19

Good for the Jews

As Eitan Haber, Yitzhak Rabin’s chief of staff, read the government statement on the prime minister’s assassination, people in the crowd outside Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv were already shouting “Bibi the murderer!”

The slain prime minister’s body still warm, the public had yet to learn the assassin’s identity, but Netanyahu was already being cast as the principal villain. Ostracized by the establishment, he was first informed that Rabin had died in the hospital by the US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk. The only official communication he received that night was from the Shin Bet informing him that his security was being beefed up.

After hours huddling with his advisers, Netanyahu came out to give a short statement. “The people of Israel gave up on political murder 2000 years ago,” he said. “We don’t replace the government by rule of gun.” Netanyahu was visibly shaken. He had dismissed warnings of an actual assassination attempt. He was well aware that the media would accuse him, but was convinced that he had done nothing wrong. Privately, he blamed Rabin for not agreeing to meet in those last months and join in a call against violence. “It’s the responsibility of the prime minister to bring the nation together, not split it,” he complained.¹

On the eve of the “Yes to Peace. No to Violence” rally in Tel Aviv, he had for the first time called upon the right wing not to cause a disruption. It didn’t make much of a difference. Counterdemonstrators arrived. Netanyahu had no influence over the far right, certainly not over the assassin, Yigal Amir, a law student and a supporter of the Hebron murderer Baruch Goldstein. When Amir’s name came out shortly after the murder, Netanyahu dispatched Avigdor Lieberman to the Likud offices to ensure that he was not a party member.

Netanyahu wasn’t surprised by the polls a few days later showing a gap of 30 percent between him and Shimon Peres. He knew the bullets that had killed Rabin had also blown away his prospects of winning the election. As far as the Israeli establishment was concerned, Bibi sat in the dock alongside Amir—and with them, the religious and settler communities.

The Likud faction gathered the next day in the Knesset. Netanyahu warned that “no one should dare blame Likud for the tragedy. It’s a false accusation. The real incitement began ten minutes after Rabin’s murder.” He wasn’t prepared to shoulder any of the blame. But some of his Likud colleagues were already convinced that the party would be better off without him. Benny Begin and Dan Meridor, who privately blamed Netanyahu for getting too close to the far right, prevailed upon him to announce Likud’s support for Peres’s appointment as prime minister. Agreeing, Netanyahu said to the media, “We won’t let an assassin’s bullet decide who is the prime minister of Israel.” One of his Likud rivals muttered quietly, “The Knesset’s mourning session for Rabin is the wake of Netanyahu’s political career.”²

PERES DONNED RABIN’S mantle. The rivalry between them had never gone away. Rabin had feared that Peres was planning to run against him again in 1996 for the Labor leadership. “Shimon will haunt me to my last day!” he said shortly before his death.³ Peres was soon to discover that Rabin had kept him in the dark over negotiations with Syria. He swore to continue Rabin’s legacy, but to go about it in a different fashion.

Rabin had refused to meet with Netanyahu, dismissed his religious opponents, and called the settlers protesting him “propellers”—implying that they just made wind and had no influence or effect. Peres was much more conciliatory. As he formed his new government, he sought to bring the right-wing National Religious Party, or NRP (Miflaga Datit Leumit, or Mafdal), into the fold. Until 1977, NRP had been Labor’s perpetual coalition partner. Peres sent his closest aide, Yossi Beilin, to renew the “historic Mapai-NRP alliance.” The NRP leaders, shocked by the murder, were willing to join, even though they continued to oppose the Oslo process. But Labor’s existing partner, the left-wing Meretz party, kiboshed any coalition with “those who had nurtured the murderer.”⁴ This was just the start of the political damage Meretz would cause Peres in the next months.

Despite all that had happened, Peres still retained warm feelings toward Bibi, whom he had first befriended after Yoni’s death eighteen years earlier. The rancor between Netanyahu and Rabin hadn’t changed that. In his speech in the Knesset recommending Peres as prime minister, Netanyahu referred to him as “Shimon my friend,” adding that “Yitzhak Rabin’s death commands us all to remember peace begins at home.”⁵

Ten days after the murder, Peres received Netanyahu at the prime minister’s office. In the interest of national reconciliation, meeting the leader of the opposition was the responsible thing to do. Peres’s Labor and Meretz colleagues were angry at him for doing so—in their view, Bibi was to be shunned as the assassin’s accomplice. Peres refused to shun him, however, and instead began the process of his rival’s rehabilitation.

Others wouldn’t forgive Netanyahu. Rabin’s widow, Leah, set the tone, refusing to shake Netanyahu’s hand at the mourning session in the Knesset and again at the state funeral on Mount Herzl, attended by leaders from around the world, including President Bill Clinton and former presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush. “[Netanyahu] didn’t say a word when Yitzhak was being called ‘murderer’ and ‘traitor,’ and I will not forgive him as long as I live,” she said.⁶ As the Rabin family sat shiva, the seven days of mourning, in their Tel Aviv home, Yasser Arafat arrived to console them. Netanyahu was advised not to come.

President Clinton agreed to meet Netanyahu after the funeral before leaving Jerusalem. Netanyahu stressed that it was Likud that had made peace with Egypt and gone to the Madrid Conference. Clinton wasn’t impressed.

THE POST-ASSASSINATION WEEKS were a bitter time in Israel, verging on hysterical. The media rehashed the events of the previous months again and again, establishing the narrative of “the incitement that led to Rabin’s murder.” Although there was no proof he had influenced the murderer, Netanyahu was portrayed as the chief inciter.

