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Metzudat Ze’ev—Ze’ev’s Fortress, meaning Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s—on King George Street in central Tel Aviv, the Brutalist-style office block housing Likud headquarters, has long been considered one of the city’s ugliest buildings. When Likud’s new leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, made his way in on the day after winning the primaries in March 1993, it was one of the most depressing. Likud, deep in debt following the previous year’s lost elections, wasn’t even sure exactly how deep.
There was no money to fix the two elevators. Paying the phone and electricity bills was a monthly struggle, and employees were instructed to pretend they weren’t there, in the hope of keeping debtors at bay. Upon his arrival, Netanyahu installed himself in Menachem Begin’s old office, which for the past decade had stood empty. He wouldn’t spend much time there, but the symbolism was clear. This was no longer Begin’s party. Then he appointed Avigdor Lieberman as the party’s new CEO.
Lieberman immediately embarked on a drastic program of cutbacks. Veteran employees were mercilessly sacked, and allocations to local branches, for years Likud’s main hubs, were slashed to near-zero. A team of accountants came in to work out what real-estate assets Likud owned, and party buildings around the country were sold. Netanyahu’s private attorneys, David Shimron and Yitzhak Molcho, negotiated loan extensions with the banks. Meanwhile, Bibi flew to New York, making the rounds of his millionaire friends. He was now leader of the opposition, a prime-minister-in-waiting, all the more reason to open their wallets.
Likud’s financial crisis was Netanyahu’s opportunity to refashion the party in his image. His Likud was no longer a grassroots-orientated ideological movement. It would be transformed into an election-campaigning machine, like the national committees of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States. It was to be Netanyahu’s platform for winning the direct election for prime minister.
In the Likud Central Committee he pushed through changes to Likud’s constitution, which were drafted by Shimron, giving the leader wide powers. He would appoint members to a new powerful executive that would rule on party matters. A toothless bureau, mainly a talking shop for discussing ideological issues, would also be elected. Ariel Sharon, who had been chairman of the now powerless Likud secretariat, opposed these changes in a Central Committee conference in May 1993, saying, “The leader can’t be the only one deciding in the party and all its institutes emptied of content.”1 Sharon was overwhelmingly voted down. He proposed an amendment whereby a future Likud government would not be committed to diplomatic agreements signed by Labor. Netanyahu opposed this on legal grounds. There was a limit to how far Likud could go in fighting Rabin’s government.
IN THE FIRST year of the new government, Likud focused mainly on its internal problems. Not that Rabin gave them much to protest in the first year of his term. With Shamir gone, the Bush administration authorized the $10 billion in loan guarantees, though settlement-building continued under Labor. By that point, the emigration from the former Soviet Union had ebbed somewhat, and the government used only two-thirds of the loan. The available cash allowed for investment in infrastructure and a boost to the private sector.
Five years in, the Intifada was on the wane. Instead of a popular uprising there were sporadic attacks against Israeli civilians and security personnel, many of them carried out by a new Islamist movement challenging the PLO—Hamas. In December 1992, following the abduction and murder of a police officer, Rabin ordered 415 Hamas activists deported to Lebanon. Despite strenuous objections from many in his government and in the Israeli legal establishment, who said that mass expulsion contravened international law, Rabin went ahead.
In July 1993, following clashes with Hezbollah on the Lebanese border, Rabin launched Operation Accountability, a weeklong bombardment of Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon. Some 300,000 Lebanese villagers were forced to flee and 118 were killed, mainly civilians.
During its first year, the Rabin government was hardly left-wing. Most of its trouble came from the ultrareligious camp. Labor’s two coalition partners were unlikely bedfellows—the left-wing and secular Meretz, and the Mizrahi, ultra-Orthodox Association of Sfardi Torah-Keepers, usually referred to by the acronym Shas. Without either party, Rabin would have lacked a majority (he hadn’t invited the Arab and communist parties to join his coalition). The leadership of Shas was under intense pressure within the religious community to leave the coalition. In an attempt to mollify the rabbis, Rabin in June 1993 replaced the education minister, Shulamit Aloni, Meretz founder and leader, a staunch feminist, and an atheist. It brought only a short respite.
Netanyahu was eager to take advantage of the coalition strife and start taking the fight to the government, but he first had to complete a personal project.
