Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Bibi
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/22/1973
WEBSITE:
CITY: Jerusalem
STATE:
COUNTRY: Israel
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2018012622 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018012622 |
| HEADING: | Pfeffer, Anshel |
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| 001 | 10689855 |
| 005 | 20180306074806.0 |
| 008 | 180306n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2018012622 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |e rda |
| 100 | 1_ |a Pfeffer, Anshel |
| 670 | __ |a Bibi, 2018: |b ECIP data view (Anshel Pfeffer) |
PERSONAL
Born June 22, 1973.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Ha’aretz, Jerusalem, Israel, journalist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Anshel Pfeffer is a British journalist, who is based in Jerusalem, Israel. He writes for the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz.
In 2018, Pfeffer released his first book, Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu. In this volume, he discusses the Israeli prime minister’s younger years, his rise to political power, and the controversy surrounding the decisions he has made during his stint in power. In an article he wrote on the Ha’aretz website, Pfeffer stated: “Netanyahu is a figure who has dominated Israeli life for a quarter of a century, and counting. A major figure on the world stage as well. So the question, why write this book, almost seems to answer itself.”
Critics offered favorable assessments of Bibi. A Kirkus Reviews writer described it as “a perceptive history of a beleaguered nation and one deeply flawed leader.” Stephen Daisley, contributor to Spectator, suggested: “Bibi is biography at its most honest, most powerful—a work of sober analysis that does not neglect the importance of personality. It is written with the immediacy of the moment, yet this gives the book the quality of aliveness that makes living history so compelling and reminds us that events, though in hindsight they may appear to, do not come in sweeps but are the consequences of moral choices made by leaders.”
“Readers who are rooting either for or against Netanyahu will find that Pfeffer’s reporting quenches their thirst for the complete picture of his rise to power,” asserted Daniella J. Greenbaum in Commentary. Reviewing the book on the Forward website, Batya Ungar-Sargon commented: “On every page of Bibi … one feels Pfeffer’s encyclopedic knowledge of his subject and his profound fairness in assessing Israel’s leader. For American Jews especially, the book pulls back the curtain on a man held in high esteem who holds us in contempt.” “Of course the book is essential—understand Bibi and you understand the times and how they came to be the times,” wrote David Aaronovitch on the London Sunday Times Online. Tom Segev, critic on the Economist Online, called the volume a”riveting and passionately critical biography” and “a must-read for everyone who is interested in the undercurrents of today’s Israeli society.” Writing on the New York Times Online, Ian Black remarked: “Anshel Pfeffer’s biography is superbly timed.” Black added: “This book is a necessary contribution to understanding a high-profile and internationally contentious figure and the fractured country he has led for so long. It is, inevitably, already out of date. But Bibi’s turbulent times are not over yet.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Commentary, April, 2018, Daniella J. Greenbaum, “Bibi Here Now,” review of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, p. 37.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of Bibi.
Spectator, May 26, 2018, Stephen Daily, “The Tough Guy of Israeli Politics,” review of Bibi, p. 41.
Xpress Reviews, March 23, 2018, Jessica Bushore, review of Bibi.
ONLINE
Economist Online, https://www.economist.com/ (May 2, 2018), Tom Segev, review of Bibi.
Forward Online, https://forward.com/ (April 11, 2018), Batya Ungar-Sargon, review of Bibi.
Ha’aretz Online, https://www.haaretz.com/ (April 27, 2018), article by author.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (July 6, 2018), author profile.
London Sunday Times Online, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/ (May 19, 2018), David Aaronovitch, review of Bibi.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (April 27, 2018), Nora Tarnopolsky, review of Bibi.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (May 7, 2018), Ian Black, review of Bibi.
Anshel Pfeffer is a journalist at the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz covering military, international and Jewish affairs. His column, 'Jerusalem and Babylon', appears every Friday on haaretz.com
QUOTED: "a perceptive history of a beleaguered nation and one deeply flawed leader."
Pfeffer, Anshel: BIBI
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pfeffer, Anshel BIBI Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $32.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-0-465-09782-1 An unsparing examination of the Israeli prime minister's rise to power.
Journalist Pfeffer, Israeli correspondent for the Economist and senior correspondent for Haaretz, makes his literary debut with a biting portrait of Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu (b. 1949), an ambitious politician whose racist, right-wing views have shaped "a deeply fractured Israeli society, living behind walls." The son of historian Benzion Netanyahu and brother of fallen soldier Jonathan, Bibi embraced the "family mythology" that "constantly tried to place itself at the center of the Zionist narrative." The author stresses the importance of Bibi's American experience, which began in high school, when his father took an academic position in Pennsylvania. Although disdaining "the liberal-leaning, Democrat-voting American Jews" he met, he appreciated American capitalism and the style of American political campaigns. In 1981, as deputy chief of mission at Israel's Washington embassy, Netanyahu set out to become a media personality. "Ever a perfectionist," Pfeffer writes, "he worked assiduously on his televisual skills, taking lessons from professional coaches" and rehearsing his delivery "of terse and soundbite- heavy sentences." Three years later, he was appointed ambassador to the U.N., where he "became a star of the air waves." In 1996, with no political experience, he won a slim victory over Shimon Peres by inflaming Israel's fear of its Arab neighbors. Besides coveting power, Netanyahu acquired a taste for luxury, extravagances that led to financial scandals later in his career. As he examines his subject's fraught relationships with Israeli politicians and U.S. presidents, Pfeffer portrays Bibi as an arrogant, polarizing figure, incapable of compromise and, like Donald Trump, "lacking in introspection." Netanyahu has never wavered in his bleak view of history, in which the Jewish homeland was threatened by "the genocidal urge of the Arab nations to destroy the Jewish presence." He opposed any move to relinquish control of the West Bank and Golan Heights, conceding only "limited autonomy" to Palestinians living in those areas.
A perceptive history of a beleaguered nation and one deeply flawed leader.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pfeffer, Anshel: BIBI." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650688/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f7cedb95. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650688
QUOTED: "Bibi is biography at its most honest, most powerful—a work of sober analysis that does not neglect the importance of personality. It is written with the immediacy of the moment, yet this gives the book the quality of aliveness that makes living history so compelling and reminds us that events, though in hindsight they may appear to, do not come in sweeps but are the consequences of moral choices made by leaders."
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The tough guy of Israeli politics
Stephen Daisley
Spectator.
337.9900 (May 26, 2018): p41. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer
Hurst, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 432
Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the most unloved and unlovable figures in Israeli politics, a solid finish in a competitive field. Yet when it comes to polling day, his Likud party watches 'Bibi' pull off another win. Many consider him venal, duplicitous, arrogant, vain and loutish. His opponents have even worse things to say. Israeli elections were once decided on the question of socialism vs. capitalism, and later peace vs. security. Today Israelis are divided over whether Netanyahu is a bastard or a necessary bastard.
Anshel Pfeffer belongs to the former camp. His new biography, Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, is a forensic character study of Israel's first native-born prime minister and of the Israel he has birthed across 12 years in power. Pfeffer sees a country that mirrors its leader: flabby, self-satisfied and shirking fundamental moral dilemmas.
Until now, the primal moment in Netanyahu's life, the event that would drive him to become the tough guy of Israeli politics, was thought to be the death of his beloved brother Yoni at Entebbe. Pfeffer hints instead at their father's awkward, somewhat bitter career as a Zionist ideologue. Netanyahu family mythology has memorialised Benzion as an icon of the intellectual right; but Pfeffer renders him a minor figure in the Revisionist movement, who chose the wrong faction in the pre-state struggle and found himself on the outside after independence. Benzion Netanyahu warred with the academic establishment, who failed to reward his talents, despaired of diaspora Jews (too weak and insufficiently nationalist), and loathed Israel's early governments for their socialism and airbrushing of the revisionists' contribution to driving out the British.