Amir had been arrested at the scene. Two accomplices who had helped him plan his actions and prepared the murder weapon were arrested as well. But the police and Shin Bet, despite questioning extreme rabbis and far-right activists, failed to find anyone else who had been in on the plot. A national commission investigated the security failings that had allowed Amir to get close to Rabin’s car and shoot him three times in the back, but it didn’t have a wider mandate to probe the political atmosphere and incitement before the assassination. Peres refused entreaties from the left wing to use the murder as an opportunity for a crackdown on the settlers.

The roots of Netanyahu’s deep-seated hatred of the Israeli media, his certainty that no matter what, the “left-wingers” dominating journalism would always blame him and were out to drag him down, can be found in those days. Bibi complained that blaming him for inciting Rabin’s murder was “Orwellian” and that he was being silenced.

For Likud old-timers, being blamed for the assassination was a replay of the murder of the Zionist socialist leader Haim Arlozorov on a Tel Aviv beach sixty-two years earlier, when the Yishuv establishment had accused the Revisionists of the murder. The event had marked the beginning of Benzion Netanyahu’s political career and the end of that of his father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, perhaps even hastening his premature death. But for Bibi, the fallout from Rabin’s death was not just a collective accusation of his entire political movement, it was personal. None of his Likud colleagues, not even Ariel Sharon, who had been much more vitriolic toward Rabin, were ostracized in the same way. It was ultimate proof that he was still an outsider.

Further proof that he was being treated unfairly by the Israeli press came when his old friend Ted Koppel arrived a week after the murder to record a special edition of ABC’s Nightline. Koppel gave Netanyahu equal airtime with Peres. In an interview with Leah Rabin, he asked what no Israeli reporter had—Why had she greeted Arafat warmly, but refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand? At a town-hall debate he hosted in Jerusalem, right-wing politicians were given space to criticize the Oslo process, and their supporters were well in evidence in the audience. The left-wingers were shocked at their opponents being treated as a legitimate side to the debate so soon after the assassination. It was the first place the right had been allowed to accuse the government of using national bereavement to squelch public discourse. Facing Koppel, Netanyahu felt comfortable enough to accuse it of “McCarthyism at its purest.” Leah Rabin complained afterward that “this is not the time yet for such debates and definitely not on our TV screens.”⁷

There were those in Likud who felt that Netanyahu could never come back. In the days after the assassination, Galya Albin, a Likud supporter and businesswoman (who had been rumored in the past to have been in a relationship with Bibi), announced a campaign to replace him with the moderate “prince” Meridor. However, Meridor lacked a wide base of supporters, and the veteran Revisionists were rallying around their leader, who in their view was being “scapegoated by the left.” Another powerful party chief who threw his support behind Netanyahu was Sharon, who detested Meridor.

Meridor never had the stomach for a fight. He would have accepted the leadership only if it was presented to him on a silver platter. He was forced to publicly foreswear any challenge.

Netanyahu’s leadership was never seriously under threat, but the talk of a challenge reenergized him. Days after the murder, he was back in election mode. A date had yet to be announced, but he was already putting together his campaign team. He asked another rival, Benny Begin, to serve as campaign chairman. Begin, who would almost certainly have supported a challenge to Netanyahu, sensed that he was being used to rehabilitate Netanyahu’s image and turned down the offer.

WITH HIS NEW government sworn in, Peres had to make a fateful decision. Riding high in the polls, he was told by nearly all his political advisers and ministers to take advantage of the seemingly insurmountable lead and hold elections in two months. It is almost impossible to see how Netanyahu could have closed the gap. But Peres hated the idea of winning under Rabin’s shadow. He believed that in a year he would reach historic peace agreements with Syria and the Palestinians. Then, at the end of 1996, he would win the election in his own right.

For weeks, Peres dithered. Pressure within Labor to call early elections remained intense. It was Netanyahu’s nightmare scenario. But one very influential voice was still calling upon Peres to wait: President Clinton convinced him that peace with Syria was within his grasp and urged him to hold off on the election. Clinton, who was well briefed on the Israeli political scene, must take part of the blame for Peres’s fatal miscalculation.

One of the unheeded Labor ministers was Ehud Barak. Netanyahu’s commander from his Matkal days had steadily risen to the post of IDF chief of staff. A legendary general who had been compared to Rabin, soon after his discharge he had been appointed by Rabin as interior minister. Barak, who never suffered from false humility, suggested that Peres appoint him defense minister in Rabin’s place. It would have been a wise political move for Peres. The sturdy Barak would shield Peres from the inevitable criticism he would receive on security affairs while he continued to focus on diplomacy. But Peres wanted to serve as prime minister and defense minister simultaneously, just as Rabin and his mentor David Ben-Gurion had. Barak was instead promoted to foreign minister.

Peres’s ambition led him to take on the burden of the Defense Ministry and push forward in two complex areas, taking on the responsibilities of serving as prime minister of a country that was undergoing deep national trauma, and maintaining leadership of a party preparing for elections. Ultimately he failed at both.

The first few weeks were promising. Israel set about implementing Oslo II, pulling out of the Palestinian cities of Tulkarm, Kalkilya, Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem by the end of December. The shock of Rabin’s murder held, and the settlers, for once, remained silent. A historic pullback took place with barely a murmur. Within weeks, Israel no longer directly ruled over a majority of the Palestinians. Arafat’s security forces took control of the cities, and Ramallah became the new Palestinian capital. High-level talks commenced between Israel and Syria at the Wye River Plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland under American auspices. For a brief moment, it seemed like Peres’s plans were coming together.

