---
title: "Benjamin Netanyahu: Power at Any Cost"
description: "Benjamin Netanyahu has shaped Israeli politics for decades. This documentary traces his journey from Philadelphia schoolboy to Israel's longest-serving prime minister, examining his military service, time as a diplomat, economic reforms, and controversial leadership through multiple wars, corruption charges, and the dramatic reshaping of the Middle East after October 7th."
url: https://fronts.co/videos/benjamin-netanyahu-power-at-any-cost.md
canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/benjamin-netanyahu-power-at-any-cost/
datePublished: 2026-10-28T01:55:11.000Z
dateModified: 2026-10-28T01:55:11.000Z
author:
  - name: Fronts Staff
    url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/
publisher: Fronts
type: NewsArticle
language: en
access: members
isAccessibleForFree: false
tokens: 32807
---

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How many Israeli prime ministers can the average person name?

Who's that guy that the airport's named after?

Ben Gurion.

We don't mean political science geeks or people with sub-connection to Israel,

but

the average person on the street who maybe occasionally listens to the news or

sees the

odd political tweet.

How many Israeli leaders since 1948 have been so consequential that their names

continue

to reverberate across the world for decades after they leave office?

Well, we can think of one.

The name that many years from now is going to be up there with gold and mare at

David

Ben Gurion in terms of recognition for better or for worse.

And given you clicked on this video, you already know who it is.

It's Benjamin Netanyahu.

To his supporters, Netanyahu is the guy who finally put an end to decades of

nonsensical

Israeli foreign policy that was too consolatory, too willing to give and not

focus on security

nearly enough.

To his defectors, he's certainly stacked up a lot of those.

He's a man whose variously guilty of genocide has led his country into a quag

mire of multiple

endless wars and has torn the region apart.

Whichever side you find yourself on, there's one other thing that makes

Netanyahu different

from the other notorious politicians of our era.

He's been able to implement his worldview in the pursuit of what he's

repeatedly described

as the New Middle East.

It takes some serious kutzpah to look at a region and say, "Yes, I am the man

to totally

remake this place."

But then again, that is Benjamin Netanyahu for you.

And this is his story.

Meet the Netanyahu's

Benjamin Netanyahu, or BB, as he would come to be called, was born in Tel Aviv

on October

21, 1949, the second of what would be three sons.

Israel itself was barely a year old at the time and hadn't exactly gotten off

to a rip-roaring

start.

When had just voted to divide British rule Palestine, it'd do a Jewish state

and an Arab

state split roughly half and half.

As you may know, that plan didn't exactly survive contact with reality.

The surrounding Arab states rejected partition immediately.

The day after Israel declared its independence, armies from Egypt, what was

then known as

Trans-Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq all invaded.

And spoiler alert, Israel survived, but without much else to show for it.

Food and clothing were both under ration, the country was completely isolated

in the

region and sat on just about the only spot in the Middle East without any oil.

More importantly, there was a strong feeling in the air among Israelis that

their newfound

state was under threat, because, well, it was under threat.

Few were under any illusions that the war they had just fought would be the

last, or

that even a moment of perceived weakness to their neighbors wouldn't be used to

launch

a renewed war.

We mention all this not because we're planning this to be a "potty" history of

Israel,

but because it is important to our title character.

Biby grew up in this atmosphere, but from an early age, his life was split

between Israel

and the United States.

His father's academic career repeatedly took the family back and forth between

the

two countries, and that pattern would continue well and to Biby's adulthood.

He'd spent his formative years in a small suburb just outside of Philadelphia

called

Chelnam.

There, he was a consummate overachiever.

He graduated near the top of his class and was on the chess club, while also

balanced

that out, with demonstrating as athletic skills on the football team.

And yes, that's football as I, a British man, would use the word "not a

reference"

to the American sport that I'm going to call rugby with padding.

Socially, Biby wanted little to do with the 1960s scene.

By the time he was in high school, free love was the vibe, and sticking it to

the man was

the default mindset of teenagers.

But not Biby.

Classmates later remembered him as an unusually serious kid and intensely

focused, someone

who seemed to have a pretty clear idea of where his life was going.

One of them said he was simply a young man with purpose.