This resentment of the outsider, Pfeffer reckons, inspired Bibi to build an electoral coalition around the angry and the marginalised. The history of Zionism is a struggle for legitimacy (and the power to delegitimise your opponents) between left and right, which the left appeared to have won decisively until Menachem Begin's election in 1977. Netanyahu has taken disparate demographics and offered them the chance to get their own back--on the intellectuals, the left, the Arabs, and every other bogeyman. If this sounds familiar, Pfeffer is already way ahead of you,
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noting that Bibi and Donald Trump are both 'fundamentally insecure, lacking in introspection, and have an uncanny ability to sense their rivals' weak spots and sniff out their voters' inner fears'.
Pfeffer is a correspondent for Haaretz, a left-wing daily held in high regard--sometimes even by others--for doggedly challenging the country's government, armed forces and human rights record. Imagine the Guardian with much higher stakes. Yet Bibi is no polemic. It is a work of searing insight that persuades with research rather than rhetoric.
To my mind, Netanyahu is necessary, and so I spent much of this volume shifting uncomfortably, forced to confront the bastardry. There is Bibi the panderer, who Facebooked a video on election day 2015 warning that 'Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves'. There's Bibi the phoney two-state-solutioner who, though promising 'peace through security', has done less to advance peace than any of his Likud predecessors. And there is Bibi the unprincipled, who reveres the land of Israel when he's courting settler votes but who has built fewer settlements than any prime minister for three decades.
Pfeffer's work would benefit from greater reflection on the role of the left in creating the circumstances Bibi so ruthlessly exploits. It was the Labour-Zionist elite that abandoned the pragmatic hawkishness of Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir for relativist mush and peace-at-all-costs. It was the left, the New Jews who built the state and their offspring, who made scant space at the table for the Old Jews, in particular the Mizrahim, whose low social standing was (and still is) mocked rather than alleviated. If Bibi is Trump in Jerusalem, the Israeli left are the Democrats relocated to north Tel Aviv. If Netanyahu has prospered by dividing Israelis, it is because the left stopped pursuing the dream of One Israel in favour of sectional interests.
However, this is quibbling about a sliver of cork in a rare and rich claret. Bibi is biography at its most honest, most powerful--a work of sober analysis that does not neglect the importance of personality. It is written with the immediacy of the moment, yet this gives the book the quality of aliveness that makes living history so compelling and reminds us that events, though in hindsight they may appear to, do not come in sweeps but are the consequences of moral choices made by leaders.
Shabtai Teveth's The Burning Ground cemented the old man's heroic reputation by venerating his character; Bibi, which merits being mentioned in the same breath, may have the opposite effect on its subject because Pfeffer portrays a man who already considers himself a hero but whose character is sorely in doubt.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Daisley, Stephen. "The tough guy of Israeli politics." Spectator, 26 May 2018, p. 41. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542801791/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=225b69a3. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542801791
QUOTED: "Readers who are rooting either for or against Netanyahu will find that Pfeffer's reporting quenches their thirst for the complete picture of his rise to power."
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Bibi Here Now
Daniella J. Greenbaum
Commentary.
145.4 (Apr. 2018): p37+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Jewish Committee http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Full Text:
Bibi: The Thrbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu BY ANSHEL PFEFFER Basic Books, 432 pages
'THIS IS Mr. Pfeffer, who's writing a book about me," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a room full of Economist senior editors. "He doesn't know anything about me. It will be a cartoon."
Netanyahu has been proved wrong. Anshel Pfeffer's Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu dispassionately chronicles the many successes and failures that have so far characterized the personal and political life of Israel's charismatic yet divisive leader. Readers who are rooting either for or against Netanyahu will find that Pfeffer's reporting quenches their thirst for the complete picture of his rise to power.
The most critical--though still not cartoonish--elements of the book appear in the text's prologue and epilogue. It is as if Pfeffer set out to write one narrative but was ultimately steered in a different direction by the fruits of his own research. In fact, Pfeffer's account is more than balanced; there are moments in the book when his admiration for Israel's leader emanates through his hard-hitting analysis.
Pfeffer insists that a modern observer cannot understand Israel without understanding the man currently at its helm. The country, he writes, "is a hybrid society of ancient phobias and high-tech hope, a combination of tribalism and globalism--just like Netanyahu himself." He explores these bifurcations in the chapters that follow.
Indeed, Pfeffer's work is as much a history of Israel as it is of Netanyahu. About the early Zionist enterprise, he asks: "Was its sole objective to build a state that would serve as a haven for Jews who would choose to live there? Or did the Zionist movement and the Jewish state have a wider responsibility for all Jews in peril?" Foundational questions of this sort foreshadowed many of the domestic debates still riling the State of Israel, 70 years later.
The same is true for the partisan nature of pro-Israel politics in the United States. Pfeffer notes that "support for the Jewish state became a partisan issue in U.S. politics even before the establishment of Israel in 1948," and he goes on to chronicle the ways in which rival Zionist factions "literally at each other's throats" in Palestine worked together with surprising harmony to
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achieve their international aims, especially in the United States.
Even Netanyahu's enemies cannot help but acknowledge that he is a talented advocate for the causes about which he cares. Once, in 1982, during a meeting with then foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir, Ronald Reagan "spoke of being deeply moved by a photograph of a Lebanese baby girl who had lost her arms in an Israeli bombing raid." The president gave the picture to Shamir, saying, '"Listen, this has got to stop.'" It was the brilliant notion of the young Netanyahu, then deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the United Nations, to ask the IDF to find the girl's family. It turned out the baby girl was actually a boy, and that his arms had been bandaged, not amputated. Reagan was notified.
Pfeffer writes about Bibi's time in the Sayeret Matkal unit of the IDF and describes the extent to which this experience still has an impact on the way he runs the country. Sayeret Matkal, a "small elite" unit, instilled in Bibi a "hostility to large organizations, including the IDF itself, which Bibi sees as cumbersome and obdurate." Pfeffer notes that even now, when "managing Israel's strategic affairs, he will always prefer using small special forces over larger regular battalions," and that he is "more likely to engage in back-channel talks through trusted confidential intermediaries than to use the services of the professional diplomatic corps."
Pfeffer chronicles his many personal failings: the infidelity, the two divorces, and the moment when his present wife, Sara, to whom he was then not yet married, informed him she was pregnant. There would be other trying times. After former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, Leah, his widow, "refused to shake Netanyahu's hand at the mourning session in the Knesset and again at the state funeral on Mount Herzl, attended by leaders from around the world, including President Bill Clinton and former presidents Jimmy Carter and George HW. Bush." To add insult to injury, Netanyahu was instructed not to pay a shiva call, even as Yasser Arafat entered the Rabin home to do just that.
Through it all, Benjamin Netanyahu has persevered and held his head high. The news that Israeli police have recommended not one, but two indictments for Netanyahu, could not have come at a better time for Pfeffer's book. But if there's anything to be learned from his biography, it's that Bibi Netanyahu will not go down without a fight.
BY ANSHEL PFEFFER
Basic Books, 432 pages
Reviewed by DANIELLA J. GREENBAUM
DANIELLA J. GREENBAUM is assistant editor of COMMENTARY.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Greenbaum, Daniella J. "Bibi Here Now." Commentary, Apr. 2018, p. 37+. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536255816/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=aeab7933. Accessed 24 June 2018.
