16
After Fleur left, Netanyahu spent a couple of years as one of Israel’s most eligible bachelors. The gossip pages reported him squiring various women, but they were usually wrong. Bibi was too focused on his political career. Liaisons, when they did occur, were almost always initiated by the other side and didn’t last. In mid-1989, Sara Ben Artzi, a then twenty-nine-year-old El Al flight attendant, approached Netanyahu on a stopover in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and after a few minutes chatting, left her phone number. Their first date was at an Indian restaurant in Tel Aviv. They continued seeing each other for a few months.
Sara was recently divorced, having ended a stormy marriage with a great deal of toxic baggage that would continue to haunt her. The marriage had lasted seven years; the divorce had been in 1987. Her friends said she had set her mind on finding a “man of consequence” and from the moment she met Bibi, wasn’t going to let go. Sara had spent a frugal and austere childhood in the small town of Kiryat Tivon in northern Israel. Her father was a Bible teacher who had enforced a religious environment within their home, although it was a largely secular community. Sara’s mother is remembered in Tivon as an angry woman who would shout at children in the street. It was a home that put a premium on education, and Sara’s three older brothers were all brilliant and radical. One brother is today a Silicon Valley millionaire; a second is a far-left mathematics professor who refused to serve as a soldier in the West Bank; and the third is a Talmudic scholar and West Bank settler. Sara’s academic career, however, failed to take off, and by the time she met Bibi, she was still struggling with her master’s degree in psychology.
Many of Netanyahu’s friends were taken aback by his new girlfriend, who seemed so different from his fiercely independent and career-driven ex-wives. Nine years younger than her boyfriend, Sara seemed fragile and childlike. Attending social events with Bibi, she wouldn’t leave his side and rarely spoke. He was attracted to her vulnerability, but, as always, hesitant in committing, especially to someone who clung to him so closely. He continued seeing other women during 1990 and drifted away from Sara for a few months. But there was a steely tenacity to her that no one had noticed. Sara had reestablished their relationship by the end of the year, and in January 1990, as Scud missiles fell near her apartment in a Tel Aviv suburb, Bibi invited her to join him in Jerusalem. One night there, Sara informed him that she was pregnant.
For the third time, a reluctant Bibi was pressured into marriage. A few weeks after the First Gulf War ended, a small ceremony took place at his childhood home in the presence of Shamir and Arens. The next morning, a carefully staged photograph of the couple, Sara’s pink dress concealing her pregnancy, appeared in the newspapers. It was the first introduction of the hitherto anonymous Sara Netanyahu to the Israeli media, which would spend much of the next decades savaging her.
At forty-one, Netanyahu bought his first apartment in Beit Hakerem, the northwest Jerusalem neighborhood where the Mileikowsky family had lived nearly seventy years before. Their first son, Yair, was born on July 28, 1991, thirteen years after the birth of his half-sister, Noa.
SHAMIR’S HOPES THE Bush administration would cut him some slack for not retaliating during the First Gulf War were unfounded. Shortly after hostilities in Iraq ended, Bush and Baker resumed their attempts to convene a peace conference with renewed vigor. They intensified pressure on Israel to stop building settlements in the West Bank.
From early 1990, a new factor came into the Israel-US equation. With the Soviet Union crumbling, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews were rushing to leave. Few of them were Zionists, and just like a century earlier, when Jews had fled the Pale of Settlement, most preferred emigrating to the United States. However, due to the changing political situation, America no longer regarded them as refugees, and it became much more difficult to obtain green cards. This situation served Israel, which was interested in boosting its Jewish population through emigration.
In 1990–1991, 332,000 Soviet immigrants arrived in Israel, which then numbered less than 5 million citizens. The sudden influx strained Israel’s economy, which was still recovering from its near-meltdown in the mid-1980s. Israel requested $10 billion in loan guarantees from the Bush administration to ensure that it could provide housing and jobs for the new immigrants. The administration’s response was positive in principle, but Baker wanted Shamir to promise that the new arrivals would not settle in the West Bank. It was a moot point, as very few of them had any interest in doing so. But to commit to the idea of Jews not being allowed to live in all of the historical land of Israel stuck in Shamir’s craw. The loan guarantees were delayed.
