Early Life
In more than a half-century of conflict over the lands claimed by Israel and Palestine, only a handful of men have dominated international understandings of that issue. Benjamin Netanyahu continues to play a role of immense significance, not merely in the decisions made by his country, but also in the way other international leaders perceive the controversial stances adopted by the modern State of Israel.
Netanyahu was born in Jerusalem in 1949, but his history begins a year earlier. Raised as the middle child in a family of three boys, Benjamin was born the year after Zionist leaders announced the establishment of the State of Israel in the wake of a British evacuation of the area. Netanyahu’s parents, Ben-Zion (Benzion) and Cela (Tzilah) Netanyahu, were members of the New Zionist Organization (NZO), a group that believed the survival and well-being of Jewish people worldwide depended upon the Jewish community’s founding and leadership of its own political state.
In the wake of World War II, as details of the Nazi effort to annihilate the world’s Jewish populations came to light, Western powers were inclined to support the Zionists’ efforts. Among those who worked extensively to gain the United States’ support for a Jewish state was V. Jabotinsky, founder of the NZO and mentor to the Netanyahus.
Athletic and intellectually gifted like his two brothers, Benjamin was competitive and ambitious even as a child. He reportedly revered his older brother, Yoni. His mother, Cela, did most of the raising of the three boys while their father, a Zionist and scholarly historian, tended to seclude himself in his study with his work. The boys were nonetheless steeped in their father’s complex understanding of Jewish history and Jewish vulnerability which could only be overcome through a brutally realistic approach to Zionist politics.
The family maintained a close connection to the United States. Cela’s parents had immigrated to the area now called Israel in 1911 from their home in the United States, and the Netanyahu’s spent a year in the United States in 1957 and 1958 while Ben-Zion worked on his historical research.
In spite of his commitment to the new Jewish state, Ben-Zion Netanyahu moved his family to the United States in 1962, frustrated at his inability to secure a teaching position at Israel’s Hebrew University. A renowned scholar who had edited the “Encyclopedia Judaica” and the “Hebrew Encyclopedia,” Netanyahu became convinced that the university refused to hire him because of his political activism. Benjamin spent his adolescent years in the United States, attending high school in Philadelphia, before going on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for degrees in architecture and business administration.
During the Netanyahu family’s stay in the United States, they frequently returned to Israel, but their ties to the fledgling state suddenly grew more significant in June 1964 when Benjamin’s older brother, Yoni, was drafted to his obligatory service in the Israeli military. After volunteering for the paratroopers, Yoni graduated first in his class from Officer’s Training School and ended up in the thick of escalating violence in the West Bank.
From its founding in 1948, Israel had been in a recurring state of war. Palestinian refugees who had been displaced in the United Nations’ partition of Israel into a Jewish and Palestinian sector fought alongside allies from surrounding countries who objected to the creation of a new, Western-backed and heavily armed state in their midst. Many of Israel’s leaders and intellectuals, like Ben-Zion Netanyahu, believed that the conflict was another attempt to annihilate Jewish people in the centuries-long history of discrimination and violence against Jews.
Yoni Netanyahu returned to the US for college in 1967, the year that Benjamin began his own obligatory service. By May of that year, another large-scale war was unfolding between Israel and its neighbors. Benjamin volunteered for the army’s IDF unit, and served for six years, taking part in some of the army’s most dangerous operations before being honorably discharged as a captain.
As a reservist for the Israeli army, Yoni returned again to Israel during the heightened violence of the late 1960s and 1970s. He survived 1967 with an injury to his arm, and returned to the army in 1968. This time, he did not survive. After earning accolades for his role in the 1972 Israeli hijacking of a group of Syrian leaders, Yoni was killed in 1976 while attempting to rescue a group of Israelis whose own plane was hijacked to Uganda. Yoni became a national hero in Israel, but the loss to his brother, Benjamin, was tremendous.
In the wake of his brother’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu left his employment with Boston Consulting Group to take a more active role in Israel. He took a management position with Rim Industries in Jerusalem, but also began organizing international conferences on the issue of terrorism and lobbying for continued support for the Israeli state.
Netanyahu’s first conference took place in Jerusalem in 1979 and helped to secure him a position on Israel’s diplomatic mission to the United States in 1982. In 1984, Netanyahu was appointed ambassador to the United States and organized a second conference, this time in Washington, DC.
Netanyahu’s second conference on terrorism resonated with international leaders. As Britain was contemplating policies to address terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland, Israel considered bombing Muslim holy sites, and the world compared its newest policing technologies with the ominous visions from George Orwell’s novel, 1984 .