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Pfeffer, Anshel. Bibi: The Turbulent
Life and Times of Benjamin
Netanyahu
Jessica Bushore
Xpress Reviews.
(Mar. 23, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bushore, Jessica. "Pfeffer, Anshel. Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu."
Xpress Reviews, 23 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A535612777/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6f86074d. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535612777
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QUOTED: "On every page of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu ... one feels Pfeffer’s encyclopedic knowledge of his subject and his profound fairness in assessing Israel’s leader. For American Jews especially, the book pulls back the curtain on a man held in high esteem who holds us in contempt."
Opinion
Netanyahu’s Use And Abuse Of American Jews: A Review of ‘Bibi’ By Anshel Pfeffer
Batya Ungar-SargonApril 11, 2018Nikki Casey
BIBI: THE TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES OF BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
By Anshel Pfeffer
Basic Books, 432 pages, $32
Early in “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu,” Anshel Pfeffer’s excellent biography of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the author quotes an anecdote that Netanyahu likes to share. It’s about the time a mob of anti-Semites cornered Netanyahu’s grandfather in the old country. According to Netanyahu, as the group beat his grandfather with their clubs, he thought to himself: “The shame. The shame that a descendant of the Maccabees is lying here in the mud, helpless.”
The story has a happy ending. As Netanyahu’s grandfather lay bleeding, he promised himself that if he survived the night, “he would move with his family to the land of Israel and help to build a new future for the people of Israel in its land.” He did indeed survive the night, Netanyahu says, adding, “I am here today as prime minister of Israel due to the promise my grandfather made.”
The story is instructive, though not so much as a piece of history; Pfeffer (with whom I have corresponded on Twitter) notes that it may be apocryphal. Its significance lies, rather, in what it reveals about how Netanyahu sees the Diaspora.
Netanyahu portrays his grandfather not as angry with or scared of the ruffians who attacked him, but rather as ashamed of his own victimization. It’s shameful to be caught and beaten by a mob that hates you, shameful to be helpless. And it’s from the ashes of his grandfather’s victim-shaming self-loathing that Netanyahu rises, phoenixlike, as a New Jew to lead the people of Israel.
This fort-da dance with the Diaspora — drawing it close, in order to paint himself as its savior from its own loathsome tendencies — is one Netanyahu has sustained throughout his career. “He has a true disdain for progressive Jews,” a senior official in Barack Obama’s administration told Pfeffer. “He talks about stuff they like — high-tech and gay rights — but it’s clear he disrespects people who put their liberalism on a par with their Jewishness.”
This tension also informs Pfeffer’s biography in a more general sort of way. Netanyahu is just one year younger than the State of Israel, and Pfeffer tells his story as a synecdoche for the story of the Jewish state. Just as Israel has always had a complex relationship with the Diaspora, so, too, Bibi.
Pfeffer was never granted an interview with Netanyahu (“This is Mr. Pfeffer who’s writing a book about me,” Netanyahu once told the author’s editors at The Economist. “He doesn’t know anything about me. It will be a cartoon.”). Instead, Pfeffer seems to have chosen to portray Netanyahu’s ego as the main character of the biography, and he chronicles Netanyahu’s self-presentation, his glories and humiliations, as though they were the man himself.
This strategy makes up for the few moments when one might have wished to get a little closer, to hear, in Netanyahu’s own words, events that in Pfeffer’s telling must remain mysterious.
Netanyahu’s disdain for the Diaspora is not one of those areas. A columnist for Haaretz and The Economist, Pfeffer knows how to satisfy Israeli and non-Israeli readers simultaneously, and Netanyahu’s feelings about non-Israeli Jews are a topic on which Pfeffer is thorough.
The contempt was formed early. Netanyahu went to high school in America, where he and his brother Yoni — later killed in the Entebbe raid and memorialized as a hero — developed contempt for their soft and ditzy American counterparts, who lacked the gravitas of Israeli youth, not to mention the military service.
Netanyahu also developed a dual persona, one for Israel and one for the Diaspora, with two names — Benjamin Netanyahu versus Ben Nitay, the last name shortened because he grew sick of Americans butchering the four syllables. This ability to perform different selves came in handy years later, when he realized that the key to success was to look good on TV. Pfeffer notes how, as deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Netanyahu, “worked assiduously on his televisual skills, taking lessons from professional coaches and spending weekends rehearsing at home… using hired video cameras.” He practiced everything from sound bites to leading anchors’ first names to “the mystery of male makeup,” and became a favorite of the American talk shows. (Larry King once said, “on a scale of 1 to 10 as a great guest, he is an 8. If he had a sense of humor, he’d be a 10.”)
But it was when he became ambassador to the United Nations in 1984 that he really developed his signature style. Netanyahu focused most of his efforts on his speeches, which he saw as “historic events,” according to one former diplomat at the mission: “The fact-checking that went into them, the testing out of every idiom and nuance, [was] painstaking and went on for days.” Yet he always gave the impression of an “off-the-cuff delivery.” It was then that Netanyahu developed his penchant for bringing visual aids to his talks.
In addition to capturing Netanyahu’s use and abuse of Diaspora Jews, the book’s most important contribution is its exploration of Netanyahu’s handling of the Palestinians, whose national aspirations and self-determination would become a virtual impossibility during Netanyahu’s tenure. This was deliberate, the work of a well-developed Weltanschauung: “Netanyahu has always maintained that the Palestinian issue is a diversion, not a central problem in the region. In the 1980s, Syria and the Soviet Union were the real issues. In the 1990s, it became Iraq, and since the beginning of the twenty-first century, he has focused on Iran.”
So, too, in his first White House meeting with Obama, in May 2009, Netanyahu “was dismayed to discover that Obama wasn’t interested in talking about Iran at any length. ” For Netanyahu, “the Palestinian issue was a distraction from the real threat, not just to Israel, but to the entire world. How could Obama expect Israel to waste time and resources on a local side-show and make dangerous concessions to the Palestinians while its very existence was being threatened by Iran?”
For Obama, of course, the exact opposite was true. The only way confronting Iran would succeed was if pursued through diplomacy, which required a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For him, solving the conflict had to be Israel’s destiny.
We all know how that turned out. Netanyahu leveraged his popularity among hawkish American Jews and congressional Republicans to try to stop Obama’s Iran deal, and failed.
And yet, amazingly, as Pfeffer notes, Netanyahu’s colossal gaslighting of those concerned for Palestinians’ human rights ultimately worked: “Netanyahu has failed to convince the world that Israel was justified in keeping the settlements, but has succeeded in taking the settlements off the global agenda.” Netanyahu expanded Israel’s diplomacy to the Far East, “where leaders were especially eager to acquire Israeli technology and had little interest in the Palestinians.” But he found an ever-bigger coup in the incursions he made with Arab Sunni dictators from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, “who saw him as a partner both in their joint rivalry with the Shi’a Iran and as a useful ally to have when dealing with Trump’s Washington.”
Ironically, these successes have enabled the entrenchment of the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade against Gaza.
