Soon after the polls closed on 23 June 1992, Israeli television announced dramatically that there had been a (second) political upheaval. Labour under Rabin had replaced Likud as the single biggest party in the Knesset. The electorate had punished the Likud. Its number of seats fell to 32, some 12 fewer than the 44 seats the Labour Party secured.
Almost immediately, senior figures in the Likud attempted to blame one another for the poor showing in the polls. Amid all the recriminations in the party, there were clear reasons for the defeat. Netanyahu, who by virtue of being benched for large parts of the campaign emerged relatively unscathed from the defeat, carefully noted the reasons why the electorate had turned against the Likud in the election.
Most of the voters who deserted the Likud on 23 June had voted for other parties from within the Likud block. The election did not, as a result, reflect a major political realignment in Israel. Indeed, when the official results were published, it became apparent that the Likud block comprising of the Likud, along with the parties of the far-right and the religious parties, had won more votes than the Labour block.
Instead, the victory of the Labour Party was largely a technical one, caused by the divisions within the Likud and the right, along with the failure of one rightist party to win enough votes to cross the electoral threshold. The party also failed to set the correct arrangement for the transfer of its votes. The British Ambassador concurred and wrote, ‘Rabin won a narrow victory in June’.1 Netanyahu understood it was disunity and division that handed Labour its victory, and this understanding became a major influence on his political development in the years following this electoral defeat.
Netanyahu, along with all the pollsters and commentators, noted one key electoral constituency that was voting for the first time in 1992 and that turned against the Likud in their thousands. The ex-Soviet immigrants to Israel punished the Likud for the failure to devote enough resources towards their absorption into Israel. By failing to agree to the terms outlined by the Bush administration in order for the Americans to agree to $10 billion of loan guarantees, the Likud alienated one of the most significant voting groups.
Netanyahu understood two important points about the new immigrants: their vote for the Labour Party was essentially a protest vote, and the majority of the ex-Soviet Jews still held hawkish views about the conflict with the Arabs. This made them potential allies for a future leader of the Likud. For his part, Netanyahu devoted a great deal of time to developing relationships with the group, foreseeing their continued importance to the outcome of future general elections.
In Washington, President Bush and Secretary of State Baker greeted the outcome of the 1992 election in Israel as a vindication of their policy of refusing to grant the loan guarantees to Shamir. In reality, the reasons for Rabin’s victory were much more complex. Rabin and his small, dedicated team managed to run the campaign as if direct elections for Prime Minister had already been introduced. Wherever possible, the Labour Party was hidden as it was deemed to be a vote loser.
Rabin managed to blur his policy towards the settlements, arguing that there needed to be a distinction between security settlements and political ones. Cleverly, he never clearly articulated how he defined each category and the differences between them. He did talk about the need to redistribute funding away from the settlements to developing infrastructure projects within the Green Line in Israel.
In doing this, Rabin managed to retain American support without agreeing to a settlement freeze. The Persian Gulf War also played a role in Rabin’s victory, with its challenge to the notion that Israel would only be safe from attack by retaining large buffer areas of land. The range of Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles made any buffer zones redundant.
On a superficial level, Israel appeared a changed country following Rabin’s victory, one that was not only welcomed in Washington, but in Europe as well. The British Ambassador recorded his impressions:
There was a palpable air of fresh optimism and expectancy. Rabin caught the mood when he told the Knesset ‘This is a time of great opportunities . . . it is no longer that all the world is against us . . . we must overcome the sense of isolation that has held us in its thrall for almost half a century’.2
The outside world’s wish for a Rabin victory to end 15 consecutive years of Likud presence in the government was granted. Political leaders, diplomats and large parts of the international media rushed to congratulate Rabin and celebrate the apparent demise of the Likud.
In the days that followed the election, the Likud was in a state of shock. The outcome of the election had been widely predicted in opinion polls conducted by both parties and the media, but there had been a hope of a late swing to the Likud – as had happened in several previous elections. Israelis are notorious fibbers to pollsters. In previous elections, opinion poll responses had been slightly distorted by voters indicating that they were not going to vote for the Likud when they fully intended to do so.
In 1992 it was different. There was no late comeback, and no surprise outcome. The Likud awoke on 24 June 1992 to the cold reality that the party, which only 18 months earlier had appeared to be the natural party of government, now found itself in opposition.
Like most electoral defeats for political parties that have been in government for a long time, the development of a deep understanding for the reasons for the defeat did not emerge quickly.3 Instead, the party entered a period of internal bloodletting, followed by a search for quick-fix solutions to reconnect the party with the electorate.
Yitzhak Shamir’s announcement of his resignation from the leadership of the Likud came as little surprise, given his advanced age and the scale of the Likud loss. What came as a much greater surprise to the Likud, and to Israel, was the announcement by Moshe Arens – two days after the election – of his retirement from political life.
