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Netanyahu has always insisted that back in his twenties, he had no intention of going into politics in 1976. He certainly had little time then, with his double-load of courses, for student activism. But from the day in 1974 when he met a fellow student handing out pro-Israel leaflets on campus, he was hooked.
This is what his grandfather had done in the 1920s, and his father back in the 1940s. This is what Bibi wanted to do. His military service over, Netanyahu was about to embark on his next crusade.
Early on during his university days in the United States, Netanyahu still believed that public opinion in America and across the Western world would be broadly in favor of Israel. In September 1972, as news was broadcast of the murder of eleven members of the Israeli team at the Olympic Games in Munich, he was with Israeli friends at the home of an Israeli professor at Brandeis. The sentiment was that “at least now everyone will know who these people are.”1 The world would have a better understanding of what Israel was up against.
It was a pivotal period for Israel’s supporters in the United States. For the first two decades of Israel’s existence, most of the American Jewish community was relatively ambivalent toward Israel. While there were, of course, many Jewish supporters of Israel and Zionism, as well as some opponents, for the most part American Jews were much more ambivalent and inward-looking than they became after 1967. The postwar era was a time in which many of the barriers to the widespread acceptance and inclusion of Jews in the highest echelons of American society came down. Most American Jews were more concerned in those days with their own social advancement.
The fears of Israel’s imminent annihilation in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War and the subsequent lightning victory caused a sea change within American Jewry. Following the war, there was a feeling that they had also played their part. “All American Jews, it seemed, now basked in the pride of victory,” wrote historian Melvin I. Urofsky, in We Are One! American Jewry and Israel.2 They had gone in the space of weeks from suddenly fearing a second Holocaust in the Jewish state to taking vicarious pride in its military prowess. From then on Israel would play a central role in the self-identity of American Jews.
For many young American Jews who had no clear Jewish identity, and no longer faced discrimination or hostility in their own daily lives, support for Israel was a way of outsourcing that undefined identity to those glorious and triumphant Israelis.
The foreign policy of the Johnson and Nixon administrations mirrored this development as the United States began to openly identify itself as Israel’s strategic ally. It reflected the worldview of those who, like Henry Kissinger, saw Israel as a pro-American bulwark in a Middle East that was in danger of coming under the aegis of the Soviet Union, as well as the growing influence of American Jews in the corridors of power. But the increasing intimacy between Jerusalem and Washington would cost Israel friends in other places.
THROUGHOUT THE 1950S and much of the 1960s, Israel—a state that had been created by refugees in defiance of colonial Britain, and with staunch socialist foundations that were expressed by the kibbutz movement—was widely seen by large sections of the American left as a progressive enterprise. This attitude was epitomized in Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarks in 1968: “I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.”3
But Dr. King’s opinion of the Jewish state would soon become a minority view on the ideological left as the works of radical thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, who identified the Palestinian cause as an “anti-colonialist” struggle, gained wider currency.
For most Jews around the world, Israel’s astonishing triumph in 1967 was a source of pride. Even Noam Chomsky, a stalwart of the MIT faculty and a fierce critic of Israel, who had spent a few months in the 1950s living on a kibbutz, said that in the days before the Six-Day War he “did have concerns about Israel’s possible fate, and didn’t anticipate the quick and overwhelming victory.”4 But the emergence of Israel as a military power, and worse, one aligned with the United States, during a period of the Vietnam War in which many young Americans saw their own nation as being engaged in an unjust and bloody colonial war, swiftly pushed the Jewish state out of the progressive camp.
As the grand causes of the progressive left in previous decades—Cuba, Algeria, and, with the American military withdrawal in early 1973, also Vietnam—receded, new ones came to the forefront. Apartheid in South Africa was one. The Israel-Palestine conflict was another. By the time Benjamin Netanyahu returned to MIT in November 1973, the issue was firmly entrenched in the consciousness of many American students and professors. And while Israelis on campus believed that, like the athletes at the Munich Games, they were the victims of the conflict, some of their contemporaries saw Yasser Arafat, who had been directing Black September behind the scenes, as a brave freedom fighter—Che Guevara with a keffiyeh.
Bibi’s first months back at MIT passed in a blur of studying as he made up for lost time. Miki was mostly preoccupied with her own studies and her part-time job at Brandeis. But as the New England winter began to thaw, he started paying more attention to what was happening around him. The fellow Israeli he had met handing out leaflets was Uzi Landau, a doctoral engineering student, who, like Bibi, had returned to fight in the Yom Kippur War as a paratrooper officer.