In an attempt to pressure the Bush administration, AIPAC and other Jewish organizations deployed hundreds of activists in a concerted effort to get Congress to bypass the administration and approve the loan guarantees. On September 12, 1991, Bush retaliated in an unprecedented press conference. He reminded the press that US troops had “risked their lives to defend Israelis in the face of Iraqi Scud missiles,” and that Israel was already receiving $4 billion that year. He promised that America would help Israel absorb the new immigrants, but reaffirmed that it could not allow the money to be used to build settlements. He was particularly scathing in his criticism of Israel’s efforts to go around his administration. “I’m up against some powerful political forces but I owe it to the American people to tell them how strongly I feel…. I heard today there were something like a thousand lobbyists working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.”1
Shamir caved. His (almost certainly unfounded) fear that the administration would allow Soviet Jews to emigrate to the United States instead of Israel pushed him to agree to the international conference that he had likened to a gallows. He did everything in his power to empty the Madrid Conference of any real diplomatic meaning. Although he was forced to swallow a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, including members clearly affiliated with the PLO, he received American assurances that the conference would just be an opening event. Actual negotiations would take place directly between Israeli and Arab delegations later on. The Bush administration also promised that it wouldn’t support an independent Palestinian state or force Israel to directly negotiate with the PLO.
The conference opening, on October 30, was officially hosted by President Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Arab delegations were led by foreign ministers. Shamir didn’t want to entrust his foreign minister with representing Israel. Until his appointment a year earlier, Levy had been Sharon’s ally, pressuring Shamir from the right. As foreign minister he had shifted to the center, favoring an acceptance of the US demands. Shamir viewed him as weak and opportunistic and decided to lead the Israeli delegation himself. Levy, in a huff, announced that he would be staying home. To make things worse for him, Shamir took Netanyahu to Madrid as the delegation’s official spokesperson.
Some veterans of the peace process have hailed the Madrid Conference as a key event leading to the Oslo Accords and peace between Jordan and Israel, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that it was largely theater. One senior Israeli diplomat involved in the conference said, “Shamir didn’t believe there would be any real substance in the conference, which is why he brought Bibi along. He wanted hasbara, not diplomacy.” Shamir left after the first day. He had made a speech dealing mainly with the Jewish people’s historical claim to the land. During other speeches, he seemed to be dozing. He noticed, though, when the Syrian foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, waved an old British “wanted” notice with his photograph and called him a “terrorist.”
For Shamir, the whole event was a dangerous nuisance. For Netanyahu, it was heaven. He led a large team of press officers and spin doctors, supervised two media tents outside the conference center in the Spanish royal palace and the delegations’ hotel, and gave daily briefings to the thousands of reporters gathered there, including one for Arab media that was simultaneously translated.
He reprised his role from the First Gulf War on a grander global stage. He waved the Palestinian National Covenant, highlighting the clauses calling for Israel’s elimination, and demanded the Palestinians “tear up the document of hatred.” He mocked the peace conference, saying he was “going around, looking for Arab representatives who will shake my hand.” In response to a speech by the leader of the Palestinian delegation demanding the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Jerusalem, he said, “It’s like someone saying I want to make peace with you but only after we amputate your hands, legs, and rip out your heart. But I certainly want to make peace with you.”
Netanyahu’s performance gained him admirers back home, but in making the conference a media brawl, he also helped to focus attention on his Palestinian opponent. The American-educated Hanan Ashrawi emerged as one of the most eloquent champions of the Palestinian cause on the international stage. There were many in Madrid who felt she had proven herself to be Netanyahu’s equal, even surpassing him with her less bombastic manner.
After Madrid, Levy made it clear that under no circumstances would Netanyahu continue as his deputy. Bibi, who had already long ago stopped taking orders from his minister, moved to the prime minister’s office, where he retained the rank of deputy minister. He was promptly sent to Washington, where separate follow-up talks between Israeli and Arab delegations were to take place. However, Netanyahu was not entrusted with actually leading one of the Israeli teams, just with their press relations. The talks immediately bogged down in arguments over formalities, as Shamir had intended.
The only tangible effect of the Madrid Conference and subsequent Washington talks was to push the three far-right parties in Shamir’s government—Tzomet, Moledet, and Ha’Tehiya—out of the coalition. In January 1992, they resigned in protest over the “dangerous” negotiations, forcing Shamir to call early elections.
There was still unfinished business in the Knesset.
AFTER THE “STINKING TRICK” of 1990, there were growing calls to change the electoral system with a view to reducing the small parties’ “blackmail” power over the government. The proposal that gained the most support was to add a direct vote for prime minister to the Knesset list vote. With a directly elected prime minister, the large parties would be strengthened. At least that was the thinking. Two supporters of this proposal were Netanyahu and Yitzhak Rabin, both of whom rated their prospects as candidates in a direct election to be high. Shamir and Arens, neither of whom enjoyed election campaigning, were flatly opposed to the “beauty contest” law. They enforced a whip on Likud MKs to vote against it. Netanyahu rebelled.
