"Bibi: My Story" - Book Review - The Washington Post

[johnkarls]

.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/20 ... y-pfeffer/


In his memoir, Benjamin Netanyahu glides through his life story
The once (and future?) prime minister frames himself as a principled defender of Israel and highlights his important relationships, while avoiding complexities

Review by Jane Eisner - a regular Book World contributor, is the director of academic affairs at the Columbia Journalism School.

November 9, 2022


When Benjamin Netanyahu was ousted from power in 2021, ending an extraordinary reign as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, he did what so many political leaders do when they leave office, willingly or not. He wrote a memoir.

“Bibi: My Story” was written in longhand over nine months and was scheduled to be published in English and Hebrew in November. But when the most recent Israeli elections — the fifth in less than four years — were set for Nov. 1, the tome, weighing in at more than 650 pages of text, was published instead in mid-October, quickly finding a spot on many bestseller lists.

In the latest election, Netanyahu accomplished what few of his peers ever could: He won what passes in Israel as a resounding victory, granting him the opportunity to become prime minister for a third time. And rather than reading like a typical self-serving retrospective, a classic bid for immortality, his memoir now becomes a reintroduction to a man who has rarely been out of the public eye for a quarter-century — and a challenge to those searching for more than a self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing narrative.

For balance and a fuller picture of the man, it is necessary to look beyond Netanyahu’s own reflections. That’s why we turn to biography. A biographer applying a skeptical, nuanced eye to the life of a consequential figure such as Netanyahu often fills in context missing from a memoir.
As the Indian biographer Ramachandra Guha has noted, a memoir, especially by a politician, is always a defensive exercise, but a “biographer is an artist under oath.”

Reading Netanyahu’s reminiscences alongside the evenhanded 2018 biography “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu,” by the respected Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, reveals Netanyahu’s genius at reframing his own story.

Netanyahu’s many fans, arguably even more on the American right than among the Israeli public, will relish the way he shapes his life story as a unique, uncompromising — and much-maligned — defender of Israel as a Jewish state against its many enemies, domestic and foreign. His detractors may see the swagger and self-delusion that have propelled his success at driving Israel ever further from its democratic roots.

In Netanyahu’s telling, two men and one woman have played consequential roles in his fate: his older brother, Yoni; his brilliant, hardcore father, Benzion; and his third wife, Sara. These figures provide the guiding principles of his ideology and his methodology as a political leader.

The generally simplistic way they course through his memoir at times seems more Hallmark than historical, more like caricatures than believable human beings. Netanyahu the writer glides over the tensions and complexities in his relationship with his brother and father, and glosses over the foundational strain in his marriage. The portraits exist to promote a vision of himself as a humble family man destined to lead not only the state of Israel but the entire Jewish people, when the reality is far more convoluted — and interesting.

His memoir opens with Yoni, the oldest of Benzion and Cela’s three sons, whom Bibi — the middle child — revered and adored, and whose 1976 death during a daring Israeli rescue of passengers from a hijacked airplane that had been forced to land in Entebbe, Uganda, has become the stuff of legend. “Yoni’s sacrifice and example helped me overcome inconsolable grief, thrust me into a public battle against terrorism, and led me to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister,” Netanyahu declares.

He published a book of Yoni’s letters and led a conference on terrorism created in Yoni’s name, which convened twice and enabled Netanyahu to associate with a growing number of Western conservative politicians and activists, keeping alive his connection with a brother whose heroic dimensions only seemed to expand over time.

In his biography, Pfeffer shows how Bibi took full advantage of the mythologization of Yoni, writing that “no other Israeli soldier has ever been accorded anything like the praise and commemoration that Yoni Netanyahu has received. Over the decades, the Yoni project intensified as his brother Bibi became a powerful politician. Local council leaders discovered that the way to his heart was naming a street or school after his fallen brother.” And those who weren’t Yoni loyalists eventually were shunned.

This despite the fact that another, independent biographer hired by the Netanyahu family reached the conclusion that Yoni — who was 30 at the time of his death, divorced, lonely and by his own admission deeply troubled — was disliked by many of his men and was hounded by his father’s unrelenting expectations. Others at the scene have disputed the Netanyahu version of events that fateful day.

As Pfeffer relates, Yoni was accused of acting against orders by opening fire on Ugandan soldiers, exposing himself to return fire that probably killed him. His family insists he was killed by the German commander of the hijackers. Pfeffer concludes that the creation of the latter scenario suggests “to some that the family felt that being felled by an ‘inferior’ African soldier was somehow a lesser way to die.”