Arens was Shamir’s anointed successor, and would probably have stood an excellent chance of succeeding his old boss as head of the party. Arens’ reasons for leaving public life were complex. Publicly, he cited his own relatively advanced age – he was 67 in 1992 and if Rabin and Labour had served a full term would have been 71 at the time of the next general election. After serving in government for nearly a decade he also didn’t fancy four years on the opposition benches.4
On a political level, he argued during the press conference announcing his resignation that ‘Likud’s failure at the polls was largely because the public did not see the Greater Eretz Israel slogan [integration of the West Bank into Israel] as a sufficient response to the problems of the Occupied Territories’.5 Put simply, the Likud needed to come up with new messages in order to reconnect with key sectors of the electorate.
In Arens’ memoirs of his time in government he makes light of his decision; a brief passage dedicated to the event concludes with the words: ‘ . . . I believed in service, I do not believe in servitude. The time had come to close this chapter of my life.’6 Whatever the motives, in the blink of an eye the two veteran leaders of the Likud most responsible for its policies towards the conflict had departed front-bench politics.
For Netanyahu, the resignation of Arens left him with an opportunity he had not foreseen coming so soon. If Arens had decided to run for the leadership of the Likud, Netanyahu would have backed his old mentor and political patron. With him out of the field, there was now nothing to stop Netanyahu from throwing his own hat into the ring for the leadership election. If he were to stand a realistic chance of victory, it was clear that he would only do so if primaries were confirmed as the method for electing the new leader.
With Netanyahu’s strong support and lobbying, this prerequisite fell into place on 28 June 1992, as the Likud agreed on a system of primaries to elect all future party office holders and candidates.7 The following day, 29 June 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to run for the leadership of the Likud party.
He had already moved to recruit a small team of key advisors who were drawn from both the public and private sectors. More importantly, he had received promises of financial support from several American Jewish business leaders with whom he had cultivated relationships over the previous decade.
All but two of the other Likud Princes whom Shamir hoped would succeed him kept their powder dry and did not enter the race.8 The exceptions were Benni Begin and the ex-Minister of Transport, Moshe Katsav. Earlier in the year, on 9 March, Begin’s father, Menachem, had passed away. Menachem Begin was the giant of the Revisionist Zionist movement and his death, at the start of the election campaign, cast a long shadow over the Likud’s campaign.
Benni was little like his father: he largely lacked the political skills and personal charm of Menachem. Benni Begin saw the Likud’s defeat in 1992 as a reflection of internal difficulties and not a rejection of its policies towards the West Bank. He was viewed as arguably the least attractive of the Likud Princes to the wider electorate, and the major charge against him was that it was difficult to foresee him leading the Likud to victory at the next general election.
The other Likud Princes, with the exception of Katsav, held back largely to assess their chances of success. The Netanyahu candidacy dominated the print and television headlines, and it wasn’t clear if there was much room for another candidate. Once it became apparent that Netanyahu was doing well in opinion polls, the potential for a challenge from a Likud Prince further receded.
Netanyahu rapidly found himself the best organized and the highest funded of the candidates from his generation. Two big beasts from the older generation, however, waited in the wings to trip up the man they regarded as a political upstart. Ariel Sharon believed that the leadership of the Likud would be his one day. He was smart politically, and clever enough to sense that the wind appeared to be blowing in the direction of Netanyahu’s candidature. He decided to wait.
Sharon announced he would not run in this election, while making it clear that he would not be bound by the result. In other words, he would mount a leadership challenge at the time of his choosing. For Sharon, this was a near-fatal mistake. With Sharon out of the picture, albeit on a temporary basis, Netanyahu’s biggest challenger was David Levy.
Levy, the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, was a populist candidate in contrast to the ideologue Benni Begin. He described himself as an ‘opinion poll on two legs’. The two men had continued their feud from Netanyahu’s time in the ministry of foreign affairs into the internal politics of the Likud. Not surprisingly, the contest for the Likud leadership brought their personal animosity back into the public arena in a way that shocked even hardened veterans of the Likud and political commentators.
On 14 January 1993, Netanyahu appeared on television, admitted to an extra-marital affair and accused a rival in the Likud of blackmail. Extra-marital affairs were nothing new in Israeli politics, but owning up to one on television was a first – along with accusing a member of his own party of blackmailing him in order to force him to withdraw his candidature for the leadership of the party.
During the interview, Netanyahu labelled the attempted blackmail ‘the worst political crime in Israeli history, perhaps in the history of democracy’. He went on to add that ‘criminals who use the methods of the Mafia’ were behind the blackmail.9 American-style politics had just landed in Israel, with all the sickening falseness and insanity of a television soap opera.