After strenuous arguments, Arens reached a last-minute agreement with his protégé that he would vote with Likud if it came down to the wire. On the night of the decisive vote, Bibi broke his promise, and the direct election law passed 57–56. There were dark mutterings in Likud that he had committed political suicide, but the outrage was short-lived. Shamir didn’t forgive or forget, however, and years later he said that Bibi supported the law “because he sees himself a king.”2
In an amendment, the direct election was postponed to the next elections. Meanwhile, Likud had much bigger problems. In the first party-wide primaries in Israel, Rabin had beaten Shimon Peres, regaining leadership of Labor fifteen years after being forced to resign over the foreign bank account scandal. Labor now launched its “Israel is waiting for Rabin” campaign, focusing on the image of “Mr. Security,” rather than on the less popular party brand. Meanwhile, Likud was once again mired in camp warfare within its Central Committee.
In the 1992 election campaign, first Shamir went through a bruising leadership contest against Levy and Sharon, winning with an underwhelming 46 percent. In the panel vote, Netanyahu came in second this time, still impressive for a first-term MK, especially one who had just rebelled against the party line. But the big news was Levy, who still claimed to be Likud’s next leader, coming in eighteenth! The Shamir-Arens camp had gone all-out to humiliate Levy. Many Likudniks felt he was splitting the party and shunned him.
A week later he salvaged a bit of self-respect, coming in third in the first “seven.” Bibi was fifth again. But only a tiny handful of Levy loyalists had made the list and would be in the next Knesset. In a furious speech after the result, Levy played the “tribal card” and accused his party colleagues of anti-Mizrahi racism: “I was for some of the Likud people like a monkey that has just climbed down from the trees,” he thundered, threatening to resign from the party. Arens begged Shamir to call Levy’s bluff and appoint Bibi as acting foreign minister until the elections.
Shamir, however, fearing that Levy’s departure would push away Mizrahi voters, gave Levy a written commitment that he would remain deputy prime minister and foreign minister in the next government. Keeping Levy in the fold did not help Likud.
On June 23, fifteen years after losing power to Likud and after four consecutive defeats under Peres, Labor finally won again. Rabin was back in office. Not only had Labor resoundingly trounced Likud as the largest party, with forty-four seats to thirty-two, but Labor, the left-wing Meretz (Vigor) party, the communists, and the Arab parties held sixty-one seats, while the Likud and its right-wing and religious allies held fifty-nine. The results, however, concealed the fact that Rabin hadn’t stopped Israel’s shift to the right.
More Israelis voted for the right-religious bloc than for the parties of the center-left. Due to fragmentation on the right and the higher electoral threshold of 1.5 percent, Ha’Tehiya and other small far-right parties failed to enter the Knesset, their votes lost. That, and the fact that Labor relied on Arab votes, would later feed the narrative that Rabin lacked a national mandate for the Oslo Accords.
Rabin won the elections presenting a hawkish image. He was “Mr. Security,” promising not to negotiate with the PLO, never to allow the creation of a Palestinian state, and to remain on the Golan Heights. Many of the new citizens who had recently arrived from the Soviet Union held nationalist views but voted for the tough General Rabin over the tired and dispirited Shamir.
Shamir lost no time, announcing his resignation as Likud leader on election night. Although he had led the movement for nine years, he had always been a transitional figure, never fully emerging from Menachem Begin’s shadow. Arens was widely seen as the frontrunner in the race to replace Shamir. On the morning after the election, Netanyahu offered to be Arens’s leadership campaign manager. The next day, Arens announced that he “believed in service, not servitude,” and that he was leaving politics. He didn’t have the stomach for another nasty contest against Levy, or the burning ambition to lead Likud, through years of opposition, back to power.
The path was open for Netanyahu, five years after joining Likud, to announce his leadership bid.
AS THE CONTEST kicked off, Netanyahu was at a disadvantage. Unlike Levy, he didn’t lead a well-established camp of supporters. Many members of the now leaderless Shamir-Arens camp were planning on voting for Benny Begin. Bibi presented himself as a leader for the post-camp era, but he had competition from another candidate—Moshe Katzav, who was popular in the Likud strongholds in the south and had served in several positions over the years, including, most recently, minister of transportation. Netanyahu relied on a new election system.
