Writing about the life of Benjamin Netanyahu means producing a recent history of Israel, the Arab–Israeli conflict and US–Israeli relations. I have been following the development of his career for over 20 years, and in that time have collected a huge range of academic, and not-so-academic, sources about the subject matter.
The Arab–Israeli conflict continues to produce a huge number of books each year that are dedicated to various aspects of the conflict. For a country of only eight and a half million, Israel attracts an enormous amount of interest with studies from across the academic sphere ranging from political to economic and from legal to geographic.
In writing the book, I have made use of what is a large library of sources from the past quarter of a century. We now live in a much more instant world when even the 30-year rule for documents to be released is not as steadfast as it used to be. In light of this, I have been able to secure the release of some documents related to the period of Netanyahu’s rule under the British Freedom of Information Act.
The documents proved useful in providing background detail and the occasional revelation that surprised even such a veteran Netanyahu watcher as myself. Like all selective releases of documents, it is important to issue a cautionary note in that their value and relevance will not be fully validated until we start to get a more comprehensive release of documents starting in 2023. This release will cover the year of 1993 when Netanyahu first became the leader of the Likud.
Over the past 22 years, I have conducted many interviews with Israeli leaders and other senior politicians, ex-military and intelligence leaders, business leaders, academics, journalists and writers. Almost all had an opinion on Netanyahu and many had worked with him or against him (and in some cases admitted to doing both at different times).
I have also been fortunate in interviewing Palestinian leaders (both the old guard and the younger generation) about Netanyahu and the peace process in general. I have been particularly intrigued by the attitude of the Palestinian economic elite on the subject matter of this book. Likewise, it has been a great pleasure discussing Netanyahu with Arab leaders, senior politicians and journalists over the past quarter of a century.
Foreign diplomats who have been based in Israel and the Arab world during the Netanyahu era have also been a rich source of information. In personal interviews, and in closed seminars and conferences, they have been very forthcoming about the career of Netanyahu, and specifically his impact on the peace process.
Many officials in both London and Washington who staff the Near East desk have been extremely helpful in helping me fill in some of the missing areas. Their expertise and information gathering provide many officials with almost encyclopaedic knowledge of Israel and its foreign relations.
Most of my personal interviews were conducted on the basis of being off the record. I chose to conduct the interviews in this way, as my main purpose was to gather background information and to cross-check information. That said, a number of the interviewees were more than happy to be recorded and some of these are sourced in the notes that appear at the end of this book.
The use of interviews as the main primary source material can be problematic. Bias, political colouring, memory loss and personal narrative-building are all common problems associated with this type of research. No amount of cross-checking of interviews can remove entirely these potential shortcomings.
Recently produced television and film documentaries on Netanyahu that used ‘talking heads’ to build their narrative and arguments provided a clear reminder of the problems of using the personal witness and active participant approach to present evidence. At the time of researching and writing this book, Netanyahu remains an active politician who is relevant not only in the past tense, but also to the present day and conceivably to the future as well.
A number of important participants in the narrative of Netanyahu’s political career clearly still have an agenda to cause him as much damage as possible. Simple personal revenge against him, or a belief that he has damaged the peace process, are only some of the apparent motives for attacking him. Likewise, there remain a number of people who try to cover his many political and personal failings in order to try to protect him and his ongoing career.
So interviews can be useful, but also misleading (either deliberately or through mistakes). On their own they do not present a complete portrait of him.
Academic books and journal articles have been an invaluable help over the years. For such a small country, Israel has a large number of outstanding scholars in the fields of political science and history. The sources on Israel’s elections were particularly helpful for the book, as were the more general accounts of Israeli politics and the peace process.
For parts of the book, I have drawn from personal memoirs to add colour to particular summits or decision-making processes. I am aware that memoirs contain many of the same pitfalls as using personal interviews. In some ways they can be even more distorted as the authors have had time to carefully plan their perspective on events and personalities. Wherever possible I have tried to double sources when using this genre of writing as supporting evidence, although in some cases this was not always possible.
Articles from the print media have been enormously useful in jogging my memory about certain events, and adding new perspectives to old stories. There remains a sizeable group of veteran journalists who have spent much of their careers as Israel watchers. Their insights into Netanyahu provided a lot of important clues to his thinking, regardless of their own, and their newspapers’, politics.
The book is laced with direct quotes from Netanyahu and those figures central to the narrative. Some of these quotes are extended ones, particularly from key speeches and press statements that are of an extended nature. They are included to illustrate and underpin key moments and points in the narrative. Netanyahu’s dialogue with President Obama represents one such moment where they were vital to the narrative of the book.
Finally, listed below are sources in a select bibliography. I chose not to present an exhaustive full bibliography of secondary sources on Benjamin Netanyahu, and subjects relating to his career, in order to save space and paper. With the advent of electronic academic journal and search engines additional sources on the subject are easier to locate in 2016 than they were in 1993, when I first started working on this project.