The Path of Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu as a Leader

The Israeli response to the October 7 Hamas attacks has been disproportionate and genocidal. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been held responsible for this unnecessary killing of thousands of Gazan people, though it is a collective decision taken by Israel’s leadership to wage a brutal war until they destroy Hamas completely. 

Netanyahu’s public approval has eroded even in Israel. As a leader and a politician, Netanyahu has navigated through pernicious and tenebrous political waters. He is a fervent follower of a right-wing and liberalism-based world order and a strong believer in military solutions over peace processes and negotiations. People close to him have observed that he believes himself to be “a messiah with a duty to protect Israel”. His one peculiar trait is that he can unflinchingly make unpopular decisions if he believes they are necessary to protect Israel. During his many years in the prime ministership, he has been accused of corruption, but none of the allegations have taken hold. He rather represents an ancient yet still prevalent value system shaped by violence, vengeance, and self-protection no matter the cost. 

Bejnamin Netanyahu: A Brief Biography

The dark shadows of a terrible genocide remain cast over his political persona. What motivations led this man to this peculiarly narrow political space and to assume a role so sinister and chilling? Even a large percentage of people in his country do not approve of his ways and policies. What shaped this man, and what motivates his decisions and actions? 

Born the second son of Benzion Netanyahu, a conservative and right-of-centre intellectual who was a revisionist Zionist with strong faith in militant Jewish and Israeli nationalism, having looked up to him as a role model, Netanyahu developed a worldview shaped by the ideological premise of his father.

 Benzion Netanyahu was the editor of Encyclopaedia Hebraica, of which an updated volume was published each year. In the 1950s, it was a popular book, purchased by around a quarter of Israeli households. Benzoine was a scholar—an academic who taught at different universities in the USA, who lobbied for the Jewish cause and Israeli statehood in America, and who had the view that the world was hostile to Israel and that Israel, as a people, needed to look after itself. The family spent their lives in Israel and America as the children mostly grew up.  

The iconic Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who personified both ultra-Orthodox Jewish ethos and extreme left views, was a family friend. Benzoin Netanyahu was a liberal when it came to making friends, but this did not prevent his children from assimilating Zionist exclusivism. Just like many other Jews who lived in the times soon after the Nazi Jewish genocide had unfolded, in its macabre details, and who grew up seeing Nazi concentration camps’ inmate numbers tattooed on their relatives’ and neighbours’ arms, Benjamin, his brother Jonathan, and their younger brother, Iddo, felt that the Jews had no way out except extremely militant options to survive, even by enforcing their strength using military prowess and even at the expense of the security and rights of the Palestinian people. The feeling was that the Jews needed to help themselves no matter what the moral and ethical costs involved. 

Benjamin Netanyahu had another equally influential second role model, his brother, Yoni (Jonathan Netanyahu), who became a national hero after he was killed in action, rescuing the Israeli hostages in an aeroplane hijacked by a Palestinian militant group. A Palestinian group hijacked an Israeli plane and landed it in Entebbe, the capital of Uganda, where they had Ugandan President Idi Amin’s covert support.

In a dangerous rescue mission that was applauded worldwide, Israeli special forces killed the hijackers and freed the hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother, Yoni, led this action heroically. Sadly, he became a casualty of this rescue mission as the hijackers shot him. Later, authors who wrote about Benjamin Netanyahu observed that this death shaped Benjamin Netanyahu’s sense of purpose and belief that he was destined to protect Israel and the Jewish people. In his autobiography, Netanyahu even indicates that he owes it as a duty to his brother.    

Growing up in the conflict-ridden Middle East, which has been an arena of war and conflict for centuries, and falling under the influence of the semi-historic, semi-mythical Biblical and Jewish grand narrative, the boy matured into a nationalist Israeli and a 100% military man. 

Benjamin Netanyahu grew up amidst Israeli scholars and thinkers like Joseph Klausner, a historian and professor of Jewish literature, who was also Israeli Nobel Prize-winning author Amoz Oz’s maternal great uncle and a dedicated Zionist. At Clausner’s, he crossed paths with Amoz Oz, the world-renowned fiction writer and peace activist. The irony is that Benjamin Netanyahu and Amoz Oz, who were influenced and, to some extent, mentored by Joseph Klausner, turned out to be different but equally important people with diametrically opposite views that affected the world and Israel. 

In his biography, Netanyahu narrates how he read books from childhood with a voracious appetite. His recent interviews also show that he still is a serious book reader. In his autobiography, ‘Bibi: My Story’, published just before the October 7 attacks, and a book that traces the Israel-Palestine conflict up to 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu has dedicated a couple of paragraphs to state his perspective on the conflict in a simple and clear-cut way. Here are those paras:

“Power has the unfortunate quality of not being limited to the morally superior and the well-intentioned. If malign forces amass enough of it and have the will to use it, they will overcome the less well-armed forces of good, especially if the good lack the tenacity to fight. Being a moral person won’t save you from the conquest and carnage, which was the history of the Jewish people for two thousand years.

“Being perfect victims who harmed no one, we were perfectly moral. Being utterly powerless, we were led to the slaughter again and again. The rise of Zionism was meant to correct this flaw by giving Jewish people the power to defend themselves. Enhancing this capacity was the central mission of my years in office.” (Bibi: My Story, Benjamin Netanyahu, 2023).

The words reflect how the victim decided at some point to become the perpetrator. Hardened by his military training in a special operations unit of the Israel army infamous for its not-so-ethical combat strategies, Netanyahu plunged into the fights that his country fought on many fronts at a young age, even before his college days were over. In this aspect, though in a slightly different way, he is similar to Arab-Palestinian leaders such as Yasser Arafat and a few of the present Hamas leaders.

