9
The friendly-fire wound from the Sabena operation was superficial, and Benjamin Netanyahu was back on operational duty within a couple of weeks. It was nearly the end of his five years of service. Throughout, Bibi had remained ambivalent toward his military career, keeping up correspondence with Yale’s admissions office. He had signed on for two additional years when there was the prospect of commanding a team and planning and leading complex operations. Staying on would mean promotion but also leaving Matkal, at least for a year or two, to command an infantry or armored company in one of the less “special” parts of the army. There was some desultory talk of moving to a tank battalion, but Bibi’s heart wasn’t in it. Having spent his entire military service in the most elite of units, he shared the dismissive attitude of fellow officers like Ehud Barak to the “big and stupid” IDF.
In the end, it was his relationship with Miki Weizmann, whom he had been dating on and off since high school, that sealed his decision to leave military life and Israel. Bibi and Miki were the same age. Their lives had run on parallel lines. She had been in Bibi’s year at the gymnasia in Jerusalem, though they hadn’t known each other before the Netanyahus had left for Philadelphia. Introduced during one of Bibi’s summer vacations in Israel, they remained an intermittent couple throughout his long absences and while both served in the IDF, though Miki became exasperated by Bibi’s reluctance to commit to a long-term relationship. During his military service, Bibi never had a fixed abode off-base. He lived in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood, alternately with Miki in her parents’ home, during the periods when they were dating, and with his brothers Yoni and Iddo, or with his friend Uzi Beller’s family, when they were less close.
Miki, or Miriam Haran, as she is more commonly known today, was not about to wait around for Bibi. After completing her military service as a training officer in 1969, she studied chemistry at Hebrew University. In 1972 she was about to leave for Boston, where she had received a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in organic chemistry at Brandeis. Miki’s departure caused Bibi to abandon any thought of remaining in the IDF, as well as his Yale plans.
On June 19, he took part in Operation Crate, led by Ehud Barak inside Lebanon, to capture a group of senior Syrian intelligence officers. When Lebanese gendarmes came close to the location where Netanyahu’s team was waiting in the underbrush, the operation was aborted. The next day Bibi was discharged back to civilian life. In July, he flew to Boston, and the next month he and Miki were married in a small ceremony at his uncle’s house in Westchester County. Benzion and Tzila were there, but Miki’s parents remained in Jerusalem, as did Yoni and Iddo, who hadn’t even been notified in advance. Yoni was hurt. It took him another month to send the couple a letter of congratulations, in which, rather undiplomatically, he chose to notify them of his upcoming divorce.
For the first time Bibi’s life began to revolve around someone other than Yoni. Unlike his second and third wives, the fiercely ambitious and intelligent Miki was not someone who would be content to support her husband’s career. The only concession she made was to agree to living half an hour from Brandeis, in the dorms of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Bibi had enrolled at the School of Architecture and Planning. The plan was for Miki to complete her doctorate and Bibi to become an architect before returning to Israel. For the next four years, it went nearly as planned.
From the first day of the semester in September 1972, the twenty-three-year-old freshman insisted he wasn’t prepared to abide by the normal academic schedule. He demanded that his faculty adviser, the professor Leon Groisser, sign off on a double-load of courses. “He made it clear that he didn’t have four years to get an undergraduate degree,” Groisser recalled in interviews twenty-four years later, when Netanyahu was first elected prime minister. He argued that having spent five years as an officer in the high-stress environment of special operations, he could deal with the double-load. “He didn’t say it with bravado,” said Professor Groisser. “He said it as fact.”1 The Jewish (and Zionist) professor, skeptical but sympathetic, agreed to a semester’s trial period.
“He proceeded to overload and he did very well,” Groisser said. “He did superbly. He was very bright. Organized. Strong. Powerful. He knew what he wanted to do and how to get it done. He’s not the flippant, superficial person I keep reading about in the newspapers. He was organized and committed.”2
Early on, Netanyahu reverted to the name he had gone by at high school in Philadelphia—Ben. He would also change his family name to Nitay, as he and Miki quickly grew tired of the way Americans failed to pronounce Netanyahu. Years later, his critics in Israeli media would use the new name, “Ben Nitay,” as proof of his having rejected his Israeli roots and becoming a yored in America. These charges were baseless. Ben Nitay was the Hebrew pseudonym that Benzion had used during the 1930s and a name appearing in the Bible and in the Talmud.
