new orbit, and make him an international television star at the dawn of the era of 24/7 global news networks.
On 17 January 1991, the Persian Gulf War began when the United States-led coalition launched massive air strikes against Iraqi forces. The following night Netanyahu was in a CNN studio in Israel giving a routine interview to the network when the warning sirens sounded to signify an incoming missile attack.
It was a time of high tension in Israel, with Saddam Hussein promising to attack the Jewish state with Scud missiles containing chemical warheads. In the weeks leading up to the war, gas masks had been distributed to all Israelis, who were told to prepare a sealed room in their homes to try to help reduce the effects of a chemical attack.
In the television studio, Netanyahu, the CNN correspondent Linda Scherzer and the rest of the CNN team donned their gas masks and continued with the interview. Scherzer addressed Netanyahu by his nickname ‘Bibi’ and asked him a routine question about his reaction to comments made earlier in the night as to how Israel would respond to any attack from Iraq.
His response, slightly muffled by the gas mask, came over as strong and resolute: ‘What it does demonstrate in a dramatic way is the threat that we are facing – and we would like to see that threat removed.’ Next came one of those perfect sound bites that would characterize his television persona: ‘I cannot tell you when: I cannot tell you where and I cannot tell you how, but we will make sure that Israel is safe.’
The reality of the interview was quite shocking. Here was a deputy minister of the Jewish state donning a gas mask against a possible chemical attack half a century after the Holocaust. The appalling significance of this point was largely lost on the television audience as ‘Sheriff Netanyahu’ tried to lay down the law to Saddam Hussein.
From a television perspective, the interview was brilliant political drama, and herein lay the crux of the debate about ‘Bibi’. He was theatrical, compelling and convincing, but his words lacked any real attachment to political reality. As we now know, Netanyahu was no better informed about Israel’s ‘when, where and how’ response to an Iraqi attack than the journalist who asked him the question.
He was a deputy minister who did not sit on the Israeli Security Cabinet; he was not a trusted confidant of his boss, the Israeli Prime Minister, and he was not privy to any substantive discussions about Israel’s response. He was essentially a spokesman winging it, but doing it with some style. In retrospect, the performance was of greater importance than the quality of the script.
Straight after the interview, Netanyahu became hot property. All the news networks wanted him on their shows and he soon assumed the role of the main Israeli spokesman during the war. In Israel, much of the Hebrew press mocked Netanyahu’s style. All drama and no substance was the general consensus among Israeli journalists. They weren’t alone. Several leading members of the Likud argued that Netanyahu was a political lightweight who, sooner or later, would fade into the background.
Most Israelis simply didn’t get him, or like him. Amidst a political culture that was characterized by its insular nature and with a small, centralized elite that was largely detached from the changes that were taking place as a result of the media, Netanyahu didn’t fit in. Within the international media, it was a completely different story. After Netanyahu’s gas mask interview, news networks across the globe couldn’t get enough of him. At the time of the Persian Gulf War and beyond, Netanyahu found himself being taken more seriously by foreigners than by his fellow Israelis.
This under-estimation of Netanyahu’s ability by Israelis helped explain why his political rivals did not attempt to block his career at this early stage. It would be folly to suggest that the interview for CNN and the subsequent ones he gave to the international press during the war were only important for the advancement of the career of this ambitious politician. They were not. The timing, style and tone of the message could not have been better for Israel, which found itself diplomatically isolated, and whose public relations efforts to present its side of the story had hitherto been mediocre.
The political career of Netanyahu began before 1991, but it was during this transitional year for Middle Eastern and world politics that he came to prominence as the spokesman for a small nation that once again found itself at the centre of dramatic international events. Prior to 1991, the energetic and ambitious would-be politician had been based at the centre of the diplomatic world in the United States: from 1982 as deputy head of the Israeli mission to the United States, and from 1984 to 1988 as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
Both postings provided a whirlwind of opportunity to build a profile and for networking, which Netanyahu grasped with both hands. Later in 1988, largely on the back of his success in the United States, and his father’s long-standing connection with the revisionist Zionist movement, he had been elected to the Israeli Knesset on the list of the Likud. Soon after, he had been appointed as deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs – and this was the position he still held in 1991. It was a relatively junior role within the Israeli government, but it provided him with open access to diplomats based in the country and to the foreign media.
It is important to remember that Netanyahu did not appear out of nowhere. Previously, he had been identified in Israel as one of the ‘Likud Princes’, a small group of young Likudniks whose speedy elevation to national leadership was based on the centrality of their fathers in the movement. In a small country where the elites are centralized and tightly bound, this initial help up the diplomatic and political ladder remained an important factor in kick-starting the careers of the privileged.