Netanyahu had one advantage over Peres—he could focus solely on the upcoming election. He was still lagging in the polls by more than twenty points, but more intensive polling revealed that the underlying fundamentals hadn’t changed. Half the Israeli public still opposed the Oslo process, and a majority feared there were more terrorist attacks in store for Israel. It seemed that following his vilification by the media, a “shy Likudnik” tendency had taken hold, with many potential Netanyahu voters ashamed of admitting to the pollsters that they still supported him. Bibi believed that, given time, the shock would wear off, and he could beat Peres.

It would take a much more nuanced message to win back enough voters. For the first time, Netanyahu began tacking to the center. In interviews, he promised to uphold the Oslo Agreements, should he be elected. If necessary, he said, he would even meet with Arafat. When the interviewers, off the record, asked him if he really believed he could overcome the odds and win, he answered, “I’ve never lost in my life.”

ON JANUARY 5, 1995, “The Engineer,” Yahya Ayyash, the Hamas commander who had built the explosive devices and masterminded the Palestinian suicide attacks since 1992, answered a phone call from his father. Ayyash was hiding in the basement of a friend’s house in Gaza City. The friend’s uncle had dealings with Israeli security, and the Shin Bet had smuggled through him a mobile phone on which they could eavesdrop on Ayyash’s calls. That morning, after confirming that it was “The Engineer” on the line, a signal was transmitted that detonated a small explosive charge in the phone, blowing Ayyash’s head apart.

The operation had been put in motion months earlier by Rabin, who approved adding Ayyash to the list of terror operatives marked down for elimination. Upon taking over, Peres had greenlighted the operation. As always in these cases, the Israeli government refused to explicitly take responsibility for the killing, but its leaders, including Peres, publicly expressed satisfaction at the demise of a man with the blood of so many Israelis on his hands. It was an ingenious assassination. It also turned out to be political suicide.

More encouraging news on the Palestinian front came on January 20, when Arafat was officially elected Palestinian president with an 88 percent majority. With most of Oslo II now implemented, the sides could start negotiating the next round of agreements leading to a permanent status. Peres, however, began to realize that it was highly unlikely the thorny issues of borders, Palestinian refugees, Jerusalem, and the future of the settlements could be resolved by the end of the year. Meanwhile, talks with the Syrians had once again bogged down on the myriad details of the exact location of the future border and security arrangements on the Golan Heights. Peres still held out for at least a public meeting with President Hafez al-Assad. He dreamed of sealing the election with his own Begin-Sadat moment. But Assad would never meet an Israeli leader.

Suddenly, there was a compelling case for early elections. On February 11, Peres finally announced that Israel would be going to the polls on May 29. He still led in the polls by around twenty points, but Bibi was ready. He had been planning his campaign for months.

Only two weeks after announcing elections, things began going drastically downhill for Peres.

Nearly two months had passed since Ayyash’s death. During that time, there was reason to hope that Hamas’s expertise in launching devastating suicide bombings had been significantly eroded, and that Arafat’s men were finally taking concrete steps to prevent Hamas from reasserting itself. On March 25, the illusions were shattered. A Hamas bomber blew himself up on the no. 18 bus in central Jerusalem, killing twenty-six. It was the first of four bombings, including a second identical one against the same Jerusalem bus route in the space of eight days, in which a total of fifty-nine were murdered. Hamas carried out the attacks in retribution for Ayyash’s death and to prove that his students were equally proficient in bomb-making.

In Jerusalem, the security forces posted armed soldiers at every bus stop. It wasn’t just the attacks’ sudden ferociousness, but their locations as well, that had security on high alert. On the main artery of Jerusalem’s transportation network and then in the heart of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, a bomber smuggled in from Gaza detonated himself outside the crowded Dizengoff Center, a shopping mall. It was the day before Purim and the scenes were etched on Israelis’ minds. Parents and children at the mall to buy Purim costumes were searching for each other in the debris.

This time, Bibi didn’t rush out to the scene of the bombing and issue orders to Likudniks not to join protests. Instead, it was an ashen-faced Peres on the scene. He viewed the carnage while hundreds gathered around, shouting insults against the government. It was as if Rabin’s assassination had never taken place. The immunity that Peres had gained in the intervening months suddenly evaporated. Netanyahu adopted a new moderate tone. “Fight them Shimon! We will support you,” he called from the Knesset podium. There was no need for him to criticize the government; it was happening on the streets without his involvement. Following the Dizengoff bombing, as the cabinet conferred in the nearby Defense Ministry, crowds closed on the compound, screaming for Peres to resign.

Had Ayyash’s killing opened the gates of hell, as Hamas claimed? Some in Peres’s entourage believed the assassination had been a mistake. Arafat’s men had at the time been discussing a discreet ceasefire with Hamas. Peres insisted this was not the case, and that Hamas was acting on orders from its sponsors in Iran to disrupt the peace process. Few seriously questioned the wisdom of Israel’s long-standing policy to take out the terror masterminds, who just kept on regenerating in younger and more destructive versions. Either way, with less than two months to election day, the campaign that had begun as Peres’s inevitable procession to victory had taken a violent turn. His lead in the polls in the aftermath of the attacks halved to under 10 percent and continued shrinking.