Netanyahu’s leadership potential became clear during the early 1980s. Articulate and well informed, he made a point of educating US policy makers on the strategic importance of Israel to its US ally, securing continued defense and economic aid for the Israeli state. His success and high-profile place in the media led him to seek political office after returning to Israel in 1988. In the footsteps of his parents and their mentor, Jabotinsky, Netanyahu ran for a seat in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) as a member of the right-wing Likud Party. He secured a seat on the Knesset and received the position of deputy minister of foreign affairs.
Netanyahu’s diplomatic skills proved crucial during his four-year post in foreign affairs. From 1987 to 1993, Palestinian refugees in the Israeli controlled West Bank and Gaza Strip organized a loosely connected series of demonstrations, riots, and violent assaults against Israeli authority known collectively as the Intifada or “shaking off.” The Gulf War, begun with the US invasion of Iraq in 1991, further exacerbated tensions between the mix of religious and cultural groups that make up the so-called “Arab nations” and the Western-supported, officially Jewish, state of Israel. Netanyahu was called upon throughout to uphold Israel’s image with its Western allies and to work toward a negotiated peace between Israel and neighboring states.
Again, Netanyahu’s diplomatic skills earned him the popular support of his party. In 1993, the Likud party elected him its chair and its candidate for prime minister of Israel. A year prior, the Labour Party’s Yitzhak Rabin had been elected prime minister and had steered the country into a relatively conciliatory position toward Israel’s Arab neighbors. This brought about the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian people, represented by the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Yasir Arafat.
Many right-wing Israelis, including members of the Likud Party believed that the agreements were a betrayal of the Israeli state. In 1995, as the provisions of the agreement were being implemented, an Israeli man assassinated Prime Minister Rabin. The assassination, combined with the PLO’s struggle to control extremists within the Palestinian population, prompted Israeli retreat from some, though not all, of those provisions.
In 1996, Netanyahu won the direct elections for Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu served as prime minister from 1996 until 1999, but his strained relations with fellow officials were a stark contrast to the skill with which he negotiated diplomatic relations. In addition, charges of corruption and incompetence began to plague his administration. As Netanyahu worked to move Israel’s economy towards increased privatization and less government social spending, it became clear that he would not hold the majority support of Israelis or of his party.
After losing his position as prime minister, Netanyahu recovered to claim the position of minister of foreign affairs in 2002. In February 2003, he became minister of finance to the state of Israel. He remained in the role until 2005, when he left government for a period due to disagreements with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon over details related to peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Netanyahu reclaimed the leadership of Likud after Sharon suffered a stroke in December 2005.
Likud fared poorly in the 2006 elections, but Netanyahu stayed on as party chairman and served as opposition leader. He was reelected party leader in 2007. In parliamentary elections held in February 2009, Likud placed second to Kadima, with each party earning over 20 percent of the vote. A coalition government was formed and Netanyahu became prime minister of Israel for the second time in his career.
Much of Netanyahu’s second term as prime minister has dealt with establishing renewed peace talks with Palestinian officials. In May 2009, he met with US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and US President Barack Obama to discuss Israeli development in the disputed territories. In September 2010, Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas held a one-on-one meeting with US envoy George Mitchell. Abbas and Netanyahu agreed to a schedule of peace talks.
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Going into the 2013 elections, the Likud party merged with the Yisrael Beiteinu party, led by foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. In the election, the coalition lost eleven seats, but remained the largest faction in the Knesset, giving Netanyahu a third term as prime minister. In 2013, Netanyahu focused mainly on his policy of economic liberalization, overseeing the construction of private ports in Haifa and Ashdod and putting forth the monopoly-breaking Business Concentration Law, which was approved by the Knesset in December of that year. In 2014, the Palestinian military organization Hamas joined with the Palestinian Authority to form a unity government, and Netanyahu began focusing on condemnation of Hamas, which he called a terrorist organization. When three Israeli teenagers went missing in June 2014, Netanyahu launched an IDF operation meant to purge Hamas from the West Bank, which resulted in large-scale violence and civilian casualties on both sides.
The relationship between Netanyahu and the White House also deteriorated in 2014; the United States has historically been a major supporter of Israel, but the US administration criticized Israeli expansion into territories claimed by Palestine, considering it illegal settlement activity; Netanyahu, meanwhile, claimed the condemnation was “against American values” and showed a lack of understanding of the situation in the Middle East.