The scandal, dubbed ‘Bibi-gate’, allegedly started when an anonymous caller telephoned his wife and threatened that an intimate tape of her husband with another woman would be made public unless he withdrew from the race. During his interview, Netanyahu admitted to the affair, said that his marriage to Sara (his third wife) was in crisis and without naming him accused David Levy of being behind the blackmail attempt.10
The interview took place in time for the Israeli press to investigate the issue and to splash the whole story over their front pages. The press soon discovered that the woman in question was a certain Ruth Bar, a media consultant who had been hired to help him with the 1992 Likud primaries. Her photograph was displayed over the front pages of local newspapers.11
Bar’s husband, who had suspected for some time that his wife was having an affair with Netanyahu, filed for divorce. While Israelis immersed themselves in the alleged details of the extra-marital sex life of the front runner in the Likud leadership race, Netanyahu’s handling of the affair raised important questions about his leadership credentials.
Netanyahu’s admission on television of the affair was widely ridiculed by his political enemies, and by large sections of the Israeli media. It was seen as a knee-jerk reaction to the alleged attempt to blackmail him. Even his advisors thought that his strategy could be seen as a panic reaction.12 The case against Netanyahu was strengthened when, despite the best efforts of the Israeli media to locate the tape, and despite Netanyahu’s admission, it was never found. Indeed, the very existence of the tape was increasingly brought into question.
The Levy camp threatened to sue Netanyahu for the damage they alleged had been done to their candidate by accusations of a blackmail attempt. ‘Bibi-gate’ did little to halt the Netanyahu bandwagon in the campaign. Opinion polls taken in the aftermath of the affair indicated that it had little impact on the intentions of Likud voters in the forthcoming leadership election. While Likud voters appeared little swayed by the scandal, there was concern over the attitude of religious voters in a national election if the self-confessed adulterer Netanyahu was the candidate of the Likud in the direct election for Prime Minister.13
Whatever was said, or agreed, in private between Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu at this point in their marriage, the result was that this was the moment when the Netanyahus became a team. Sara become a central figure in the Netanyahu camp, appearing beside her husband at political events.
Sara’s conversion from a wife who stayed in the background to her more prominent role worried many of Netanyahu’s key aides, who feared that she was not up to dealing with the kind of scrutiny that the local and international press would subject her to if Netanyahu were to win the leadership contest.14
Aides, however, soon learned to bite their tongues and keep quiet about the ‘Sara factor’, as one of them put it. At this stage, Netanyahu’s team heavily managed any contact she had with the press.15 Two things became clear: the Netanyahus were not about to separate, and Sara’s influence over her husband was substantial, including an alleged veto over who was to be admitted into his inner entourage.
For a man of such apparent charisma and charm, as well as rugged good looks, Netanyahu was not good at forging meaningful relationships with women. During his early years he attracted a number of suitors from both Israel and outside it. Some relationships broke down over his alleged infidelity, others simply through natural causes and changes in career or country of residence.
It is difficult to explain this emotional and sexual drifting. There is little evidence that points to a specific woman breaking his heart or being the love of his life. No woman appeared to have damaged him or scarred him emotionally. One of his key aides suggested that Netanyahu was so focused on political power and so much wanted to become Prime Minister that there wasn’t much room for anything more in his life.16
He enjoyed the company of women, but remained suspicious of their motives – just as he did with male friends and colleagues – and never really connected with them on a deep emotional level. He also liked his private life to remain private and this makes his public admission of guilt over the affair with Bar all the more difficult to comprehend.
The story of Netanyahu’s first meeting with Sara, and the development of their relationship, remains one of the oddities of the Netanyahu narrative that has developed and been modified over the years. Critics of Sara (and there are plenty in Israel) tell the story of the girl from a humble background meeting the jet-setting politician on a flight from Israel to the United States, on which she was an air stewardess. David Margolick, who wrote an extended character piece on Netanyahu for Vanity Fair in 1996, summed this up:
Contemporaries describe his current wife, Sara Netanyahu, who was born in a small town near Haifa to a religious family, as quite ordinary. One of Bibi’s American friends called her an ‘A-I-R-E-S-S,’ his way of telling me not just that Sara had been a stewardess when she met her husband but that she was not nearly the intellectual equal of Bibi or either of his first two wives.17
Quite soon after their first meeting, Sara became pregnant and a few months later, in March 1991, they married. It was not long after their wedding that Netanyahu began the affair with Ruth Bar, who had been brought in by Netanyahu to work on his image. Clearly, with the Likud elections so near and with political power beckoning, Netanyahu understood that the stakes were getting higher, and he simply could not behave in a manner that would allow his enemies to make political gains.
As the Likud race entered the final stages, Netanyahu tried to shift the political agenda back on to politics. The Levy camp, however, sensed that ‘Bibi-gate’ provided it with ammunition to attack Netanyahu’s lack of judgement and to illustrate that he cracked under fire. ‘This man is not fit to lead the Likud or the country’ was the spin that the Levy camp tried to put on Netanyahu’s character. It wasn’t completely successful, but Netanyahu’s actions in January 1993 raised question marks about his temperament, which to this day have not been put to rest.