TEN YEARS AFTER starting his career as Israel’s media champion, Netanyahu summarized a decade of advocacy in his blueprint for Israel’s future. Weighing in at 467 pages, A Place Among the Nations, published in April 1993 in the United States, is an unwieldy tome. It was relatively well received by American critics at the time, though it failed to garner the attention that his book on terrorism had. Updated in later English and Hebrew editions, it isn’t easy reading, but twenty-five years later, it remains one of the most comprehensive, if extremely biased, examinations of Israel and the case for Zionism.
Netanyahu’s policies today remain essentially identical to those he held as a relative newcomer to politics. Few politicians have had such a long and intensive career without their views evolving. Over the years, Netanyahu has been forced to publicly jettison some positions and present a more pragmatic image. In his actions, he has remained resolutely doctrinaire.
A Place Among the Nations is three books in one—a highly selective history of the Zionist enterprise; a polemic against the enemies of Zionism and against weak-hearted Jews and Israelis who feel they have to apologize on its behalf; and a policy paper on the parameters for future Middle East peace (a later edition emphasizes this in the changed title—A Durable Peace).
Netanyahu’s arc of history goes back millennia, to the days of sovereign Judea when the Jews were a fighting nation. Even after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, they remained a majority in the land, under Roman and Byzantine occupation, until the first Muslim conquest in the seventh century. Taking a page out of his father’s writings, Bibi likens the struggle of the Jews for their land to the Reconquista of Spain.2 Benzion put the return of the Christian kings and the expulsion of Muslim Moors from the Iberian Peninsula at the center of Western history. The Christian return to Granada after 800 years prefigured the Jewish return to their ancient homeland 1,200 years after the Muslim conquest.
The modern Israeli-Arab conflict and the Palestinian issue in Netanyahu’s book are inseparable from the 1,500-year struggle for hegemony over Europe and the Middle East—which is why he describes the land as an inconsequential backwater of the Ottoman Empire that remained largely uninhabited until Jewish immigration was renewed in earnest in the late nineteenth century. Netanyahu adapts Israel Zangwill’s claim that it was a “nation without a land,” arguing that the Arabs living there at the time were mainly nomads or relatively recent arrivals. The major landowners lived elsewhere, in Beirut or Damascus, leaving their land barren, until the Jews returned. The land was then developed thanks to the Jews, and the development of the land also encouraged more Arabs to emigrate there.
Netanyahu quotes a wide range of contemporary sources to support his historical narrative and claims that by the end of World War I, there was growing support in the West for rebuilding the Jewish homeland. The turning point was the rise of pan-Arab nationalism in the 1920s and the Europeans’ sympathy toward the Arabs, alongside deep-seated anti-Semitism within the British Colonial Service.
From that point on, it would be the Arabists in the British and US diplomatic corps, Soviet communism, Nazi Germany, and the left-wing media who all in some degree collaborated with the genocidal urge of the Arab nations to destroy the Jewish presence. With the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, pan-Arabism began losing its potency, but the same dynamic reappeared with individual Arab dictators and radical Islam.
“The durability of the twin fanaticisms of Pan-Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism—their militarism, xenophobia, irredentism, and irreducible hatred of the existing order—is the true core of conflict in the Middle East,” Netanyahu wrote.3 Therefore the conflict is not about the Palestinians, borders, or refugees. It’s not even about Israel. It rises from an implacable Arab and Muslim hatred toward the West, and Israel as the West’s outpost in the Middle East. This being the case, real peace can only come when the Arabs recognize the Jewish state’s right to exist. And there’s little hope of that happening in our lifetimes:
We must assume that for our generation and perhaps the next, the task of peacemaking is with the Arab world as it is, unreformed and undemocratic. The prevalence of radicalism in the Middle East—and the danger that, in the absence of any democratic traditions, a non-radical regime can turn radical overnight—means that peace in the Middle East must have security arrangements built into it. I have already noted that for the foreseeable future the only kind of peace that will endure in the region between Arab and Arab and between Arab and Jew is the peace of deterrence.4
Netanyahu’s view of history is bleak. Writing immediately after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, he attacked the “end of history” theory, made fashionable then by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe was indeed proof that democracy could prevail, even among the Arabs, but there were no guarantees. International relations must still be based on military deterrence. There must be no question of Israel relinquishing control of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, vital buffer zones for a tiny state surrounded by enemies.