This tension, between opening to the Arab world and foreclosing on Palestinian human rights, lies at the heart of Netanyahu’s legacy. And yet, balancing contradictions — between nationalism and liberalism, openness and protectiveness, Old Jew and New Jew — is a Netanyahu family legacy. For three generations, the Netanyahus have staked their claim in the Revisionist Zionist camp of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, assuming Jabotinsky’s Hobbesian outlook, that nations who wish to survive must “keep apart, untrusting, perpetually on guard.” And though his elders remained obscure outsiders in the history of Zionism, ultimately their brand of Zionism seems to have won the day; “integrating Jewish nationalism and religious tradition is one of the dominant ideologies in Israel.” This is in no small part due to Netanyahu, who, though staunchly secular himself, has always used the ultra Orthodox parties and the religious Zionist settlement movement to his advantage.
With his willingness to mine the worst in humans to ensure his political longevity — who can forget the Facebook video of Netanyahu warning voters to get to the polls because the Arabs were voting “in droves” — and an ability to manipulate the press while simultaneously whining about unfavorable coverage, some readers might be reminded of President Trump. (Sara Netanyahu told Melania Trump when the first couple landed in Ben Gurion Airport: “We’re just like you. The media hate us but the people love us.”) As the Israeli politician Dan Meridor told Pfeffer, “Bibi isn’t a racist himself, but he is adept at using racism for political purposes.” It sounds eerily familiar.
But Pfeffer’s Netanyahu is a man driven by both political self-preservation and deeply held convictions. He inherited from his father “a deep disdain for what he sees as an inherent weakness in the Jewish character” — “Only a strong leader, capable of withstanding unbearable pressure to concede, can safeguard Jewish sovereignty for another generation.”
And though the Jewish state has existed for 70 years, much like Netanyahu himself, “its existence remains as precarious as that of the Hasmonean dynasty of Judea” in Netanyahu’s mind. One wrong turn and you’re lying in a puddle of mud after having been beaten up by a group of ruffians —- or on your way to the gas chambers.
This also means that Netanyahu sees threats to his leadership as threats to national security, a conflation that will only increase as his legal troubles close in on him.
On every page of “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu,” out May 1, one feels Pfeffer’s encyclopedic knowledge of his subject and his profound fairness in assessing Israel’s leader. For American Jews especially, the book pulls back the curtain on a man held in high esteem who holds us in contempt.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the Forward’s opinion editor.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.
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QUOTED: "Of course the book is essential—understand Bibi and you understand the times and how they came to be the times."
Review: Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer — a small man for a mean age
Understand how Benjamin Netanyahu has succeeded in Israel and you understand our times, says David Aaronovitch
David Aaronovitch
May 19 2018, 12:01am, The Times
Middle East
Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu
JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
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In the past few days Israel turned 70, the Palestinians commemorated what they call the “Nakba” — the catastrophe of dispossession — the Americans reopened their embassy in the disputed city of Jerusalem, dozens of Palestinians were shot dead approaching or attempting to storm the border between Israel and Gaza, and Netta won the Eurovision Song Contest, bringing next year’s finals to Israel.
This last provoked a triumphant and two-fingered tweet from the prime minister’s office. “You know what we say,” Benjamin Netanyahu wrote. “Those who didn’t want Jerusalem in Eurovision are going to get the Eurovision in Jerusalem.”
“Bibi” Netanyahu turns 70 next year, making him, narrowly, the first Israeli prime minster to be born in the modern state of Israel. And if he survives another year in office he will — remarkably and almost unaccountably — become the longest-serving prime minister in the country’s history, outlasting the legendary David Ben-Gurion. They will have to name an airport after him.
And yet the tweet surely indicates the stature of the man. For 30 years, whenever you looked, there he was, morally small but indestructible as a beetle. And for all that 30 years I have wished that he was gone, replaced by someone wiser and less destructive. So despite Anshel Pfeffer’s qualities as a writer and an observer of the Israeli scene, mostly for the newspaper Haaretz, I approached this timely book with no great pleasure. If Bibi Netanyahu exemplifies anything it is the meanness of the age. As a generation we have sat on the shoulders of giants, and pissed on them. So, of course the book is essential — understand Bibi and you understand the times and how they came to be the times.
Bibi was born in 1949 into a family whose father, Benzion, was a failed (or rather, spurned) politician on the Israeli right who spent much of his life espousing Jewish nationalism from various academic posts in the US. Benzion is recalled in this book as a rancorous and highly intelligent man whose demands weighed heavily on his three sons, Yoni, Bibi and Iddo.
Benzion belonged to one side in Zionism’s long internal political battle. Like in Ireland, Israel’s parties originated in the period before and immediately after independence, and they still refer vestigially to ancient divisions. Where Ireland has Fine Gael and Fianna Fail still fighting out the 1920s, Israel has the descendants of Ben-Gurion’s collectivist settler party, Mapam, and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Jewish nationalists or Revisionists. These in time became Labor and Likud. The Netanyahus were Likud.
In the commando force Sayeret Matkal in 1973
In the commando force Sayeret Matkal in 1973
GETTY IMAGES
The young Bibi was brought up mostly in the US, by which time his father’s involvement in active (as opposed to rhetorical) politics was over. Bibi turned 18 in 1967, the year that Israel won the Six-Day War against its Arab neighbours, and went from mini-state to regional power. He returned to Israel, volunteered for an elite commando force called Sayeret Matkal, and was one of the few considered fit, brave and clever enough to be accepted. By the time he was in his twenties Netanyahu had been to Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, but never invited or as a tourist.
The two seminal moments in his early life were the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which broke out when he was in the US and which began catastrophically for Israel, and the famed Entebbe operation of 1976. On that raid to free hostages held by terrorists in Idi Amin’s Uganda, Netanyahu’s brother, Yoni, also in Sayeret Matkal, was the sole military fatality. He became an Israeli legend and his family tended the flame of his public memory with assiduity.
Bibi entered politics gradually, first as a diplomat in the Israeli embassy in Washington and then as the young ambassador to the United Nations. He spoke excellent American, was handsome, telegenic and glibly effective. While in the US he cultivated useful contacts among influential right-wing Jews and influential right-wing gentiles. By the late 1980s he was ready to return and stand for parliament for the Likud Party. By 1996 he was prime minister for the first time.
Why? Pfeffer shows us a man who is a combination of lizard talents. Bibi was an instinctive embracer of the coming trend, seeing clearly that the Jews arriving from Russia, and the Mizrahi (Jews from Arab countries), were voters underrepresented in the old establishment. They also tended, though poorer, to be anti-collectivist and Bibi stood as a market moderniser. He understood the power of the new TV channels, and was one of the first to employ the young and brilliant American pollster Frank Luntz to advise him on “message” strategy.
He has always understood America and used that understanding to encourage its pro-Israeli stance while fighting off its do-goodish tendencies towards the Palestinians. He never quite denies the Yanks any chance of the peace they always want and that he has never believed in.
So what does he believe in? Above all in Israel, in free-market capitalism, in strong security forces who are not squeamish about using their weapons, in keeping his enemies weak and his friends anxious.
Pfeffer avoids making great judgments of character and wants the reader to understand, not to like or dislike, his subject. Yet his Bibi also emerges as a serial philanderer, a man who likes to live high on the hog, who indulges a third wife, has bullied employees outrageously, who — if Max Hastings, the biographer of Yoni Netanyahu, is to be believed (and I think he is) — is also something of a racist, and who may yet go down for corruption.
There is, however, one part of the book where I found myself taking serious issue with the author. In 1993 the Oslo Accords were signed between Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman, Yasser Arafat. The Israeli right, though having no alternative, opposed the accords (as did Hamas on the other side). As Pfeffer reminds us: “There has been nothing as prolonged, as intense and as toxic as the anti-Oslo protests of 1993 to 1995.”