Netanyahu's Ideology and Beliefs

From an early age, he decided peace had no chance in the Middle East. He felt that if his people were to have a chance at survival, they needed to fight – as long as it would take; for nailing it into the minds of the Arab leaders that Israel was very much a Middle Eastern reality and way too powerful for them to get rid of; a perfect example of how childhood influences and experiences shape a man. The epic socio-political background of Jewish annihilation by the Nazis provided the grand setting. The loss of his brother, his first and foremost hero, forever imprinted a picture of a hostile understanding of Middle Eastern reality into his brain. 

Things changed drastically for Israel and Palestine after the six-day war of 1962. Netanyahu says that this war was thrust upon Israel by the Arab countries that surrounded it, but he revels in Israel’s victory after fighting on multiple fronts. Israel captured the Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Sinai, and the area under its control tripled. Thus began a wider Israeli occupation of the Palestinian lands. A war, any war, has a limiting effect on all good things possessed by humanity, as is seen in how the Israel-Palestine conflict unfolded in history. Victory and defeat, survival and death, then become the only two options available to choose from for those who are entangled in them. Inhumane excesses and perpetual justifications of these excesses accompany them at every turn. 

Netanyahu, the Man, the Leader

Netanyahu presents himself as a secular leader in his autobiography, despite his known staunch commitment to Jews and to remedying the precarious situation his people are in, surrounded by hostile Palestinian Arabs and Muslim countries on all sides. In this crusade, he never once believes in a path of peace, which he considers only a pipe dream professed by those who do not understand the Middle Eastern realities. His biography reminds us that when he looks in a mirror, he sees a crusader for his people, though the world thinks he is a warmonger and a heartless dictator. Netanyahu still describes himself as a pragmatic leader and politician committed to the cause of the Jewish people and Israel.   

 

“The Prime Minister has a messianic notion of himself as a person called to save the Jewish people,” said Eyal Arad, former advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2020 when Netanyahu went all out to stop the US nuclear deal with Iran even at the cost of facing the anger and distrust of the US President, Barack Obama. Eyal Arad was talking to an interviewer for a Frontline PBS documentary. Another Netanyahu advisor, Tzachi Hanegbi, speaks of Netanyahu’s conviction that he has a historic role to play and could not make a mistake for the sake of the Jewish people. 

In his autobiography, he advocates a liberal economy and a free world. Yet, he is constantly erasing the already thin boundaries of morality in politics and statecraft whenever he deems it necessary and very often so.

 

India’s Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, when questioned about whether non-violence as a form of protest could ensure that no people die in violence, replied that the least number of people would die if we adopt non-violent protest when compared to other violent methods. Benjamin Netanyahu has never figured this out. He has constantly shown that he has strong reasons to believe otherwise. He believes that only fear and power could deter enemies from attacking Israel. He does not seem to have even a modicum of trust in a peace process, at least in the peace processes he and his predecessors were in at the time and now again. 

Benjamin Netanyahu has always been an aggressive and effective communicator in mass communication channels. When he used his US Congress speech as a platform to undermine the US policy regarding Iran in 2015, journalists called him audacious because he put at risk the pro-Israeli sentiment in the US and the friendship between the two countries. His justification for taking this huge risk was that the greatest danger the world faces is “the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons”. US President Obama was infuriated by this speech, and so were the Democrats, as the country was on the verge of concluding a nuclear deal with Iran.  

Netanyahu became an early spokesperson for Israel on American television, first by himself and later in an official capacity. He became a TV star of the Jewish wing in America and soon became a diplomat formally appointed by Israel. One of his most significant assignments was as the Israeli ambassador to the UN. He presented Israel as the strongest ally the US could have in the Middle East. 

A prominent leader of Israel for half a century, he began his political career when he resigned as Israel's ambassador to the UN and returned to Israel. Since then, he occupied the prime ministership in Israel for many terms. One must also remember that it was the people of Israel who chose him to lead them, and he is not a dictator but a democratically elected leader. In the perpetual situation of war, many an Israeli leader has chosen the easy path of dictatorship over being a democratic leader once they reach the top political position. Benjamin Netanyahu tops the list.   

When the October 7 attacks happened, his public approval was at its lowest. However, when it became clear that war was the only option from an Israeli perspective, the political leadership of Israel entrusted Netanyahu with leading the nation at war; an intriguing aspect of Israeli reality to peruse. Whether we like it or not, Netanyahu has a public mandate that many political analysts underestimate, a mandate consolidated by the insecurities that a history of conflict imparted in the Israeli minds.  

One must acknowledge that Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the Israeli leaders instrumental in ensuring Israel’s economic, technological, and military growth and success among world nations. He is leading Israel in this war with an iron grip and unrelenting resolve. Netanyahu is a strong leader, but he is not as well-analysed as Donald Trump, Putin, or Modi by the likes of Archie Brown, who wrote the world-renowned book The Myth of the Strong Leader. The life and decisions of Benjamin Netanyahu are complex and worth investigating for any political student and researcher of international conflict and the Middle East. Though too speculative a thought and lacking any usefulness in an immediate context, what if another man, another leader, were in Netanyahu’s shoes? Would it have brought peace to the region with less bloodshed and loss? 

References

'Bibi: My Story' by Benjamin Netanyahu, 2023

'Netanyahu at WAR', Frontline PBS, Vimeo.