At the start of the 1990s, Netanyahu would have to be characterized as something of a late bloomer within this group, with several of the other so-called Likud Princes occupying loftier positions than the deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. The time Netanyahu had spent in the United States proved to be very useful in the long run, but in the short term it gave several of his political rivals in the Likud the opportunity to steal a march on him.
Where Netanyahu stood head and shoulders above his peers, however, was in his oratory. Arguably, this was to become the single most important factor in Netanyahu’s rise to the top, and in his ability to hold on to power, sometimes against all the odds. It was a skill he had cultivated during his university days, and had perfected in the corridors of power in Washington and at the United Nations.
Many people can still recall the first time they saw Netanyahu interviewed on international television channels and the lasting impression it made on them. There had been reports circulating among the foreign diplomatic corps, and intelligence officers based in Tel Aviv, about this articulate, young, telegenic Israeli politician who spoke beautiful English with a clipped American accent.
All of this was in contrast to most of the other members of the higher echelons of the Israeli political elite who generally either mumbled, or barked, their way through speeches and television interviews. More often than not they spoke in grammatically confused, unfinished sentences with heavy accents that revealed their East European origins. In Hebrew, their articulation was usually equally poor with several leaders using the lowest forms of the language.
There had been historic exceptions to this rule on both the English and Hebrew language fronts, but by 1991 these leaders had long exited the political arena. So in retrospect, although nobody gave it much thought back in 1991, the timing of Netanyahu’s arrival on the international stage could not have been better for the man, and, from a public relations perspective, for Israel.
The timing was perfect for Israel for a number of reasons. It is important to go back, for a moment, to the long hot summer of 1990. Israel was heading towards one of its decisive moments when a clash between the newly installed ultra-nationalist governing coalition and the outside world appeared inevitable.
The government, which was led by the veteran Yitzhak Shamir, was arguably the most hawkish in Israeli history and included parties from the far-right as well as the religious parties. Naturally, its composition and policies did not go down well in Washington, where there was a growing sense of polarization of opinion about Israel. While support was still relatively strong on Capitol Hill, at the White House there was a deep sense of frustration that the Israelis were seemingly not interested in moving the peace process forward.
Specifically, President George H. W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, were alarmed at the pace of Israeli settlement in what was described by the State Department as the Occupied Territories. The fear was that it was the intention of the Israeli government to settle widely in the West Bank (and to a lesser extent the Gaza Strip).
Bush and Baker had adopted a more critical line towards Israel from the outset of their administration, in January of the previous year, than the previous administration of President Ronald Reagan. For its part, the Israeli government made no secret of its desire to settle widely in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the intention of changing the facts on the ground: specifically altering the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in the area. The end of the Cold War was drawing near and with the Soviet Union allowing its large Jewish population to emigrate to Israel, there appeared a plentiful supply of immigrants for Israel to settle in the West Bank.
On top of this there was an ongoing Palestinian Intifada (uprising), which had started in December 1987. While the intensity of the campaign, characterized by stone-throwing Palestinian youths, was diminishing, the political and public relations damage it inflicted upon Israel was not over.
For more than two years, American news networks had regularly broadcast scenes from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of Israeli soldiers using live rounds and forceful non-lethal measures against the stone-throwers. The resulting heavy casualties among the Palestinians led to calls for greater American pressure to be brought to bear on Israel to show greater restraint.
Through the first part of the summer of 1990, the world waited for the catalyst that would spark what was expected to be one of the biggest diplomatic crises in US–Israeli relations. Then, as so often happens in the Middle East, while people are eagerly watching one area something quite unexpected happens elsewhere, which changes nearly everything.
On 2 August 1990, the world awoke to the news that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi armed forces had invaded Kuwait. Few, if any, European, American or Arab diplomats or intelligence services had foreseen the invasion. Within 48 hours Iraqi forces were in complete control of Kuwait, and the world speculated as to whether Iraq would push on into Saudi Arabia.
Many Middle Eastern experts at the time of the invasion were left dazed and confused by the invasion. One thing was clear from the outset, however: the old bipolar lines of the Arab–Israeli conflict, which had dominated the region’s recent history, were about to become very blurred.
The diplomatic crisis and eventual war that resulted from the Iraqi invasion did lead to major developments and changes. One of the most significant was the arrival on the international political and media stage of Benjamin Netanyahu. In short, it made a star of this previously little known junior Israeli politician.
Without the Iraqi invasion, Netanyahu might very well have reached the highest circles of political power in Israel, but it is less likely that his rise to the apex of power in Israel would have been so meteoric.
The crisis and eventual war led to a number of firsts, new alliances and developments on the political side as well as on the battlefield. One area that is sometimes overlooked in today’s world of instant online news is that the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first 24/7 cable news conflict. The war as a result helped make not only Netanyahu, the interviewee, but also the news presenters of Ted Turner’s CNN.