But there is something to the charges that have dogged Netanyahu over the years that he is more American than Israeli. From the time he left Israel in 1963 at the age of thirteen, he would never spend a prolonged period living there as a private citizen. His army years were spent in a secret cocoon. Besides during officers’ course, he rarely had much to do with other ranks and corps. When he finally returned to Israel in the late 1970s, he was already a public figure, the brother of a fallen war hero. Soon after he again left for the United States, he returned as a senior diplomat and then became a prominent politician. Netanyahu had never lived as an ordinary grown-up civilian in Israel.
As a consequence of spending most of his formative years as a teenager, student, and rising diplomatic star in the United States, Bibi developed a chameleon-like ability to adopt an Israeli or American persona at will. In many ways he prefers American culture and American ideas, particularly conservative ones, to Israeli ideology. He has scant appreciation for much of Israeli society or its academia (at least in the fields not connected to technological research), and little interest in the nation’s diverse communities, save for the need to appeal to them for votes. As much as Israel has changed over the decades, it remains a much more egalitarian society than America. In this sense, Netanyahu is an American.
Even as the son of an outsider to the establishment, Netanyahu always lived among the Israeli elite in central Jerusalem. Accusations of him spurning his Israeli identity during the 1970s in Boston are particularly hollow. Most of the students in his social circle were Israelis studying in neighboring universities. Those were the friends Miki invited to meals at their tiny dorm apartment. When he was required to present a paper with a fellow student, it would invariably be another Israeli. Of course, Israelis studying in the United States were themselves another Israeli elite. And just like many of them, when the Yom Kippur War broke out in October 1973, Netanyahu rushed to return home and fight.
IN THE EARLY 1970S, Israel’s main borders were relatively calm. Despite the Egyptian Army moving antiaircraft missile batteries to the Suez Canal Zone, the ceasefire agreed upon in August 1970 held for over three years. The Syrian border remained quiet as well—Israel’s control of the Golan Heights preventing shelling or incursions into Israeli territory.
Since the end of the Six-Day War, Jordan had become the main base for Palestinian attacks on Israel, but tension between the Hashemite Kingdom and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been accused of establishing “a state within a state,” was growing.
Hussein’s perceived impotence in his kingdom was too much and he declared martial law, sending troops into Palestinian bases and neighborhoods. Thousands were killed in the operation, which the Palestinians named “Black September.” Syria threatened to invade Jordan in support of the Palestinians, and Hussein secretly appealed to Israel. The IDF mobilized troops near the Israel-Jordan-Syria border triangle, and its aircraft flew menacingly over the Syrian tanks. US Marines and airborne troops were also preparing to come to Jordan’s aid. The invasion was averted while Jordan’s army continued mowing down Palestinian fighters. By the end of October, PLO leader Yasser Arafat was forced to sign an agreement dismantling his bases in Jordan.
Now based in Lebanon, Arafat ordered the establishment of the Black September group, which would carry out “deniable” operations against Jordanian and Israeli targets. For the next three years, Israel contended with terrorist organizations rather than with conventional Arab armies. It was a campaign waged in the Middle East and Europe, with the Palestinians enlisting the assistance of radical groups from around the globe.
In September 1972, at the Olympic Games in Munich, Black September carried out its most daring attack, infiltrating the Olympic Village and taking eleven members of the Israeli team hostage. Two of the hostages were killed in their sleeping quarters and nine during a botched rescue attempt by German police. In response to the Munich massacre, Prime Minister Golda Meir launched Operation Wrath of God to track down and eliminate Black September operatives. The operation would continue into the 1980s, long after Arafat had disbanded the group in late 1973. It consisted mainly of assassinations carried out by Mossad, but the IDF also played a role.
On the evening of April 9, 1973, teams of Matkal, paratroopers, and naval commandos landed on the Lebanese coast, where they were met by Mossad agents who drove them to their targets. As many as a hundred Fatah members were killed in the operation. Yoni Netanyahu was among those who killed, at close-quarters, Muhammad Yousef al-Najjar, one of Arafat’s deputies, who doubled as Black September’s chief of operations. Al-Najjar’s wife, who tried to defend him, was also killed.
A few months earlier, Yoni had divorced his wife after a miserable four and a half years of marriage. Except for the ten months at Harvard, he and Tirza had spent little time together. In his increasingly infrequent letters to his parents, he continued to promise that he would return to Harvard, but by mid-1973, the only studies he was seriously contemplating were at IDF staff officers’ college.