The Palestinians living there, whose existence Netanyahu begrudgingly acknowledged, should be offered, at most, limited autonomy. The millions of Palestinians were the responsibility of their Arab brothers, who had used them for too long as a cudgel against Israel and a fake cause to distract the world’s attention from their own human rights violations. It was in the Arab nations’ interest to make peace with Israel, to enjoy cooperation in science, medicine, and water management, Netanyahu wrote. The fact that they refused to do so had little to do with sympathy for the Palestinians’ plight; it stemmed from their genocidal hatred of the Jews.
Netanyahu’s other targets were Jews and Zionists who thought differently from him, especially Israelis who “believed that the Arabs loathed war as much as they themselves did and that, given a proper explication of Israel’s peaceful intentions, the Arabs would embrace and welcome us.” This “cloyingly sentimental approach” would only encourage further Arab demands and aggression, and while that view may gain Israel fleeting sympathy in the West, only standing firm for Israel’s true interests would bring genuine respect and a “durable peace.”5
A Place Among the Nations was the ultimate hasbara handbook. Many of the standard tropes of Israel’s defenders were first set out there and have been echoed in thousands of Facebook posts and tweets by people who have never even read it. At its core is the belief that Israel’s cause is unassailably just and that it is possible and imperative to convince all Westerners of that fact, with the exception of dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semites. Indeed, once the case for Israel has been properly presented, if you still disagree, you probably are an anti-Semite.
A quarter of a century after publication of the first edition, not only is A Place Among the Nations still the essence of Netanyahu’s policy, but it remains an inexhaustible source for his speeches. “When we’re working on a major speech, he’ll still bring out his book for inspiration,” said one long-serving aide. “He loves it and is convinced it still rings true.” Netanyahu continues to insist that the Palestinian issue is a distraction from the real issues of the Middle East, telling foreign visitors that it’s “a rabbit hole” that misinformed Westerners insist on going down.
The book’s long list of acknowledgments included, besides Sara and Iddo (interestingly, not Benzion), some interesting names. Over the years Netanyahu had various groups of admirers with whom he would meet to plan political moves. One group of rotating confidants, known as “Bibi’s submarine,” were mainly Israeli friends and allies who, like him, were outsiders to the political system. Together they plotted how to take over Likud and win elections. He always had a second group, consisting mainly of Israelis who had either been born in the United States or had spent long periods of their lives there. Though they were all fluent in Hebrew, he preferred speaking with them in English, a habit he kept up in the prime minister’s office of holding internal meetings in English. This group is his brain trust, and three prominent members are mentioned in the acknowledgments to his book.
The eldest of them was David Bar-Ilan, an Israeli concert pianist who had lived most of his adult life in the United States. Alongside his musical career, Bar-Ilan was a prolific writer of pro-Israel columns in the American press. He was introduced to Netanyahu in 1985, when Bibi needed someone to organize the Jonathan Institute conference in Washington. They remained close friends, and Bar-Ilan became a fixture of Bibi’s New York circle. Returning to Israel, in 1992 he became editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post. The venerable establishment newspaper, which had traditionally been aligned with Labor, had recently been bought by Hollinger, a media company owned by the right-wing Canadians Conrad Black and David Radler.
Under the new ownership, the paper veered rightward, leading to a walk-out of its best journalists led by managing editor David Landau. They refused to accept editorial interference. Netanyahu had a small part in this when, as deputy foreign minister, he had been angered by an interview with him and intervened through the owners to make changes. As editor, Bar-Ilan took the paper even further to the right, writing his own weekly column lambasting the left-wing Israeli media.
A second member of Bibi’s brain trust who was mentioned in the acknowledgments to his book was Dore Gold, a Connecticut-born academic who had written his PhD on Saudi Arabia’s support for terrorism. Gold was also Netanyahu’s unofficial diplomatic adviser.
The third was Yoram Hazony, who researched the sources for the book and helped produce the manuscript (transcribing what Netanyahu dictated). A year later Hazony became a founder of the Shalem Center, a right-wing think tank and later a private college sponsored by Netanyahu’s American donors, including Ronald Lauder. Shalem, they hoped, would become the vanguard of a new ideological movement in Israel.