The brief that Netanyahu was left with – to act as the spokesman for Israel’s defence in the international media – was a difficult one. Soon after Iraq’s invasion the Bush administration set out with the aim of building as big a coalition as possible for a potential military campaign against Saddam Hussein.
At the centre of this coalition were the Arab states. President Bush made it clear that he wanted as many of them to commit forces to the Allied coalition as possible. Sensitivities in Washington centred upon allowing any military action against Iraq by the United States to be perceived as a modern take on the crusades.
As a result, not for the first time in its short history Israel found itself as something of a strategic liability to United States policy aims in the Middle East. The conventional wisdom in Washington was that the Arab states would not join any coalition that contained Israeli military forces, either directly or indirectly.
One Arab who was acutely aware of this point was Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader announced that if Iraq were to be attacked by the US-led coalition, he would respond by launching missile strikes against Tel Aviv, with the intention of bringing Israel into the war and thus splintering the coalition.
During the intensive diplomatic talks to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis, Saddam Hussein attempted to link a potential Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to an Israeli one from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Once again, the subtext to this Iraqi manoeuvre was to try to sow the seeds of division within the US-led coalition. In Israel, Saddam’s attempts at the linkage were viewed with considerable concern.
The former Prime Minister and veteran Labour Party politician Yitzhak Rabin briefed the international press corps, pointing out that he feared the world would pay Saddam Hussein with Israeli currency. Rabin’s slightly cryptic comments revealed the concerns of many Israelis, that the United States might be willing to eventually cut a deal with Iraq, which would see it apply additional pressures on the Israelis to make far-reaching concessions to the Palestinians.
The final parts of the complex jigsaw puzzle that Netanyahu faced as he entered the international stage centred upon the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and its leader, Yasser Arafat. At the key juncture of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait the PLO found itself knocking on the doors of the White House in Washington and 10 Downing Street in London.
Arafat and the PLO had seemingly renounced violence on 13 December 1988, and accepted a two-state solution for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In essence, this meant that the PLO had effectively recognized Israel’s right to exist within its 1967 borders, with the PLO-proposed Palestinian state being limited to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Naturally, the United States and European leaders welcomed this shift in policy as well as Arafat’s public declaration of it at the United Nations. The PLO leadership believed that it had met the criteria that Washington had set it as pre-conditions for being allowed to enter the Washington-led diplomatic talks on the Israeli–Palestinian track of the Middle East peace process.
Netanyahu’s boss, Yitzhak Shamir, viewed Arafat’s statements and the changes in PLO policy as a trick.1 Whatever Arafat’s and the PLO’s motives, this shift, by the summer of 1990, was starting to have the desired effect from a Palestinian perspective. The period of quarantine during which the Americans wished to test the sincerity of Arafat and the PLO’s commitment to non-violence and acceptance of the two-state solution was drawing to a close.
The Bush administration appeared increasingly willing to involve Arafat and the PLO in the process, as did several European leaders. This was not good news for the Israeli government trying to deal with its increasingly prickly relationship with Washington.
In Europe, while opposition to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait remained strong, there was a feeling that Israel had made an already bad situation worse with its seeming intractability towards the Palestinians. Saddam Hussein’s attempts to link resolution of the Palestinian issue to that of the Iraqi–Kuwaiti issue had resonated in some European capitals that were already more receptive to Arafat’s message than the United States had been.
The charge made by Saddam Hussein of the West’s double standards in dealing with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Iraqi one of Kuwait, while clearly aimed at sowing the seeds of division, appeared to make sense to some Europeans who were determined to avoid an armed confrontation with Iraq. Among the Palestinians, Saddam Hussein’s linkage was hugely welcomed, as was his call for the destruction of Israel.
There were political ramifications for all of this, with Yasser Arafat voicing his support for Iraq and thus distancing himself from the American-led coalition. At the end of the war, this was to prove one of the costliest mistakes of Arafat’s career. At the onset of the war, however, the pressure was firmly on Israel.
When all these international factors were taken together it meant that, when Netanyahu appeared on international television essentially spinning Israel’s position, he was operating from an apparent position of weakness. To a certain extent this made his performances in the media during the crisis and resulting war all the more compelling and impressive.
When the war started, Netanyahu was on television screens across the globe. ‘We know how wars start, but we don’t know how they end’ was the message he put out when asked how he envisaged the war developing. Dressed in dark suits, crisp white shirts and club striped ties, he acted as the Israeli point man for the foreign media. All wars have been important for Israel, but the Persian Gulf was different in many respects from previous ones, and Netanyahu’s performance crucially had to reflect these changes.