Some of that might have been because of the time he spent in Israel, but

remember, the

new found Jewish state was at the time overwhelmingly left wing, so that

clearly doesn't explain

the conservative security focus of Biby's mindset.

No, for that we need to look to his father, Benzion Netanyahu.

He wasn't especially hands-on.

Biby later said simply that, quote, "Our mother raised us," while his dad spent

much

of his time shut away in his study.

But his ideas and worldview loomed large over the family.

Benzion was a historian by training, but was also active in politics, where he

was

part of the revisionist Zionist camp.

The movement founded by Zayev Jabonitsky as a direct challenge to the labor's

artists

who dominated Israel's politics in the early years.

Their disagreement wasn't just about something as trivial as the ideal tax rate, though.

While labor's Zionism was not afraid of nationalism, it embraced it in a unique

way.

The movement aimed at creating a, quote, "new Jew" who would be part of a

egalitarian,

collectivist society built around institutions like the kibbutz.

In that sense, statehood was important, but only one part of a much larger

social revolution.

Revisionist Zionists, on the other hand, saw all this class-struggling,

egalitarian stuff

as a bunch of work nonsense.

In their view, the real prize at hand was a strong Jewish state.

Jabonitsky called the idea "one flag."

Zionism's main goals should unapologetically be large-scale Jewish immigration

to the new

country to secure an overwhelmingly ethnic Jewish majority, build an army

strong enough

that its enemies couldn't threaten them, and foster a government unwaving in

its support

of all that.

Benzion was part of that movement's furthest right faction.

And where Jabonitsky still believe Jewish strength could eventually force

Israel's enemies

to come to terms with it, Benzion's own outlook was much more bleak.

While Israel's a hole in 1949 was convinced that the war wasn't over, he was

convinced

that the war couldn't be over.

Ever.

This owe is simply a clash between two incompatible peoples.

In his words, "The tendency toward conflict is in the essence of the Arab."

And while there were many Arab Israelis living in the country after

independence, he believed

that they overwhelmingly wanted to exterminate the Jews and only refrain from

doing so because

Israel was strong.

A lot of that wealth you came out of the subject that Benzion spent his adult

life studying.

The one thing nobody expects, least of all in a YouTube document to read about

a contemporary

Israeli leader, the Spanish Inquisition.

Benzion's central argument was that persecution of the Jews in Spain had

persisted even after

many converted to Catholicism because hostility towards them was something

closer to a permanent

racial prejudice rather than merely a religious divide.

To Benzion, that was a lesson for geopolitics.

Anti-Semitism was something that societies would always grapple with, and Jews

who forgot

the lessons of the past were fooling themselves.

So when combined with everything it's seen in Israel, Bibi almost certainly

inherited

at least some of his father's hard-headed view of the world.

And when war broke out again in 1967, Bibi reportedly wasn't surprised.

He flew back to Israel to fight, only for the six-day war to be over in, well,

it was

over in six days, obviously, but while Bibi fails, someone till the hundred

years war.

But while Bibi failed to take part in the not quite a weak war, that wouldn't

be his

only opportunity.

If it was actually wanted, it was actually going to get when the music stopped.

Netanyahu's military service began in the uneasy, sarcastically speaking, peace, followed

with the war having reinforced much of what he already believed about the

threats that

Israel faced.

With the end of the fighting, Egypt controlled the West Bank of the Suez Canal,

while Israel

held the East, along with the entirety of the Sinai Peninsula.

That enormous geographic loss was simply too much for Cairo to accept, and

after some sporadic

clashes over the next two years, Egypt formally ended the ceasefire in March

1969, and began

a sustained round of fighting that became known as the War of Attrition.

By this point, Bibi needed no further convincing about where he wanted to be in

the world.

Much to the chagrin of his dad, who wanted him to remain in the States to

pursue his

education, Netanyahu followed his older brother, Yani, into the Israeli Defense

Forces.

Yani had always been something of a model for him.

Bibi would later call him his North Star, and both would go on to serve, not

just in

the IDF.

In the siret, Matt Carl thinks that as basically Israel's navy seals.

This was the Krem de la Krem.