Yoni made it back to the country of his birth one last time in 1973, spending a rare vacation on a summer semester at Harvard that had been arranged by Bibi. It was also the last significant period of time the two brothers would spend together. They ran along the Charles River, attended lectures and concerts, and had long philosophical conversations, smoking cigars. Years later, Bibi would often describe it as “a magical summer.”3 In many ways it was the end of their youth together. Yoni enjoyed Harvard, but he left with mixed feelings about what he called, in one of his letters to a friend, “the decadent, naïve and destructive American society.” The brothers shared a low view of many of the young Americans they met, along with an appreciation of America’s merits. “Young people here seem to be in constant frustration, incapable of emerging from the infantile stage,” he added in the same letter.4
“Everyone is educated to be antiestablishment and everyone slanders the administration,” he continued. “The most radical are the Jews. They seem to have long ago ceased being objective. A pity for America, because these crazies will destroy it. On the other hand, there’s no limit to my amazement. This is an incredible country! Technically, in its achievements, efficiency, politeness, order, comfort and more. They are ten levels above the rest of the world (and fifty above Israel).”5
Yoni and Bibi parted in August, not expecting to see each other for a long while. They weren’t the only ones not expecting war in October.
ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1970, Egypt’s president, Nasser, died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two. His admirers believed he had never recovered from the defeat of 1967. With him, aspirations of pan-Arab nationalism were laid to rest. His successor, Vice President Anwar al-Sadat, was initially viewed by many observers as a political lightweight.
In 1971, through UN and US intermediaries, Sadat passed on to the Israeli government proposals for entering a comprehensive peace process and an interim disengagement agreement between Israeli and Egyptian forces on the Suez Canal.
Israel’s political and military leaderships were split over whether to take Sadat at face value. Golda Meir was firmly in the skeptic camp and relayed wary answers to Sadat, insisting that Israel would not retreat from all the territories captured in 1967 and demanding that Egypt commit to non-belligerence with Israel from the start. Messages were relayed back and forth for months, but by early 1972, Sadat had seemed to lose interest.
The annual intelligence assessment for 1973 set the prospect of war at “low probability.” A few midlevel analysts argued that Sadat was preparing for war, and in the summer the IDF General Staff put the army on high alert for three months. By mid-August, the “concept” that Egypt would not go to war without the necessary air power for carrying out strikes deep within Israel reestablished itself. The belief that the Arabs would not risk a second humiliation was so deeply entrenched that even when, by early October, reports accumulated that mass mobilization by Egypt and Syria exhibited a clear preparation to attack, Israel’s generals still convinced themselves that the Arabs were just carrying out exercises.
Sayeret Matkal, the intelligence branch’s most elite unit, was not preparing for all-out war. Since his return from Harvard, Yoni had been training a special team to carry out a rescue operation of Israeli servicemen from Cairo’s Abbasiya Prison. On the morning of October 6, 1973, Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, he was summoned to Sirkin. The IDF was convinced that war would start in a matter of hours, and Meir had given the go-ahead for full mobilization. But once again, fearful of drastic actions, whether in war or peace, Israel’s inflexible prime minister would not authorize a preemptive strike.
For the next twenty-four hours, frustrated Matkal officers waited on base, as no mission orders arrived from the high command. Three years earlier, under Ehud Barak’s command, they had carried out a complex operation planting “special devices”—surveillance instruments capable of monitoring communications between Egyptian command posts. This was Israel’s insurance policy, to be used in time of emergency for clear indication that the enemy was on a war footing. Two days earlier, the special devices had been activated for nine hours and shut down. No irregular signals had been recorded, but the instruments were deemed too valuable to be used for long. Matkal’s efforts were to prove useless.
Bibi heard the news in the early afternoon of Yom Kippur in Boston. War had broken out seven hours earlier, at 1:55 p.m. local time, with simultaneous Egyptian and Syrian artillery barrages on Israeli forces. Within hours he bade Miki farewell and was on a train to New York. El Al, the only airline still flying to Israel, was about to dispatch its first Jumbo Jet, filled with students like him rushing back to their units. Bibi missed the flight and wasn’t assured of a place on the next one. The terminal at JFK was filled with hundreds of reservists. The priority was for members of armored units to be transported so they could help relieve the tank crews, which were barely holding on by the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights. It took urgent phone calls to the military attaché’s office at the Israeli embassy in Washington, in which Bibi notified them that he was a Sayeret Matkal officer, to secure a seat. Another passenger on those first flights back to Israel was his old commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ehud Barak, who had just started a master’s degree at Stanford. For the second time in just over six years, Netanyahu landed at a blacked-out terminal in Lod Airport without a clear idea of his role in the war.