Uzi’s father, Chaim Landau, was a Knesset member of the new party that had been formed around Menachem Begin’s Herut a few months earlier. It was called Ha’Likud—“The Consolidation.” Landau Sr. had been one of Begin’s chief lieutenants in the IZL underground, serving as its last chief of staff before independence and as a Herut MK from 1949 onward.
Uzi Landau was one of a group of second-generation Herutniks, sons of the underground commanders, who would themselves go on to become prominent Likud politicians. From the mid-1980s onward, in Israeli politics they would be called, often dismissively, “the princes.” There are those who have sought to portray Netanyahu as one of the princes, by virtue of his Revisionist roots, but this characterization is groundless. Benzion never had anything to do with the Herut elite, which he despised. Throughout his political career, Bibi would fight the princes for control over the party, eventually driving nearly all of them out of Likud. Even Landau, a future minister, would in 2005 run against him for the party leadership, and three years later he left Likud for a more right-wing alternative, accusing Netanyahu of having led Likud “astray.”
In those days, however, Landau welcomed Netanyahu to the fold. Bibi wasn’t interested in handing out leaflets on campus. He had much grander ideas of fighting for Israel’s cause statewide. He urged the members of the Israeli students association to find larger venues and to set up meetings with local politicians, members of Congress, and the governor. They were all in their early twenties, and unlike Bibi, lacked the polish or sophistication for public speaking and political lobbying. He would be their spokesman, with his perfect accent and preppy suit and tie. To add gravitas, he would sometimes invite Benzion, who was by then a professor at Cornell, to the important meetings. They were impressed. Landau had no illusions regarding Netanyahu’s future: “It was clear to me that he would become a major political figure,” he later said.5
The first mentions of Netanyahu—or Ben Nitay—in the media are laconic accounts in local Jewish newspapers of lectures he gave in Massachusetts and Philadelphia synagogues and Jewish federations on Israeli current affairs. Benzion, who had known little and understood even less of what his sons were doing back home in the army, finally approved, telling Bibi that he saw shades of his own father’s rhetoric in him. Yoni wrote from the Golan praising him for “trying to save the state” and “working hard for our joint interest—continuing our existence.”6
ISRAEL’S FOUNDER, DAVID Ben-Gurion, died on December 1, 1973. Upon resigning as prime minister ten years earlier, he had taunted the Revisionists in his farewell speech, saying, “I wasn’t your partner when you praised Hitler.” The next day he explained himself in a letter: “I have no doubt that Begin hates Hitler—but this hatred doesn’t mean he’s any different. When I first heard a Begin speech on the radio—I heard the voice and the screaming of Hitler.” Ben-Gurion treated Begin as a pariah throughout his political career, but in the last decade of his life, relations between the two political rivals eased somewhat. During the 1967 crisis, Begin actually suggested that Ben-Gurion come back to lead the country. In 1969, Ben-Gurion wrote him that while he opposed him politically, “I never personally bore you a grudge and the more I’ve known in you in recent years—the more I’ve admired you.”7
Ben-Gurion’s successor, Levi Eshkol, allowed Jabotinsky’s coffin to be brought to Israel for a state burial in 1964, and on the eve of the Six-Day War, he requested that Begin join a unity government. For the first time, the Revisionists were brought in from the cold. They were still far from power, but they were slowly gaining legitimacy.
In 1965, Herut and the Liberal Party set up a joint electoral bloc called Gahal, for Gush Herut-Liberalim (Herut-Liberals Bloc). The plan, pushed by the influential columnists of Haaretz, was to build a viable alternative to Mapai. The new party was to adopt the Liberals’ market-orientated economic policies and Herut’s hawkish positions on security and diplomacy. Begin agreed to one significant concession, dropping from the party’s platform the demand that in the future Israel encompass the eastern bank of the Jordan.
By the early 1970s, they were beginning to look for the first time like a government-in-waiting. Ambitious young generals retiring from service, such as Dayan and Rabin, had in the past routinely joined Mapai on the fast track to a cabinet post. In 1972, former air force commander Ezer Weizman joined Herut. The next year, the Paratroopers Brigade founder, General Ariel Sharon, resigned from the army and set about trying to unite the parties of the center-right. Both Weizman and Sharon believed they would soon oust Begin and lead the party to power. Sharon aggressively brokered an alliance between Herut, the Liberals, and smaller parties from the center and the right.
On September 13, 1973, the Likud party came into being. In addition to Begin’s Herut and the Liberals, it included the Free Center, a party of the rebels who had broken with Herut eight years earlier; the State List, which had been Ben-Gurion’s last political vehicle, before his final retirement from politics in 1970; and the far right Greater Eretz Yisrael List. Likud was now poised to replace Mapai, which had rebranded itself as the Israeli Labor Party. Sharon was to be the campaign manager for the election scheduled for October 21. Four weeks later, however, he was back in uniform commanding a reserved armored division. His soldiers would cross the Suez Canal, finally turning the tide of the Yom Kippur War in Israel’s favor.