He's been most of the following five years in uniform, taking part in a number

of super

high-risk operations, including the 1972 rescue of a hijacked plane, where he

was wounded

by friendly fire, but lived to tell the tale.

Which, given we're only one chapter into a gigantic video on his life, probably

should

come as a surprise.

After leaving active service in 1972, Bibi returned to the United States,

following his

girlfriend Miriam Wazeman, known as Mickey, who had enrolled at Brandi's

University as

a chemist.

He enrolled at MIT in Cambridge to stay near, and the two married later that

year.

By 1976, Bibi had finished degrees in architecture and management, and was

starting to build

a successful life for himself.

He joined the Boston Consulting Group, where he met one Mitt Romney.

That Mitt Romney, the future Republican nominee.

But the good life he was building all came, crashing down on July 4, 1976.

The previous week had seen Palestinian and German militants hijack an air

France flight

from Tel Aviv to Paris shortly after it took off from a layover in Athens, and

fly it

all the way to Indebbe Airport in Uganda.

Once there, they separated the Israeli and Jewish passengers, from the others,

eventually

releasing most of the latter while keeping more than 100 Jewish hostages,

Israel decided

to launch a rescue operation, despite being more than 3,000 kilometers away.

Now, if you think it yourself, how could this involve Bibi, hadn't he left the

military

years ago?

Well, you're right there.

But there was another Netanyahu who was serving.

His older brother, the only Netanyahu commanded the 29-man Cyrets-McKhal

assault team tasked

with storming the terminal to free the hostages.

That raid would ultimately go down as one of the most spectacular successors in

Israeli

military history.

They killed the hijackers and rescued over 100 of the hostages with only 3

being killed

before they restored order.

Yet those three were not the only fatalities of their operation.

There was one additional loss from the IDF.

His name was Yoni Netanyahu.

Bibi was devastated by the news when he found out.

That was his older brother.

Someone he had basically looked up to his entire life.

To make matters even worse, he had to be the one to inform his parents who were

living

in Ithaca, New York, where Benzion had been teaching at Cornell.

He and Mickey ultimately made the six-hour drive from Boston to tell them in

person.

He'd later go on to write in his memoir that it was a "vah-dollarosa of unspe

akable

pain."

Just about everything that came afterwards in Bibi's life could be traced at

least to

some degree back to what happened at an Tebe airport.

He'd already grown up with his father telling him that Israel, and by extension

the Jewish

people, would always have enemies.

And just three years earlier, had flown back from MIT when Egypt and Syria

launched their

surprise attack on Yom Kippur.

So he hardly needed any further convincing that there were some serious threats

out there.

Yoni's death made this personal in a way that all the rest never really had.

This was no longer an abstract, theoretical framework of what might happen if

Israel

let its guard down.

His brother had just been killed halfway across the world while rescuing

largely Jewish hostages

from terrorists.

He would later say, outright, that the loss diverted the course of my life.

I did the years that followed, fighting terrorism increasingly became something

of a personal

mission for him.

Shortly thereafter, Netanyahu's professional and personal life began to go un

characteristically

off the rails.

Having spent much of his life being the personification of "I've got my sh*t

together," he now became

the personification of "everything is falling apart, sort of like millhouses,

dad."

But with more sex and money.

The first thing to go ended up being his doctorate.

He had only just begun the program when Yoni was killed, and he ultimately

ended up abandoning

it in the aftermath.

Shortly after, Phoebe struck up a affair with a girl named Fleur, who he

reportedly mattered

to University Library.

Oh, and he did all of this, by the way, while Mickey was pregnant with their

first child,

which went about as well as you would expect.

The exact details are disputed, but one account alleges that Mickey found a

long blonde hair

on his suit and from there connected the dots.

Regardless of how she found out, though, once she did, she ended it there and

then, kicking

him out of the Boston apartment.

Ultimately, he stayed with Fleur, and Mickey formally divorced him shortly

after their

daughter, Noah Netanyahu, was born in 1978.

Having crashed out of his doctorates and then his marriage, he decided to head

back to Israel,

with Fleur set to later join him, but little else going for him and little idea

of what

he was going to do when he got there.

And what does man do when he has no prospects and a burning zeal to change the

world?

Why?

He gets into politics.

Starting again.