Israelis who lived through those days remember it as the country’s darkest hour. The lowest point was on the night of October 8, when, after sixty hours of hearing encircled soldiers crying for help on the radio from isolated outposts, and reports of air force jets being shot out of the sky by elusive surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, the generals in “the pit,” the IDF’s underground central command post in Tel Aviv, feared that Israel’s strategic reserves were exhausted.
A despondent defense minister, Moshe Dayan, joined the IDF chief of staff, David “Dado” Elazar, as news arrived of the failure of Israel’s counteroffensive in Sinai. Only hours earlier, Dado had confidently promised at a press conference, “We will break their bones.” Dayan, the warlord of 1967, began talking darkly of drafting high school students, discharged veterans, and even Jewish hippies from America (“We’ll cut their hair”) to protect the approaches to Tel Aviv.6 The “spirit of Masada” spread through the headquarters as Dayan predicted a “destruction of the Third Temple,”7 and Israel’s strategic forces were put on alert as a last resort. As morning broke, fresh reports arrived of the start of an Israeli counterattack on the Golan and the air force’s first successes in taking out SAM missile sites. Spirits rose as plans were finalized to intensify the offensive against Syria, while holding the line in Sinai and preparing to cross the canal, taking the battle to the enemy’s territory later in the week.
As Bibi arrived in Sirkin, he was unaware of any of these developments. With no time to prepare special operations, Matkal had split into crack infantry companies, deployed as emergency reinforcements to both fronts. The base was nearly empty, and he joined a group of reservists who were heading south with the mission to protect exhausted tank crews in Sinai, while they slept at night, from marauding Egyptian commandos. It was a frustrating war for Bibi, who had returned from the United States anxious to do his part. A week later he was transferred to the Golan front.
Although he has movingly described flying back on a plane with a group of his comrades, “for some of whom, it was their last journey,” Netanyahu has never spoken of the last period of the war. Forty years later, when asked to recount his Yom Kippur experiences to an Israeli website, he wrote simply, “I went north to command a special operation.”8 Details of that operation are yet to emerge.
On October 24, when a ceasefire was agreed upon, Israeli troops controlled 1,600 square kilometers (618 square miles) of Egyptian territory west of the canal and on the Syrian front were shelling the suburbs of Damascus. Three weeks later, after a brief visit with Yoni, Bibi was back in Boston, resuming the grueling pace he had set for himself. He was allowed to make up his missing coursework during the January break.
ON THE BATTLEFIELD, Syria and Egypt suffered over eight times the number of casualties as Israel. But with more than 2,200 Israeli dead, it was still a heavy blow for a population numbering barely 3 million. Egyptians celebrate the “October War” each year as a great victory. They had removed the shame of 1967, crossed back over the Suez Canal, and forced the Israelis to realize that they could not hold Sinai for perpetuity. Israelis mark the war each year, on the day after Yom Kippur, with solemn ceremonies at military cemeteries. It is a victory tainted with the bitter failure of intelligence and chaos on the front lines during the first days of fighting.
A national commission of inquiry headed by the president of the Israeli Supreme Court issued a series of scathing reports on the military leadership that had been captured by “the concept” that the Arabs would not dare attack. Chief of Staff Elazar was forced to resign, along with the commanders of the intelligence branch and the Southern Command. The politicians escaped the commission’s censure, as they had been following the assessments of the generals, but Meir bowed to public pressure. Ten days after the commission delivered its initial report, she resigned. It was the end of an era. Meir was the last of Israel’s leaders to have served in government from the time of independence.
THERE WERE THOSE who had acquitted themselves well in the war. Major Jonathan Netanyahu was one. On the second day of the war he had led a Matkal company up to the Golan. Upon arrival, he and his men had fought off a Syrian airborne raid on divisional headquarters, wiping out forty-one enemy commandos. They had then joined the frantic armor battles on the front line, rescuing crews from burning tanks. For one of these missions, where Yoni and a small team extricated a wounded battalion commander from behind enemy lines, he was awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service, Israel’s third-highest military decoration.
