"Bibi: My Story" - Book Review - The Wall Street Journal

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/bibi-book- ... os1&page=1


‘Bibi’ Review: The Warrior Netanyahu
In his memoir, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister puts the focus on his determination to fight for himself and his country.

Review by Dominic Green - a WSJ contributor and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Dec. 2, 2022 11:40 am ET


Benjamin Netanyahu is the most successful politician in Israeli history. If Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, defined the Jewish state’s birth and early years, Mr. Netanyahu has redefined Israel in its maturation. He has spent more time as prime minister than Ben-Gurion did, and he isn’t finished. In November’s elections, his Likud Party came out on top. He is now forming the coalition that will inaugurate his third premiership. His memoir, “Bibi,” is as polished, argumentative and fascinating as its author, a restless work in progress whose story is that of modern Israel.

“Bibi” begins with a bang. In 1972 Palestinian terrorists hijacked a Sabena airliner and flew it to Lod Airport near Tel Aviv. Mr. Netanyahu, then 22 years old, was serving in the Sayeret Matkal special-forces unit. He and his comrades disguised themselves as ground crew, burst into the plane, and killed and captured the hijackers. Mr. Netanyahu was shot in the arm. The existential stakes, and the implicit contrast with the soft-handed civilians who lead the Western democracies, could not be clearer.

He always knew he was right. His father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu, was secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideologue of Zionism’s right-wing Revisionist school. The early Israeli state was a socialist monopoly. The exclusion of Revisionists drove four of Benzion’s brothers into a lush exile in America. Benzion’s family also sojourned there while he researched his books. By the time Bibi entered politics in 1988, he had spent nearly half of his 38 years in America. He is the most American of Israeli prime ministers, except when he is not.

Mr. Netanyahu’s historic mission, the survival of the Jewish people, is deeply personal. His older brother Yoni was his hero, the living image of a sabra, the new, fighting Israeli Jew. Yoni was killed leading the Entebbe hostage rescue in 1976 and became a national icon. Mr. Netanyahu was at MIT when he heard. He is unusually candid about his brother’s loss. “If there was a moment in my life worse than hearing about Yoni’s death,” he writes, “it was telling my parents about it.”

Readers of the Hebrew Bible’s sequel might recognize the story of the Prodigal Son in Mr. Netanyahu’s early adulthood. After earning a master’s degree from MIT’s Sloan School in 1976, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and then for his family’s anti-terrorism foundation, the Jonathan Institute. In 1982 he was working for RIM, an Israeli furniture manufacturer, when Moshe Arens, a Revisionist connection, asked him to join him at Israel’s Washington embassy as a deputy. A senior left-wing columnist mocked Mr. Netanyahu as a “furniture salesman.” It marked, he says, the beginning of an “obsessive campaign” that would escalate as “the press failed to block my many victories in democratic elections” and would lead to ceaseless scandals on such matters of national import as his wife’s expenditure on dry cleaning.

Mr. Netanyahu’s American education taught him the merits of free-market economics and technology, which would be key to liberalizing Israel’s economy and transforming the state from avocado exporter to high-tech power. Two years in the embassy, and four years as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, trained him in public relations, and showed him how to update Jabotinsky’s “Theory of Public Pressure” for the age of cable news. Heads of state, Mr. Netanyahu writes, can be persuaded by appeals to “their national interests.” But the “most potent influence” on democratic governments, Jabotinsky wrote in 1929, is “the pressure of public opinion.”

In 1988 Mr. Netanyahu entered the Knesset with Likud and joined the government, first as Moshe Arens’s deputy in the foreign ministry, and then as deputy minister in the office of the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. After the Labor Party won the 1992 elections, Mr. Netanyahu became Likud’s leader. When the Labor prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, gambled Israel’s security by embracing the “peace process” with the Palestinians, Mr. Netanyahu led the strident campaign against Rabin and the Oslo Accords. In November 1995, Rabin was murdered by an ultranationalist Israeli Jew.

Mr. Netanyahu strives to dismantle the “scandalous” accusation that he fomented Rabin’s assassination. He became prime minister for the first time in 1996 despite the “outrageous and systematic interference” of the Clinton administration on Labor’s behalf. Mr. Clinton, he writes, was “totally in the grip of the Palestinian Centrality Theory,” the notion that Israeli-Palestinian peace was the key to regional peace. His grudging concessions to Mr. Clinton’s pressure spelled the end of his governing coalition, and he lost the 1999 elections to Ehud Barak, his old commander in Sayeret Matkal. Messrs. Clinton and Barak pursued the mirage of peace with Yasser Arafat until it blew up in a wave of suicide bombings. It is, Mr. Netanyahu writes, now entirely “clear who got it right and who got it wrong.”

When Ariel Sharon returned Likud to power in 2003, Mr. Netanyahu became finance minister. His market and banking reforms helped Israel become “fully integrated into the first-world economy.” By 2019 Israel’s GDP per capita outstripped those of Britain, France and Japan. Mr. Netanyahu also engaged in a “deliberate strategy” of diplomatic outreach, outflanking the Palestinians and the Arab boycott by trading Israel’s military and security know-how for deals and recognition. The result, he writes, was a “quantum leap in Israel’s power” and strategic leverage. The Obama administration tested it, and Mr. Netanyahu’s powers of persuasion, to the limit.

After the 2009 elections returned Mr. Netanyahu to the prime minister’s office, he assembled a centrist coalition and endorsed a demilitarized Palestinian state. This only encouraged the Obama administration’s pressure. Mr. Obama, he writes, saw Israeli Jews as “neocolonials.” The president acted in “bad faith” by not keeping his end of the deal after Mr. Netanyahu imposed a settlement freeze. He gave the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas a “secret commitment” to establish “a full-fledged Palestinian state before he left office.” He promised to contain Iran’s nuclear program, but in reality took a “soft line” that empowered a state committed to Israel’s destruction.

Mr. Netanyahu does not specify the “offensive” language that Mr. Obama used in a private attempt to intimidate him, though he does say that it was “out of character” and “shocked me deeply.” Mr. Obama was publicly insulted when Mr. Netanyahu, in a last-ditch attempt to block the Iran Deal, accepted a Republican invitation to address the U.S. Congress. Mr. Netanyahu insists that he was right to do it, because Israel’s existence was on the line, but this Jabotinskyite play failed, and the diplomatic fallout with the Democrats continues. The story of the Obama years is so bitter that the only light relief comes when John Kerry tells Mr. Netanyahu to outsource Israel’s security to an American-trained Palestinian militia, and suggests a “clandestine visit” to Afghanistan to see “what a great job we did there to prepare the Afghan army to take over the country once we leave.”

President Trump’s team also subscribed to the Palestinian Centrality Theory, but Mr. Trump had none of Mr. Obama’s “vindictive zeal,” and his “inherent irreverence” made him open to an “entirely new approach.” The Abraham Accords, an Israeli-Arab alliance against the Iranian threat, upended the failed logic of the peace processors. This was a total repudiation of the previous administrations’ approaches, the second Bush presidency among them, and a vindication for Mr. Netanyahu. The climactic chapters of his extraordinary career, in which a lame-duck Biden administration confronts a hard-right Netanyahu coalition while the futures of both Israel and Iran hang in the balance, will make no less compelling reading.