Back in Israel, Beebe wasn't entirely starting from scratch with his new career.

In the two years since Joni's death, the Netanyahu family had been building

something

in his memory.

The Jonathan Institute, Jonathan, are being the anglicized version of Yonatan.

For Beebe, who had come home without much going for him, this was both a start

as well

as a mission that he had a great deal about.

The Institute was set up to accomplish three things, teaching Zionism to

Israeli school

children and soldiers, arguing globally that Israel played a unique and central

world for

security concerns to both Europe and the Americas, and investigating where the

terrorism

engulfing the world had come from.

Shortly after returning Beebe stepped in, took over as director and doubled

down on its outreach.

He was able to get some of the big wigs in Israeli politics signed up early on,

including

former Prime Minister Gold Amare.

But in order to really get traction, he wanted to take the Institute

International where it

could have real impact.

They held a conference in the first week of July 1979 at the Jerusalem Hilton,

drawing

on a transatlantic political network that the Netanyahu family had been

building for decades.

Bentina had spent years in American revisionist Zionist politics, while Beebe

had added plenty

of contacts of his own during his time in the States.

It worked too.

Big time.

Nearly 700 people came, including top US senators, retired spy chiefs, and even

George

H.W. Bush, who had just thrown his hat in the ring for the Republic of Party's

nomination

for presidents.

A driving message of the conference was to define terrorism across the globe as

essentially

being one network that traced back to the Soviet Union, which people at the

time were

only too happy to believe.

From the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Beyder mine half gang, to

even the

Irish Republican Army, the whole point was to merge international disputes into

a more

unified conflict where it was West versus East.

And naturally, given that the PLO was very much front and center at this

conference, this

essentially merged Israel into the West's Cold War.

Democratic Senator Henry Jackson gave the conference as keynote speech and left

what

went down as the best remembered line of the whole thing, quoting, "

International terrorism

is a modern form of warfare against liberal democracies."

In the essence, there's been criticism of Netanyahu for merging these conflicts

by

those who think that they should have remained separate, as well as the framing

that the

Israel-Palestine dispute really was a Western issue.

But to be fair to him, Netanyahu didn't just make this stuff up.

A lot of these groups running around, blowing up buildings across Europe, were

explicitly

aiming to establish a Marxist-Leninist state.

On the other hand, the predominant grievance of the Palestine Liberation

Organization is

not the unwillingness of the Israeli government to establish a dictatorship of

the proletariat,

but one based on land.

And while the PLO did receive support from the Soviet Union, Moscow was

relatively apathetic

about the whole thing.

The party line was that they supported a two-state solution that respected the

rights

of both peoples to remain there, which is the geopolitical equivalent of saying

you're

into Taylor Swift.

A boring, widely accepted statement, fine-tuned to cause as little offence as

possible.

Within a few years of this successful conference, BB was headed stateside once

again.

FLOOR, by the way, was still with him at the time.

His father was Jewish, but her mother wasn't, meaning that she wasn't

considered Jewish

under orthodox and, by extension, Israeli law.

She converted, though, and the two married in 1981.

Shortly thereafter, an old family friend, Moshe Arends, got tapped to be the

next Israeli

ambassador to the United States in 1982, and as luck would have it, he needed

staffers.

BB was the man for the job in his eyes and happily accepted the offer to be

Israel's

deputy chief of mission at their embassy in Washington.

This was, by the way, a hell of a promotion.

He was 32 at the time, which was young, not scandalously so, but he had no

diplomatic

experience and leapt over a large line of many other diplomatic staffers who

had dedicated

decades to the trade.

BB didn't have much time to get settled in DC, though.

Just four months after he took the job, Israel invaded the country to its north, Lebanon.

The PLO had been based there since they got thrown out of Jordan a decade

earlier, and

had been shelling northern Israeli villages from across the border ever since.

And when the war broke out, BB initially got a call from the Saar at Maktkar,

asking him

to come home to Israel for a reserve duty, but by then he was Israel's number

two man

in Washington, and the war had created an enormous demand for someone who could

defend

Israel's case to an American audience.

Netanyahu requested to remain in the US instead, and increasingly became the

face of that effort

on television.