Israel was supposed to have changed irrevocably after Rabin’s death. It hadn’t. It was still split between those who believed that only peace with the Arabs would guarantee long-term security and those who were convinced that security could only be achieved through eternal vigilance and deterrence. Netanyahu, no longer “dancing on the blood” at the bomb sites, was much better positioned than Peres to fight such an election. This was the campaign he had been preparing for, on his terms.

IN THE FIRST month after Rabin’s murder, both candidates flew to the United States. Peres, in Washington, met with President Clinton, who received him like a long-lost brother, and presented his grand vision for Middle East peace to a joint session of Congress. Netanyahu’s visit had a much lower profile. He arrived in New York with Sara on December 27 and spent only twelve hours there. He was in town to hire a campaign director.

Placing his political fate in the hands of someone who didn’t speak Hebrew and had never fought an election in Israel would have been unthinkable for any other Israeli politician, but not for Netanyahu. Bibi needed someone whom he could trust to rise above party politics, and, more crucially, someone he respected enough that he would allow himself to be overruled by him. No one in Israeli politics fit that bill. But Ronald Lauder had just the man in New York.

Arthur Finkelstein had spent a quarter of a century working on Republican campaigns, including those of Presidents Nixon and Reagan, before he met Netanyahu. He had mentored two generations of Republican campaigners, but had remained in the shadows for his entire career. It was in Israel where he became a household name.

A Finkelstein campaign consisted of two key stages. First came intensive polling to identify the electorate’s hidden fears and hopes as well as his client’s and opponent’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Based on the findings, the second stage was a relentless series of short attack ads targeting the opponent’s weak spots. Finkelstein would hit upon a single word, conjuring up voters’ most visceral emotions. He said his proudest achievement in decades of running campaigns for conservative candidates was turning the word “liberal” into a pejorative.

He was no magician. Finkelstein had had his fair share of defeats in the United States, and he would go on to lose in Israel as well. Lauder had first met him in 1989 when Finkelstein had run his campaign to win the Republican nomination for New York City mayor. Although Lauder had lost that race, he knew that Finkelstein’s strategy had scored an impressive number of victories for no-hoper candidates taking on entrenched incumbents. Finkelstein had enjoyed one of his signature wins in 1994, when he had guided the campaign of George Pataki, a little-known state senator, to successfully unseat three-term New York governor Mario Cuomo, who had long been considered a potential heavyweight contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Impressed, Bibi enthusiastically accepted Lauder’s recommendation. He also expected Lauder to help foot Finkelstein’s $1,000-an-hour bill. The guru came not only with a hefty price tag but with a busy schedule, as it was an election year in the United States as well, and he was running dozens of campaigns back home. He would make only short visits to Israel, spending three or four days there at a time, and leave one of his assistants onsite in his absence. All polling data would have to be translated to English, and meetings with Netanyahu’s campaign team would be held, in English, at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, where Finkelstein would stay under an alias.

Finkelstein was worth it. His first round of polls confirmed Netanyahu’s earlier belief. Peres’s lead was “soft,” and the polls cited in the media failed to take into account the large proportion of “undecideds” and “shy Likudniks.” With these constituencies in play, the election would be a close-run affair, Finkelstein predicted. The team began crafting Likud’s messages accordingly.

Labor also had foreign advisers. Doug Schoen, Clinton’s favorite pollster, had been sent to Israel in 1995 to help Rabin prepare for elections, and he continued after Rabin’s death, advising Peres’s team. He was not a government official, but he was a useful back channel for Clinton, who was able to remain abreast of the scene while maintaining the barely credible fiction that the administration didn’t take sides in internal Israeli politics. Schoen’s research pointed to conclusions similar to Finkelstein’s, but his warnings remained unheeded by Labor’s campaign chiefs. Peres had doled out the key campaign positions to his senior ministers, and the headquarters was riven by infighting as they competed for influence and squared off against each other in the primaries for Labor’s Knesset list. They ignored Schoen’s advice, regarding him as an outsider who failed to understand Israeli politics. Jacques Séguéla, the French public relations guru who had masterminded François Mitterrand’s presidential campaigns, and who had also been hired, by an admirer of Peres, to work on the campaign, received similar treatment.

Likud’s campaign team was more focused than Labor’s. Led by former ad executive and Knesset member Limor Livnat, along with Netanyahu’s old press officer from the United Nations, Eyal Arad, it included a much higher proportion of PR professionals, some of whom were left-wingers attracted by the challenge and the money. Bibi ruled that Finkelstein, not the politicians, would have the last word.

Under Finkelstein’s guidance, the team zeroed in on Jerusalem as Peres’s weak point. An overwhelming majority of Israelis, including those supporting Oslo, were against any concessions to the Palestinians in Israel’s contested capital. The fact that Likud had zero evidence of the government negotiating with the Palestinians over Jerusalem was immaterial. “Peres will split Jerusalem” was a devastating slogan.

Finkelstein drilled the team until they understood that they had to push “Fear” and “Peace.” Likud’s second slogan, “Netanyahu—Making a secure peace,” surprised Israelis. Even Netanyahu’s most fanatical supporters hardly associated him with peace. But Finkelstein insisted they would. The negative slogan would be “No security. No peace. No reason to vote Peres.” Jerusalem’s mayor, Ehud Olmert, was drafted in to hold a press conference warning of Peres’s designs.

Peres strenuously denied that Jerusalem had ever been on the negotiating table. But he was exposed and he knew it. The two academics, Ron Pundak and Yair Hirshfeld, who had pioneered the Oslo process, along with Peres’s protégé Yossi Beilin, had discussed Jerusalem’s future with Palestinian representatives. These had not been official negotiations sanctioned by Peres—they were more like academic exercises and probing—but Peres knew that if any detail of these talks should leak, it would vindicate the Likud campaign.