Netanyahu was the respectable face of those protests. At big rallies, where extremists would wave “Death to Rabin” placards, Netanyahu would chide such militancy, while feeding its belief that Rabin was unpatriotic and somehow un-Jewish. In November 1995 Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Jewish extremist and his widow, Leah, refused to speak to Netanyahu at the funeral. Despite this, Netanyahu won the next election, held in 1996, thanks in no small part to a Hamas campaign of suicide bombing.
Pfeffer, although no apologist for the man, argues that to blame Netanyahu for Rabin’s murder in any way is unfair. “What could Netanyahu have done differently?” he asks. “It was his duty as leader of the opposition that was fighting the government on a policy that would have historically changed Israel’s foundation, disastrously in his opinion, to lead the protests . . . Refusing to work with the far right would have meant Netanyahu and Likud giving up the street. That would have limited them to speech-making in the Knesset and being sidelined by the largely pro-Oslo media. Israeli politics was still being played out on the streets in the early 1990s, not on the internet, and the extremists made up the necessary numbers.”
But that’s the point. What would a statesman have done, a person of conscience thinking about the long-term future of his country? Netanyahu had no alternative to Oslo, other than not doing it. He let Rabin take the risks and exploited the fearful nationalist and often racist backlash to giving any concession to the Palestinians.
Netanyahu is in every important sense, as this otherwise superb book makes clear, a small man with a horribly long political life.
Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer, Hurst, 256pp; £20
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QUOTED: "riveting and passionately critical biography"
"a must-read for everyone who is interested in the undercurrents of today’s Israeli society."
Binyamin Netanyahu’s unofficial history
Our Israel correspondent unpacks the life story of the man who may soon become the country’s most durable leader
Culture
May 2nd 2018
Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu. By Anshel Pfeffer. Basic Books; 432 pages; $32. Hurst; £20.
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU has long dreamed of surpassing David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest serving prime minister. He may still be able to make it, in about another year. But in March Mr Netanyahu and his wife Sara were interrogated by Israel’s police and his eldest son Yair by the tax authority, on suspicion of financial misconduct including taking bribes. In the subsequent weeks the prime minister, long regarded as one of Israel’s strongest leaders, has appeared weaker and more indecisive than ever before. Anshel Pfeffer’s riveting and passionately critical biography portrays him as a clone of Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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Under Mr Netanyahu’s leadership, Israeli democracy has become even more fragile than it had been before, with more racism and xenophobia, often backed by some members of Mr Netanyahu’s government as well as the prime minister himself. The ever so slim chances for peace seem to have gone completely. “The only peace he has been willing to consider is one where Israel bullies the Palestinians into submission,” Mr Pfeffer writes.
Mr Netanyahu shares some characteristics with Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, including an unconditional belief in Zionist ideology and a deep conviction that the independence of Israel as a Jewish state must be maintained at all costs. Similar to Ben-Gurion and many other Israelis, Mr Netanyahu lives in constant awareness of the possibility of imminent destruction, or as Mr Pfeffer puts it—“one wrong turn and Israelis in the 21st century could face a similar fate to the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust.” Like Ben-Gurion, Mr Netanyahu regards himself as a secular Jew with roots in Jewish history, particularly the Old Testament; also like Ben-Gurion, he spent some years in America and admires its culture and basic values. Ben-Gurion was among those national leaders not content with making history, but also eager to influence his country’s historiography. His memoirs alone contain over two million words. Mr Netanyahu appears to care mostly for his own image.
Scrutinising the official history of the Netanyahu family, Mr Pfeffer has exposed parts of it as mythology, including the controversial role Mr Netanyahu’s elder brother, Yoni, played during the heroic hostage rescue operation at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. Yoni was killed in that operation. Over the decades, an entire industry of books, movies and research was built around Entebbe, creating the impression that Yoni’s part was much larger than it actually was. Some details of the prime minister’s own official biography have also been contested.
This tendency to mythologise his life is curious, for Mr Netanyahu’s real story abounds with uncontested success, as a good-looking and intelligent officer in one the most daring top-secret commando units of the Israeli army, a student at MIT, an effective businessman and popular ambassador to the United Nations. He is one of the most prominent figures in the international media, and has open lines to the presidents of both America and Russia. Why would he long for an even more glorious biography?
He has also on occasions told entirely fictitious stories, often aimed at inciting anger at the Palestinians. He once claimed that the Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had suggested that Hitler exterminate the Jews in their meeting in November 1941. “Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel them,” claimed Mr Netanyahu. “Husseini had indeed been a virulent anti-Semite and admirer of Hitler,” Mr Pfeffer notes, “but no serious historian agrees that he had been the author of the Final Solution.” How could Mr Netanyahu have risked his respectability with such a horrendous tale?
But then again why would he risk everything he had ever achieved in exchange for expensive cigars and other bribes he allegedly received from Israeli and foreign tycoons? Explaining all this perhaps requires a less antagonistic biographer than Mr Pfeffer, as well as a wider historical perspective than is available at this time.
Mr Netanyahu’s popular support is based largely on Israel’s economic affluence. Never before have so many Israelis lived so comfortably. Also Palestinian terrorism has been largely contained, and since the so-called “peace process” has been put to sleep, no territorial concessions have been forced on Israel on his watch. Celebrating 70 years of independence this year, the Jewish state with all its flaws constitutes one of the most dramatic success stories of the 20th century. Mr Netanyahu has come to be recognised as his country’s most authentic spokesman today.
Like Ben-Gurion he believes that to be the prime minister of Israel, one needs a grasp of history, a vision for the future, and the fortitude to withstand unbearable pressures. According to Mr Pfeffer, Mr Netanyahu knows only one man with these qualities. “The idea of one of his long list of political rivals…occupying his office is not just laughable but a threat to the nation’s survival, in his opinion,” the author contends. Still as one of Israel’s best informed writers he is not altogether desperate. “Hopefully”, he writes, “the next leader will embark upon a necessary process of healing and building afresh because on the day after Benjamin Netanyahu leaves, his ultimate legacy will not be a more secure nation, but a deeply fractured Israeli society, living behind walls.” While most Israelis may not agree with this conclusion it is part of what makes this book a must-read for everyone who is interested in the undercurrents of today’s Israeli society.
TOM SEGEV*
*Our policy is to identify the reviewer of any book by or about someone closely connected with The Economist. Tom Segev is an Israeli historian, the author most recently of “Ben-Gurion: A State At All Costs”, to be published in English by the end of 2018
QUOTED: "Netanyahu is a figure who has dominated Israeli life for a quarter of a century, and counting. A major figure on the world stage as well. So the question, why write this book, almost seems to answer itself."
Opinion Right-wing Jewish Nationalism Created Netanyahu. Then Netanyahu Became Its Master
For the last 30 years, Bibi has been Israel's most constant, compelling and important story. But he wants to control how history will see him. As journalists, our job is to prevent him from doing so
Anshel Pfeffer
27.04.2018 12:32 Updated: 12:33 PM
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures as he addresses a health conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 27, 2018
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures as he addresses a health conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 27, 2018\ AMIR COHEN/ REUTERS
How Netanyahu has betrayed the Jews
Netanyahu's Israel is now an object of envy for ethno-nationalists worldwide
The tragedy of suspect Benjamin Netanyahu
The personality cult around Netanyahu
My new book, "Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu" is out next week. So I’m exercising a columnist’s droit de seigneur and this column is a shameless puff-piece on my book’s virtues.
I was asked recently in an interview why I wrote the book - and for a few seconds I didn’t quite know what to answer. Because I’m a journalist, of course, and a writer, and Netanyahu is the biggest, most compelling and most important story in Israel over the last 30 years.
