Bibi: My Story

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Netanyahu notes that he regularly studied the weekly Torah portion with his son. Yet in political life, he has ignored the universalism within Judaism and its concern for global justice. There are few new or surprising details in it. Netanyahu’s life has already been reported on in minute detail by the Israeli media and been the subject of half a dozen biographies already. And yet, in his telling it is still a fascinating story of the meteoric rise of a boy who spent his childhood split between Jerusalem and various American cities. His five years of military service in the most elite of Israeli combat units, followed by his years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then the death in Entebbe of his elder brother Yoni and a few years in which he seems to have gone astray, not quite finding himself in the business world either in the U.S. or Israel. Until he got the unexpected offer to become Israel’s deputy ambassador in Washington at the age of 32, making him an almost overnight media star and launching his breathtaking public career. When he was asked by a student in 2018, what is the most important subject to study for a political career, Benjamin Netanyahu replied that there were three answers: ‘History, history and more history’.

If you can put politics aside (it seems that most people have either strong negative or positive feelings about Netanyahu), then you will benefit from reading this book. It describes economic miracles in moving Israel from a poorly functioning economy to one of the top 10 economies in the world. Other nations, regardless of their political beliefs, came to Netanyahu to learn how to develop their economies following the example of Israel. They increased their trade with each other to the extent that 4 Arab nations agreed to a peace treaty with Israel, realizing that peace was necessary for prosperity. But Netanyahu also repeatedly describes his frustration as Trump continued with a “fixation with the Palestinians” rather than “a great political deal of peace with Arab states that I believed was around the corner”. Bibi Netanyahu: 102, and he was pretty, I would say that at the age of 100, he gave a speech, which is amazing, three minutes, after being feted by, you know, all these intellectuals and all these well wishers. And he came up to the stage at 100, no help, just came. And he said, "Well, it's all very kind of you, all the kind of things you said, but time is precious, so I'll limit my remarks. We have to stop Iran, that's how we safeguard Jewish history, thank you very much," and no more then. So he was very alert and acute intellectually until the end of his days. But I asked him before I became Prime Minister, I asked, he said first of all, "You sure you can do this? That, is get elected?" I said, "Yeah, I think I can be." And he said, "Well maybe so, but once you get in, the left will do everything to get you out." And I said, "Well, we'll see." By the way, he was right on that.

Table of Contents

Peter Robinson: So let me try a thought out on you. This is, I'm not sure, I'm not at all sure I'm right about this, but it strikes me as plausible. I'd like to hear what you make of it. Observation about American strategy. Since at least the Civil War, the American way of war has relied on superior materiel. Grant just grinds down Robert E. Lee, and that's how the Civil War ends. And in the Second World War- Peter Robinson: Could I ask you to give me a brief tutorial? I've got a couple questions, and the tutorial runs in the following nature. You're talking to an American and a gentile. And when I look at this country, this little country, a third of this country is desert, and it's in danger every day. The last time I was here, dinner in Jerusalem, a rooftop restaurant, air raid siren. People stand up, look around, sit down, continue their meal. You live a peculiar way here. And I look at a country that works in practice, but not in theory, I can't figure it out. So here's question number one, if I may. Here in Tel Aviv, I have a number of Israeli friends who tell me they're atheists. "After what happened in the Holocaust, I can't believe in God, what I believe in is Israel." I have friends in Jerusalem, and it's pretty roughly the other way around. They're very sure about God, but they have all kinds of criticisms about the state of Israel. I don't understand how you sustain a Jewish state, when your own Jewish citizens have such different conceptions of what it means to be Jewish. How do you hold this together? Though each US Presidential Administration from President Truman on is discussed, the climax of the narrative comes in Chapter 54, fittingly titled “Never Again,” where Mr. Netanyahu gives his 2016 speech before the United States Congress in opposition to the Obama Administration’s disastrous Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. The Prime Minister provides excerpts in the text, but I recommend watching the entire speech for yourself. In this link, Mr. Netanyahu enters the chamber at 22:32, and begins speaking at 26:49 after a brief appearance on screen of his wife, Sara. In Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s ”compelling” (The Economist) and“substantive” (The Guardian) autobiography, the newly reelected prime minister of Israel tells the story of his family, his path to leadership, and his unceasing commitment to defending his country and securing its future. Israel’s politics are fractious and tribal. The far right grows as the left is decimated by the failed dream of the Oslo peace accords. Yet outside politics, things there are less fevered and acrid. Start-Up Nation has supplanted the kibbutz. Technology makes the desert bloom.

