Netanyahu in his own memory

Nearly six years after police first questioned Netanyahu for graft, we know those predictions did not come true. As this magazine is printed, Israel will head to the ballots for the fifth time in less than four years. And unlike in the previous four rounds, this time, Netanyahu is opposition leader, not prime minister. Yet, like in all the other elections in 2019-2021, Netanyahu’s Likud is polling as the largest party. But the pro-Bibi and anti-Bibi blocs are at a deadlock.

If this memoir, released just before a crucial election, is not a campaign book, that almost says more about Bibi than if it were one. And it is not one, or not just one. It certainly has politics in it, being the story of a politician’s very political life. Netanyahu doesn’t miss a chance to get in digs at Defense Minister Benny Gantz, for example, who, as Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, was hesitant ahead of a 2012 Israeli strike in Sudan on an Iranian arms shipment headed for Hamas. “What’s the problem?” Netanyahu says he asked. “That the Sudanese will send rubber boats up the Nile?” Prime Minister Yair Lapid had a “desire for power and a willingness to shed … commitments to voters to achieve it.”

Even those who are out of the game in this election, but could pop up again in the future, don’t escape Netanyahu’s ire: The recently resigned prime minister and perennial thorn in Netanyahu’s side Naftali Bennett “postured as right-wing” but only “craved fame and power.” Ehud Barak is not quite the hero he’s been made out to be in the Bibi version of the leaders’ shared military exploits. He is quite gracious to former rivals, like Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, who are deceased.

Netanyahu’s love-hate relationship with the media is on full display. He makes his disdain for journalists and commentators in general very clear, yet he frequently quotes their positive statements about him and repeatedly describes access to the American media as the key to winning Israel favor in the United States.

Netanyahu himself is close to flawless in his own retelling. This is how the book veers into election territory. It definitely isn’t a warts-and-all story of Netanyahu’s life, though his warts come through despite himself. The former prime minister admits to a few tactical errors, like the merger between his Likud party and another party he had to form to win in 2013. But he totally ignores others, such as the “hot tape affair,” that are likely to be well known to his readers in Hebrew if not in English.

He misses what could at the very least have been opportunities for reflection. Many on the Israeli Right are still angry at him for voting in favor of the unilateral evacuation of thousands of Israelis from Gaza in 2005, paving the way for Hamas to take over and shoot far more rockets at Israeli civilians than before, before voting against it at the last chance. Netanyahu, in a chapter unlikely to satisfy those critics, said he couldn’t have completed his sweeping economic reforms if he had gone all in against the government.

Netanyahu’s economic reforms were undoubtedly transformative and contributed to Israel’s massive growth in the 21st century, but the sections on his time as finance minister and economic policies in his first term as prime minister are among the few that are not smooth and easily readable. He probably gets too wonky and domestically focused here for non-Israeli readers.

In the chapter on COVID, when he did a 180 on his usual free market economic policies, having the government spend, by his own admission, “billions of shekels to help small businesses, employers, and laid-off workers,” he brushes off the criticism from “those who had previously supported my tight fiscal policies” rather than address the sharp rise in unemployment and inflation that were, in part, results of that policy. In a time of reckoning with the disastrous effects of pandemic shutdowns on children, he thinks they should have been longer and that opening up when Israel did was “a cardinal mistake,” not mentioning the social and educational impacts at all.

The chapter on Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress in 2015 also provides a good example of Netanyahu’s near-total inability to acknowledge the downsides of his decisions. Most Democrats on the Hill were either deeply offended by Netanyahu going forward with the speech despite President Barack Obama’s opposition to it or willing to pretend to be. The speech contributed to a growing atmosphere of distrust between Democrats and the Israeli government, and there are members of Congress who resent it to this day. Arguably, on net, convincing the Obama administration to change its Iran policy was a lost cause anyway, and the ill will was worth it to tell the truth about a nuclear Iran and try to shift votes in Congress, with the added bonus that the speech ended up attracting Gulf states to get closer to Israel. Yet, in Bibi, there was only good, no bad. Chuck Schumer commended Netanyahu for his Washington speech, the book recounts, and an “old colleague who was a Churchill buff” told him it was his “finest hour” and that any criticism was just the media and his political rivals doing their thing.

In the section on the Obama years, Netanyahu can barely hold back his contempt for the former president and for some members of his administration, such as Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel. Though Netanyahu clashed nearly as often with President Bill Clinton, whom he describes as very misguided on Israel and the Palestinians, he doesn’t doubt that Clinton had good intentions and repeatedly notes his charm and frankness. The Obama crew, however, “forc[ed] us into a confrontation.” It was a case of “not merely bad policy; it was bad faith.”

When it comes to the presidents post-Obama, Netanyahu is very obviously holding back in case he becomes prime minister again while one of them is in the White House. President Joe Biden is described as the member of the Obama administration most dedicated to trying to keep the U.S.-Israel relationship from going off the rails.

President Donald Trump checked off many items on Netanyahu’s wish list, leaving the Iran deal, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and moving the U.S. Embassy, as well as ushering in peace between Israel and four Arab states. As such, he is described in overwhelmingly positive terms. His salty post-presidency comments (“f*** him,” to be exact about what Trump said of Bibi) go unmentioned.

So that’s the daily grind in Bibi. When Netanyahu is not settling scores and recounting the back-and-forth of domestic and international politics, his writing reminds the reader that he is an excellent teller of Israel’s story and the justice of the Zionist cause. Netanyahu was born in 1949, a year after the State of Israel, such that the chapters of his life often parallel milestones in the country’s history. Still, he starts decades before that, weaving together a story in which his grandfather, father, and Benjamin himself have a Forrest Gump-like tendency — though an intentional one, in their cases — toward proximity to major events leading up to and after the establishment of the Jewish state. That, of course, includes Netanyahu’s older brother, Yoni, the hero of the Entebbe raid whose death played a pivotal role in Netanyahu’s move from a comfortable life as a business consultant in Boston who occasionally engaged in pro-Israel activism to a life of public service.

Some of it, like his father Benzion’s role in convincing the U.S. to support the soon-to-be state, is probably overstated, though he certainly made a valiant effort. Yet that overstatement is another key to understanding Netanyahu. The huge influence of the elder Netanyahu, a historian of Spanish Jewry and the Inquisition, on the younger Netanyahu’s thinking has been well documented and is even the topic of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen) that presents it as something almost sinister. Though Netanyahu mentions and debunks some of the cruel takes on his family presented in the media, he disregards the chatter about his father, taking pride in him and recounting situations in which, even as prime minister, he sought his advice.

In the book’s epilogue, the message Netanyahu seeks to impart is unmistakably Benzion-esque: “The arc of history may bend toward justice, but it is a brittle arc. It can break at any moment under the pounding of the darkest force. The founding of Israel did not stop attacks on the Jews. It merely gave the Jews the power to defend themselves against those attacks. … More [power] will surely come if we continue to nurture our might, our resolve and our belief in the justice of our cause. … Having restored our independence, we cannot, and we will not, let anyone bring an end to this miracle.”

There’s no denying that Netanyahu has brought that fighting spirit to his life and now to his autobiography.

Lahav Harkov is the diplomatic correspondent and a senior contributing editor for the Jerusalem Post.