CRAFTING MESSAGES FOR swing voters was only a small part of Netanyahu’s campaign. He began 1996 as an isolated candidate, facing not only a rampant Peres but also two other candidates running for prime minister who threatened to attract right-wing voters: former Likudnik David Levy and the leader of Tzomet, Rafael Eitan. Drafting new stars to his Likud was a key element in proving leadership.

Yitzhak Mordechai, a popular Mizrahi general, would also play a role in the campaign. Mordechai, the only officer to have commanded all three of the IDF’s regional commands, was attracting suitors from left and right. He was at the end of his military career, having been passed over for promotion to deputy chief of staff. He lacked deep political convictions, however, and since the early 1990s had been discussing his future with both Labor and Likud representatives.

He preferred Labor, as they were in power, but Peres refused to guarantee him a minister’s position. Peres wanted Mordechai to run in the primaries first, promising that, should he win a high place on the Knesset list, he would become a minister. This wasn’t enough for the ambitious Mordechai. Within hours of being turned down by Labor, he was already hosting Netanyahu at his home. It had been less than two months since Rabin’s assassination, and Bibi was anxious to achieve something. On the spot he promised Mordechai, whom he barely knew, that he would be defense minister, the country’s second most powerful post, should he win the election.

Mordechai announced that he was joining Likud (Bibi’s promise was an open secret). He was a valuable addition to the party, giving Likud more security credentials and filling the spot of a senior Mizrahi vacated by Levy.

Strengthened, Netanyahu set about eliminating his right-wing competitors. Rafael Eitan was the easier target. A crusty old general who had been chief of staff during the First Lebanon War, Eitan insisted that he was running for prime minister, despite knowing that Tzomet had peaked with eight seats in the 1992 election. He was easily bought off with a promise of second place on the Likud list, a ministry in the next cabinet, and seven spots for his party members in the top forty-two. It meant Likudniks would lose out on seats in the next Knesset, but it was a worthwhile sacrifice for Bibi, who was anxious to get his rivals out of his way to clear a path to the prime minister’s office. It would also serve as a model for the deal with Levy.

The estranged former foreign minister was a much more difficult prospect, however. His new party, Gesher, had been launched with much fanfare six months earlier. Its members were politicians and activists from the mainly Mizrahi working-class neighborhoods and development towns. They wanted Gesher to emphasize social issues instead of taking a nationalist focus like Likud. But Levy, despite his background as an immigrant construction worker from Morocco, had been in national politics for nearly two decades, and he was unprepared to lead the type of movement they yearned for. He also lacked the fundraising skills necessary for building a new party, and Gesher was paralyzed by lack of funds.

There had been leaks in the media that senior Likud and Gesher members were in talks to engineer a reconciliation, but Levy denied it, saying, “I didn’t emigrate to Israel and raise children and grandchildren here so Bibi could send them to war.” He added, “The thought of him as prime minister should keep every Israeli citizen from sleeping.”⁸ The most damaging of these leaks was that Levy had sought a promise that should Netanyahu win, he would be reappointed as foreign minister. His idealistic followers were shocked that Levy was not demanding the Finance Ministry, where he could influence domestic social policies.

Levy was also reading the polls, and he came to the realization that he would receive only a few points as candidate for prime minister, and Gesher would win no more than a handful of seats. Fearing marginalization, he accepted a similar deal to Eitan’s, who agreed to cede second place and move a spot down the list. Netanyahu guaranteed Levy the Foreign Ministry and agreed to sign an apology drafted by him.

Just like that, the sea of bad blood between Bibi and Levy had been crossed, at least temporarily. On March 12, the Likud Central Committee approved the Likud-Gesher agreement. Thousands of members cheered as Levy and Eitan joined Netanyahu on the stage. All three victoriously held their hands above their heads. Netanyahu stood between the general and Israel’s most prominent Mizrahi politician, who both now supported him as the right wing’s sole candidate.

Netanyahu had given up 30 percent of Likud’s viable Knesset seats to Gesher and Tzomet in return for a clear run. By the end of March, as Likud held its first-ever primaries for Knesset candidates, the list was finalized. Peres’s lead in the polls was down to 5 percent.

WHILE NETANYAHU WAS shoring up his right-wing base, Peres was receiving support from around the globe. Following the suicide bombings, Clinton agreed to head to the region for a March 13 summit of world and Middle East leaders in support of the peace process—and, more critically, of Peres.

Dubbed the “Summit of Peacemakers,” it was an impressive event organized in just ten days. Leaders and foreign ministers of twenty-seven nations, including thirteen of the “moderate” Arab countries, met on the Red Sea at Sharm el-Sheikh, with Clinton and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak co-hosting. Syria and Lebanon had been invited as well but boycotted the “pro-Israel” summit. There was no political substance to the summit—no concrete proposals for fighting terrorism or achieving peace, just eloquent statements. It was the international community’s elite trying to boost Peres’s electoral fortunes, and no one was fooled.

When Clinton left the summit, he took Peres along with him on Air Force One back to Israel. He then made an emotional pilgrimage to Rabin’s grave and told a thousand students in Tel Aviv to “overcome fear, don’t give into it, don’t give up hope, don’t let the terrorists win.” A perfunctory fifteen minutes were allocated for a protocol meeting with Netanyahu.