At the time, Netanyahu was quick to put the attacks on his character down to either Levy or to the left-wing bias in the Israeli press. The questions about his judgement outlived the career of David Levy, and in recent years have also originated from members of the Israeli press more closely associated with the right in Israel.
After the bitter campaign between Netanyahu, the two candidates, along with Benni Begin and Moshe Katsav, awaited the results of the election on 24 March 1993 with some trepidation to see how the 145,000 Likud members had cast their ballots. In the end, Netanyahu won handsomely, taking 52.1 per cent of the votes. The margin of victory over Levy, who was second with 26.3 per cent, was gratifying for Netanyahu. Benni Begin, who polled 15.1 per cent, followed David Levy, and former Transportation Minister Moshe Katsav was last with only 6.5 per cent.
Netanyahu had easily passed the 40 per cent threshold to avoid a second round of voting. In reality, despite last-minute rumours of a decline in his support, Netanyahu proved his critics in the Likud wrong. Those who had not taken him seriously most certainly had to following this result.
His victory took place amid a worsening security situation in Israel, with a spate of attacks against Israeli citizens. Netanyahu devoted much attention during the campaign to what he saw as the failure of the Rabin-led government to deal with this threat. Netanyahu’s stump speech rhetoric was crisp and seemingly seductive:
This government says that it is impossible to fight the knifings, that it is impossible to fight terrorism. How do they put it? Terrorism has only one solution: a political solution. In other words, there is no solution to terrorism except retreat.18
He went on to attack the government’s policy towards negotiations with the Arabs: ‘In the peace negotiations, the government only offers concessions,’ he said, and the consequences for Israel would be ‘to bring the Syrian army on the Golan Heights closer to us, to shrink and reduce the size of this country, to bring the border to the outskirts of Petah Tikvah [a town just outside Tel Aviv]’.19
In his fiery victory speech he chided the government’s record, as he put it:
We can fight terror. We know how to, and we will do it! If [members of the government] don’t know how, they should step aside . . . We will, through parliamentary and other means, organize to topple this government as soon as possible.20
Brave promises from what was still an essentially inexperienced politician who, by Israeli standards, was still a member of the young guard. In retrospect, his eagerness to please the party faithful and his promise to attack the Rabin government on all issues was merely macho chest puffing, but it set the tone for his leadership of the Likud for the subsequent two years.
On internal Likud issues, Netanyahu used part of his victory speech to try to rebuild bridges with his rivals, including Levy. He failed. Levy neglected to congratulate him, and told aides that he planned to try to take over the party internal committees to make sure that his influence continued.21 Ariel Sharon continued to circle Netanyahu from the political shadows, promising the new leader that, just because he had been elected the leader of the Likud, it did not mean that he would eventually be the candidate of the Likud in the direct elections for Prime Minister.
Sharon told his supporters, the local media and anybody else who would listen that he felt he was the legitimate leader of the Likud and that Netanyahu, and his hardline rhetoric, would not bring success. It remains rare in politics for a comprehensive victory such as Netanyahu’s to be so quickly undermined by his rivals – who steadfastly refused to accept his authority.
The most striking part of the victory, noted by local journalists, was Netanyahu’s gushing tribute to his wife, whom he kissed and thanked for standing by him.22 Israelis were not used to this American-style political culture. Some journalists at the event described Netanyahu’s conduct during it as ‘stomach churning’.23 Netanyahu’s point of reference might well have been a young, pre-presidential Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign amidst the Gennifer Flowers scandal.
The link between Clinton and Netanyahu did not stop with their extra-marital controversies. Netanyahu carefully studied and learned from the Clinton political machine. Both men were highly articulate and came across well in the media. Both had also built formidable campaign machines that were backed with big money from American donors.
At the outset of their national campaigns, both men were relative outsiders, neither of them particularly liked nor rated highly by the majority of the grandees of their respective parties. In the end, both became the political stars of their generation and came to reflect the changed political culture in the era of the telegenic politician.
Despite the remaining internal challenges to his leadership, Netanyahu’s victory was quite remarkable within a movement, which, in its entire history to this point, had only been led by two leaders. The basic Likudnik rationale for voting for Netanyahu was the belief that a Likud led by him would soon return the party to what it saw as its rightful position in government.24
One thing that party members forgot, however, was that even with Netanyahu at the helm it would, in all likelihood, be another three and a half years before Netanyahu and the party were given the opportunity to win a general election.25 Before that point, Netanyahu would have to develop his credentials from leader of the opposition to become more statesmanlike. Coming as it did, in one of the most turbulent periods in Israeli history, this challenge would prove to be one of the greatest of Netanyahu’s political career.