The election, postponed by the war to December 31, proved a disappointment. Likud did far better than Begin’s Herut ever had, receiving nearly a third of the votes and thirty-nine Knesset seats. But despite the public anger over the war’s results, Golda Meir’s Labor Party, running as “The Alignment” in an alliance with the socialist Mapam (Mifleget HaPoalim HaMeuhedet, or United Workers Party), held on with a plurality of fifty-one seats, enough to form a coalition. Begin encouraged his crestfallen colleagues. “Even though Labor won this election, after what happened in the Yom Kippur War to the nation and the government, they must lose power,” he said. “It’s just a question of time.”8
Not everyone was convinced. Earlier that year, the editor of the newspaper Maariv, Shmuel Shnitzer, had written that even though Israel was ripe for a change in government, Begin’s party, with its extreme baggage, was incapable of delivering. “There is a psychological barrier stopping many people going over to Herut,” he observed. “What can be done when between an opposition seeking a party and the only party which can serve as opposition there are a thousand memories of old arguments that Herut gleefully renews whenever it seems there’s a risk they may be forgotten.”9
The Netanyahu family had certainly never believed in Begin as a viable leader. In a letter before the election to his parents, Yoni wrote, “No doubt, Israel needs a new leadership.”10 But he knew better than to mention Begin as a candidate. After the election, he wrote to them, “The alternative to Alignment [Labor] in Israel is so weak, and we are stuck in the middle. On the one side, we want change, on the other, we can’t find the body that can bring it.”11
For the time being, the alternative was a new generation of Labor leaders. Following Meir’s resignation in April 1974, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres fought each other for the party leadership: the army’s commander in the Six-Day War against Ben-Gurion’s protégé. It was a bitter political rivalry; they were to battle over the party’s leadership for the next two decades. This time, Rabin won narrowly, 298–254, in the Central Committee vote. He became Israel’s fifth prime minister and its first born in the twentieth century. Grudgingly, he appointed Peres as his defense minister.
Rabin was an inexperienced politician, in his first Knesset term (it was Peres’s fifth). He had been elevated to the premiership after only three months of serving as minister of labor. Before that he had been Israel’s ambassador to the United States (1968–1973), and while in Washington he had built a personal relationship with Nixon, departing from diplomatic conventions by lobbying on the Republican president’s behalf among Jewish leaders. Nixon saw the majority of American Jews as part of the East Coast liberal establishment controlling the media and implacably opposed to his administration. In private he was given to anti-Semitic remarks. Nevertheless, he developed an admiration for Israel and its military and intelligence capabilities. It was a dynamic that would be replicated in relationships between future Israeli governments and Republican administrations, which shared a conservatism alien to mainstream American Jews.
Early in the Yom Kippur War, Nixon had given the orders for a massive airlift of arms to Israel to replenish the arsenals depleted on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. It was left to Kissinger, who had recently been promoted to secretary of state, to implement the airlift, which he did while fighting opposition in other parts of the administration, mainly from Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. The American arms arrived too late in the war to have any impact on its outcome, but the knowledge that they were on the way increased Israeli confidence as the counteroffensives were launched with existing resources. The delay did feed Israeli accusations that Kissinger had been willing “to let Israel bleed a while” to pressure it back to negotiations after the war.
In 1974, Kissinger embarked on a series of “shuttle diplomacy” missions between Jerusalem, Cairo, and Damascus to help broker disengagement agreements made on the front lines. The United States was rattled by the Soviet intervention at the end of the Yom Kippur War, when the Kremlin had threatened using its own military might, perhaps even nuclear weapons, if Israel continued to pursue its advantage against Syria and Egypt. For the first time US forces were placed on DEFCON 3, a defense readiness condition alert. The Arab oil boycott, in response to the arms airlift, had damaged the US economy and was felt by ordinary citizens at the gas pump. Achieving a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace became a strategic interest of US foreign policy, and shuttle diplomacy between Israel and the Arabs, the norm for US envoys.
