As the polls closed across Israel on the evening of 29 May 1996, Israelis, and much of the rest of the world, waited with bated breath to hear the results of the exit polls, which were broadcast on Israeli television channels at 10.00 p.m. local time. It was to prove to be another decisive moment in the career of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Earlier in the day, he had admitted to feeling nervous as he cast his vote. ‘Butterflies in my stomach? Well, I had moments of hesitation, but I’ll tell you who I voted for. I voted for Netanyahu,’ he had told the gathered media scrum.1
‘Too close to call,’ announced the presenters on Israel’s Channel 1 and Channel 2 at exactly 10.00 p.m. Then a picture of the Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, flashed on the screen – both networks were calling the direct election for Prime Minister for Peres, but by a margin of error of 1 per cent.
The exit poll put Peres on 50.7 per cent with Netanyahu on 49.3 per cent.2 The television coverage then cut to the Labour Party’s election headquarters where there were muted cheers. At the Likud election headquarters there was a feeling that the night was young and that the official result would be different.
Both Netanyahu and Peres were nervously watching the coverage, trying to catch key official results as they were announced. What struck both candidates was the exit poll for the Knesset, which indicated that both the major party lists – Labour and Likud – had done badly, and the religious parties and other smaller parties had picked up a large number of seats.
Netanyahu and Peres both understood immediately that whoever won the race to become Prime Minister would face major obstacles in putting together a winning coalition of 61 seats in the Knesset. The intention of the supporters of the new electoral system of strengthening the executive over the legislature had failed.
Yossi Beilin, one of Shimon Peres’s closest allies and a minister in the outgoing government, did a brief round of local and international interviews. ‘A win is a win,’ he told journalists.3 Likud politicians were sceptical of Beilin’s comments, describing them as premature. Netanyahu’s choice for Minister of Defence, Yitzhak Mordechai, was sent out to reassure the Likud faithful and brief the international press. ‘This is just an exit poll. We will wait for the results.’4
Locked away in his private suite, Netanyahu remained confident. He and his small electoral team understood two important precedents that would impact upon the results. The first of these was the unspoken truth of Israeli politics: Israelis do not always reveal their real voting intentions to pollsters. Moreover, the majority of those who were less than truthful about how they voted on election day more often than not favoured the Likud over the Labour Party. There appeared to be a stigma for some centre-ground voters to admit to supporting the candidates of the right at any given election.
Netanyahu’s opponent in the 1996 race had a painful personal experience of this phenomenon. In the 1981 election, Peres was humiliated when Israeli television announced the exit poll results giving Labour the lead – defeating the Likud, led by the then Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Peres triumphantly appeared before jubilant Labour Party supporters to celebrate the victory, only to learn later in the night that the television exit polls had been wrong.5 In 1996, Peres wasn’t going to make the same mistake again and stayed safely locked away from his supporters and the gathered press, waiting for the official results to start to come in.
Netanyahu’s second reason for confidence was that the exit poll did not include the 150,000 absentee ballots, most of them cast by serving members of the IDF. In previous elections, the majority of the soldiers had taken a hawkish view of the peace process and supported the Likud. Given his strong emphasis on security over peacemaking, Netanyahu believed that he would gain enough of the soldiers’ votes to see him over the line.
With this in mind, at 1.00 a.m. Netanyahu appeared in front of his supporters at election headquarters. ‘The race is very, very close. Do not lose hope,’ he told his hushed supporters, who were still trying to understand the tightness of the Prime Minister’s race and the poor result of the Likud in the Knesset elections.6
Prior to going to the stage, Netanyahu’s aides had told him that barring anything unexpected among the absentee ballots he would be Israel’s next Prime Minister. Netanyahu was set to become Israel’s youngest Prime Minister, and would achieve this without having previously occupied any of the senior political offices in the country.
In the end, Netanyahu’s margin of victory over Peres was narrow, but decisive. He won 50.4 per cent of the vote to Peres’s 49.5 per cent and in terms of actual votes 1,501,023 to Peres’s 1,471,566.7 Netanyahu’s victory revealed another characteristic that came to serve him well, namely his resilience. Largely written off, including by many in his own party, after Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu – with the help of events and mistakes made by Peres’s campaign team – had become Israel’s very own ‘comeback kid’.