But in unconventional scenes similar to those in countless books of reportage and Trump tell-alls, Netanyahu also says that to sway Trump from his desire to pursue peace between Israel and the Palestinians and to scotch his positive first impression of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, the Israelis deployed golfing metaphors and maps of New York City. Bibi Netanyahu: No they fit in mine, because I believe, look. I think that I don't take a pollyannish view of democracies. Democracies can have different ethnic groups, they can have different, all sorts of conflicts, built-in conflicts. And the way you solve them is twofold. One, you solve them by the idea of democratic votes. You basically try to come to an agreement, and if you can, you do. And if you don't, you go to the ballot, not through the bullet, okay? That's what differentiates democracy. It's the non-violent majority-based solution to conflicts in a given country. But that for me is again, a fundament but not enough. It's necessary but not sufficient. The sufficient element that adds to, that gives practical success to that, is a free economy, a mobile economy, in which everybody has, as much as you can, equal opportunity. And for that, you have to incorporate the Arab community into the Israeli success story, into inspiring them, entrepreneurship, education that leads to higher income, and-Bibi Netanyahu: That innovation is critical. Israel's value to the United States is rising as our capacity to innovate and technologize is rising.

But this is an autobiography. I think that most of us, when describing our lives, prefer to omit our biggest failures. Some of his failures are described in a few lines with few details while his accomplishments are described more thoroughly. That's human and to be expected in an autobiography. But it means that we need more sources to get a complete idea of Netanyahu. I don't like a one-sided presentation.

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Peter Robinson: Christians, a special case. Small number, but down in Jerusalem, there is a historic presence. They've been a Christian community for 2000 years, formal Orthodox and Catholic presence for over 1000 years, where do they fit? Peter Robinson: So the first question is, how did you do this? How did the country do it? This is not just changing economic policies, this is the changing the notion of what it means to be, an Israeli teenager, 40 years ago, go to a kibbutz. An Israeli kid today, "Where's the startup?" This is a fundamental change in the conception of what it means to be Israeli, is that correct? I was not aware of Bibi’s actions in his early days in government to reform Israel’s economy from semi socialist to capitalist. This was really interesting. All of his arguments and comments about the changes he made work very well within the context of the capitalist system. Not much different that what Lee Kuan Yew accomplished in Singapore. Netanyahu recalls the well-attended Israel Solidarity rally in Trafalgar Square in May 2002 in the midst of suicide bombings by Palestinian Islamists and falsehoods about the Jenin ‘massacre’, taken up by sections of the British media. There was considerable internal debate within Jewish leadership as to whether it was wise to call upon Netanyahu’s services to present the case for Israel. Netanyahu pledged not to be controversial, but on the day could not resist the temptation to reach rhetorical heights — telescoping Chamberlain, appeasement, Churchill, the British in Palestine, Palestinian terrorists, antisemites, Arafat and the PLO into one long monologue. Richard Harries, the then Bishop of Oxford, commented later that Netanyahu ‘used the occasion for his own political purposes’.

Following the interview, there was a brief conversation about Bibi’s writing process and the political biographies that influenced him. Bibi Netanyahu: Well I would say, now I wouldn't put it in these impersonal terms. I would say in general, when you see antisemitism speak out against it. Peter Robinson: Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu, the once and future Prime Minister of the state of Israel, and the author of "Bibi: My Story". Thank you.

In his memoir, Netanyahu doubles down on his embrace of the Covid vaccine and regrets easing up too early on pandemic closures, in hindsight a “cardinal mistake”. Here, the divide between Netanyahu and the other members of the populist right could not be starker. For him, modernity matters.