“I hope my visit helped,” whispered Clinton to Peres’s entourage before leaving Ben Gurion Airport. But the polls hadn’t budged, and worse was in store.

Since early 1996, the situation in south Lebanon had rapidly deteriorated. Hezbollah had intensified both rocket attacks on Israeli towns and clashes with IDF troops in the “Security Zone.” More Katyushas fell on the Galilee as Air Force One was heading back. As American and French diplomats tried to broker a ceasefire, support for the government eroded. Peres and his ministers were shouted at angrily when they visited the northern town of Kiryat Shmona, whereas Netanyahu and Mordechai were greeted as heroes. Peres was convinced that the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and Hamas’s paymaster, was directing the bombardments to scupper the peace process. The Israeli military intelligence chief, General Moshe Yaalon, put it bluntly: “Iran is trying to influence the elections in Israel and is behind the wave of attacks.”

On April 11, Peres ordered Operation Grapes of Wrath. For sixteen days, Israeli artillery and warplanes bombarded Hezbollah targets and Lebanese infrastructure while the Israeli Navy imposed a blockade on Lebanon’s ports. But Hezbollah continued firing rockets. On April 18, a team of Israeli commandos operating inside Lebanon came under mortar fire. The commando lieutenant, Naftali Bennett, called in covering fire. Some of the shells fell near a temporary UN shelter at Qana where Lebanese civilians had gathered: 102 were killed. The Qana massacre added to the international pressure, leading to the operation’s premature end and an unsatisfactory ceasefire agreement.

Operation Grapes of Wrath failed to convince Israeli voters that Peres was taking care of their security. It also damaged his standing with Israeli-Arab voters who were already angry with the closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the suicide attacks.

THE NEW SYSTEM of direct elections meant that the prime ministerial candidates had to spend time before the elections wooing voters of other parties. Netanyahu had the advantage there, as he had been busy courting the ultra-Orthodox and immigrant communities for over a year, starting long before Rabin’s assassination and Peres’s candidacy.

Bibi felt he had to somehow atone for his “hot-tape” sin in front of the rabbis, and gave long monologues about how he had rehabilitated his marriage. He needn’t have bothered. The Haredi (Orthodox) leaders considered all the secular politicians fornicators anyway. Their decision about whom to endorse was not influenced by the candidates’ sex lives. But Netanyahu persevered, telling the rabbis how what happened had “caused me much harm, and my wife and children.” As usual with Bibi, he was the victim.

Netanyahu’s biggest fear was that the Haredi voters would cast only one ballot, making do with voting for their sectoral parties and abstaining from the vote for prime minister. In his meetings with the rabbis, he implored them to either specifically endorse him or at the very least hint that he was their preference. Peres, belatedly, also began making the rounds among the rabbis.

In his four decades in politics, Peres had built warm relations with many of the leading rabbis. On April 2, the eve of Passover, he visited Rabbi Ovadya Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, who blessed him, praying that “he should have the privilege of forming a brave, strong and true government.” Netanyahu was also granted an audience, but his blessing was only to “succeed in all he does.” But Shas followers, like most other Haredi voters, were on the right politically, and they especially hated Peres’s coalition partners, the members of the ultra-secular Meretz party. The political leader of Shas, Arye Deri, was at pains to emphasize that Rabbi Yosef would not be endorsing a candidate.

In his meetings with Haredi groups, Netanyahu spoke emotionally of how his son Yair was learning his prayers at a religious kindergarten. Both candidates promised the Haredim government funds and political power if they should win the election. The rabbis respected Peres, and in many cases shared his dovish politics. But there was a limit to how far they could go against their hawkish followers, and Peres received very few rabbinical endorsements. Netanyahu, who in his personal life was just as secular as Peres, if not more so, had the advantage of Likud’s image as a more traditionally Jewish party. Labor was historically associated with its godless socialist founders, and, of course, partnered with Meretz. Ultimately, most of the rabbis let it be known that they favored Netanyahu.

Another significant group of voters ostensibly up for grabs was the recent immigrants from the Soviet Union. Peres had appointed liaisons to the Russian community and made sure they had a representative on Labor’s list, but he relied mainly on what he believed was a shared background. Born in Vishnyeva in today’s Belarus, Peres thought the immigrants from Russia and other former Soviet republics were similar to his generation of pioneers arriving in Palestine seven decades earlier from Eastern Europe, and therefore natural Labor voters. It was a dangerous assumption.

Netanyahu had in his Moldovan-born right-hand man, Avigdor Lieberman, a much more influential ambassador to the Russian community. Netanyahu was also close, since his days at the United Nations, with Natan Sharansky, the Jewish Russian human rights activist and famed Gulag prisoner. Netanyahu had campaigned for Sharansky’s release, and the two shared a belief that the only way to make peace in the Middle East was for the Arabs to first embrace democracy.

In March 1996, Sharansky founded Yisrael B’Aliyah (Israel on the Rise), an immigrants’ party. Both Peres and Netanyahu appeared at its conference, appealing for support. The prime minister listed all that his government had done for the immigrants, but he seemed condescending. Netanyahu received a much warmer reception. His tough-talking commitments not to make further concessions to the Palestinians were much more in tune with their thinking. Four years earlier, many of them had voted Labor, out of appreciation for “Mr. Security,” Rabin. Peres failed to inspire them.