By all accounts, he was bloody good at it too.

Part of this was because of just how American he was.

BB spoke flawless English, which gave him a leg up over the many Israeli

officials with

thick Hebrew accents.

He didn't sound like a foreign diplomat, and beyond just the optics, he also

knew how

to sell the message to a US audience.

Rather than presenting Lebanon as some impossibly complicated regional war, he

framed the issue

as a Western democracy, Israel, fighting terrorism.

Two years later, at just 34 years old, Netanyahu was appointed Israel's

ambassador to the

UN, a nice promotion for the up-and-coming self-starred statesman.

Over the next four years on the job, he always found himself returning to the

same themes

that had dominated his time at the Jonathan Institute.

Terrorism, security, and what he saw as the UN's hostility towards his country

while

becoming an increasingly familiar face to American audiences.

He was such a regular on-nightline, in fact, that one study of appearances

between 1985

and 1988 found that he was the number one repeat offender, usually discussing

terrorism.

He even published a book on the subject in 1986, "Terrorism, How the West Can

Win".

Importantly, he very much included Israel as a part of the West.

That was central to his ideology.

The West was Israel, Israel was the West, making his country spite against

terror, just

one front in a much larger struggle shared by the US and Europe alike.

And with that argument now firmly established, the next question was whether

Israelis themselves

would be quite so receptive to him.

Israelis meet B.B.

Three weeks after the November 1988 election, Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in

as a member

of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, for Likut, the main party of Israel's

right.

But as was the case with his time at the embassy states side, he wasn't just

going

to be some backbencher.

Oh, no, no.

If there's one thing that's clear about B.B. by this point, he doesn't do

anything

halfway.

Upon taking office in the Knesset for the first time, he was also tapped to be

Deputy

Foreign Minister, once again working for Moshe Ahrens.

Part of the reason these two were so close came down to familial ties, as both

Moshe and

B.B.'s dad played a big role in revisionist Zionism, basically the school that

thought

mainstream Zionism had gone soft.

There was something more personal than just a shared ideology between the two

men, though.

To Moshe, B.B. was like looking at himself, or at least a younger version of

himself.

Both of them went to MIT, both married foreign women, and perhaps most

importantly, both

spoke English without an accent.

Netanyahu's personal life had been going through some changes by this point,

too.

B.B. and Fleur ended up getting divorced in 1988 after nearly seven years of

marriage.

Fleur never really assimilated into Israel, at least not enough for someone who

was eyeing

an ever more prominent role in public life, and was already vulnerable on the

whole half-American

front.

When you add into the mix her Hebrew being even worse than "my check," well,

you can

see how she might have been an electoral vulnerability, though what ultimately

drove

that breakup is impossible to know.

It's worth noting how unusual B.B.'s rise was inside of Israeli politics, where

parties

are basically THE defining characteristic.

They don't run candidates on a constituent-by-constituent basis.

Each party basically creates a list of people they put forward as future MKs,

seats a rewarded

on a nationally proportional basis, and those high up on the list make it

depending on how

other party does.

B.B., who hadn't even been in the country for much of his life, made the cut

with room

to spare.

Much like the embassy staffer situation, this won him no friends among the lak

ud party's

upper echelons who had been politicking their way into the party's elite for

years.

This wouldn't have gone over too well regardless of who was taking the top spot, but as rumor

has it, the old guard in the party never really accepted B.B., they often

described

him as egotistical and reckless, while the pro-B.B. camp largely chalks this up

to them

being irked about watching the party fall to a newcomer with a Philly accent

who flew in

from the States, set up sharp and acted like he ran the place.

It was only a short period of time before B.B., who was really in his element

once again.

In 1990, Iraq invaded and annexed its neighbor to the South Kuwait in a dispute

overall that

was roundly condemned across the world, including the Middle East.

The US entered the fray on behalf of Kuwait, deploying forces to the Gulf that

year, and

things that were not going well for old Saddam's grand strategy.

He knew he was outgunned big time, so he reached for the only mechanism he had

left.

He started launching on Israel with the oh-so-creatively named Al Hussein long-

range missiles.

The strategy here was to turn this from a war against Iraq into one he could

play as

an Arab versus Israeli one.