Bar-Ilan, Gold, and Hazony were early members of the group that coalesced around Netanyahu from the early 1990s in a joint endeavor to replace the left-leaning elites of Israeli academia and media.
The first edition appeared before the Rabin government’s negotiations with the PLO became known. But already then Netanyahu accused Rabin’s government of dereliction of national duty, taking the Labor government to task for ordering Israel’s diplomats, upon entering office, to relinquish “aggressive public relations”; for “declaring a unilateral cease-fire in the media war”; and for “not responding to the provocations of the Arab spokesmen.”6
In a cruel irony, Netanyahu dealt at length in the book with the murderous nature of Arab regimes. He contrasted them with the Jews, who had learned their lesson from the period during the Second Temple, when “Jewish factions in besieged Jerusalem were literally knifing each other to death.” This period, he said, “gave rise to the emphasis now placed on Jewish unity and the taboo on political killings among Jews, which has resulted in the virtual absence of civil war among Jews for two thousand years. With remarkably few exceptions, Jews do not kill Jews over politics.”7
WITH HIS BOOK published, Likud under control, and its finances improving, Netanyahu was ready to take on the government. At the end of August 1993, Likud prepared to launch an “Elections Now!” billboard campaign across Israel. Just as the first signs were going up, the news broke. On August 27, Israelis learned that for the past seven months, secret negotiations had been held between Israeli representatives and senior PLO members under the auspices of the Norwegian government in secluded locations around Oslo.
The Israeli media had had no idea. The circle of secrecy around the Oslo talks didn’t even include the cabinet. Talks had been initiated in early 1993 by a deniable duo of academics, Yair Hirshfeld and Ron Pundak, meeting with Yasser Arafat’s representatives. They reported to Yossi Beilin, who had replaced Netanyahu as deputy foreign minister. Rabin initially was skeptical, but for once he had allowed Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to persuade him. By August, an agreement had been reached whereby the PLO would officially recognize Israel and commit to ending the violence. Israel, in turn, would recognize the PLO as representing the Palestinian people and allow Arafat to establish, in the first stage, a Palestinian Authority in Gaza as well as in one West Bank city, Jericho. Following that, negotiations would take place regarding further Israeli pullbacks in the West Bank.
The Israelis were stunned. Could the Jewish state be on the verge of a historic compromise with Palestinian nationalism? Was Arafat, the archenemy, suddenly a partner for peace, and the PLO, which had been discredited by its support for Saddam Hussein just three years earlier, now to be rehabilitated, and allowed to arrive openly to territory under Israeli control?
Netanyahu was as surprised as anyone. None of his contacts in Jerusalem or Washington had informed him that such a breathtaking reversal of Israeli policy was in the offing. He lost little time lambasting the Oslo Agreement. “Israel faces an unprecedented threat to its security. The government is allowing the PLO to carry out its plan to destroy Israel,” he declared in the Knesset. But the leader of the opposition was, for now, an irrelevant figure on the margins. The “Elections Now!” campaign (hastily canceled) and his new book, with its plans for a distant but “durable” peace, were totally overshadowed.
The world’s eyes were on Rabin on September 10 as he signed the letter recognizing the PLO. Three days later, the first Oslo Agreement was signed on the White House Lawn, a beaming President Bill Clinton urging a reluctant Rabin to awkwardly shake Arafat’s hand.
Netanyahu was slow out of the gate. In another Knesset speech, he likened the Rabin government to the British leadership that in 1938 had signed the Munich Agreement, ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany. “You are worse than Chamberlain,” he said. “He endangered another nation, but you are doing it to your own nation.” But raising the ghosts of Munich was a tired and stale argument; it had been used for decades by Likud leaders warning against dangerous peace plans. The real battle against Oslo was already taking place on the streets in violent protests in Jerusalem. The protesters weren’t Likudniks, but religious settlers who hadn’t forgiven Likud’s prime minister, Begin, for giving up Sinai to Egypt, or Shamir for going to the Madrid Conference. They didn’t have much trust in Netanyahu, either, as he was still an unknown quantity.
