Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu ended his 12-year stint as Israeli prime minister on Sunday as a man of flawed character, who yet was one of the greatest world statesmen of our lifetimes.
Netanyahu’s decades of public service left Israel a vastly more prosperous, vastly more secure, vastly more respected state. Derided as a destabilizer and a warmonger, he left Israel, the entire region, and the world both more stable and more peaceful.
While Netanyahu left office promising a fierce stance as leader of the opposition and predicting his own return to power, it could well be that his career will fade now that he has lost his perch. Even so, Bibi’s complicated legacy should always be seen as monumental.
A captain in his nation’s special forces, Netanyahu began his public career by founding an anti-terrorism institute named after his late brother Jonathan, the hero of the amazingly successful 1976 rescue operation in Entebbe, Uganda. By 1984, he already was Israel’s public face to the world as its ambassador to the United Nations, from which he became an eloquent and familiar expositor of his nation’s cause just as the American era of cable news was achieving liftoff. Except in very rare interregnums, he has since stood at or near the very center of Israel’s quest for worldwide acceptance.
For nearly the past 30 of those 37 years, even before he became chairman of the Likud party in 1993, he has been vilified in unusually harsh terms by almost everyone who is not on the Israeli or U.S. political Right. For almost the entirety of that time period, the Right dismissed the vilification as hack political attacks less moored in any real character flaws of his own than in opposition to his policy preferences. Because his path to peace ran through strength rather than through endless, fuzzy-headed “proofs” of Israel’s goodwill, the worldwide Left demonized him.
By now, though, even those of us who publicly have admired him for decades must admit that Netanyahu’s character is far from pristine. Bedeviled and almost felled by influence-peddling allegations that his allies portrayed as pure smears as long as 25 years ago, Netanyahu should have learned from that experience to reform both appearances and reality as he returned to power in 2009 and thereafter. Instead, he danced at the edges of propriety.
Without time for an exhaustive discussion of the charges facing Netanyahu in the rial that undermined his political standing, let it be said that he is at least guilty of massive self-indulgence (hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cigars, champagne, and jewelry) and that it certainly appears some of his behavior was unethical. Where exactly the line falls in Israeli law between the merely unethical and the illegal is for Israeli courts to decide. Still, one is struck by how unnecessary some of his (alleged) actions appear to have been.
That, combined with his habit in personal dealings of what columnist John Podhoretz described as “treat[ing[ people like garbage — friends as well as foes,” made it hard for him to remain in office despite an almost mind-boggling array of achievements for Israel’s well-being.
In his first term as prime minister (1996-99), Netanyahu proved less an intractable hard-liner than a canny negotiator actually willing to sign an accord. He was reasonably tough-minded, even with the despicable Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Crucially for his country, he also began economic reforms that rejected Israel’s soft socialism in favor of free-market, sometimes supply-side policies — which he then resumed as minister of finance from 2003-2005 and again as prime minister for the past 12 years.
From a situation of rather moribund finances, Israel has become an economic and innovation powerhouse, largely because Netanyahu unleashed its entrepreneurial potential.
Meanwhile, Bibi’s diplomatic success for the past 12 years has been colossal. Outside of its own region, Israel’s relations with almost every major nation on Earth are better than ever in history. And, as the Jerusalem Post noted in an editorial assessment of Netanyahu’s service, the recent unpleasantness with Hamas spurred the previously near-unimaginable display of the Israeli flag, in solidarity with the Jewish state, from nations such as Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Panama.
Most impressive, though, is what once would have seemed impossible: peace accords with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, and the informal cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, among other Arab or Muslim nations. The whole world is safer because of it.
There can be no doubt that Benjamin Netanyahu, lover of and longtime inhabitant of the United States and avatar of liberty, has always been first and foremost an Israeli patriot, and for all the right reasons. As he and his brother Iddo wrote in 1980 in tribute to their late brother Yoni, he could have been describing himself as much as Yoni in penning these words [some punctuation changed for clarity]:
“Deeply conscious of what it meant to belong to the Jewish people and the land of Israel, he saw himself as a representative of the people’s wondrous history, as heir to the legacy of the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba, as successor to the unparalleled struggle of the Jewish people for its identity and survival.”
To cement that legacy and continue that mission, whether he ever takes his nation’s top office again, it is time for Bibi to look beyond himself and start grooming a worthy successor. In a life full of accomplishments on behalf of his beloved nation, Netanyahu must look beyond himself in this way: to act not as Israel’s master but as its loyal and farsighted servant.