It was a long shot, but given that he was staring down a full US invasion, it

was the

best one he had.

The US realized this was actually a risk to their support amongst Arab

countries and

leaned hard on Israel not to respond.

And they didn't, even as the Al Husseins were landing across the country.

In total Iraq fired 39 of them at Israel, damaging thousands of apartments and

injuring

dozens.

Though remarkably, only two people were killed directly by the missiles.

It was during this period that Bibi was in his element.

The man did something like 50 television and radio interviews in the first 72

hours alone,

many of which were with international media.

The most famous of these were with CNN's Linda Scherzer, during which the air

raid sirens

went off mid-interview.

Rather than cancelling it, as in risking looking like he was retreating, he

strapped

on a gas mask.

Saddam maintained a large chemical weapons program at the time, and just kept

on rolling,

quoting, "This is the dandest way to do an interview," end quote.

And he made the case to viewers around the world just what type of threat

Israel was

under.

At a time when the internet meant ordinary Americans being amazed by this new f

aggot email

and long before smartphones and social media, this was basically as up close to

the action

as people got.

And it's easy to see how well this resonated back in the states.

Here was a guy who sounded like he could be a U.S. government spokesperson

talking about

how his country was under attack and was exercising restraint to avoid

escalation to

a wider war.

Right, left or center, that is a compelling message at Israeli's notice too.

He had been something of an outside of them for most of his political career,

even just

how U.S. centric he had been, but this war was when they really got to know B

ibi for the

first time.

But for a lot of them, they liked what they saw, and you look good.

When it comes to elections, outcomes are zero some, there is one winner, and

there is one

loser.

Usually this is framed as a good thing for the winner, but depending on what

exactly

it is that they're taking over, it might be more of a curse.

That was the scene on Israel's right around 1992 and 1993 in a way that has a

lot in common

with a similar dynamic that was playing out back in the U.K.

The two had seen long stints of right-wing governments.

In Israel's case, over 50 years, with only a brief reprieve of two years in the

mid-1980s.

Over that period of time, the right just largely read out of steam.

In Britain, the John Major government was slow-marching into sleaze and crisis,

while

in Israel, the Likud party had descended into a mini-civil war over the future

of the movement,

all while the country was coming under massive strain from an influx of Soviet

Jews making

their a-layer, or return, to a country that was already experiencing an intense

housing

crisis.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Labor Party chose Yitzhak Rabin as their leader.

Rabin had previously served as Prime Minister in the 1970s, and actually it was

the one

to greenlight the raid at Intebbe, where Jonathan Netanyahu was killed.

On top of that, he had served as the Chief of Staff of the IDF during the Six-

Day War,

so he had some serious military experience that separated him from the more

typical

labor politicians.

Those bona fides won Rabin and his party the election in 1992, and Shmir

stepped aside

from a top Likud after the defeat, which freed up a spot that BB threw himself

at head first.

That race, by the way, got ugly.

He ultimately went on national television to announce that he was being

blackmailed.

BB had been having another affair, and someone who he ascribed to Likud's

establishment

apparently had proof on tape.

But all in charge, I'm sure of how thoroughly that tape proved anything if you

catch our

drift there, but ultimately this front-running prevented its release.

By this point, BB was on wife No. 3.

Back in 1991, it married Sarah Benazzi, an Israeli psychologist he met while

she was

working as a flight attendant on L.L.

Rather than ending his campaign, though, this whole thing barely slowed him

down.

If anything, it built up his "not going to stop fighting" persona.

Two months later, BB won the Likud leadership race outright, with just over

half the vote,

putting the party in the hands of a man who had entered the care set, only four

years

previously.

Once then, Netanyahu didn't have to sit around wondering what his party should

make

its defining issue while in opposition.

Within a year, Sabine's government unveiled one of the most consequential and

controversial

agreements in Israeli history, the Oslo Accords.

Man deal, which was reached by way of negotiations between Jerusalem and the PL

O before being

signed on the White House lawn, resulted in a Palestinian recognition of Israel, with

Yasser Arafford agreeing to renounce terrorism.

In return, Israel would begin handing over parts of Gaza and the West Bank to a

newly

created Palestinian Authority.