Netanyahu’s victory was no accident. He had run a futuristic twenty-first-century campaign against a twentieth-century one of Peres and the Labour Party. Ignoring the issues, events and Netanyahu’s own performance for a moment, there were two reasons for his victory: the huge amount of campaign funds he raised, and his appointment of an American election strategist to oversee his campaign.
Israeli elections, as a result, would never be the same again. Peres and Labour could not match the funds raised by Netanyahu, and his campaign manager, Chaim Ramon, overruled Peres’s calls for the appointment of an overseas campaign strategist. Ramon was also one of the potential successors to Peres when he stood down.
The message that Netanyahu put over in his campaign was simple: security was more important than peace. Critics rightly tried to pin him down on the issue, arguing that the two were interrelated, in that you couldn’t have security without peace.
It didn’t matter. Netanyahu’s message was slickly presented and appealed to the constituencies he was targeting to secure his victory. It would be unfair to suggest that his campaign represented a simple case of spin over substance. It did not. What it did reveal was that Netanyahu’s American style of politics worked with Israelis, and future elections in Israel would reflect this change.
On 30 May 1996, Israelis awoke to the news that they would have a new Prime Minister, but wondered what type of government he would be able to put together. For the moment, Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu basked in the glow of victory. Sara would be given a prominent role in public life, an American-style first lady. This starkly contrasted with Shimon Peres’s wife, Sonia, who had remained in the background. The how-to-handle-Sara question was discussed by Netanyahu’s aides soon after his victory was confirmed.
Political honeymoons in Israel tend to be short-term affairs, and even before he entered what were to become tortuous negotiations over the formation of his coalition government, Netanyahu had work to do to reassure the divided nation, and a sceptical world, that he was a statesman.
In what amounted to his victory speech and coronation rolled into one, he addressed a packed audience at the International Convention Centre in Jerusalem on 2 June 1996. His message was simple: the need to unify the divisions in Israel (both Jew and non-Jew) and to reassure the outside world, specifically the Clinton administration, of his intentions regarding the peace process.
Bristling with the confidence of victory, the transformation of Netanyahu from rabble-rousing opposition leader to statesman was almost complete. His speech was delivered in a tone that indicated he was the father figure of the nation. As he put it:
The State of Israel is embarking on a new path today, a path of hope and of unity, a path of security and of peace. And the first and foremost peace we must make is peace at home, amongst ourselves.
This is our most important task because in recent years the polarization in Israeli society has deepened, the gaps have become larger, and the tension has increased.
Dear friends, I see my first task as Prime Minister to mend the rifts, to reduce the tensions and to strengthen the unity and the sense of partnership, which is the basis of our existence. And I want to tell you: the first peace is peace at home.
Israeli society is blessed with many shades and persuasions. Our unity is not based on blurring the uniqueness of each group. It is expressed by nurturing tolerance and mutual respect while maintaining the religious status quo.
I am talking about a coming together of all the sectors in Israeli society, while maintaining the delicate balance between differing worldviews. This is our way and we will pursue it.8
That he talked of healing the wounds of Israeli society was lost on the Israeli left, who argued that he had been the principle cause of the polarization of society. On the peace process his words were carefully chosen to try to provide reassurance to groups with differing views on it:
The government we will form in a few days, with God’s help, will act to strengthen ties of peace which have already been forged with Jordan and Egypt. We will continue the negotiations with the Palestinians. And we will work to further peace Accords and coexistence with other Arab countries. I call upon them too: join the circle of peace.
