The tough guy of Israeli politics

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.

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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.