Benjamin Netanyahu sat back on the narrow bench, the tired puffiness beneath his eyes still visible under the perpetual television makeup. The Sikorsky Sea Stallion clattered off the Hadassah hospital helipad and headed south over the Judean Desert. Wearing the rectangular reading glasses he is rarely seen with in public, he perused his daily intelligence briefing papers. But for most of the hour-long journey, he seemed lost in his own thoughts.
Forty years earlier, as a young special forces lieutenant, he would fly in such a helicopter as he led his team of commandos on missions deep within enemy territory, most of them still classified. Today’s trip was public: his first visit to the construction site of the new border fence between Israel and Egypt.
It was September 2011, midway through his second term. Netanyahu had been back in power for over two years and was now facing his most significant challenge since reelection. That summer, a grassroots protest movement had begun in Tel Aviv, out of the Facebook page of a young woman. Enraged at the raising of her rent, Daphni Leef had set up a tent on Rothschild Boulevard. Thousands of young people and families had joined in, setting up their own tents in Tel Aviv and other cities.
The public anger focused on one of Netanyahu’s weakest points—the growing gap between a thin layer of businesspeople and entrepreneurs, making millions from Israel’s high-tech-fueled economic success, on the one hand, and, on the other, the majority, those who were struggling with rising housing and consumer prices.
Israel had weathered the global financial crisis of 2008–2010 relatively unscathed. Unemployment was down, gross domestic product (GDP) was up, and headlines announcing yet another sale of an Israeli start-up, for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, was an almost weekly occurrence. But the complaints of young middle-class Israelis, who were unable to buy their own homes and live a comfortable life without incurring crushing debt, made Netanyahu vulnerable.
The government’s derisory attempts to deflect criticism, announcing housing reforms and appointing a special commission to examine the problems of the middle class, failed to arrest the plummeting popularity of Netanyahu and his right-wing party, Likud, in public opinion surveys. At least one senior minister warned that “if this continues, we can say goodbye to power in the next elections.”
Netanyahu was loath to change his economic policies. He believed that the economic reforms he had made in 2003–2005, while serving as finance minister, had saved the country’s economy during the worldwide recession. After winning the 2009 elections, he had awarded himself the title of “Supreme Minister for Economic Affairs.” A group of activists, dangerous left-wing anarchists funded by foreign money, in his view, would not blow his economy off-course. Netanyahu would change the national agenda instead of engaging with them.
The chopper flight south was a thinly veiled attempt to wrest back control of the news agenda. Work on the new border fence had been in progress for years, but in the wake of a terror attack launched from Egypt, in which eight Israelis were killed, Netanyahu pushed through a decision to immediately add another 1 billion shekels of funding for the 250-kilometer-long, 5-meter-high reinforced steel barrier and prioritize its construction. On his first visit to one of the completed sections, Netanyahu was taking along defense correspondents from the main media organizations, who would be less likely than other journalists to press for his response to the protests. Their presence would lend a suitable military atmosphere to the visit.
Landing in a small desert wadi hidden from the sight of any snipers who might be lurking across the border, he was taken in a convoy of bulletproof jeeps to an observation post prepared nearby. An air-conditioned tent with refreshments had been erected. Dozens of senior officers had been brought in to provide a backdrop for the prime minister’s viewing of the fence. The camera crews were taken closer in to get a good view of the barrier, so they could impress their audiences with footage of the impregnable fortification. After hearing the briefings and seeing for himself the long fence snaking away to the desert’s horizon, Netanyahu stood at a podium to deliver a few carefully prepared sentences and swat away the reporters’ softball questions.
He was in such a good mood that on the flight back to Jerusalem, he sat up front in the crew chief’s jump seat, between the two pilots, animated by the spectacular view of the Negev Desert and Israel’s heartland beyond. Netanyahu obviously felt that the visit to the border fence had been a success; he returned there with reporters in tow twice more over the next sixteen months.
The fence has become Netanyahu’s signature project, his physical version of the metaphorical “Iron Wall” that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of Israel’s right wing, had called for in 1923 to protect the Jews from their hostile Arab neighbors.
The fence was not only meant to block terror attacks—it would have the additional benefit, in Netanyahu’s eyes, of keeping out African migrants fleeing the impoverished and war-torn Horn of Africa. Tens of thousands had crossed the old ramshackle fence. Most had made their way to the run-down neighborhoods of South Tel Aviv, their illegal status allowing them only to scrabble a meager existence.