I see our friend, the United States of America, as a true partner in this process of making real peace. The relations between the U.S. and Israel are rock solid, and I am certain they will remain that way in the next four years. Our relations are built not only on common interest. They are founded on the shared values of democracy and human dignity.9
The section contained one of the buzzwords that would be much employed during Netanyahu’s tenure as Prime Minister, namely democracy. In this respect, Netanyahu once again shifted the goalposts of Israeli politics. He was essentially a strong believer in American-style democracy over its European form. Like a man taking a new car out for a spin, Netanyahu wanted to remind the world that democracy was to be aspired to, and that making peace with the Arab world would be much simpler if the Arabs embraced democracy.
The speech in Jerusalem was Netanyahu’s coming of age. The election had provided his greatest challenge to date and his victory arguably represented the most decisive moment in his career to that point. It is worth highlighting the counterfactual to the electoral victory. If Netanyahu had lost the election, even by a small margin, he would have faced within days a challenge to his leadership of the Likud from Ariel Sharon, David Levy and one or two of the Likud Princes such as Benni Begin.
Deserted by many of the supporters who had originally backed him as the best bet of beating the Labour Party, it would have been difficult to see his leadership of the Likud surviving the onslaught from his party rivals. In all likelihood, the name of Benjamin Netanyahu would have been consigned to the dustbin of political history. Not content to play a secondary role in political life, Netanyahu would have become a successful businessman, making his fortunes in trade deals between Israeli and American companies.
The premature ending of his political career following his electoral defeat would have been harsh. His rival in the direct election for Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, had previously been unable to form governments after the 1977, 1981, 1984 and 1988 elections. Peres’s political career had not been terminated after continuous electoral failure, but there was something unique about Netanyahu that made it difficult to envisage him surviving politically after an electoral defeat in 1996.
His margin of victory in 1996 was small, but it really was the difference between being crowned king and being exiled into the political wilderness. As he looked out over the cheering masses of Likud supporters chanting ‘Bibi, Bibi’ at the International Convention Centre, he was aware just how narrow the margin was between victory and defeat, success and failure.
The long dark nights of November and December 1995 appeared a lifetime away to him, as they seemingly did to most Israelis. Back in 1995 all had appeared lost, and it had been his deep sense of optimism that things would change for the better for him personally that had kept him going.
Following the assassination of Rabin and the formation of a new government led by Shimon Peres, the first task for Netanyahu had been to convince those close to him, and in the wider Likud, that he could still win the next election. This was no easy task. In doing this, Netanyahu argued that the assassination had actually changed very little in Israeli politics.
The issues remained much the same: implementation of the Interim Agreement, personal security for Israelis, dealing with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. As the implementation of the Interim Agreement called for Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank, something Netanyahu sensed that many Israelis were not fully prepared to accept, he saw opportunities that lay ahead for him to recover politically.
Although opinion polls conducted by the Israeli media in the months following the assassination (in November and December 1995) indicated that Netanyahu and the Likud would be trounced at the next elections, he believed the numbers to be soft. In other words, the assassination did not change the deep-rooted opinions of Israelis towards the peace process. The polls reflected an emotional response to the assassination that would pass as the political agenda of the country moved on.
Netanyahu and his team argued that there was still a paradox in the mindset of Israelis towards the peace process. The 60:60 formula, as David Levy labelled it, was characterized by the two paradoxical polling numbers: 60 per cent of Israelis wanted peace and 60 per cent did not want to give up land.10 This was true for both the Syrian and Palestinian tracks of the peace process. Levy reminded everybody, including Netanyahu, that the politician who could bridge these two conflicting polling findings would win the elections in 1996.
On this score, Netanyahu was proved correct. Israeli opinion towards the Palestinian peace process was soft and did eventually return to its pre-assassination position. In order to have a chance of winning the election, Netanyahu had first to see off an internal challenge in the Likud to his leadership.
The Israeli media ran one story after another about plots within the Likud to remove Netanyahu from the leadership. His alleged indirect complicity in the assassination, articulated by members of the Rabin family, tainted him among some Likudniks as being politically unelectable.
In the end, this did not prove as difficult as first thought. In this respect, Netanyahu got the first piece of luck in the early months. The name mooted as the alternative leader in both the press and inside the Likud was that of Dan Meridor. A fellow Likud Prince, Meridor was viewed as politically clean, had a strong record in defending minorities during his stint as Minister of Justice in the previous Likud government and, crucially, was seen as a moderate.