After Labor’s successful first party-wide primaries, many in Likud demanded party-wide primaries as well. Most of the leadership were against holding party-wide primaries, but Netanyahu had an unlikely ally in Levy, who believed he could sign up enough new members in the mainly Mizrahi working-class towns and neighborhoods to wrap up the race.
At a post-defeat Likud Central Committee conference, Netanyahu and Levy both urged members to relinquish their power to select the party’s representatives. Against them stood Begin and Sharon, who tabled an alternative plan to first revive Likud finances under a secretary-general (Sharon intended to run for this new post) and postpone primaries until the eve of the next Knesset election. Sick at the thought of spending years in opposition, 80 percent of the Central Committee voted in favor of holding primaries in eight months.
The first stage of the campaign was registering new members. Levy and Katzav relied on their existing supporters to sign up friends, relatives, and neighbors. Netanyahu’s campaign set up dozens of blue booths in town centers emblazoned with Bibi’s face and the slogan “Netanyahu—Choosing a Winning Leadership.” In the pre-Internet era, much of Israeli political life still took place out on the street. But it was the first time anyone had actually registered new party members on the street. Registering thousands of new members weekly created Netanyahu’s camp out of nothing. Campaign volunteers had an incentive to sign up hundreds of members, making them overnight leaders in their local party branches. From the start, the Netanyahu campaign had something that his rivals had not felt necessary: a computerized operation with all their supporters in a database. They also received details about existing members from party headquarters. Only Netanyahu’s campaign was computer-savvy enough to make use of the new digital technologies, and all of these contacts were subjected to phone calls and campaign mail. Bibi’s expensive and well-organized campaign signaled to the party that he was the one to modernize Likud and fix its finances.
By the end of 1992, Likud membership had grown over 60 percent to reach 216,000, or 4 percent of Israel’s population. Likud officials estimated that over 70,000 new members had been registered by Netanyahu’s campaign, while Levy succeeded in bringing in around half this number and Katzav only a few thousand. Benny Begin didn’t even try to sign on new members. Once again, he was running on his name alone.
Most Likud MKs refused to openly support Netanyahu. The “princes” preferred Begin, who was one of them; they believed they would have control over him. Only three MKs joined Netanyahu’s campaign—Tzachi Hanegbi and Limor Livnat, young Likudniks who had been first elected to the Knesset with Bibi in 1988, and one old-timer, Yehoshua Matza.
By the last months of the campaign, Netanyahu was the obvious frontrunner. He was running two races simultaneously: a straightforward political contest, with Levy, for control of the party, and an ideological struggle with Begin for Likud’s soul. On the surface, the two Benjamins had risen from the same source. Both were sons of lifelong Revisionists, steeped in an uncompromising version of Zionism, and both opposed any retreat from the whole of the land of Israel. But both were also their fathers’ sons. Begin’s Revisionism, like his father’s, was the parochial variety—a warmer, more Israeli ideology. Netanyahu, like his father, saw Revisionist Zionism as part of a wider Western tradition that was in tune with the conservative thinking of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Benny and Bibi could cooperate on many issues, but there was a difference between them that went to the core.
One morning during the campaign, they were both interviewed on the radio. Bibi was asked what he had for breakfast. A yoghurt, he answered. Begin then said, “That’s exactly what the primaries are doing to the Likud. Yoghurtization. The primaries have made Likud superficial. I’m against this Americanization.”3 Netanyahu wasn’t about to apologize for running an American-style campaign. He led convoys of dozens of vehicles with “Bibi” signs to towns with large numbers of Likud members. The local newspapers carried entire pages with the photographs.
Netanyahu’s primary campaign brought another element of American politics to Israel: the political sex scandal.
ISRAELI POLITICIANS ARE no more straitlaced than their counterparts in other countries. In such a small country, politicians’ sexual escapades rarely remain secret for long, but Israeli media traditionally does not report on these matters. It’s not out of prudishness or reticence: Israeli reporters are notoriously intrusive and combative. But the unwritten understanding is that “everyone cheats” and there are far more serious matters on which politicians should be judged.
One evening in January 1993, while Netanyahu was on his way to a campaign event, Sara, at home, answered the phone. An anonymous caller informed her that Bibi was having an affair. There was a videotape of him having sex, and if he didn’t pull out of the race, it would be released.
A hysterical Sara called Bibi, who immediately returned home. When Sara finally succeeded through tears to tell him what she had heard, he didn’t try to deny it. For three years he had been having an off-and-on affair with Ruth Bar, a married marketing consultant who had worked on Likud campaigns as a polling expert. Sara demanded that he leave. Netanyahu packed a few suits and left for his place of penance, his parents’ home.