At the final cabinet meeting before the 2013 election, Netanyahu proudly announced that “as a result of building the fence, we have totally stopped the entry of infiltrators to Israel’s cities. Over the past seven months, zero infiltrators have entered our cities.” It was “one of the greatest engineering feats ever achieved in the state of Israel.”1 To those who accused Israel of mistreating refugees, he responded, “There is no asylum seeker problem in Israel—they are illegal job immigrants.”2 Israel, he said, had the right to control its borders—seemingly unaware of the irony that he had spent his entire political career trying to ensure that Israel did not have clearly defined or internationally recognized borders.
Western countries have not had a particularly stellar record of dealing with the influx of migrants escaping war and poverty in recent years. But most countries prefer keeping the waves of immigration at bay by following the measures already in place. In Netanyahu’s Israel, the Iron Fence, for many, is a source of pride. With the election of US president Donald Trump, justification for the fence seemed even more solid—it became a model for what the United States might erect on its border with Mexico.
Netanyahu had spent much of his career telling Americans how much they had in common with Israel, and trying to convince Israelis that despite living in a “tough neighborhood,” they could have a smaller version of America, complete with their own Wall Street and Silicon Valley on the banks of the Jordan.
Netanyahu was convinced that just like America, which has sent its superior military forces across the globe to neutralize any threat to its security and interests, real or perceived, Israel could not allow threats to exist. He has done little to find solutions to the conundrum of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians. Instead, he has done everything in his power to create a bubble in which the majority of Israelis believe they are enjoying a Western lifestyle and the benefits of democracy. A short drive away, their beloved army maintains its rule over a population not much smaller than their own, keeping out infiltrators who would seek to swamp the Jewish paradise.
Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall was aimed at creating military deterrence that would ultimately allow Jews and Arabs to coexist in mutual respect. Netanyahu has scant faith in such an outcome—certainly not in his lifetime. Instead, he believes that his wall, perched between Africa and Asia and surrounded by enemies, keeping the Arabs and Africans out, can safeguard the state.
THIS BOOK TELLS the story of a man. It also tells the story of a nation.
Benjamin Netanyahu was born seventeen months after the State of Israel was born. He was the first leader of Israel—and at the time of this writing, its only leader—to have been born in the new state.
Israel’s story has been told over the years chiefly from the perspective of its founding generation. It has been the story of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and their contemporaries, the pioneering generation of Israelis who came from Eastern Europe, founded the kibbutzim, and built and commanded the army. But there was always an alternative narrative to the Israeli story.
The underdogs of the Zionist enterprise—the members of the right-wing Revisionist movement, religious Jews, the Mizrahim emigrating from Arab lands, the petite bourgeoisie of the new towns and cities—all were to be melted into the crucible of the “new Jew” and airbrushed out of official Israeli history. It didn’t work. The other Israel has dominated the second half of Israel’s history thus far, and Benjamin Netanyahu has been its champion.
Netanyahu belongs to both Israels—its old “serving elite” and the seething underdogs. He is also a product of the United States, where he spent much of his early life and career. He believes that he understands and connects with America better even than some American presidents, and when he thinks it’s necessary, he challenges them on their own turf.
Netanyahu doesn’t seek, as some have facetiously suggested, to make Israel the fifty-first state of the union. He is a staunch believer in Jewish sovereignty and in his own personal role in history as the man ensuring its survival, endurance, and prosperity. This has engendered in him a sense of entitlement that in recent years has evolved into an autocratic style. But he fervently believes that Israel shares in the exceptional destiny of the United States—that together they are the world’s indispensable nations. He sees an even greater bond between the two countries than what Winston Churchill described as “the Special Relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. And while to many these notions may seem risible, there is no lack of influential people in America who are prepared to accept and reinforce his view.
Netanyahu’s Israel enjoys an American-style standard of living while keeping its immediate neighbors under military occupation, shutting out the Middle East behind high walls and communicating with its soulmate six thousand miles away. It is a hybrid society of ancient phobias and high-tech hope, a combination of tribalism and globalism—just like Netanyahu himself. It is impossible to understand Israel without first understanding the man who leads it.