Those in the Likud who supported a Meridor coup (and they were numerous) were aware that, given the changes made to the party’s constitution by Netanyahu, it would be difficult to replace the incumbent without his agreement. Plans were hatched for a group of party elders to approach Netanyahu to ask him to stand down for the good of the party. It was to be made clear to Netanyahu that Meridor enjoyed strong support among many in the party, and that he should exit gracefully.
Netanyahu got wind of the plot – this wasn’t difficult as the details of the potential challenge from Meridor were splashed over the newspapers and openly discussed on television news programmes. Smartly, and employing the carrot and stick approach, Netanyahu convinced Meridor not to run against him.
The carrot was the promise of a major cabinet position in any Netanyahu-led government. The stick amounted to a veiled threat to marginalize Meridor in the party by not offering him help in the Likud primaries for its Knesset list. It worked. Meridor announced that he would not run for the leadership of the Likud and the press soon lost interest in the story.
Although he didn’t realize it at the time, the ‘Meridor Plot’ was not the serious challenge to his leadership that he had presumed it to be. It transpired that Meridor had hesitated to fully commit himself to the challenge. While he dithered, Netanyahu had made his move. Netanyahu’s promise of a future senior cabinet post for Meridor would not be the last one he made.
In seeing off the challenge of Meridor, Netanyahu had achieved the first part of his political rehabilitation. He would remain as the leader of the Likud and be its candidate in the direct election for Prime Minster against Shimon Peres. Those Likudniks who had wished to get Netanyahu out had missed a golden opportunity that would not present itself again for quite some time.
With the internal challenge to his position behind him, Netanyahu was able to focus on the forthcoming election. There were concerns that Peres might try and cash in on his large lead in the polls and call early elections for the first part of 1996. For Peres, this was arguably his safest option to retain power. The timing of the election became a vitally important decision for Peres as he prepared his peacemaking strategy.
While Peres had been fully in the loop on the Palestinian track, Rabin had kept his talks through the Americans to Syria close to his chest. When Peres was informed of the negotiations after succeeding Rabin, he indicated a strong desire to try to rekindle the negotiations with the Syrians.
All of this was factored into Peres’s decision about the timing of the elections. The essence of the decision that Peres faced was whether to try to make as much peace as possible before the election, or to move the poll date forward and secure a new mandate for his policies.
In the end, afraid that any move towards early election would give the impression of cashing in on Rabin’s assassination, Peres chose not to call elections for the first part of 1996 but to try to get as much peacemaking completed before going to the polls. It was a brave choice, but it turned out from his perspective to be the wrong one. Netanyahu – although he did not realise it at the time – had just got his second big break since the Rabin assassination, following on from the failed Meridor challenge.
At the end of 1995, lagging well behind in the polls, and with the stigma of the accusations of his role in creating the political climate that led to Rabin’s death proving hard to shake off, Netanyahu took what was for an Israeli politician a revolutionary decision. Without discussion with his close set of advisors, he decided to hire an American strategist to oversee his campaign. Today, almost every political campaign in Israel comes with American spin doctors and strategists representing the candidates. This was not the case in the mid-1990’s.
The appointment of Arthur J. Finkelstein turned out to be one of the most important and astute that Netanyahu had made up until this point in his career. Finkelstein was to take the Netanyahu political machine to new heights of efficiency in getting over his message to the Israeli public. Finkelstein’s appointment was kept secret for a long time: Netanyahu did not want to alert Peres and the Labour Party. Finkelstein checked into the King David Hotel in Jerusalem under a false name and commuted back and forth from the United States.
Finkelstein’s track record in the United States in getting Republican candidates elected was extremely impressive. He was experienced, ruthless, demanded total control over campaigns he worked on – and he was expensive. Netanyahu resolved the money issue by tapping one of his American donors, Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire, to foot the bill. It was Lauder who had recommended Finkelstein to Netanyahu, and Lauder was happy to pick up the tab.
