Bibi, look, I'm under a lot of pressure here. And they pressure me to put an end to this as soon as possible.” The conversation, openly, could be from yesterday, but it is from three years ago. Joe Biden, president elected a day earlier, talks to Beniamin Netanyahu to ease his attack on Hamas in Gaza after the surprise attack by the Palestinians just a month ago
Both have known each other for 40 years and in that time Biden is the Democrat who has thrown the most cables at the Israeli premier, always uncomfortable for his bosses Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama. On the other end of the phone, Bibi replies that he “is squeezed by the millions of Israelis hiding in shelters.” On the phone, two brown beasts, two survivors in every sense, patient, strategists, with a hook.
And perhaps the Israeli leader is perhaps the most vilified politician in the West in the last 30 years (with the permission of Thatcher and Trump). In any case, these days he takes the cake. Vladimir Putin? who is that? But Netanyahu doesn't care: they have always attacked him from all sides, including those of his party. This is, at least, how it is presented in the autobiography published by Nagrela Editores, Bibi, my story. It is his version of the events, of his life.
In it he shows the keys to how to be inflexible and unbreakable, that of a soldier first and foremost guided by the spirit of his brother Yoni, who died in combat in 1976; He displays his liberal-conservative convictions inoculated in the US and argues his fight against Hamas and Iran, and above all and above all, his mission for the survival of Israel.
Those are his last words, on page 641: “The Book of Samuel says: 'The eternity of Israel will not perish.' Throughout our journey this has always been the case. The people of Israel live!” The autobiography appears at the height of the umpteenth confrontation between Israel and Palestine, a brutal one. Three years after the call, Biden's message has not changed. Bibi's, neither. But now hell is even worse.
Netanyahu writes an autobiography, which at times is hagiography, generous with his friends (and with political adversaries, from the Likud, such as Ariel Sharon; from the Labor Party, Shimon Peres and Rabin, and from the Palestinian Hanan Ashraui...). He is implacable with his enemies: Arafat and the ayatollah regime. He does it bare-chested and, at the same time, with the armor with which he has managed to be prime minister six times and that helps him isolate himself from the gory photos that we see these days. Astute, Netanyahu has written a manual on how to cling to power or avoid it when he was burning.
The Israeli premier has spent his life dodging bullets (real ones and political ones) and launching missiles no matter what the enemy's name was. He received one (for real) at the release of the Belgian company Sabena's plane in 1972 at Tel Aviv airport. Bibi led a unit and after an accurate operation they freed all the kidnapped people except one woman who died. The commander of that operation was called Ehud Barak, future prime minister. The highest military authority, Moshe Dayan, and the Minister of Transportation, Shimon Peres.
In the seventies “Israel's existence was constantly questioned,” recalls the premier now, who has always faced the “Western vision” on settlements, expulsions and harassment of Palestinians in their homes or the wall: “In 95 % is a fence,” he says.
Bibi was not going to be a politician; His father, a great scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and creator of a Hebrew encyclopedia, seemed to show him another path, but in 1976, another air hijacking in Uganda changed his roadmap. The rescue was a success, but four hostages and a soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, Bibi's older brother and idol, died in the shootout. Entebbe changed everything for the young man who as a child was known as the akshan of the family, the stubborn one. And there it continues.
His academic time in the United States was essential, but politics awaited him, in the early eighties as an advisor at the Israeli embassy in Washington, then as the country's spokesperson at the UN. He had previously trained in handling propaganda, the hasbara.
It was inevitable that he would end up in the Knesset, and would rise in the Likud in a country where Labor had been hegemonic in the seventies, a power that he would break over time, and not always continuously. But his political setbacks have strengthened him.
Netanyahu always defends that the more you give to the Palestinians, the more they ask for. And in that it is granite. For him there are, there were and there will be groups like Hamas, Hizbullah and before that Arafat's PLO that want the destruction of Israel. “The basis of peace is for our neighbors to realize that Israel is here to stay,” he insists.
The years of military training and real combat shaped the politician: “Don't assume that the enemy is standing still, you're going to have to raise your head to see what he's doing,” was one of his brother Yoni's pieces of advice. Another lesson that he applied in the first days of this crisis was: “You have to get out of the traps as soon as possible.”
The premier has been on a tightrope... and whether he has fallen or due to circumstances (there is no longer talk of his alleged corruption), they have saved him to return him to the political arena. Bibi has no less than seven lives, some of them earned outside Parliament, when he saw the technological advances at the prestigious MIT (he completed a four-year degree in two years and rejected Yale on several occasions). “One day this will be helpful to his country,” they told him. Other times luck came to him through the misfortune of others (the assassination of the Labor Party Rabin in 1995) and opened the doors to power.
Since 1988, when he was appointed deputy minister, until today, Netanyahu has lived on a roller coaster, but always with three very fixed ideas in mind: modernize the country, defend what he sees as the limits of Israel and, it is being seen These days more than ever, to the enemy or water. Over the years he has learned to measure the power of the White House and to be flexible while being inflexible.
Clinton admitted that she torpedoed her first two election campaigns. In the first one he couldn't beat Bibi, in the second one, yes. His phone calls, Netanyahu reveals, were always tense. He also happened to Obama, who warned him not to lay “not one more brick” for settlements. He has always regretted that his boss Sharon “withdrew troops from Gaza in 2005.”
Mistakes? As Sinatra, whom he knew, sings, he recognizes “a few”, but what defines him most are not the decisions but, as Frank Blue Eyes also sings, he has done it his own way. And he continues doing it, mercilessly, with the bulletproof vest, just like in the plane hijacking in 1972.
