László Bernát Veszprémy

„King Bibi” – Who Is the Man Leading Israel to War?

In 1978, a 28-year-old Israeli appeared on a Boston television program under the name Ben
Nitay, where he said that the real core of the conflict is the Arab rejection of the state of
Israel." The speaker looked exactly like a young Benjamin Netanyahu, and there's a reason
why: it was him. Netanyahu studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Harvard University (both in the Boston area), and during the filming of the show, he worked
at the international business consulting firm Boston Consulting Group. He used the name in
America because he said they had trouble pronouncing the name Netanyahu. When asked if
he had changed his name because he wanted to stay in America, he said no: he came from
an old Zionist family and never wanted to stay out.

Israel's current Prime Minister was born in Tel Aviv in 1949. His father was the Polish-Jewish
historian Benzion Netanyahu, who was at one time secretary to the father of the Zionist
right, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky. His father taught in America in the 1960s, so Netanyahu
graduated from a Pennsylvania high school and is a native English speaker. Later, he did his
compulsory service in the Israeli army, including fighting in the Yom Kippur War. In 1976, he
lost his brother, Yonathan „Yoni” Netanyahu, an Israeli army officer who was commander of
the hostage rescue operation during the Entebbe hostage crisis, when a flight from Israel to
France was hijacked by terrorists. The operation was successful, with the commander being
the only casualty.

Back in the US, he joined Likud, became a member of parliament (Knesset) and in 1993
became the leader of the opposition. On 19 October 1994, the worst suicide bombing ever
in Israel took place: a Hamas member blew himself up on a crowded bus near the central
Dizengoff Square of Tel Aviv, killing 22 people. Netanyahu, who was staying nearby at the
Likud headquarters in Metsudat Ze’ev, named after Jabotinsky, joined the angry mob
berating the government around the burnt-out bus.

The next day, his political opponents and media pundits accused him of 'dancing on blood',
but most Israelis remembered the gruesome footage of torn bodies and the driver lying
dead at the wheel. They realised that they were no longer safe even in the heart of
cosmopolitan Israel - writes his biographer, the otherwise strongly liberal Anshel Pfeffer.
According to opinion polls following the '5 no. bus assassination', Netanyahu was finally
ahead of incumbent Yitzhak Rabin, who was shot the following year (in the context of the
fiasco of October this year, it should be noted that Shin Bet had been watching Rabin's
assassin they concluded that he was not a threat).

Although a strong part of Netanyahu's image is ’Mr. Security’, and Time's May 2012 cover
even named him ’King Bibi’, it would be far from fair to say that Netanyahu's career has not
had a few fiascos. In September 1997, on Netanyahu's orders, Mossad attempted to
assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Amman, Jordan. The operation failed, Mashal
survived the poisoning and two agents were even arrested by Jordanian police. The case was
particularly humiliating for Netanyahu, as the Israelis had to hand over the antidote to the
Hamas leader in a Jordanian hospital and dozens of Palestinian detainees were released as
an act of atonement. The Economist, Netanyahu's favourite newspaper, wrote an article
about Netanyahu a year after he took over as prime minister under the headline 'Israel's
serial bungler'.

What determines his views on Gaza and terrorism? In 1995 he wrote a book on terrorism.
The book weighs counter-terrorism measures against the issue of civil liberties, but also
writes about jihadism and nuclear dangers. Looking at the date of the book, it is interesting
to see that he does not simply see terrorism as a security challenge, but as an element of a
civilisational conflict. He clearly situates Jewish culture and Israel's place 'in the West', which
is both a break with Israeli tradition - which traditionally sees Israel as a mediator between
East and West - yet somewhat in keeping with Jabotinsky's 'Western' self-image (Jabotinsky
had more of a love-hate relationship with British culture, while Netanyahu is a fan of
America).

Netanyahu that there is no terrorism without the support of sovereign states: they train,
arm, finance and indoctrinate individuals open to terrorism. He named Iran, Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories as such dangerous countries, but also mentions
Lebanon, Yemen and (perhaps ironically today) Saudi Arabia. He saw the main danger in the
Palestinian context in the indoctrination of children: teaching children to kill negates the
need for intercontinental missiles to be the weapons of Islamism, because they will be the
delivery system – he wrote. Despite the fact that the biggest security fiasco in Israel's history
is now attributed to him, 28 years earlier he was scourging the West for 'pressing the
collective snooze button' on Islamic terrorism.