THE LAST MONTH of the campaign was the television stage. Israeli law forbids the purchase of airtime for political purposes. Instead, parties are allocated fixed broadcasting slots according to their electoral size. Until Finkelstein came along, political ads sought to educate viewers on the opposing worldviews of the parties. The ads were so ponderous that some parties interspersed their messages with political stand-up comedy routines.

The anti-Peres ads that Finkelstein crafted for Netanyahu’s campaign were short, simple, and monochrome—for example, dark glass shattering, giving way to a blurry photograph of Peres and Arafat together. Peres was portrayed as an aging and deluded dreamer, easily tricked by the devilish Arafat. Netanyahu, by contrast, was shown in soft colors, with a mock-up prime minister’s office in the background to lend him gravitas and a dove of peace flying above. Bibi’s soundbites were moderate and upbeat, extolling “our wonderful country,” a phrase that has stuck to him to this day.

Labor’s ads were more low-key, presenting Peres as Israel’s elder statesman. Arafat did not appear in the footage, and both Rabin and Netanyahu were relegated to only occasional cameos. Labor’s campaigners were afraid to make unwelcome comparisons between the slain leader and Peres and didn’t want to present Bibi as his worthy challenger.

As a result of the ad campaigns, Netanyahu was winning the battle of the airwaves even before the debate. Labor’s campaign chiefs were under no illusions their man could beat Likud’s accomplished performer onscreen. As the two parties’ representatives met to discuss terms, Likud had one objective—making sure a debate, any debate, took place. They knew Bibi would win and accepted Labor’s demands. They would hold just one thirty-minute debate, to be recorded at Labor’s studios and moderated by the Peres-supporting broadcaster and Haaretz columnist Dan Margalit.

The debate was set for Sunday, May 26, three days before the election. Netanyahu spent the weekend, a total of twenty hours, rehearsing in a mock studio. Meridor played Peres, and he attacked mercilessly. At one point he asked Bibi, “Why should the public believe you? Even your colleagues Benny Begin and Dan Meridor don’t believe you.”⁹ But Netanyahu took it all in stride, preparing answers for every potential attack line. Peres, who hated the whole idea of a debate, would agree to spend only a couple of hours preparing, and he never did a full rehearsal. His strategy was to not treat Netanyahu as an equal, and he stuck to it throughout, looking at the moderator rather than the camera or his opponent.

The result was horrendous. Peres looked tired, frozen, and robotic. Complaining about Likud’s accusations over Jerusalem, he sounded petulant. Netanyahu, who had arrived at the studio a bag of nerves, came alive as soon as the cameras started rolling, and he was animated and eloquent. Deflecting Margalit’s questions, he took the battle to Peres. “Many watching us now get up in the morning and ask themselves when the next terror attack will happen,” he said accusingly. The soundbites were well crafted and well aimed. “My ambition isn’t to tour the palaces of Europe, like Mr. Peres,” he said, mocking his opponent.

Margalit asked him about the “hot tape.” Netanyahu calmly replied, “It was a mistake that hurt my wife,” and immediately parried. “The bigger mistake is what Mr. Peres has done over the last four years and that has hurt all of Israel.”

The final stage of the debate was a single direct question from each opponent. “What happened to the New Middle East you promised us?” asked Netanyahu. Peres, in turn, refused to ask Netanyahu a question, instead demanding he apologize for Likud’s accusations. Even the most partisan viewer had to admit that Bibi had won by a knockout.

THROUGHOUT THE CAMPAIGN, Peres’s staunchest supporters were foreigners without a vote. In April he flew to the Gulf states of Oman and Qatar, in the hope of demonstrating to Israelis that the fruits of peace and regional cooperation were just around the corner. Later that month he was in Washington again. Clinton showered him with compliments, arms deals, and joint statements scheduled for prime-time news in Israel. A US president had never made such overt efforts to influence a foreign election. When, on the eve of the election, Clinton promised Israelis continued American support if they chose peace, there was no doubt whom he was endorsing.

But Clinton was up against another American with more influence in Israel—even though he was dead. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Chabad leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, had passed away on June 12, 1994, disappointing his followers by not appearing as the messiah. But they were still resolved to fulfill his wishes and support Netanyahu, who they believed would keep the Land of Israel whole. Ten days before the election, Sharon organized a secret meeting with the main Chabad rabbis. He told them that Netanyahu still needed a last push to overcome Peres. Netanyahu, arriving toward the end of the meeting, explained that he could not abrogate the Oslo Agreements, but as Arafat himself was not in full compliance, he would make sure they went nowhere.

The Chabad rabbis were on board. The movement officially would not take part in politics, but its thousands of members were drafted into an unofficial last-minute campaign. An Australian Chabad donor, the diamond millionaire Joseph Gutnick, promised to foot the bill, which would come to millions. Entire printing presses were hired to prepare banners, leaflets, and stickers of all sizes with the slogan “Netanyahu is good for the Jews,” which some criticized for being racist, since it ignored the fact that only about 75 percent of Israeli citizens are Jewish. Seventy-two hours before the polls opened, the Chabadniks spread out across Israel, plastering them on every available space and at intervals of a few hundred meters on highways. It was a stunning blanket surprise campaign. When Netanyahu was asked about it, he feigned innocence: “I’ll be good for everyone. Arabs and Jews as well,” he responded.

The rabbis were falling into line. Two days before the election, a ninety-four-year-old Kabbalist sage, Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, received Netanyahu, saying in his blessing over him that he would become prime minister. Netanyahu kept a serious face, masking his disdain for the sage’s mystical form of Judaism. Shas campaigners had been handing out amulets signed by Kaduri to their voters, and it was a roundabout way of getting that party’s endorsement as well. In Haredi neighborhoods, banners went up with the slogan, “With God’s Help, Netanyahu.”