Quite frankly, I don’t understand why many more books haven’t been written about him over this period. This is only the fifth biography to appear to date, in Hebrew or English. More are now being written. And that’s as it should be.
Netanyahu is a figure who has dominated Israeli life for a quarter of a century, and counting. A major figure on the world stage as well. So the question, why write this book, almost seems to answer itself.
The real question for me, assuming my Bibi will be sharing shelf-space with others, was how to make this book stand out - what was I offering readers by writing it? I spent a good deal of time thinking about this and the conclusion I reached, which guided me through writing it, was that Netanyahu’s personal and political story is very much the story of Israel.
That should be obvious from the bare facts: he’s the first and only prime minister of Israel born since the foundation of the state, in October 1949, so he’s nearly the same age as Israel. But he’s not seen as that kind of articulation of the state's history. Certainly by many who portray him in the media. For two reasons.
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First, on a more general level, even today, in 2018, there’s still a tendency to view the 70 years of Israel’s existence, certainly the defining early decades, through the perspective of Mapai, the forerunner of today’s Labor Party, who were in government in Israel’s first three decades. That’s natural because Mapai was the party of the founding fathers who built the state and dominated it, before and after independence.
But that perspective overlooks the many groups within the Zionist movement and in early Israel, who shared the Zionist vision and were here when the state was built, but are barely mentioned in the accepted canon of Israel's history.
Benjamin Netanyahu and his late father Ben Zion at a memorial ceremony for Yoni Netanyahu at the Mt Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem
Benjamin Netanyahu and his late father Ben Zion at a memorial ceremony for Yoni Netanyahu at the Mt Herzl cemetery in Jerusalemflash 90
Netanyahu, the third Likud prime minister, embodies along with his father Benzion, and grandfather Natan, the parallel narratives of Israel and Zionism, in many ways, even more than Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, the first Likud prime ministers.
Which leads us to the second reason why I think Bibi isn’t seen as the embodiment of Israel’s story, as he should be. Many of his political opponents, particularly on the center-left, but also many on the right, still feel, after all the time that’s passed since he entered political life 30 years ago, that he’s an aberration. A foreign transplant from America who’s taken over the Israeli body politic.
This perspective is not just very wrong, it’s also the central reason Bibi’s opponents, both within Likud and certainly on the center-left, have always underestimated and failed to read him. And as a result, they've usually lost to him.
The forces of Jewish nationalism that created Netanyahu existed in the Zionist movement from its inception. The components of the right-wing-religious coalition which has served as Bibi’s base were there from 1948. It may have been Begin who first brought them together in his government in 1977, but Netanyahu has made this coalition-maintenance and appealing to the base an art of survival, far surpassing anything that Begin ever imagined. It’s the secret of his success.
Israel today is the sum of those tensions, passions and divides in Israeli and Jewish society which created the Netanyahu coalition.
Trying to combine a history of Zionism and Israel, alongside Netanyahu’s own personal story, makes perfect sense. But writing it as an account of contemporary Israeli politics as well was not so simple. Netanyahu is still such an active politician that it’s sometimes astonishing when you remember he will be 69 in October and just how far back his own story goes. Those of us who are old enough to remember when he first appeared on the scene, and I’m sorry to say that I am, still think of him sometimes as this exciting new meteor.
Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with attendees before a joint meeting of Congress in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S. March 3, 2015
Benjamin Netanyahu shakes hands with attendees before a joint meeting of Congress in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S. March 3, 2015Bloomberg
A few weeks ago was the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Karameh. The first time the Israeli army carried out a major operation against a Palestinian organization, it was also Netanyahu’s first military operation.
Bibi was there as a young soldier, manning one of the roadblocks out of Karameh where they captured fleeing Palestinian fighters. Their main target was Yasser Arafat, but he had escaped on a motor-bike shortly before they arrived.
That’s half a century, more than two-thirds of Israel’s history, in which Netanyahu has been on the frontline of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It began with a failed operation - and Netanyahu, who hates being associated with failure, has never spoken of being at Karameh, except once, when he first met Arafat in 1996 and said to him, “We were both there 28 years ago.”
Last month was also the thirtieth anniversary of his entry into politics, in an interview on Israeli television in which he announced he was resigning as a diplomat and joining Likud. He was so busy that day rehearsing for the interview that he barely remembered at the last moment to call up the Foreign Ministry and tender his resignation.
And then there are the personal milestones. 60 years ago, his parents informed him they were moving to the United States. He would spend the next few months sitting in a classroom in a public school in Manhattan, struggling to understand a word that was being said. The humiliation of being treated like an idiot would motivate him to master English, better even than a native speaker.
Next week is a much more poignant date for him: the fortieth birthday of his daughter Noa, mother of his three grandchildren.
Noa and her children are never seen in public, and even the single photograph of her that Bibi once had in his office, disappeared 22 years ago for "reframing." It never returned. This may have something to do with her being the daughter of Bibi’s first wife, Miki, that when she was born in Boston, her parents had already separated, and, of course, the way that Bibi’s current persona has been built around his new family with his third wife Sara.
Protesters hold signs calling upon Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step down during a rally in Tel Aviv, Israel. February 16, 2018
Protesters hold signs calling upon Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step down during a rally in Tel Aviv, Israel. February 16, 2018\ AMIR COHEN/ REUTERS
Getting all these three Netanyahus, the historical, the political, and the personal Bibi, in to one book was a challenge. It would have been impossible without the dogged work of Israeli journalists, especially at Haaretz, who have tirelessly ferreted out every detail, challenged every spin and - no matter how hard he has tried to suppress the media - relentlessly held Netanyahu to account.
Each one of the many Israelis, and Americans with personal insights into Netanyahu I spoke to has a story of betrayal. In some cases, many stories. Even those who have forgiven him and continue to support his policies. And so many of them were eager to tell their stories. Except one.
Bibi ignored my requests for interviews for this book. He didn’t even take the trouble to refuse. But over the last couple of years, whenever we did meet, he had something sarcastic to say.
Once when I was sitting with some colleagues in his office, he suddenly stopped mid-conversation and said to me, "I can see you’re taking notes of what my office looks like. Don’t worry, I’ll let you have a look afterwards." Of course, he didn’t.
On another occasion, when we entered his office, he announced: "This is Mr Pfeffer who’s writing a book about me. He knows nothing about me. It will be a cartoon."
Last week, I was surprised to see that the essay I wrote, based on the book, had been copy-pasted, in its entirety, on Netanyahu’s Facebook page. I’m not sure whether I should see that as a compliment. Perhaps he just likes cartoons.
The truth is, he is actually obsessed with cartoons. And the way cartoonists portray him. In a meeting with Haaretz journalists a couple of years back he drew a cartoon of himself, not a bad one, to lampoon how we in the media see him. That's his overriding obsession.
Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin NetanyahuBasic Books
And it’s why he is already working secretly on his memoirs, though he plans to remain for many more years in office. Not satisfied with his power over Israel’s present, he wants to control how history will see him. A large part of our job as journalists is to prevent him from dictating the narrative of his life and times.
"Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu" (Basic Books) will be published on May 1, 2018
Anshel Pfeffer
Bibi' is a major biography of Benjamin Netanyahu. Anshel Pfeffer gets to the Israeli leader's core.