Entire echelons of the armored corps had been decimated in the war. Yoni’s original plan to attend staff officers’ college was scrapped. Instead, he transitioned to tanks, undergoing a crash course in armored warfare and taking command of a company of tanks that were involved in ongoing skirmishes with the Syrian Army within the enclave captured by Israel at the end of the war. He was on the fast track to rapid promotion with a promise to be a candidate for the next Matkal commander. Within four months he was promoted to battalion commander.
AFTER YOM KIPPUR, Israel was a nation suffering collectively and individually from posttraumatic stress disorder. The Israeli economy would grind to a standstill for months, as most of the able-bodied men remained on reserve duty, on high alert at the front. Over the next two years, defense expenditures, which have always been much higher proportionally in Israel than in the West, jumped to a crippling 30 percent of GDP. Arsenals were replenished and new weapons systems developed to deal with the Soviet-made antitank and antiaircraft missiles that had caused so many casualties. Israel’s finances were tipped into a downward spiral that would become nearly catastrophic within a decade. It was a period of growing bitterness and recrimination. Yoni, at the age of twenty-nine, now promoted to lieutenant colonel, and Bibi, at MIT, were largely isolated from the economic problems. But generals always prepare to fight the previous war, and Israelis failed to realize at the end of 1973 was that they had just fought their last war in which they had been outnumbered. In all the subsequent rounds of conflict, Israel would unquestionably be the numerically superior force. They were about to transition from David to Goliath, and with that transformation, new challenges and opportunities would be created for them. They have been grappling with them ever since.
It was Bibi’s generation—those who had enlisted after the Six-Day War, who had borne the main brunt of the war. The majority of those who had been killed and wounded, or were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, were men in their early twenties. Like Bibi, they had been born after Israel’s War of Independence, and had missed out on the glory of 1967. Instead, they shared in the frustration of the War of Attrition and the anger over the failures of 1973. They were to emerge as a bitter and jaded generation, many of them driven by disillusionment with the old leaders to the extreme edges of politics on right and left. The war would have much less of an effect on Netanyahu, who had been brought up since childhood to have little faith in the Mapai leadership.
Of the members of the small team that had joined up with Bibi in August 1967, three had been killed near him in those early years. One more, Ilan Shapira, would die in the Yom Kipper war on the bank of the Suez Canal as a reserve paratrooper officer. Two of the officers, Rafi Bar-Lev and Amit Ben-Horin, were killed as well. Bibi’s first team commander, Amiram Levin, was severely wounded at the end of the war, though he returned to the unit six months later.
There was some rancor toward Bibi for rushing back to MIT, while most reservists, including his younger brother, Iddo, who had completed his service the previous year and was about to start medical school, remained for months, and would continue doing lengthy reserve stints for years. But Netanyahu was at the end of the military chapter in his life. The three Netanyahu brothers had defied their father, leaving America to serve in the IDF’s most demanding unit. Now Yoni alone remained in service, on what was expected to be a long army career. He supported Bibi’s early return to the US. “From your point of view, you were very clever,” Yoni wrote him from the bombarded enclave in Syria. “It’s good you’re back studying, instead of wasting time.”9
Colonel Omer Bar-Lev, who in the second half of the 1970s was in command of the Matkal reservists, later remembered Bibi returning only once to take part in an operation. “It was the first operation I commanded in 1975, and Bibi, who was back in Israel on vacation, commanded the rescue team. But that was a one-off. We barely ever saw him in uniform [again].”
Many Matkal officers who served with Netanyahu became political opponents over the ensuing years. Bar-Lev would go on to become the unit’s commander and a member of the Knesset for the Israeli Labor Party. Together with other Matkal alumni, in 1978 he was among the founders of Peace Now, a movement that has continuously urged the Israeli government to make concessions for peace and strenuously opposed the West Bank settlements. Danny Yatom, one of the officers who selected Bibi for the Matkal unit, would also be elected a Labor MK. In 2017, both Bar-Lev and Bibi’s first commander, Amiram Levin, ran unsuccessfully in Labor’s leadership primaries, seeking to lead the parliamentary opposition to Netanyahu. And then, of course, there was Ehud Barak, perhaps the only person closer to Yoni than Bibi, who would unseat Netanyahu at the end of his first term as prime minister in 1999.