Whatever the truth, Bibi surely cannot be faulted for idolizing Yoni even more in death than in life. But the adulation makes no room for ambiguity — and that says as much about the surviving brother as it does about the dead one.

Similarly, there’s no room for ambiguity in his depiction of their father, Benzion, a scholar of medieval Jewish history and, in Bibi’s eyes, a brilliant, prescient and (again) often maligned activist on behalf of Zionism and the Jewish state. The elder Netanyahu eschewed compromise, believing that Arabs would never, ever accept Jews and that the only way to prevent another Holocaust was through unmitigated strength and assiduous wooing of supportive publics and political leaders.

He is rightly credited with helping to persuade the Republican and Democratic parties to support the establishment of a Jewish state in their 1944 platforms. This breakthrough was achieved, Netanyahu writes, “not by cowing to anti-Zionism but by standing up to it.” He continues: “My father was thus one of the de facto progenitors of America’s bi-partisan support for the state of Israel and the first to bring it into practical fruition. It was ironic that decades later I would be falsely accused of not appreciating the importance of American bipartisan support for Israel when in fact my own father had initiated it.”

But beneath Benzion’s rigid, polarized worldview was a confounding irony: He didn’t much want to live in Israel and didn’t want his sons to, either. As Pfeffer recounts, the elder Netanyahu relocated his family to the United States when he secured academic employment there, and he was highly critical of his boys when they returned to serve in the Israeli military.

“Benzion’s sons were incapable of fully confronting the contradictions between their father’s Zionist ideals and his living in America,” Pfeffer writes. Instead, they sought to mollify him. In his memoir, Bibi shapes his antipathy and estrangement into a principled stand. In that version of Netanyahu’s life, defiance is forgotten, filial devotion is all that matters.

If father-son relationships are complicated, so are marriages. Netanyahu could be forgiven, in his own book, for glossing over the dissolution of his first two marriages and (perhaps) for mentioning the daughter he had with his first wife only once. His third and current wife, Sara, is awarded pride of place.

His descriptions of her are so unceasingly laudatory that she appears superhuman. Her political advice is always spot-on, her charitable works magnanimous and cruelly overlooked. Sara never left the bedside of her dying mother and then her father, too; Netanyahu quotes a physician saying that he had “never seen such devotion of a daughter to her parents.” And the care she showered upon their two sons, Yair and Avner! Netanyahu compares it to “a lioness guard[ing] her cubs.”

Not only was all this ignored by the media, but “Sara sustained an endless campaign of character assassination … a vicious onslaught [that] went on for more than twenty years!” he writes. This “burgeoning industry of defamation and lies” would never have been directed at the spouse of a left-wing prime minister, he insists.

But Sara Netanyahu is unlike any other politician’s wife in Israel. As Pfeffer recounts, during the middle of a political campaign in 1993, Netanyahu publicly acknowledged an affair and begged Sara to reconcile. The resulting agreement stipulated that Sara would accompany her husband on all his major public engagements and foreign trips; that she would have full access to his schedule; and that she would vet appointments of members of his staff.

She pleaded guilty in 2019 to misusing state funds and is a subject in an ongoing corruption trial accusing both Netanyahus of illegally receiving gifts, jewelry and champagne. So the many investigations that have threatened the Netanyahus — at least when he is out of office — have a degree of public legitimacy. Sara chose political power, her husband granted it, and accountability flows from that.

What’s left unsaid in a political memoir is also meaningful. Ordinary Palestinians — the very many who aren’t terrorists — are missing from Netanyahu’s own story, even though his government has occupied Palestinian territory for 55 years. He has long insisted that the greatest threat to Israel is from Iran; the reader can decide whether that singular focus is justified or a skillful way to change the subject from Israel’s assertion of political oppression that many believe stains the nation’s soul.

Netanyahu’s political resilience is unparalleled in Israeli history, and for that reason alone, his memoir serves as an essential window into his character — as long as it is read with the proper perspective. As Carlos Lozada observed earlier this year in The Washington Post, the writings of any politician “should not be taken at face value; the purpose is to obscure as much as to reveal, the content is propaganda more than truth. . . . But as with all political writing, propaganda is enlightening because it reveals something about how its purveyors wish to be perceived.”