By Noga Tarnopolsky
Apr 27, 2018 | 11:25 AM
'Bibi' is a major biography of Benjamin Netanyahu. Anshel Pfeffer gets to the Israeli leader's core.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's Policy Conference at the Walter Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C., in March 2014. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
Perhaps the most conspicuous surprise in Anshel Pfeffer's biography of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's long-serving but little-loved prime minister, who glowers from the cover, is his emergence from these pages as a man of unbending principle.
This does not conform to the Netanyahu we think we know, the master manipulator of Israel's political sphere, the man trailed by criminal investigations whose own fans admiringly claim him as a bully.
The change in perspective leading to this realization is one result of the daunting task Pfeffer, a writer for the Israeli daily Haaretz, has set for himself: to recount the life of Netanyahu against the background of the life of Israel, from its pre-state inception into its 71st year.
The mirroring may have been too tempting to resist. When not referring to himself as the voice of the Jewish people, Netanyahu, 68, Israel's first Israeli-born prime minister, has a penchant for using himself as a metaphor for the state.
Set aside the pettiness of politics and the daily accommodations necessary to survive a rough-and-tumble democratic arena. Pfeffer's Netanyahu is convincingly portrayed as a devoted adherent to a rigid, right-wing worldview from birth.
Three consecutive generations, starting with Nathan, the premier's grandfather, who attended the Eighth Zionist Congress of 1907 and adopted the name Netanyahu, are portrayed as unchanging in their conception of the world as it pertains to Jews — and Jews, their fate and their agency, are the unchanging topic that consumes the Netanyahu men.
Anshel Pfeffer's new biography of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "Bibi."
Anshel Pfeffer's new biography of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "Bibi." (Basic Books)
History, of course, has provided some validation for their dystopian vision.
Still, it is amusing but not shocking to read that 20 years ago, as Israel turned 50, Benzion Netanyahu, the prime minister's father, grumpily conceded to a journalist that "with all the faults and weaknesses it was a wonder in my eyes that with the human material at our disposal, which was not ideal, we succeeded in building a viable state."
The "not ideal," in his eyes, was David Ben Gurion, Israel's legendary founding prime minister and a visionary who never harbored a single doubt about the viability of the state, yet was, from the Netanyahu standpoint, a wimp.
A chip on the shoulder, it turns out, can be hereditary. Netanyahu has built a myth around his family's contributions to the success of the Zionist enterprise, but Pfeffer writes that "Benzion was just as peripheral a figure as Nathan, a failed politician who never once failed to bet on the wrong horse. Bibi is the exact opposite — a politician with near flawless timing."
The family first came to public attention in 1976, when Yoni Netanyahu, Bibi's older brother, died while commanding the rescue of Israeli hostages at Entebbe.
The Bibi who emerges from this readable, thought-provoking book is an utterly recognizable Bibi complete with his familiar smirk (now explained: scarred in a childhood accident, the prime minister still instinctively hides his lip), the polished English, the self-assurance, the shameless political ploys and the obsession with Jewish vulnerability.
Anshel Pfeffer, author of the new biography of Benjamin Netanyahu, "Bibi."
Anshel Pfeffer, author of the new biography of Benjamin Netanyahu, "Bibi." (Yarden Gabbay)
But this Bibi is also new, a chrysalis. Some facts about Netanyahu, it turns out, have been distorted by time. He did not expediently adopt an American persona while studying at MIT, as Israelis believe. Instead, through his mother, Tzila, he was born a dual national, American and Israeli to the root.
And he fought hard for the flawless American English that has won him the admiring votes of two generations of Israelis. Bibi's childhood memories include the trauma of showing up at a new school in New York, aged 8, not knowing a word of English, during one of the family's numerous transatlantic relocations. Yoni never lost his Hebrew accent.
In grappling with the dilemma that defined his life, the prime minister's father, Benzion, Pfeffer writes, "was incapable of identifying with his sons, who felt that by leaving Israel, they were abandoning the Zionist enterprise that was central to their self-identity."
We discover that the Netanyahu boys' coming of age was defined by rebellion against their unyielding, standoffish father, who preferred American university libraries to Israel, where his ideological nemeses were building a state and where, casting off his awkwardness, his good-looking, fitness-obsessed sons were ravenously integrating into the élite.
In a fascinating section, Pfeffer describes a stiff Netanyahu in post-Kennedy America, "a chameleon" already inhabiting "the dual persona that would characterize him for life": American Ben filled with "disdain for liberal-leaning, Democrat-voting American Jews," and Israeli Bibi, back home for the summer, lecturing kibbutz "friends about the evils of socialism." He was 14.
This is also when Netanyahu developed the contempt he makes little pains to hide today toward diplomats, military officers, journalists, anyone, really, professing any sort of expertise.
The sons defied the father in every aspect of life but one: a fixed dogma unaffected by time or the appearance of adaptation to political reality.
Yes, a first-term Netanyahu shook hands with Yasser Arafat in 1996 (the picture chosen by Pfeffer makes it look as pleasant as a colonoscopy) and signed the 1997 Hebron Agreement, turning major responsibility for security to the Palestinian Authority. Yes, in 2009, months into his second elected term, Netanyahu delivered the Bar Ilan speech, reaffirming his commitment to the two-state solution with the Palestinians.
"Bibi" makes plain that none of this made one bit of difference. In his heart, Bibi is unchanged. In 2001, no longer in government, Netanyahu said the Hebron agreement had been a mistake. In the 2015 election, he bellowed that there would be no Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister.
It is a lifetime riddled with the carcasses of mentors and allies Netanyahu discards without a thought, pierced through with a steel thread of certainty.
About midway through the book we encounter the early 1980s Netanyahu, recently appointed Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. It is not a coincidence that that Bibi remains vivid in the minds of so many; it was, Pfeffer notes, at that time that Netanyahu discovered the role that would allow him to do what he did best: "be an Israeli on the American stage."
"Oozing self-confidence, he quickly became a fixture on [American] news shows," Pfeffer says, adding that Netanyahu quickly started lobbying for the post of ambassador to the United States. "The idea of appointing a 33-year-old with no political standing and only six months of relevant experience to Israel's most sensitive diplomatic posting may have seemed absurd, but Netanyahu believed he was the best man for the job."
Those 10 words could serve as the title for this book.
Pfeffer begins his chapter on Netanyahu and President Obama with the observation that "both men were elected leaders of their countries in their mid-forties, with little political experience but enough eloquence and charisma to defy entrenched political establishments." Netanyahu, he reveals, hoped Obama would win against Hillary Clinton in 2008. He'd had enough of the Clintons with Bill, who figures prominently among the diverse list of American presidents — Eisenhower, Reagan and George H.W. Bush — who brought the vaunted American-Israel relationship to a chilly low spot.
In this context, the Obama era is interesting not because of its overexposed flops, but in the particulars, especially the Obama team's mystifying yet complete inability to productively engage with the Middle East. The background to the first Obama-Netanyahu White House encounter unfolds almost like a thriller, with each side confidently striding toward a precipice.
Pfeffer describes Netanyahu, his mind on the Iranian threat, expecting a meeting with a generically Democratic president, whereas Obama, either unaware of diplomatic precedent going back to 1967, or unaware of its significance, resolved to demand a "complete settlement freeze" from the Israelis.
"Nothing," Pfeffer writes, "could have prepared Bibi for that meeting."
Nine years later, with Iran licking at the Israeli border in Syria and settlement growth unstopped, one wonders how Obama will describe the encounter in his upcoming autobiography.
The final rendering of Netanyahu is devastating. "Israel turns seventy in 2018. Netanyahu will turn seventy in 2019. He is convinced that no one else but him is qualified to lead the nation into its eighth decade and beyond," Pfeffer concludes.