When, on the second night of the war, Saddam Hussein attacked Israel with the first of the 39 Scud missiles launched during the course of the conflict from western Iraq aimed at Tel Aviv, and the rest of Israel’s coastal areas, it was the first time that Israel’s major population centres had come under direct missile attack. While today this has become more commonplace in subsequent Israeli wars, with both Hamas and Hezbollah being characterized by missile strikes targeted against Israeli cities, in 1991, it was something new for Israelis to have to contend with.
In maximizing his threat to Israel, Saddam Hussein declared that the missiles would carry chemical warheads that would cause massive casualties. In the weeks prior to the war, Israelis became accustomed to carrying gas masks everywhere they went and preparing a shelter in their homes. In order to try to lighten the fears a little, Israeli children and young women decorated their gas mask cases, thus making them into something approaching a fashion accessory.
With the threat of being killed by an explosion from a Scud or from the potentially deadly chemical fallout, thousands of Israelis simply packed their bags, left Tel Aviv and headed for Eilat, in the south of the country, or Jerusalem, where they believed (correctly) that Iraq would not dare bomb.
In the end, the Scud missile threat was partially neutralized by the inaccuracy of the missiles – they were operating very close to or even beyond their maximum range – and by Allied bombing and sabotage efforts against the mobile Scud launchers in western Iraq.2 At the outset of the war, the United States, desperately trying to keep Israel from retaliating to the Scud attacks, rushed Patriot defensive missiles to Tel Aviv that aimed to shoot down the incoming Scuds.
The supply of the Patriot missile batteries was a major public relations triumph in reassuring Israelis, but actually had little impact on the war. A leading member of the Israeli government said after the war that the missiles had only intercepted a couple of Scuds and that the collateral damage from the Patriots was as significant, if not greater, than the damage caused to Israel by the Scuds.
Perhaps the biggest lesson Netanyahu took from the attacks on Israel related to the response of the Israeli Prime Minister to the Scud attacks. Twelve days before the first Scud missile was launched against Israel, while Netanyahu was reminding the world of Israel’s right to self-defence and its history of retaliation along the lines of an eye for an eye, Israel’s Prime Minister slipped quietly out of the country with two of his advisors and a senior Israeli Defence Forces commander, General Ehud Barak.
Their mission was a private meeting with King Hussein of Jordan in his country house near London in order to finalize a secret agreement between Israel and Jordan.3 Shamir and his team spent the weekend at the King’s residence, coming to an important understanding with the King.
In essence, Israel and Jordan agreed that Israel would not violate Jordanian air sovereignty: this made it very difficult for Israel to mount bombing raids on Iraq. In return the King promised to prevent Iraqi planes flying over Jordan, which made it difficult for Iraq to bomb Israel.4 The King also banned Iraqi troops from entering Jordan. This move, in turn, removed the threat of an Iraqi land-based attack on Israel.
Netanyahu was not privy to these discussions or the outcome of the meeting. As ever, Shamir played his cards close to his chest, not officially informing the United States of the talks or their outcome, as well as keeping most of his political colleagues in the dark. The agreement worked and Israel did not respond to the Scud attacks. The Israeli Air Force was readied for attacks over Iraq, which avoided violating Jordanian airspace by flying first south rather than east.5 The missions, however, were cancelled, many at the last minute, due to Shamir’s intervention or poor weather.
Shamir’s restraint was widely welcomed by both the United States and by the majority of the Israeli public. On a strategic level, his actions helped keep Jordan out of the war and prevented a potential Iraqi invasion or internal coup. It was a sign of the relatively lowly political position of Netanyahu that he was kept largely uninformed by Shamir about the strategic agreement with Jordan. Opinion polls conducted at the end of the war in Israel gave Shamir a significant bump in support for both his leadership and for the Likud.
Support for Netanyahu deepened during the war, where he was seen as having effectively won the public relations battle against the Arabs and other anti-Israel groups. His impressive performance meant that he had arrived on the political scene and the political agenda appeared to be moving in his direction. As the internal political fallout from the war developed in Israel, it soon became clear that Netanyahu’s star was burning brighter, but there were several other Likud Princes who appeared better placed to succeed the high-flying Shamir when he chose to step down as leader.
There were also two other senior members of the Likud, Ariel Sharon and David Levy, both older than the Likud Princes, who believed themselves to be strong candidates to succeed Shamir. Not all Likudniks were taken with Netanyahu’s style. Many felt him to be something of a theatrical performer who lacked depth: a classic case of style over substance. More problematic for the relative newcomer to politics was his lack of a real power base within the party organs, the majority of whose members were tied to Sharon, Levy or one of the more senior Likud Princes.
Netanyahu, however, was making big plans to deal with this problem, and also to effectively bypass some of the party institutions. In the meantime, there was much public relations work to do for Israel’s unofficial spokesman in the arena of the Arab–Israeli conflict.