On June 16, 1974, Nixon landed at the recently renamed Ben Gurion Airport on the first presidential visit ever to Israel. He also visited Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Fifty-three days after leaving Israel, he resigned over the Watergate scandal. Under President Gerald Ford, Kissinger continued his shuttle diplomacy, pressuring Israel to make further withdrawals. Many in Israel criticized Kissinger for what they saw as his cavalier attitude toward Israel’s security so soon after it had been jeopardized in war. Worse, he was seen as a traitor to his Jewish roots. In right-wing rallies he was routinely called “the “Jew-boy” (a nickname Nixon had in the past used for him) and “the husband of the gentile.” In a Knesset speech, Begin castigated him: “Be careful Dr. Kissinger,” he said. “You are a Jew. You are not the first to have reached high office in the country where you dwell. Remember the past. There were Jews who out of a complex of fear that people would say they are acting on behalf of their people because of their Judaism, did the opposite.”12
The Netanyahus were deeply suspicious of the American moves. In Jerusalem, Yoni and Iddo joined thousands of Israelis in demonstrations against Kissinger. In a conversation with Bibi, Yoni dismissed the agreement that Kissinger had brokered with North Vietnam on ending America’s military presence in Vietnam. “Is this the peace they are planning for us as well?”13 In one letter, he referred to the administration as “friends” in quotation marks.
In March 1975, following Rabin’s rejection of yet another disengagement plan, Ford and Kissinger openly blamed Israel for the failure of the initiative. The president announced a “reassessment” of US ties with Israel, including a freeze on arms sales. Rabin set out to overturn the president’s decision, mobilizing support in the Democratic Congress. On May 22, seventy-six senators (fifty-one Democrats and twenty-five Republicans) signed a letter condemning Ford’s decision.
Ultimately, a compromise was reached. Israel agreed to sign a disengagement agreement with Egypt whereby its forces would retreat nearly forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) in Sinai, leaving a buffer zone between the two armies. To compensate Israel, Rabin and Ford agreed on a secret deal that included the supply of advanced weaponry, including F-15 and F-16 fighter jets; an emergency plan for resupplying Israel in case of war; American guarantees for Israel’s oil supplies; and the assurance that the United States would not recognize the PLO as long as the PLO refused to recognize Israel. The “reassessment” was over, but it had left Israelis with the realization that safeguarding the strategic relationship would take more than just a friendly president in the White House. It would mean continuous maintenance of all levels of support: Congress, statehouses, and Jewish organizations and federations as well as the American media.
THE ISRAELI STUDENTS group at MIT and neighboring universities sought the help of Israel’s consulate in Boston in setting up meetings and coordinating their work. At first they were disappointed by the professional diplomats’ lack of interest in their grassroots work. Israel’s foreign service in its early decades had been built on the statesmanship ethos of its British-educated founders, men like Abba Eban, who were skilled diplomats and fine orators, but had little understanding or interest in the mass media and in the necessity of taking the message to wider audiences.
In early 1975, a new Israeli consul arrived in Boston. Colette Avital, one of the few women in the male-dominated diplomatic corps, had been relegated in her first postings to media and PR roles and understood their importance. She was the first Israeli diplomat to see the potential in the twenty-five-year-old Netanyahu, with his combination of special forces experience, an American accent, and a polished appearance. She sent Netanyahu on his first official speaking engagements and appearances on local television stations on behalf of Israel, for which he was paid twenty-five dollars a lecture. She couldn’t foresee then that twenty-two years later, by then a veteran ambassador and avid supporter of the Oslo process, she would be forced out of the foreign service by the first Netanyahu government.
For Netanyahu, it was clear from the start that the campuses were only the lowest level of an all-out campaign on all fronts. For decades he has insisted that the strategic flaw in Israel’s policy was not dedicating major resources and professional efforts to explaining its actions to the world. He has claimed that this PR project was the “third pillar” of Jabotinsky’s vision for ensuring the nation’s security, along with building its military might and settling the land of Israel.
There was nothing new about this observation. Ben-Gurion said in the early 1940s that “the way to acquire the American administration is acquiring the people, the public opinion.”14 But those in Ben-Gurion’s camp, the center-left mainstream of Zionism, always saw propaganda as something the right wing was best at; while they focused on physically building a new state, the Revisionists could just talk.
In the mid-1970s in Boston, Netanyahu’s enthusiasm for becoming an architect was waning. Over the years he has said that he felt he lacked the creative instincts to succeed in the field of architecture and was becoming more attracted by the world of business. In 1975, close to completing his second degree in architecture, he began a master’s degree at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and took four courses in the Department of Political Science doctoral program. By this point in the last year of his studies, he was handling a triple course load. Despite Bibi’s consistent denials that he harbored any thoughts of a public career at that point, it is hard to escape the impression that he was already finding his métier.
Netanyahu’s first experiences of advocating for Israel in the United States had certainly left him with an appetite for more. It was clear that at some stage, not far off, there would be a change of government in Israel, to one more fitting to his political inclinations. But even if we are to believe Netanyahu’s protestations that he had no plans then of going into politics, the events of July 1976 would launch him on an unstoppable trajectory.