And as any good political agreement does, it took all of the more controversial

stuff,

especially the future status of Jerusalem and the final borders between the two, and

kicked them just about as far down the road as they could.

Nearly three and a half decades later, that can is still clattering along the t

armac.

Not that this was obvious at the time, for BB, the news was the equivalent of

lining up

at a buffet and picking up all the various assortments that you not only hate,

but are

allergic to.

He had quite literally built both his persona and worldview around not doing

this.

He didn't believe that Arafford magically transformed into some peace-loving,

second-coming

of Gandhi, and even if Arafford was genuine, his ability to actually bring the

rest of Palestine

with him was in doubt.

Even worse, BB viewed this as an irreversible mistake.

Once you take the whole Palestinian-stated thing out of the bottle, it is never

going

back in.

Without a Palestinian state, it was a dispute over land and borders, but if

Palestine was

of full country, that would be another thing entirely.

It didn't take long for things to head south either.

In February 1994, Jewish extremist Barack Goldstein walked into the tomb of the

patriarchs

in Hebron and murdered 29 Muslims while they were praying.

Hamas, which had also opposed Oslo altogether, had apparently been

experimenting with suicide

attacks the year prior, but after the Hebron massacre, they seriously upped

their game.

Within weeks, bombs had gone off in Afula and Hadera, and over the next several

years,

suicide bombings became one of the defining threats hanging over the peace

process.

Remarkably, that peace process still continued to move, but every bomb that

went off, and

there were a significant number of them.

Maids Netanyahu's warning that Israel was making a deadly mistake all the

easier to

sell.

In 1995, opposition to Oslo had become the defining cause of the Israeli right,

with

Netanyahu having emerged as the undisputed champion.

He appeared at enormous demonstrations in Jerusalem against the Arabian

government, accusing

it of gambling with the country's security, as Oslo transferred even more power

and land

to Ramallah.

For many in the crowds, this was a perfectly legitimate part of the democratic

process.

Israelis are well within their rights to criticize their leaders, after all.

But given how much was at stake, some took it to a whole new level.

Rabin was increasingly being called a traitor.

At one rally in Zahn Square on October 5, 1995, while Netanyahu was speaking to

a crowd

from a balcony, protesters had a mock Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform and

Palestinian

kafir.

At a separate event, he was also seen leading a protest line, while a coffin

was carried

some distance behind him, labeled Rabin as causing the death of Zionism.

If that wasn't enough foreshadowing for you, all of this came to a head in

early

November 1995.

Rabin was speaking to a peace rally in Tel Aviv, and when he headed back to his

car,

a 25-year-old Jewish extremist named Yagal Amir shot him dead.

For Netanyahu, the assassination was a game-changer.

He'd spent the past two years making himself out to be Rabin's most prominent

opponent

and had largely pulled it off.

But now, there was going to be a lot of soul-searching, and BB wasn't eager to

see where that was

going to go.

With the now as of the assassination, Shmoam Parris was made acting Prime

Minister, knowing

that he was inheriting a country that was badly adrift.

Given just how traumatic the event was, though, there was actually a pretty

dramatic surge

in support for the Inter-MPM, and more specifically, against the man leading

the opposition, none

other than BB himself.

Now, we do want to qualify this, because it's not like the entire country

turned on

Netanyahu, but there were many, including someone on the right, who saw the

hardball

rhetoric he used against Rabin as having led to the first assassination of a

sitting Israeli

Prime Minister.

One carried out no less by a 25-year-old law student who believed he had a

religious duty

to kill Rabin.

Leah Rabin, the late PM's widow, made national news when it came to light that

she agreed

to meet with Yasser Arafat, who had come to pay his respects, but wouldn't do

the same

for BB.

For Israeli political standards, that was an earthquake.

Arafat had long been seen as a consummate bad guy in some circles, which is

what made

people working with him in the first place so controversial.

The fact that he was more of an acceptable figure to Leah than the leader of

the opposition

really shows where she put the blame for her husband's death.

But if that wasn't clear enough, she'd go on to spell it out in a later

interview,

or when she asked if she thought BB and Isla Qud were responsible for the

political atmosphere

that led to the assassination, and she flat-out said, quoting here, "I do blame

them."

