Bibi the Bliksem is in a class of his own

IF IN another life the premier of Israel had been a mielieboer somewhere near Bultfontein or Bothaville and you were to ask one of his neighbours, “Who is Benjamin Netanyahu?", you might have gotten an answer like, “That guy is a bliksem."

If you ask the same question today on the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, you will get varied answers. One might respond that he is the only leader who can protect Israel from annihilation by Iran. Another that he turned Israel from a secular state to one surrendered to the interests of the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox faithful. Yet another will point out that thanks to Netanyahu, Israel is one of the countries in the world with the highest investment per capita in high-tech startups. Someone might whisper that his third and current wife, Sara, is the real power behind the throne and that she has a hold on her husband owing to a secret agreement she forced him into when she found out about one of his affairs.

If you had asked that question in the weeks and months before Hamas' attacks on October 7, 2023, you might have gotten different answers than today. Just over a year ago, Benjamin “Bibi" Netanyahu was a beleaguered and often visibly exhausted premier: There were (and still are) the corruption charges against him involving his wife and eldest son; the deep divisions within his own Likud party and in his ruling alliance; an angry public who for months had been taking to the streets every week to protest against his efforts to get through controversial reforms of the country's legal system; and his relationship with the White House was at a low point due to Israel's accelerating illegal occupation of the West Bank of the River Jordan.

In none of these respects is Netanyahu or Israel better off today than a year ago. On the contrary: The initial semblance of unity after Hamas's attacks did not last long and as premier he is blamed for  Israel now being more divided and in a greater existential crisis than ever before. His domestic corruption trial will resume in December, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has applied for arrest warrants against him and his defence minister for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed under their leadership in Gaza. Worst of all for his political career may be the accusation that he did not do enough to free Israeli hostages in Gaza and even that he sacrificed them to ensure his own survival.

Netanyahu's political style has more than just this survival instinct in common with second-time US presidential candidate Donald Trump. Like Trump, he hides his own establishment roots behind populist talk – the media and the courts are all part of the conspiracies against him; his mistakes are always someone else's fault; he dismisses everyone to the left of himself as not being Jewish or patriotic enough.

When Likud, at the time under Ariel Sharon, was punished at the polls after Netanyahu as finance minister had drastically cut subsidies to the Haredim, Bibi made an about-face on the issue. Today the Haredim receive more money from the state than under any previous Israeli leader.

Netanyahu's political dependence on the ultra-Orthodox has enhanced the Haredim's status as a superprivileged class in Israel, even though they only make up about 13% of the population. Efforts to “reform" the legal system will make it even worse. The Haredim were until recently exempt from military service, their children have fewer compulsory subjects in school, and their population growth rate and levels of unemployment (especially among men) are much higher than the national average, yet they pay less tax pro rata. In this 2022 article The Jerusalem Post referred to growing unemployment among the Haredim as a “ticking bomb".

Their best years

Netanyahu's strategy boils down to the idea that if you can build a strong enough base among the extreme sections of the electorate, you can ignore the people in the middle. If this sounds familiar, read what Netanyahu wrote about Trump in his memoirs: “Our years together were the best ever for the Israeli-American alliance.”

Netanyahu even resonated with Vladimir Putin. Election posters from 2019 show him shaking hands with Trump and Putin, with the slogan “Netanyahu: In a class of his own".

About his parallels with Trump, Ruth Margalit wrote in The New York Times Magazine last year: “For his electorate, he is exactly that: a once-in-a-generation leader, suave and polished, speaking a refined American English, and also a bare-knuckled sabra [a Jew born in Israel] who has shown no qualms about taking on Barack Obama, the Palestinian leadership and the UN Security Council. ‘He has turned himself into a symbol for entire sectors of the public that are drastically different from him but that are willing to die for him,’ Zeev Elkin, a former Likud minister under Netanyahu who is now chairman of National Unity, told me."

For most other Western leaders, Netanyahu was a source of frustration. Bill Clinton reportedly angrily told his aides after their first meeting: “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fuckin' superpower here?”

And Nicolas Sarkozy of France was unknowingly recorded by a microphone in 2011 saying to Barack Obama: “I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar."

To which Obama responded: “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you.”

The American years

Benjamin Netanyahu was born in 1949 in Tel Aviv. His parents both were secular Jews. He grew up in Jerusalem and later in Pennsylvania in the US.

After finishing high school in the US, he returned to Israel and joined the Israeli army in 1967 to serve as a member of the reconnaissance unit Sayeret Matkal. He was wounded several times in a variety of operations, including in 1972 when he was involved, along with Ehud Barak who would also become premier of Israel, in the evacuation of passengers from Sabena's Flight 571 after it was hijacked by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.

After his military service, Netanyahu returned to the US and obtained qualifications in architecture and business management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His doctoral studies in political science were interrupted in 1976 when his beloved elder brother Yoni was shot dead during the hostage rescue operation at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda. It was a turning point in his life, and he decided to actively get involved in Israeli politics.

In the 1980s, Netanyahu was Israel's permanent representative to the UN, and in 1988 he was elected to the Knesset (Israel's parliament) for the first time, as a member of Likud. He became Likud's leader in 1993, and in 1996 he was elected premier for the first time. He was the first Israeli premier to be directly elected by popular vote and was the youngest premier in the country's history.

After being defeated in the 1999 election, Netanyahu retired from politics but returned in 2002 as foreign minister and later finance minister. In 2009, he began his second term as premier thanks to a coalition with other right-wing parties. His third and current term began in 2022, making him the longest-serving Israeli premier overall.

Despite all these years of experience, Netanyahu has not yet managed to make the transition from a narrow nationalist defender of Israel's immediate interests to someone who has a larger vision for the Middle East and the Palestinian issue. This is well summed up by a recording of Sara Netanyahu that came to light in 2002 in which she rails against her husband's critics: “Bibi is bigger than this country! People here want to be slaughtered and burned? Why should he even bother? We'll move abroad, and the whole country can burn."

Well, it's not as if things have improved with him at the helm. At the same time, Bibi the Bliksem is holding together many threads that might well unravel the day he is no longer in control.

And as always in the Middle East, one should never think an already bad situation cannot get any worse.

♦ VWB ♦

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