The first English biography of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spills the beans on the longtime statesman.
By BEN FISHERPM Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, wave as they celebrate his election victory on June 2, 1996(photo credit: REUTERS)
Israeli mythology tells that it was the string of four suicide bombings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ashkelon which killed 61 Israelis ahead of the 1996 elections that elevated Benjamin Netanyahu to power. The story goes that, after Shimon Peres called for elections following the assassination of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, he held a healthy lead in the polls and the nation fully expected Peres as its next prime minister.But in a two-week period over February and March, the bombings by Palestinian terrorists killed scores and swung a nation that Rabin had been trying to convince to make peace with Yasser Arafat to the Right, electing then-46-year-old Netanyahu in a surprisingly nail-biting election.But as Neill Lochery, a Scottish author and professor at University College London, explains in his new book on the prime minister, The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, Netanyahu’s ascent to power had been in the works long before the bus bombings that spring.One of the book’s most compelling chapters tells the behind-the-scenes story of how Netanyahu and his political team orchestrated his unlikely 1996 win.The appointment of American political strategist Arthur J. Finkelstein (bankrolled by US cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder) was “one of the most important and astute [decisions] that Netanyahu had made until this point in his career,” Lochery writes, given Finkelstein’s critical role in propelling Netanyahu to victory.Finkelstein was behind such ideas as dyeing Netanyahu’s salt-and-pepper hair gray to give him a more statesmanlike appearance.The book recounts Netanyahu’s meteoric rise from the deputy head of the Israeli mission to the United States in 1982, to deputy minister in the Likud giving interviews to CNN during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, to his first term in office in 1996, to his loss in the 1999 elections to Ehud Barak, when the world wrote him off and he was banished to the political wasteland, and finally to his return as prime minister.The impact of life in the United States, his wife Sara, his father Benzion and his late brother Yoni, are all explored in detail.Lochery, presumably not the prime minister’s biggest fan, refers to Netanyahu as a “slightly goofy wanderer” before being forever changed by the death of Yoni.He seems to take pleasure in recounting a story about Benzion’s stony-faced behavior at his son’s inauguration, and how he used to telephone “his son after some of his speeches in order to correct his Hebrew grammar.”
Much of Netanyahu’s political career has been a balancing act as he positioned himself in ways to respond to pressure from his right-wing constituents and coalition members, as well as left-wing opposition and various US presidential administrations. Lochery persuasively describes how Netanyahu was able to “balance these conflicting demands,” explaining that the statesman “found himself having to work overtime on his speeches and comments to please his two paradoxical masters: the cabinet and the United States.”Lochery points out many of the flaws for which Netanyahu is consistently faulted by the Israeli public, as well as foreign and domestic media. His tendency to “concentrate on the self over the collective” appears multiple times in the book as does his reputation for indecision and stalling, made plain in Lochery’s chapter about the Wye River Memorandum, which Netanyahu negotiated with Arafat and former president Bill Clinton in 1998.Netanyahu’s relationship with many of his American counterparts is touched on at various points, and Lochery even likens him to Clinton, citing their extramarital controversies. Both men are considered charismatic and “came across well in the media.” It was also reported that Netanyahu carefully studied the inner workings of the Clinton political machine.Lochery’s work has some odd quirks, including reminding the reader no fewer than four times that Barak was Netanyahu’s superior in the army. The book also features an oddly arranged time line at points, jumping around different periods of important events in a way that is not always clear to the reader.If Netanyahu is still in office in July 2019, he will become the longest serving prime minister in the country’s history, overtaking David Ben-Gurion. Lochery’s book is the first English biography of a man he says will be remembered as an “Israeli leader of historic importance.” It’s a fascinating glimpse into his past, the people and things that motivated him, and ultimately what he might do next.