One of Netanyahu's main tenets is that terror should not be rewarded. Any move that
legitimises terrorists, he said, will only lead to more terror, because it shows that the tool
works. He saw as one of the main threats the acquisition of nuclear and biological weapons
by terrorists - on 7 October this year, however, Hamas showed what they could do with
knives and firearms only. Finally, Netanyahu proposed the creation of an international
coalition against countries that support terrorism.

Terrorism should not be rewarded - this is a very important point, but it is interesting that
Netanyahu has had a contradictory attitude to this throughout his career. In 2005, when
Ariel Sharon's government withdrew from Gaza, Netanyahu opposed it as Finance Minister
and offered his resignation in protest. He told his fellow representatives in the Knesset that
’We must stop this evil (...). Don't give the Palestinians weapons, don't give them rockets,
don't give them ports, don't give them a base for terrorism’.

A year after his speech, Hamas kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In 2011, he released
over a thousand assassins, terrorists and murderers in exchange for this soldier. The deal
was opposed by several members of the Israeli government, including Avigdor Liberman,
who almost joined the current unity government, and the now inactive Uzi Landau. Landau
argued that the deal was a ’huge success’ for terrorism and would encourage Hamas to
kidnap more and more Israelis. But they represented the minority and were voted down.

It is also worth examining Netanyahu's attitude towards Arabs. According to researcher

Joshua Sinai, Netanyahu, for his part, tends to view Israeli Arabs as a security threat, and
during the 2015 elections he tried to motivate his base by claiming that Israeli Arabs would
’turn out in droves’ to vote. In addition, Israeli Arabs interpreted the Nation State Law
passed by Netanyahu's government in July 2018 not only as a downgrading of their status as
equal citizens, but also as a downgrading of Arabic from equal status with Hebrew to ’special
status’.

Netanyahu has therefore been branded a 'racist' by much of the international press,
elegantly overlooking the fact that Netanyahu has spent 15 billion shekels to improve the
situation of the Arab community in Israel. A new Arab middle class has emerged, sometimes
at odds with the anti-Zionist Arab members of the Knesset - much to Netanyahu's delight.
The investment is, of course, in Israel's interest, too, with Arabs making up some 21 per cent
of the Israeli population and 15 per cent of university students, and the numbers are
growing.

At one point, an adviser to Netanyahu told me that ’Bibi’ is only interested in two things: the
economy and Iran. According to Sinai, it is precisely the focus on Iran that has distracted
Netanyahu from other security challenges (the author identifiesd12 such issues in Israel!).
One of these challenges was Gaza and Hamas. It is interesting to see that not only did
Netanyahu not take Hamas seriously, but he was also expressly afraid of a land incursion.

The change came on 12 June 2014, when three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and then
murdered by Hamas members in the West Bank. Israel responded with widespread arrests
and Hamas responded by firing rockets daily from Gaza. In response, Israel announced an
offensive in Gaza. Throughout the operation, Netanyahu resisted the more militant members
of the IDF General Staff who called for a widespread invasion. He even fired Deputy Defence
Minister Danny Danon for publicly criticising him for his restraint. Netanyahu was worried
that the IDF would be mired in a high-casualty conflict in Gaza's system of narrow alleys and
tunnels, writes Pfeffer. Even after finally authorising a ground campaign on 17 July, he
ordered that incursions be limited to a few kilometres. Never before as leader has
Netanyahu come so close to war - but as we know, he declared war in October this year.

Israeli intelligence has known for years that Hamas was digging tunnels under the border,
but Netanyahu's cabinet has only superficially discussed this threat to Israeli civilians. The
IDF has devoted few resources to tunnels, and its units deployed to Gaza in 2014 were
untrained and lacked the proper equipment for underground warfare. In any case, in 2014,
tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed in Gaza, 2,100 Gazans were killed (half of
them reportedly civilians) and 73 Israelis fell. But Netanyahu's attention ’quickly turned
elsewhere’. His conduct during the Gaza conflict highlighted two contradictory traits in his
leadership: a profound reluctance to address the burning issues on the Palestinian front and
an extreme aversion to risk and large-scale military adventures - says his biographer.

The question is, with these experiences behind him, how does Netanyahu plan to lead Israel
to victory in 2023? A hundred years from now, will historians write about 'King Bibi' or
'Israel's serial bungler’ - or will they settle somewhere in between?