And yet, despite having run a dismal campaign, on the morning of May 29, as Israelis went to vote, the polls were predicting a narrow 51–49 victory for Peres. Just more than half the country seemed to still believe in Peres’s vision for peace and wanted him to continue where Rabin had tragically been cut off. Labor’s strategists were convinced that they held the lead. Labor had run a non-campaign designed not to anger wavering voters. The party had decided not to bring up the accusations that Netanyahu had incited against Rabin, assuming that the trauma of his assassination was still fresh in voters’ minds.

Instead, the campaign had focused on how good the economy was doing—on the fact that Israelis were buying new cars and computers and taking vacations abroad. But the majority, who had yet to share in the fruits of the new prosperity, only felt left behind. Labor organized gatherings of cultural figures and show-business people, and set up events with luminaries such as the renowned writer Amos Oz, under a banner reading, “The Nation for Peres.” But this approach only highlighted the narrative of the elites versus the outsiders.

Peres’s campaign believed that when the moment of truth came, most voters would realize there was no comparison between their candidate, who over forty years had built Israel’s military, established its nuclear program, and brought the economy back from the brink in the mid-1980s, and a man whose only accomplishment was being a star TV pugilist. Peres had served in every key ministerial post as well as prime minister. Netanyahu had never even been in the cabinet or taken responsibility for life-and-death decisions. Israelis had always placed their fate in the hands of wise old men (and one wise woman). Surely they weren’t about to change tack and elect a charlatan, no matter how many tactical mistakes Labor made in its campaign.

BOTH CANDIDATES BEGAN election day upbeat, voting early and touring regional headquarters, meeting enthusiastic supporters. As the day drew on, Peres received updates from Labor’s main office, which suggested that voting in the Arab towns, where he was expecting to win by a landslide, was sluggish. He rushed to central headquarters in Tel Aviv and spent the last hours frantically calling local party bosses to get out the vote.

Likud’s field operation, run jointly by Lieberman and Mordechai, was much more efficient. By evening, Netanyahu grew withdrawn. The campaign had succeeded beyond expectations, and Finkelstein, who had left Israel on Sunday morning, had predicted a wafer-thin victory on the basis of his polling. But on the brink, he was suddenly gripped by doubt. Benzion had said that no matter what, the left-wing establishment wouldn’t let Bibi win. A group of Netanyahu’s American supporters had arrived in Israel for election night, taking suites in a Tel Aviv hotel. Bibi joined them for a few minutes, but then sat alone with Sara in another room to await the exit polls at 10:00 p.m.

Both television channels had the same result—Peres in the lead with 50.7 percent to Netanyahu’s 49.3 percent. Statistically it was too close to call. That didn’t stop hundreds of Labor members gathered in the Tel Aviv Cinerama from bursting into cheers. Across town in the Convention Center, Likudniks were desolate. They had felt throughout the day that victory was within their grasp. The cameras zeroed in on the tearful face of a young blonde activist, the then anonymous Tzipi Livni.

Lieberman knocked on Bibi’s door. “The exit polls are wrong. My reports from the field put us in the lead.”¹⁰ But Netanyahu believed the numbers on television. After midnight, he left the hotel for the Convention Center to face his supporters, this time without Sara by his side. “A very large part of the nation supports our way. I love you. I’m proud of you. I salute you,” he said to them.¹¹ It wasn’t quite a concession speech, but Netanyahu was already launching his battle for survival against the Likud rivals who were preparing to challenge his leadership.

The Convention Center began to empty as Likudniks drifted home and television crews started to pack up. The Cinerama was still packed with Labor members singing peace songs. Peres, at home in his Tel Aviv apartment, was already receiving congratulatory phone calls from around the world. The White House called asking if it could issue a formal congratulation. Peres counseled waiting for actual results and went to bed, after scheduling a meeting in the morning with his advisers to discuss the next stage of negotiations with the Palestinians.

Peres was asleep when at 2:45 a.m. the television announced that the trend had reversed. The results coming in had made them update their prediction, putting Netanyahu in the lead. Hundreds of Likudniks streamed back, chanting, “There is a God!” and “Peres go home!” The trend held, and four hours later the analysts called it for Bibi. He had won with 50.5 percent of the vote, beating Peres by 29,457 votes.

Peres realized belatedly that he had taken the country he had served all his life for granted. He had won handily in places like secular middle-class Tel Aviv, but had lost overall by 11 percent among Jewish voters, and had succumbed to a majority comprising a coalition of outsiders. He said after the election that “the Jews had beaten the Israelis.”

Bill Clinton took two lessons from the election that he had tried so hard to help Peres win. One, according to Dick Morris, Clinton’s political consultant, was that “the candidate who used American-style polling and media won.” The other, Morris wrote, quoting Clinton, was that “you can’t push people faster than they are ready to go. If they’re not ready for peace, there’s not much you can do about it.”¹²

Clinton was being uncharitable. Israelis wanted peace, but they were afraid of making concessions to their enemies, just like any other nation. It had been Peres’s election to lose. He had failed to convince enough Israelis that his vision for peace could be achieved. And it was the victory of one man who had read the undercurrents of the electorate. Benjamin Netanyahu had stoked Israelis’ deepest fears, and believing in his inevitability, had transformed himself, in less than seven months, from pariah to prime minister.