Netanyahu is depicted as a man stricken with an acute case of l'état, c'est moi, a "patriot" with little faith in the remarkable nation he leads, believing only in himself.
Tarnopolsky is a special correspondent who reports on Israel and the Middle East for The Times.
::
"Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu"
Anshel Pfeffer
Basic Books: 432 pp., $32
QUOTED: "Anshel Pfeffer’s biography is superbly timed."
"This book is a necessary contribution to understanding a high-profile and internationally contentious figure and the fractured country he has led for so long. It is, inevitably, already out of date. But Bibi’s turbulent times are not over yet."
If You Want to Really Understand Bibi
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Supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu at a campaign rally in 2015.CreditJack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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By Ian Black
May 7, 2018
BIBI
The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
By Anshel Pfeffer
423 pp. Basic Books. $32.
Benjamin Netanyahu is now close to becoming Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Haunted by scandal, the Likud leader is a controversial figure at home and abroad. He makes headlines and arouses strong feelings because he deals with big and enormously divisive issues — war and peace in the Middle East, the nuclear ambitions of Iran, the future of the Palestinians and the fate of the Jewish people, not necessarily in that order. He has a strong sense of history and especially of his own indispensable role in making it.`
Anshel Pfeffer’s biography is superbly timed — appearing as Israeli justice closes in on a man who has been in power for nearly a decade and is a major player in what he famously calls a “tough neighborhood” for far longer. Bibi, as he is known at home (though the use of his childhood nickname does not automatically imply affection), comes across as a more complex figure than his legendary mastery of the sound bite suggests. Family background and tribal politics are two of the main strands of his story. America, where he spent much of his early life and formative stages of his career, is another significant one.
If there is a master key to cracking the Bibi code, this insightful and readable book argues, it is his identity as someone who has always stood outside the mainstream. This distance is something of a family inheritance. Netanyahu’s grandfather and father were members of the right-wing “Revisionist” movement at a time when Zionism was dominated by the left in Eastern Europe, America and Palestine. There is a familiar theme in Israel’s history — most eloquently evoked by the late Israeli writer Amos Elon — that the state’s founding fathers and their sons behaved very differently. In the case of the Netanyahus, the “inability to become part of the establishment,” as Pfeffer puts it, made for unusual continuity between the generations.
Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s independence and what Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”) forged one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. His experience attending high school near Philadelphia, where his father had taken an academic job, instilled in him views that were out of sync with then “little” Israel’s collectivist ethos. He has often been accused by his critics over the years of being more American than Israeli. His elder brother Yoni, an officer in the Israeli Army’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit, was a powerful influence, one magnified by grief when Yoni was killed in the Entebbe hostage rescue mission in 1976. Bibi served in the same unit. His role commemorating the fallen hero provided his first intense exposure to public life.
By the early 1980s, after studying at M.I.T. and working as a management consultant, Netanyahu was a rising star at Israel’s Washington embassy. It was there, and later as ambassador to the United Nations, that he honed his formidable public relations skills (known as “hasbara” in Hebrew), befriending columnists, talk-show hosts and influential and wealthy Jewish and other Americans, including the real-estate entrepreneur Donald Trump. In 1988, as the first Palestinian intifada was challenging the status quo of the post-1967 occupation, he went home to join the Likud Party. The world beyond the Beltway first noticed him on CNN, donning a gas mask on air during the 1991 gulf war.
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Pfeffer is one of the smartest and most prolific of Israel’s younger generation of journalists. His work for Haaretz reflects that paper’s liberal bent, instinctively opposed to Netanyahu and much of what he represents. It is hard to imagine that this author ever voted for his subject. Bibi, obsessed by hostile “left-wing” media, complained pre-emptively that this biography would be a “cartoon.” It is not: It fleshes out a superficially familiar and invariably quotable figure with a wealth of background information and analysis that provide necessary and, of course, often highly critical context.
Yet it is also fair. In 1995, before the trauma of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish extremist, Netanyahu was widely accused of “incitement.” Not fair, Pfeffer concludes, explaining that Netanyahu nevertheless chose to ride the “far-right tiger.” Yasir Arafat paid Rabin’s widow a condolence call; Bibi was not welcome but he still won an election, albeit by a tiny margin, soon afterward. Another interesting observation on Pfeffer’s part is that Netanyahu is no fan of military action, tending to caution and even indecision, rejecting, for example, a ground offensive after the Israeli air campaign in the Gaza war of 2014.
Pfeffer rightly focuses on Bibi’s attitude toward the Palestinians. In his first term of office in 1996, he inherited Rabin’s landmark Oslo agreement with the P.L.O., which the Likud opposed, but still grudgingly complied with it. Back in power in 2009 after a period that encompassed the second intifada, Arafat’s death and Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, he came to appreciate how Oslo maintained Israel’s security while allowing settlements to expand as the American-led “peace process” went nowhere slowly. Netanyahu was initially seen as committed to a two-state solution while simultaneously demanding that Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. But a few years later the most he was prepared to contemplate was a “state-minus.” Rivals further to the right do not even go that far. “The only peace he has been willing to consider,” Pfeffer concludes, “is one where Israel bullies the Palestinians into submission. Until that happens, he will continue building walls.”
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Netanyahu, in this view, has always seen the Palestinian issue as a diversion — a “rabbit hole” that misinformed Westerners insist on going down. Terrorism and unchanging Arab and Muslim hostility were and remain his preferred emphases. In recent years his “primary obsession” has been the danger from Iran, whose plans to acquire nuclear weapons (and break Israel’s regional monopoly on them) he says threaten a new Holocaust. Barack Obama’s support for the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement and his efforts to curb Israeli settlements meant that mutual loathing between president and prime minister was inevitable. Trump is a different and of course unfinished story. (Bibi’s aides, perhaps unsurprisingly, have begun branding unfavorable media reports as “fake news.”)
Bibi’s standing has been tarnished by investigations into bribery and corruption — accused of accepting gifts of cash, champagne and cigars — and by the antics of his wife, Sara, whose tantrums and lavish sense of entitlement at public expense made for damaging leaks. Acquiring the loyalty of his own uncritical right-wing media outlet was one response. Sowing fear and promoting division were others: For his fourth election victory in 2015 the Bibi campaign bombarded disenchanted Likud supporters with messages about the dangers of a Palestinian state and racist warnings about Arab citizens voting “in droves.” The result is an erosion of Israel’s democracy.
Still, Netanyahu wins standing ovations from supporters, in particular in the United States. For better or worse he embodies Israel as a modern, “hybrid society of ancient phobias and high-tech hope, a combination of tribalism and globalism.” Netanyahu sees himself, Pfeffer points out, not just as Israel’s premier but as the leader of the Jewish people and he seems little concerned with the problem that bedevils Zionism 70 years after the birth of the Jewish state: what to do about the other people who inhabit that bitterly contested land. In fact, the greatest achievement of Bibi’s career can be seen as a negative one, as Pfeffer describes it, “trying to ensure that Israel did not have clearly defined or internationally recognized borders.”
This book is a necessary contribution to understanding a high-profile and internationally contentious figure and the fractured country he has led for so long. It is, inevitably, already out of date. But Bibi’s turbulent times are not over yet. Updated editions look certain.
Correction: May 20, 2018
An earlier version of this review misidentified the location of Benjamin Netanyahu’s high school. He attended Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pa.; he did not go to high school in Philadelphia.
Ian Black’s latest book is “Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017.”
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A version of this article appears in print on May 12, 2018, on Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Defender. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe