Understanding Netanyahu

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu

Anshel Pfeffer

Basic Books

423 pages; $32

Anshel Pfeffer’s biography is superbly timed — appearing as Israeli justice closes in on a man who has been in power for nearly a decade and is a major player in what he famously calls a “tough neighbourhood” for far longer. Bibi, as he is known at home (though the use of his childhood nickname does not automatically imply affection), comes across as a more complex figure than his legendary mastery of the sound byte suggests. Family background and tribal politics are two of the main strands of his story. America, where he spent much of his early life and formative stages of his career, is another significant one.

If there is a master key to cracking the Bibi code, this insightful and readable book argues, it is his identity as someone who has always stood outside the mainstream.  Mr Netanyahu’s grandfather and father were members of the right-wing “Revisionist” movement at a time when Zionism was dominated by the left in Eastern Europe, America and Palestine. In the case of the Netanyahus, the “inability to become part of the establishment,” as Pfeffer puts it, made for unusual continuity between the generations.

Mr Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s independence and what Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”) forged one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. His experience attending high school in Philadelphia, where his father had taken an academic job, instilled in him views that were out of sync with then “little” Israel’s collectivist ethos. He has often been accused by his critics over the years of being more American than Israeli. His elder brother Yoni, an officer in the Israeli Army’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit, was a powerful influence, one magnified by grief when Yoni was killed in the Entebbe hostage rescue mission in 1976. Bibi served in the same unit. His role commemorating the fallen hero provided his first intense exposure to public life.

By the early 1980s, after studying at MIT and working as a management consultant, Mr Netanyahu was a rising star at Israel’s Washington embassy. It was there, and later as ambassador to the United Nations, that he honed his formidable public relations skills (known as “hasbara” in Hebrew), befriending columnists, talk-show hosts and influential and wealthy Jewish and other Americans, including the real-estate entrepreneur Donald Trump.  

Pfeffer is one of the smartest and most prolific of Israel’s younger generation of journalists. His work for Haaretz reflects that paper’s liberal bent, instinctively opposed to Mr Netanyahu and much of what he represents. It is hard to imagine that this author ever voted for his subject. Bibi, obsessed by hostile “left-wing” media, complained pre-emptively that this biography would be a “cartoon.” It is not: It fleshes out a superficially familiar and invariably quotable figure with a wealth of background information and analysis that provide necessary and, of course, often highly critical context. Yet it is also fair. In 1995, before the trauma of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish extremist, Mr Netanyahu was widely accused of “incitement.” Not fair, Pfeffer concludes, explaining that Mr Netanyahu nevertheless chose to ride the “far-right tiger.” 

Mr Pfeffer rightly focuses on Bibi’s attitude toward the Palestinians. In his first term of office in 1996, he inherited Rabin’s landmark Oslo agreement with the PLO, which the Likud opposed, but still grudgingly complied with. Back in power in 2009 after a period that encompassed the second intifada, Arafat’s death and Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, he came to appreciate how Oslo maintained Israel’s security while allowing settlements to expand as the American-led “peace process” went nowhere slowly. Mr Netanyahu was initially seen as committed to a two-state solution while simultaneously demanding that Palestinians recognise Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. But a few years later the most he was prepared to contemplate was a “state-minus.” Rivals further to the right do not even go that far. “The only peace he has been willing to consider,” Mr Pfeffer concludes, “is one where Israel bullies the Palestinians into submission. Until that happens, he will continue building walls.”

In recent years his “primary obsession” has been the danger from Iran, whose plans to acquire nuclear weapons (and break Israel’s regional monopoly on them) he says threaten a new Holocaust. Barack Obama’s support for the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement and his efforts to curb Israeli settlements meant that mutual loathing between president and prime minister was inevitable. Donald Trump is a different and of course unfinished story. 

Bibi’s standing has been tarnished by investigations into bribery and corruption — accused of accepting gifts of cash, champagne and cigars — and by the antics of his wife, Sara, whose tantrums and lavish sense of entitlement at public expense made for damaging leaks. For his fourth election victory in 2015 the Bibi campaign bombarded disenchanted Likud supporters with messages about the dangers of a Palestinian state and racist warnings about Arab citizens voting “in droves.” The result is an erosion of Israel’s democracy.

Still, for better or worse he embodies Israel as a modern, “hybrid society of ancient phobias and high-tech hope, a combination of tribalism and globalism.” In fact, the greatest achievement of Bibi’s career can be seen as a negative one, as Pfeffer describes it, “trying to ensure that Israel did not have clearly defined or internationally recognized borders.”

This book is a necessary contribution to understanding a high-profile and internationally contentious figure and the fractured country he has led for so long. It is, inevitably, already out of date. But Bibi’s turbulent times are not over yet. Updated editions look certain.

© 2018 The New York Times News Service