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For the 2009 campaign Likud hired a Republican strategist from the United States, John McLaughlin. (Finkelstein had been hired by Netanyahu’s rival on the right, Lieberman.) McLaughlin advised Netanyahu to run a “winner’s campaign” and not act the underdog, as he had in past elections. This time Bibi needed no urging: he simply couldn’t conceive of an outcome in which the people wouldn’t want him back in office. But he couldn’t always trust the people. The strategy was for Netanyahu not to mention his rivals at all. He was to be presented to the Israeli public as the only competent and experienced candidate on offer.
The strategy worked for Netanyahu as long as Likud was leading Kadima—which was still associated in the public’s mind with Olmert’s corruption—by a wide margin in the polls. But the gap narrowed as Kadima’s campaign, presenting Livni as “Ms. Clean” and Netanyahu as just another failed corrupt ex-prime minister, began to hit home. Netanyahu authorized attack ads against Livni, accusing her of being a leftist endangering Israel’s security. These ads mainly served to draw more center-left voters into the Kadima tent and highlight Livni as a viable alternative.
Netanyahu worked hard, traveling to places across the country hit by his economic policies. He explained and apologized and promised that his next government would be more sensitive to the concerns of Likud’s traditional voters. In what was a huge personal sacrifice, he canceled the publication of a book he had spent two years writing. The Israeli Tiger was to have been his economic manifesto and the story of how he had wrought wonders as finance minister. But he realized it would be political suicide to trumpet those achievements—especially because, with the global economy in crisis, owing largely to lax controls on Western banks, deregulation of the financial system suddenly didn’t sound like such a great idea. The Israeli Tiger never saw the light of day.
ON FEBRUARY 10, 2009, the day of the elections, Netanyahu toured the Likud strongholds south of Tel Aviv, which in the last election had voted for Kadima.
“Everyone thinks I have already been elected prime minister,” he complained to a reporter. “And now they’re allowing themselves to be enticed by niche parties.”1 As far as he was concerned, all voters wanted him back as prime minister. But he was concerned that right-leaning voters were voting for other potential coalition partners, and that Likud would not be large enough.
In the last hours of voting, the data from exit polling was troubling. The reports were of right-wing voters wavering between Likud and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu and a strong showing for Kadima, especially in the Tel Aviv area. “We have to call our branches and start threatening them the left is rising,” said Gilad Erdan, a young MK who had been an aide in the prime minister’s office during Netanyahu’s first term, anxious to reestablish his loyalty. “Threats are what work. We’re paying the price now for not running a negative campaign against Kadima and Livni.”
Netanyahu spent most of the day visiting regional Likud headquarters, delivering pep talks to volunteers. As night fell, to the consternation of his security detail, he shifted to direct interaction with voters. In Ashdod he ordered the convoy to stop at a shopping mall and went inside, mingling among shoppers and popping into restaurants. “Did you vote already?” he asked each person he came up to, waving a Likud ballot paper. “Finish your soup and then go to the polling station,” he jocularly admonished one table.
As shoppers gathered to see the candidate, his entourage was squashed between the public and the extra police who had been called in to ensure security for the former—and perhaps future—prime minister. “From tomorrow we won’t have to suffer this,” sighed Ari Harow, who had replaced Bennett as chief of staff. “Either we’ll be in the prime minister’s ‘sterile zone’ or we won’t need security at all.”
A few hours later, as the results started to come in, it turned out that Netanyahu was right to have been worried.
LIKUD HAD MADE an incredible comeback from the catastrophic result three years earlier, when only one in ten voters had favored Netanyahu’s party. He had more than doubled their 2006 tally to twenty-seven seats. The right-wing-religious bloc of parties held a Knesset majority of sixty-five seats, virtually ensuring him a coalition.
But Livni could and would also claim victory. Kadima under her leadership had received more votes than Netanyahu’s Likud. It was the tiniest of margins—less than thirty thousand votes, which translated into just one more Knesset seat. Her success had come at the expense of the rest of the center-left camp. Kadima voters who had returned home to Likud had been replaced by Labor and Meretz voters, particularly women. Livni had emerged from the election still the leader of the Knesset’s largest party.
Both Netanyahu and Livni proclaimed victory. Netanyahu could claim, with some degree of justification, that a clear majority had voted for parties likely to support him as prime minister. But Livni had received more votes than him.
It was a classic electoral stalemate. Most of the Israeli media, except Sheldon Adelson’s Yisrael Hayom, were treating the results as a tie—further proof to Netanyahu that the old elites would do anything to prevent his return to office. “They are trying to steal the elections from the people,” he fumed to his aides.
President Shimon Peres once again was to play a pivotal role in Netanyahu’s rise to power. Israel’s president is required by law, after consulting with the Knesset parties, to call upon the party leader with the best chances of commanding the support of a majority to form the new government. This was likely to be Netanyahu, but in the past it had always been the leader of the largest party.
Netanyahu was frustrated with Lieberman and the Shas leader, Eli Yishai, for remaining noncommittal about whether they would recommend that Peres call upon Netanyahu. That was normal following an election for the smaller parties, because they sought to maximize their opportunities for extracting promises from prospective prime ministers. For Lieberman and Yishai to have acted in any other way would have been out of character—and bad tactics. But Netanyahu was impatient with anyone seeking to delay his new government’s swearing-in and convinced that behind his back, secret talks were in progress to form an alternative Livni coalition.
