Jewish businessmen, notably Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, he was willing to debate any of Israel’s critics, such as Columbia University’s Palestinian apologist Edward Said, and was able to crush most and hold his own with all. From his Washington debut, he went on to become Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, extending his charismatic presence to New York. Among his fans were talk-show host Larry King and John Stossel of ABC News.
All in all, the Netanyahu family has been more successful in the United States than in Israel. Not only did his father Benzion attain his greatest eminence as a historian of the Spanish Inquisition teaching at Cornell, but no fewer than six of Benzion’s brothers became steel magnates in the United States under the name Milo, adopted upon immigrating to America.
Bibi always kept in touch with his American uncles, and after hearing him speak on terrorism before a joint session of Congress after 9/11, his Uncle Zachary proudly observed that if his nephew had not been born in Tel Aviv, he might have become the first Jewish president of the United States. After his May 2011 appearance before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Republicans spoke longingly of finding a birth certificate for him somewhere in the file cabinets of some Pennsylvania town.
As prime minister in the 1990s and finance minister under Ariel Sharon from 2003 to 2005, Netanyahu led the drive to liberate and recast the Israeli economy as the leading force for prosperity in the Arab world — if only the Arabs would see it. Even if his dream of a transformation of the regional economy succeeds, however, no legacy of tax cuts, hedge fund performance fees, and single taxation of venture investors would prompt anyone to talk of Netanyahu in the same breath as Winston Churchill. Netanyahu’s Churchillian role and reveille has come on the issue of Islamist terrorism: the global jihad against the United States and Israel. Just as Churchill gained a prophetic advantage by paying close attention to the early rhetoric of Adolf Hitler and his disciples, Netanyahu understands that the best way to grasp the intentions of organizations such as al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian mullahs is to listen to what they have to say.
Even more than Churchill, Netanyahu has been a warrior since his early years. Before entering college, he joined the elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit — the secret Sayeret Matkal — or 269, that served as a spearhead for the Israel Defense Forces in their combat against terrorism. It was this unit that later led a retaliatory attack against the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Village attack on Israeli athletes by killing three of their leaders. Among the targets of his first operation with the unit, in 1968, in response to a mine attack on a bus full of young Israelis, was Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian was targeted for capture by a paratroop recon team, while Netanhayu’s unit rescued injured members of an ambushed tank team. Arafat managed to escape disguised as a woman.
Toward the end of 1968, Netanyahu participated in a successful counter-terror operation against Middle East Airlines and Libyan Arab Airlines, destroying fourteen unoccupied planes at the Beirut International Airport in retaliation for an attack by Palestinian terrorists. Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had arrived in Athens from Beirut airport and fired on an El Al jet, killing an Israeli citizen, wounding a stewardess, and damaging the aircraft. Netanyahu also played a key role in securing the release of 40 hostages from a hijacked Sabena Airlines plane at the Ben-Gurion Airport. (He was wounded in the arm by accidental friendly fire.)
In May 1969, he nearly lost his life in an action against Egyptian forces that had been laying traps for the Israelis near the Suez Canal. The team succeeded in destroying an Egyptian truck loaded with weapons, but two days later Egyptian troops opened fire on Netanyahu’s inflated rubber boat operating in the canal. Laden with ammunition for his machine gun, Netanyahu discovered that he could neither swim nor disengage himself from his sling full of ammunition. He had all but drowned by the time he was rescued by a naval commando named Israel Assaf, who happened to notice bubbles of foam on the surface, felt for a head under the water, and extracted Netanyahu by his hair under intense Egyptian fire.
The impetus for Netanyahu’s unyielding emphasis on the terrorist threat was the death of his brother Jonathan who had led the key commando rescue team at Entebbe in Uganda in 1976. A group of seven terrorists had seized an Air France Airbus on a flight to Paris from Tel Aviv. Bearing guns and grenades, they forced the pilot to fly to Libya to refuel, and then land at Entebbe, Uganda, 2,500 miles from Tel Aviv. Declaring the principle of no compromise with terror, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the elite unit to fly to Entebbe, kill the terrorists, free the 103 Jewish hostages who remained after the gentile passengers had been released, and bring them home. The operation was a stunning success. Only three hostages were killed in the fighting. An additional hostage — an elderly woman who had become ill in Uganda — could not be rescued because she had been taken to a hospital in Kampala; she was later murdered in her hospital bed under the orders of the brutal Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin. But Jonathan, guiding the troops from outside the terminal, was shot dead by a Ugandan soldier from the top of the airport control tower.
This experience transformed Netanyahu’s life, somewhat in the way that the death of Joseph P. Kennedy in World War II changed the life of his brother John F. Kennedy Jr. In the United States at the time, Benjamin Netanhayu resolved to enter politics, with a focus on combating terrorism.
After founding the Jonathan Institute, Netanyahu called a conference on terrorism in July of 1979 in Jerusalem. He attracted such notables as George H. W. Bush, then a former head of the CIA, as well as future Reagan cabinet leaders George Schultz and Ed Meese, then-FBI Director William Webster, and soon-to-be American ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick. To this group Netanyahu offered shocking details of a Soviet network of training camps for Muslim terrorists.
Out of this conference came Netanyahu’s first book, an edited compilation of the speeches from the event together with two analytical chapters by the editor. It was called
Netanyahu singlehandedly shaped the U.S. response to terror of three American administrations. Like Churchill, he took his enemies at their own word and resolved to overcome them, whatever it might take. His own first administration ended in three years with an economic crisis caused by the bursting of the tech bubble, and he was defeated in a sweep by his former special forces commander, Ehud Barak. But both Netanyahu’s economic policies and his view of terrorism were vindicated by subsequent events.
Netanyahu is a flawed politician, but he is flawed like Churchill — stogies and drink (though Bibi is a teetotaler compared to Churchill’s famed capacity) and a succession of three wives. Like Churchill, Netanyahu was more than a decade ahead of his contemporaries in grasping that the enemy is serious and that their stated goals must be weighed seriously. Now he must confront the Iranians at a time when it appears that the only plausible path is the overthrow of their government. Perhaps, though, there is an implausible alternative.
“The first and most crucial thing to understand [about terrorism],” as Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress after 9/11, is that “there is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states…. Terrorists are not suspended in midair. They train, arm, and indoctrinate their killers from within safe havens in the territories provided by terrorist states.” The reality is that Hezbollah and Hamas are creatures of Iran, that al-Qaida is harbored by Pakistan, that the Palestinian Authority depends on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Nations, and that the Kurdish PKK, the Islamic jihad, and Hamas all subsist on Syrian support. North Korea aids Iran and Pakistan in their nuclear ambitions, which portend the most lethal threat that terrorism poses.
Even suicide bombings, as Netanyahu observes, “are seldom carried out by solitary individuals. A whole array of people inculcate the suicide, provide him with explosives, guide him in their use, select the chosen target, arrange for his undetected arrival there, and promise to take care of his family after the deed is done. In short, suicide attacks require a significant infrastructure, and the people who provide it are anything but suicidal.” These people are all ensconced in nation-states, and by them are taught, sustained, encouraged and their families financially rewarded. In addition, he explains, the “terrorist states and terror organizations together form a terror network, whose constituent parts support each other operationally as well as politically.”
Netanyahu spurns the romantic image of the lone caveman terrorist who poses a mere police problem. As Boston University strategist Angelo Codevilla explains the issue, this concept “substitute[s] in our collective mind the soft myth that terrorism is the work of romantic rogues for the hard reality that it can happen only because