Early in his political career, Netanyahu would make very little use of his Matkal past. Until 1992, the unit’s name could not even be mentioned in the Israeli media. Besides, when compared to his iconic brother, Yoni, and later on, his rival, Barak, it was a relatively minor record. In the first edition of his book A Place Among the Nations, published in 1993, there are only very brief references to his military service, and Sayeret Matkal is not mentioned, just “an elite unit.” Later on, however, as the unit was slowly and very partially dragged out of the shadows, he began speaking of his days there more often, gradually verging on the boastful.
In March 2016, during a cabinet argument, Netanyahu slapped down his young challenger for leadership of the right wing, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, saying, “Don’t preach to me on backing IDF soldiers. I’ve led more soldiers than you into battle.”10 Beyond the childishness of his remark, it wasn’t even true. Bennett, who also served in Matkal, had commanded an entire special forces company and had continued to serve as a reserve officer for many more years than Netanyahu.
An even more bizarre boast came in January 2006, days after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon slipped into a coma. Netanyahu had just regained leadership of Likud after Sharon had split with the party and founded the centrist Kadima. Bibi was contemplating a three-headed election against Kadima and Labor, which was headed by his nemesis, Barak. One evening on a television talk show he told a story from the war about meeting Major General Sharon, who had commanded the crossing of the Suez Canal, the crucial turning point on the Egyptian front. He later repeated it in an interview with the New York Times. In the talk-show interview, he put it this way:
I knew him in the Yom Kippur War. It was the third or the fourth day of the war. It was a makeshift force of Sayeret Matkal and we arrived there on the bank of the Canal, to help Arik, the IDF. The Egyptians had destroyed there some 200 tanks in the day or two before. We got into his command vehicle. There were three of us: Ariel Sharon; Ehud Barak, who commanded the unit; and your servant. It was interesting, because no one knew we had been there, three prime ministers. But you know, today we all belong to different parties. There we were in the same party. That is the greatness of this nation, in critical moments we are all in the same party.11
It was the perfect anecdote, putting him in the same company as his illustrious rivals. However, Barak and other officers on Sharon’s staff had no recollection of the meeting ever taking place. It was highly unlikely that a junior reserve officer would have joined such a gathering with the divisional commander. Neither does it tally with what is known of the three men’s whereabouts in those fateful days. But Netanyahu, when subsequently asked about the episode, insisted it happened and that he had been “on the first plane” from the United States. In his own book, which he had written thirteen years earlier, he had missed the first plane.12
Why did he need to puff up his already impressive military record with an unlikely story? Just as he has spent decades creating a greatly exaggerated narrative of his grandfather, father, and older brother at the heart of the Zionist endeavor, it seems Netanyahu must also place himself at the heart of Israel’s historic events.
SAYERET MATKAL LEFT an indelible mark on Benjamin Netanyahu, beyond political posturing. It could hardly have been otherwise for a young officer in his early twenties, sitting in front of large-scale maps, planning strategic operations, with the Middle East his oyster. He has remained for his entire career a “big picture” politician, with little patience for detail or consideration of obstacles. The small elite and secluded unit instilled in him a hostility to large organizations, including the IDF itself, which Bibi sees as cumbersome and obdurate. Managing Israel’s strategic affairs, he will always prefer using small special forces over larger regular formations. He is more likely to engage in back-channel talks through trusted confidential intermediaries than to use the services of the professional diplomatic corps, and more likely to appoint experts from the private sector to ad hoc task forces than to work with the civil service.
In an interview in 1997, he explained that
the main thing you learn in the unit is to set a target and achieve it…. The entire work process is captive to achieving one specific mission. There’s no routine. There are missions defined by periods of time; months, sometimes even a year or two. And there is a certain destination which you home in on and dedicate all your mental resources and everything else to reaching. That destination is almost always reached and if it isn’t, you try again…. You learn what you can make of yourself. You learn the essential need of the people working around you to reach the destination. And afterwards, when you achieve the goal, you say: here, I’ve reached my target, I’ll go on to the next thing.13
But the philosophy of a small elite unit is not always the best practice for running a country. “When things get fucked up in his chaotic office,” says one long-suffering Netanyahu aide, “Bibi will shoot at you—‘This couldn’t have happened in 269,’” using the code number of Matkal. “Or he’ll say—‘This couldn’t have happened at BCG,’” meaning Boston Consulting Group, the next self-perceived elite stop on Netanyahu’s trajectory. “But he won’t actually give you any idea of how to prevent the chaos he creates around himself.”