Lieberman played on Netanyahu’s fears. Yisrael Beiteinu had exceeded expectations by gaining fifteen seats, even more than Labor, making it the third-largest party in the new Knesset. “Everyone knows we now hold the key to the next government,” Lieberman said in his victory speech, without indicating whose door he would open with that key. Hours after the election ended, Lieberman flew off for a week’s vacation in Minsk. Netanyahu’s office tried for days, in vain, to locate him in the Belarusian capital, and when they finally succeeded in getting him on the line, Lieberman refused to make any promises.
When they finally met, Lieberman made it clear he expected one of the top three posts in the new government—Defense, Finance, or Foreign Affairs. Netanyahu acquiesced. Following Lieberman’s lead, the other right-wing and religious parties also announced they would be recommending Netanyahu to the president. He now had a potential majority of sixty-five Knesset members.
Meanwhile, Livni’s potential coalition was unraveling. Labor and Meretz, smarting at the way in which Kadima’s leader had enticed away their voters, refused to recommend her, telling Peres he should make his own choice. She may have been the leader of the largest party, but with only twenty-eight Knesset members, she couldn’t form a coalition.
TEN DAYS AFTER the elections, Netanyahu was summoned to the president’s residence. In private, before officially instructing him to form the new government, Peres implored Netanyahu, “for the good of the state,” to engage with Livni and form a national unity coalition with a wide base.
There were few Israeli politicians who irritated Netanyahu as much as Livni. He couldn’t forgive the disloyalty of the woman he had promoted from obscurity. He was deeply offended by anyone who could conceive of Livni as a credible alternative to his leadership. Netanyahu was especially affronted by Livni’s expectation that he would agree to splitting the premiership term with her. Any partnership with her was out of the question. But Netanyahu did want a wide and stable coalition, with at least one center-left partner. He didn’t want to be at the mercy of his far-right partners, as he had been in his first term.
Netanyahu was aware of his hardliner reputation outside Israel and was anxious to project a more moderate image—especially as he was soon to meet the new president, Barack Obama, in Washington. For two weeks, he went through the motions of holding coalition talks with Livni, who drove a tough bargain, insisting the new government commit to the two-state peace solution with the Palestinians. The prospective prime minister seemed unfazed, promising to form a national unity government: “With goodwill we can bridge over the differences,” he told her.2 But as the talks dragged on, and Netanyahu signed coalition agreements with the right-wing and religious parties, Livni got the message. She ended the sham negotiations. But she never was the moderate partner Netanyahu had been after.
After leading the Labor Party to the worst election result in its history, Ehud Barak told his party that “the voters’ verdict has sent us to opposition. I have informed Netanyahu that we will be a constructive and responsible opposition.”3 But he was already holding secret talks with his old soldier Bibi. The personal ties between the two men had survived the animosity of the 1999 elections. The history they shared transcended party divides, and they both despised Livni. They were natural allies. Netanyahu was happy for Barak to continue as defense minister in his new cabinet. He had promised the ex-IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon, who had joined Likud at one of its lowest points, that he would be defense minister once they returned to power. But Netanyahu had no problem shafting Yaalon, who had little time to build up his own support base within Likud.
Barak unleashed his political earthquake—he would be proposing a coalition agreement with Likud at the Labor convention. His party members were livid at what they justly saw as an abrupt change in party policy without any form of consultation. But Barak managed to push the coalition deal through the conference by a small majority of party delegates voting in favor.
Ehud Barak, the man who had ended Netanyahu’s first term, would prove to be the closest thing he ever had to a political soulmate. For the next four years, the two men would work together in harmony to a degree they had never enjoyed with their own party colleagues. These two deeply suspicious, ego-driven individuals found joint purpose, seeing in themselves Israel’s only “responsible grown-ups,” surrounded by despised, incompetent political hacks. Netanyahu now had his wide coalition and moderate partner.
Fifty days after the elections and 3,556 days, nearly ten years, after leaving the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu gave his second inaugural Speech. Toward the Palestinians he was surprisingly emollient, promising their leaders that “if you really want peace, we can reach it. The government I head will work to achieve peace. We don’t want to rule over the Palestinians and we’ll aspire to reach a permanent arrangement. The Palestinians will have all the authority to rule themselves except those that will threaten our state.” The tough talk was reserved instead for Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose “calls to destroy us are accepted by the world without firm condemnation, almost as routine. The Jewish people have learned their lesson not to dismiss megalomaniac dictators threatening to exterminate us. Unlike the Holocaust, when we had no salvation, today we are not without a shield. We have a state and we know how to defend it.”4
These would be the twin themes of Netanyahu’s second term. Promises to the Palestinians, if only they would prove serious about making peace, and warnings of a genocide planned by an Iranian leadership against which the Jews had no choice but to fight for their lives. Just before midnight on March 31, following the first vote of confidence in his new government, he was sworn in, with ninety-nine-year-old Benzion Netanyahu gazing sternly from the gallery.
The next morning, the members of the new government gathered at President Peres’s residence for the traditional group portrait. Only a hundred people were allowed to attend, and there was intense jockeying for invitations. Minutes before the ministers took their places, a black van stopped by the gates and a white mobility scooter was lifted out. A ruddy-faced elderly gentleman, his hair dyed bright red, trundled up the path, followed by his energetic wife. He maneuvered the scooter into the hall, parking in a front-row space that had been reserved in advance. With unabashed pride, he looked on as Netanyahu uneasily took his seat, his knees pointing outward. Sitting beside him, Peres seemed to shrink in resignation. This was the moment Sheldon Adelson had worked for and paid for. Bibi was back in power.