Bibi, look, I'm under a lot of pressure here. And they are pressuring me to put an end to this as soon as possible". The conversation, bluntly, could have been yesterday, but it was three years ago. Joe Biden, president-elect just the day before, talks to Benjamin Netanyahu to ease the attack on Hamas in Gaza. Both have known each other for 40 years and in that time Biden is the Democrat who has sent the most cables to the Israeli prime minister, always uncomfortable for his bosses Bill Clinton and then Obama. On the other side of the phone, Bibi replies that he is "pressured by the millions of Israelis hiding in shelters". On the phone, two political beasts, two survivors in every sense, patient, strategists, with a hook.
And that the Israeli leader is perhaps the most vilified politician in the West in the last 30 years (with Thatcher and Trump's permission). In any case, these days it takes the palm. Vladimir who? But it does nothing to Netanyahu: he has always been attacked from all sides. This is, at least, how it is presented in the autobiography published by Nagrela Editores, Bibi, mi historia. It shows the keys to being inflexible and unbreakable, that of a soldier first of all guided by the spirit of his brother Yoni, who died in combat in 1976; he deploys his liberal-conservative convictions instilled in the US; and argues the fight against Hamas and Iran, and above all and above all, its mission for the survival of Israel.
These are his last words, on page 641: "The book of Samuel says: 'The eternity of Israel shall not die.' 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. Neither does Bibi's. But now hell is written in capital letters.
Netanyahu writes an autobiography, at times a hagiography, generous with friends (and with political adversaries, from the Likud, such as Ariel Sharon; from the Labor Party, Shimon Peres and Rabin, and from the Palestinian Ashnan Ashrawi...). With the enemies it is implacable: Arafat and the regime of the Ayatollahs. He does it in the open and, at the same time, with the armor with which he has managed to become prime minister six times and which helps him isolate himself from the gory photos we see these days. Astute, the politician has written a manual on how to cling to power or avoid it when it boils.
The Israeli prime minister has spent his life dodging bullets (the real ones and the political ones) and launching missiles without caring what the enemy is called. He received one (really) in the liberation of the plane of the Belgian company Sabena in 1972 at the airport of Tel-Aviv. Bibi led a unit of the Sayeret Matkal and after a precise operation they freed all the abductees 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 Transport Shimon Peres. In the 1970s, "the existence of Israel was constantly questioned", recalls the prime minister, who has always faced the "Western vision" of settlements, expulsions and the siege of Palestinians in their homes or the wall: "95% is a fence", he says.
Bibi was not meant to be a politician, his father, a great scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and creator of a Hebrew encyclopedia, seemed to mark a different path for him, but in 1976, another hijacking in Uganda changed his route The rescue was a success, but the shooting killed four hostages and one soldier, Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, Bibi's older brother and idol. Entebbe changed everything for the young man who as a child was known as the akshan of the family, the entosodit. And it continues.
His academic time in the USA was essential, but politics awaited him, at the beginning of the eighties, as an adviser at the Israeli embassy in Washington, then as the country's spokesperson at the UN. He had previously trained to deal with anti-Semitic propaganda, the hasbara. It was inevitable that he would end up in the Knesset and that he would ascend to 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 tricks have also ended up strengthening him.
Netanyahu always argues that the more you give the Palestinians, the more they demand. And, in this it is granitic. For him there are, there were and there will be groups such as Hamas, Hizbullah and before 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 him: "Don't take for granted that the enemy is still, you have to raise your head to see what he's doing", was one of his brother's advices. Another of the lessons, which he applied in the first days of this crisis, was: "You need to get out of the traps as soon as possible". The prime minister has been on a tightrope... and whether he has fallen or because of the circumstances (now there is no mention of his alleged corruption) they have saved him to return him to the political arena. Bibi has no less than seven lives, some of which he won outside of parliament, when he saw the technological advances at the prestigious MIT (he did four in two years and rejected Yale twice). "One day this will help your country", they told him. Other times, luck came to him through someone else's misfortune (the assassination of Labor leader Rabin in 1995) and it opened the doors to power a year later.
From 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 Israel's borders and, it is being seen these days more than ever, the enemy has no 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 botched her first two election campaigns. In the first he couldn't with Bibi, in the second he did. Their calls, Netanyahu reveals, were always tense. It also happened to Obama, who warned him not to lay "one more brick" for settlements. He has always regretted that his boss Sharon "withdrew the troops from Gaza in 2005". Errors? As Sinatra sings, whom he met, he recognizes "a few", but what defines him most is not the decisions but, as Frank Ulls Blaus also sings, that he has done it in his own way. And he continues to do it, mercilessly, with a bulletproof vest, just like in the hijacking of the plane in 1972.
