Month: January 2023

Bibi

It is not every day that a world leader has a chance to take a break and tell his own story in his own words before picking up the mantle of the Prime Minister’s office for yet a third stint in December 2002. Benjamin Netanyahu’s autobiography traces in essence not just his life, but the life of the independent Jewish state, which faces existential threats from Iran, intent on achieving atomic warfare, and from Hamas and Fatah, local terrorists dedicated to death and destruction. Unique among Israeli leaders, Bibi was born after the Jewish state declared independence from the colonial aspirations of Great Britain and he lived many of his formative years in the United States, ultimately attending MIT to become an economist. One of three brothers, he dedicates the book to his elder brother, Yoni, who famously led the charge at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, the sole soldier who lost his life in freeing the hostages from the terrorists. Yoni was Bibi’s “North Star,” his guiding light “through life’s labyrinthe paths.” Yoni and Bibi as well as the third brother all served in the elite Special Forces, which fought an unending war against Arab terrorism while the world shrugged its collective shoulders.

Bibi spends a few chapters detailing his childhood. What really will interest most readers is his military career and then, years later, his political career. Chapter Four takes the reader with Bibi as he returns to Israel from the States in June 1967 as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan pledge to annihilate the Jewish state and graveyards for mass burials are being dug. Although in retrospect the significant victory, liberating the eastern portion of Jerusalem and much of the central portion of Israel from Jordanian occupation appears to have been a foregone conclusion, at the time, the worst was feared and a second Holocaust appeared to be at hand.

After serving five years in the military, including the Special Forces, Bibi finally enrolled at MIT where he formed his ideas about the importance of technological change and competitive advantage, ideas he put into action years later in reforming the Israeli economy from one primarily government-owned to a private enterprise capitalism system which took off as the cyber-economy gained ascendance.

It was also during this period that Bibi realized that merely winning on the battlefield was not sufficient because, if your adversaries succeed in portraying your cause as unjust, they will gradually erode your position. It became a full time job to speak out and combat the slanders and propaganda coming out of the Arab world.

Entebbe, a formative event in Bibi’s life, also merits its own full chapter. Bibi notes that the 1970’s marked the beginning of a wave of terrorism that swept the Western world and that the terrorists cast aside all civilized norms, making noncombatants fair game, including massacres of schoolchildren and olympic athletes. Bibi notes that the terrorists assaulted the basic foundations o the laws of war by obliterating the distinctions between combatants and noncombatants and that, by habituating people to the idea that their supposedly just causes justified mass murder, the terrorists neutered man’s sense of sin. Moreover, their choice of means revealed what their true aims were. “Those who trample human rights into dust by deliberately blowing up buses full of children or crushing a baby’s skull do not create democracies.”

Bibi first became prime minister at age 46, twenty years after Entebbe, in 1996. He details dealing with President Clinton and Madeline Albright and their fantasy that the sham peace deal of the Oslo accords would bring peace. Neither Clinton nor Albright were willing to recognize that the PLO considered Oslo but one step to annihilation of Israel. The goal of the Oslo Accords under the PLO was to reduce Israel to indefensible boundaries and then invade by terror cells and armaments until the Jewish people were driven into the sea, the same genocidal fantasy that Leftists scream for on college campuses today.

In 2009, Bibi became prime minister for the second time, but as he details he now had a far more troublesome administration to deal with than even Bill Clinton’s administration. Obama had a myopic vision that equated Zionism with Western colonialism, ignoring the fact that only one people ever had a historical claim to the land of Israel, a claim going back thousands of years, and that it was Arab colonialism which had conquered the land of Israel, not the other way around. Obama made normalizing relations with Iran his top priority even as Iran raced headlong to produce nuclear bombs and continued to threaten to wipe Israel off the map. Obama, while not hostile to individual Jews, was hostile to the idea of a Jewish state and minimized any concern whatsoever for Israel’s security. True to his experience as a Chicago organizer, Obama viewed Iran merely as a local bully who he would cut a deal with and thereby pacify the neighborhood. The problem, though, with this short-sighted vision was that Iran didn’t want to pacify the Middle East. It wanted to conquer it. Several chapters are devoted to the difficulties in dealing with the hostility of the Obama administration, culminating in the administration’s final backstabbing vote at the United Nations.

While the international world was difficult during these years, Bibi details how his economic reforms helped the hi-tech economy to boom and international relations with a host of countries blossomed. This truly bore fruit with the Abraham Accords, a set of peace treaties with six Muslim nations.

Amazingly, though, since the completion of the book, Bibi has been elected to the prime minister’s seat for yet a third time. The story is not over. There is more to come.