Sticking to his Munich narrative, Netanyahu wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Peace in Our Time?” He lambasted the agreement. “What will happen when terrorists attack Israelis in Jerusalem and return to nearby P.L.O. land? Or fire rockets from hills above Tel Aviv?” he wrote.8 It was easier to express his views in the American media than to present himself as the leader of Israel’s right wing. But that soon changed. At the start of the Oslo process, Bibi may have seemed like little more than a minor irritant, but he was soon to transform into its worst enemy. Oslo was to be the real start of Netanyahu’s leadership campaign.
THE FIRST MONTHS of the Oslo process were euphoric. On the way back from Washington, Rabin stopped over in Morocco for a first public meeting with King Hassan. A few weeks later, secret talks that would soon lead to a peace agreement began with Jordan. All of a sudden peace between Israel and the Arab world seemed tangible. For a short while, a majority of Israelis were willing to believe in Shimon Peres’s vision of “a new Middle East.” Some polls had support for the Oslo Agreements at over 60 percent. The members of Israel’s left wing felt they had finally won the historical argument. Veteran political scientist Zeev Sternhell wrote in Haaretz that Rabin’s decision was widely popular and that “the opposition facing him is crumbling, clueless and leaderless. The air has escaped from the swollen balloon called Benjamin Netanyahu even faster than his most severe critics predicted.”9
Oslo was the only game in town. Netanyahu went from being a frequent guest on the airwaves to someone whose press secretaries (who were constantly resigning) had to beg producers to even get his statements mentioned on the news. When he was booked, interviewers enjoyed mocking him. One television interview opened with the question, “Benjamin Netanyahu, are you a political failure?”10
It wasn’t just widespread public support, and even wider media support, for the Oslo process. The Labor government was also presiding over a period of unprecedented economic bloom. Inflation was down to its lowest levels in over two decades. Flush with funds from the American loan guarantees and the fruits of a privatization drive, the government invested in infrastructure building and the first Israeli venture capital funds that gave the tech sector the boost it needed to begin competing with the world. The uneven distribution of the fruits of this prosperity would ultimately have dire political results for Labor; but during the early Oslo period, as foreign investment in Israel spiraled and the prospect of the Middle East opening up for business beckoned, peace and prosperity seemed unstoppable, and Netanyahu was sidelined.
In an attempt to recapture the narrative, Netanyahu formulated his own “peace plan.” It was a very watered-down autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, allowing them limited self-rule in isolated cantons. It was inconceivable that any Palestinian leader would ever agree to such a plan, but Netanyahu didn’t publish it. He knew the far right and the settlers would reject even the tiniest concessions and was afraid to jeopardize his ties to them. With Likud still unsettled under his new leadership, Netanyahu had few soldiers out on the streets. The overwhelming majority of those who were protesting daily against Oslo were from the religious right. Bibi couldn’t afford to run afoul of them if he wanted to continue speaking at their rallies.
He did have one opportunity to prove himself to fellow Likudniks that year. In November 1993, local elections took place across Israel. Likud was still repaying its debts, but for Netanyahu this was a chance to show that his party was still electorally viable and that he could become an election winner.
The party machinery that Avigdor Lieberman had been building for the past seven months clicked into gear. Local Likud candidates were offered campaign and advertising services. Bibi once again crisscrossed the country, making speeches to support them. Labor’s efforts, meanwhile, were disjointed, as government ministers had less time to spend on the stump. On November 2, Netanyahu began to reap the results, with Likud holding onto nearly all its local councils and municipalities and winning dozens of races against Labor. Most significant were the Likud victories in Israel’s two largest cities.
In Jerusalem, the former health minister Ehud Olmert ended the twenty-eight-year rule of Labor’s mayor, Teddy Kollek. In Tel Aviv, the former police minister, Ronny Milo, fought off Labor’s candidate, a celebrated general. They had both shown how Likud, despite the unfavorable political climate, could still win elections. In Jerusalem, Olmert had struck a deal with the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, promising their representatives powerful positions in his city administration. They ordered their followers to vote for Olmert, ensuring his majority. In secular, left-leaning Tel Aviv, Milo departed from Likud national policy and indicated that he accepted the Oslo Agreements. Two and a half years later, Netanyahu would adopt both tactics when he promised diplomatic pragmatism and quietly made his own deals with the rabbis.
For Labor, losing Jerusalem, in particular, was a blow. But Rabin and his colleagues continued to see Netanyahu as a lightweight. They believed that as long as the peace process was on track, they had little to worry about.