Over the next days, Bibi had two worries: how to keep his third marriage together and keep his campaign on the road. He ordered his campaign manager, Lieberman, to find out who the anonymous caller had been, and whether his political rivals had secretly filmed him. The conspiracy-minded Lieberman stoked Bibi’s suspicions with the suggestion that perhaps party members close to Levy were involved.
Had Netanyahu been thinking clearly, he would have realized that his only problem was with his wife. As long as the relations are consensual, a sex tape is worthless in Israeli politics. There was no question of it being shown on television or reported in the newspapers. There was no Internet then on which it could go viral. It could, of course, be distributed to party members, but it would never have reached all of them, and besides, there was no reason for Likudniks to turn against Netanyahu just because he had sex with a woman whom few of them knew. No one had any proof that such a tape even existed. But Netanyahu wasn’t thinking straight. He lodged a complaint with the police and then decided to preempt any blackmail by going public.
For once the immaculate performer wasn’t composed on television. In a rumpled and angry interview he claimed that “senior people in the Likud are trying to blackmail me over a love affair I had. I had a connection with a woman that ended. We know who is behind this attempt, one of the senior people in Likud, who is surrounded by a group of criminals. Who has used methods of espionage, wiretapping and burglary, who is not worthy of being in the leadership and [whose] place is in prison.”4
An Israeli politician speaking about his sex life was unprecedented. Menachem Begin was once asked by reporters about a secret meeting with Bashir Gemayel and answered, “You don’t ask a gentleman where he spent the night.” What made it worse was the explosive allegation against “one of the senior people in Likud.” No one had any doubt who he was referring to. A furious Levy publicly demanded that Bibi say exactly whom he meant. The media, for the first time invited by a senior politician into his bedroom, were having a field day, dubbing the case “Bibigate” and “the hot tape.” They speculated on the identity of his lover, but Bar’s name came out only months later, when her husband sued for divorce.
The police investigation was eventually discontinued when no evidence of the existence of a sex tape was discovered. In going public, Netanyahu’s intention had been to divert attention from his affair onto the senior Likud member who had carried out “a crime unprecedented in the history of democracy.” Now he was left with egg on his face. He would forever be portrayed as not being able to handle the pressure. It was hard to see how he could remain in the same party with Levy.
Meanwhile, he worked to mend things at home. Sara was mortified by the television broadcast but allowed Bibi back the next day to see Yair and collect some clothes. They remained inside for hours as he beseeched her to reconcile. She demanded a divorce, but toward evening agreed to step outside and have their picture taken by one of the photographers who had been waiting outside since the previous night. Despite her anger, Sara was prepared to remain in the marriage, on her terms.
The lawyers met. Sara was represented by Yaakov Neeman, one of the best-connected attorneys in Israel, who would go on to serve as a senior minister in Netanyahu’s governments. Netanyahu’s attorneys were the feared litigator Dan Avi Yitzhak and Bibi’s cousin David Shimron. Eventually Bibi and Sara reconciled. Neeman denied for years that there was a written agreement on the terms in his office safe, describing the rumors as “an urban legend.”5 The facts remain that from the last weeks of the primary campaign to this day, Sara has accompanied Bibi on nearly all his major public engagements, and especially his foreign trips, with the exception of military- and security-related events. She has had full access to his schedule and has vetted the appointments of members of his staff. What’s more, the self-centered Netanyahu, who rarely acknowledges those around him, not only has borne Sara’s constant presence with complete grace, indulging her every whim, but has seemed truly devoted to her, even when her demands for constant affirmation of her central role at his side have caused considerable political damage.
One place the “hot-tape” scandal didn’t cause Netanyahu major damage was among Likud members.
IN ITS FINAL weeks, the campaign descended into acrimonious mud-slinging. In a televised debate, Levy called Netanyahu “Napoleon” and a “slippery eel,” and diagnosed Likud as being in need of “antibibiotics.” But Likud members thought otherwise.
On March 24, 1993, 52 percent of the party members voted for Netanyahu. Levy received 29 percent, and Begin only 16 percent. Whatever they thought of him personally, Likud’s rank and file believed that Bibi could rebuild the party’s fortunes and quickly return it to power. As dozens of young supporters chanted “Bibi King of Israel,” he began his victory speech kissing Sara and thanking her for standing by him. It would be the first of many speeches in which he would name-check his wife.
The son of Benzion Netanyahu, who forty-five years earlier had been ostracized by the Revisionist leadership, was now leader of the movement.