With Lauder effectively bankrolling his campaign for Prime Minister and one of America’s most effective election strategists at his side, Netanyahu, unbeknown to Peres, was very much back in the political frame. After meeting Finkelstein for the first time, Netanyahu understood exactly what he needed to do to win the election in terms of positioning strategy and for him personally. The good news for Netanyahu was that, despite his lowly poll ratings, Finkelstein believed the forthcoming election to be highly winnable.
Any concerns that Netanyahu might have had over the reaction of his own team of advisors to his appointment of Finkelstein, and the handing over of total control to him, soon evaporated. Netanyahu’s close advisors such as Eyal Arad and Limor Livnat welcomed the arrival of Finkelstein, whom they viewed as having come to Israel on a mission to win.11
While Netanyahu was busy fending off an internal challenge to his leadership of the Likud and subsequently putting together what he viewed as a winning team for the forthcoming election, the Peres-led government moved quickly to try to implement as much of the Interim Agreement as possible before going to the polls. This proved easier than under Rabin, with the agreement very much perceived by Israelis as Rabin’s political legacy. The opposition to the agreement from Netanyahu and other opponents was toned down. This was a tactical retreat by Netanyahu who needed to rehabilitate his image with centrist parts of the Israeli electorate.
Peres made good on his word to complete as much of the implementation of the agreement on schedule – unlike the previous stages of the Oslo Accords. The planned Israeli withdrawals from West Bank cities and towns covered by the agreement were completed on time by the IDF. The exception to this was Hebron where Peres decided to postpone a partial withdrawal until after the elections.12 As Netanyahu would one day discover himself, Peres had good reason to leave the religiously sensitive Hebron until later.
Peres’s decision was largely motivated by his desire not to offend the religious parties in Israel prior to the election. It might appear strange that a leader who had been abandoned by Shas during his attempt to form a government in 1990 could believe that he stood a chance of wooing the religious voters six years later.
The Labour Party saw Netanyahu’s personal weaknesses as opening the gates of opportunity for Peres to make inroads into this constituency. More centrist elements in the party thought this all rather fanciful, arguing that Netanyahu already had the religious vote wrapped up.
With the exception of Hebron, the Peres-led government could point to major progress in the peace process with the Palestinians. The withdrawal of the IDF from key Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank meant that the Palestinian election could go ahead in January 1996. The Israeli left and the outside world viewed this important development as proof that the implementation of the Interim Agreement was progressing well.
The Palestinian elections were held on 20 January 1996, with the presidential election won by Yasser Arafat with a resounding 88.2 per cent of the votes. Arafat’s Fatah movement secured 55 of the 88 seats and also won the legislative elections, which were held on the same day.
It was hoped that the achievement of a higher level of political legitimacy by Arafat would increase his scope and willingness to deal with the Palestinian rejectionist groups to the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu argued that it would make little difference and that Arafat would not offer full security cooperation with Israel. Whatever Netanyahu’s viewpoint, it was abundantly clear that Arafat’s victory in the elections – described by observers as generally fair and open – did enhance his international standing.
Unbeknown to Netanyahu, although he did suspect it, Peres, as well as pushing the Palestinian track forward, was also involved in secret negotiations with the Syrians. Peres had succeeded in getting the talks restarted by agreeing to discuss not only security-related issues, but a wide range of subjects, including water rights.
The talks that took place in Washington were led from the Israeli side by Yossi Beilin, and were thought to be making some progress. Peres, however, was unable to translate this into either an agreement or even the holding of a summit meeting with President Assad.
In the end, with the Syrian track unlikely to produce a quick breakthrough and with final status talks with the Palestinians due to start in May 1996, Peres was left with little choice but to bring the elections forward from November to the end of May.
Netanyahu, Finkelstein and the rest of team were prepared for the new date and ready to execute the closely guarded plans the American had made for the campaign. While the Israeli press still labelled Peres the favourite to win the race, there was a quiet confidence in the Netanyahu camp that, if their candidate did not make any mistakes, he would be victorious.