Perez could have, at that point, called for a general election, yet the basis

to do it,

or would have reaped some serious benefits given that polls at the time put him

somewhere

between 20 and 30 points.

That is a healthy lead for any politician, but in Israel, it's essentially

unheard of.

This wasn't lost on Netanyahu either.

He reportedly worried aloud that if elections did take place, the right would

be decimated.

And no, that's not in the old-fashioned sense of reduced by 10%, but in the

common,

modern meaning of absolutely devastated.

Press ultimately decided against going straight into election in the weeks

after Rabin's

death.

He didn't like the idea of winning on a dead man's blood, and explicitly said

as much.

But with labor still riding high in the polls at the time, he moved the

elections up a bit

from October to May.

It seemed like a pretty safe bet at the time.

Already Netanyahu was pivoting, though.

He knew this was a serious point of vulnerability for him, and he wanted to get

as far out ahead

of the accusations that he was responsible for terrorism as possible.

Running as the security guy with the former PM's blood on your hands isn't

exactly a

winning message after all.

He went quiet and the whole "labor is handing the country to the Palestinians"

line altogether.

And when he did talk, he spoke of the importance of healing and national unity.

At the same time, Netanyahu knew that he'd have to get creative at who was

going to pull

off a win.

His time in the States had taught him a thing or do about campaigning, and he

very much wanted

to bring some of those lessons to Israel.

Lesson number one, oh, is to hire a professional, and that professional came in

the form of

one Arthur Finkelstein, an American Republican operative who worked on numerous

U.S. Senate

races, along with Richard Nixon's 49 state landslide in 1972.

Finkelstein did not speak a word of Hebrew, but that was mostly beside the

point.

The idea was that if his strategy worked in the United States, it'd work in

Israel, too.

Finkelstein got to work by setting up a never-ending series of opinion polls

across the country,

which revealed to them that Israelis broadly still supported the concept of

peace, but

didn't trust the guys running it.

That was BB's window.

It was narrow, certainly, but what a window is for if not betting in the

occasional unexpected

ray of sunlight.

Oslo had intentionally kicked the hardest question of the whole conflict, the

status

of Jerusalem towards the very end of the process, essentially trying to avoid

even discussing

it until both sides were so heavily invested in peace that they'd be heavily

incentivized

to figure something out.

That was the thinking anyway, but BB seized on this to use it as a way to bash

labor.

As the peace process unfolded, Israel needed someone strong to make sure that

it didn't

make unreasonable concessions that would compromise its security, and losing

Jerusalem was unthinkable

for many Jews in the country.

Nothing indicates that Paris was actually going to be willing to concede

Jerusalem, but

the pro-BB camp ran with two slogans that caught on easily with the domestic

audience.

The first, the press would divide Jerusalem, the second, that BB was good for

the Jews.

Now, to view as accustomed to modern 21st century campaigning, this is probably

nothing

new or even noteworthy, but for Israeli politics in the mid-90s, this was way

more polished

and Americanized than anything they had seen before.

Slick campaigning could only get Netanyahu so far though, press was so far

ahead in the

polls he was practically lapping BB.

What really changed that race was a wave of Hamas suicide bombings in February

and March,

which killed 59 Israelis in four separate attacks.

This enormous lead collapsed almost overnight, and BB's warnings that this

whole Oslo peace

process was leaving Israel vulnerable suddenly sounded a lot more convincing.

And with it, the country headed to the polls in May of 1996, with Netanyahu

securing a

narrow victory.

He'd been aided by a reform borne out of exhaustion over the multiparty system

in the

country that was responsible for governments constantly collapsing, and '96 was

the first

year where Israelis actually elected their PM directly, separately, from the

parliamentary

vote.

It didn't last long, that's a story for another video, but in a head-to-head

against

Paris, BB won the day.

It was a hell of a comeback, barely six months earlier, Netanyahu had been

staring down polls

that suggested his political grim might be over.

Now, by fewer than 30,000 votes, he was about to become Prime Minister.

The first crack at the apple.

Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in on June the 18th, 1996 as the 9th Prime

Minister of Israel.

At 46 years old, he was also the youngest.

The country had long skewed towards older, experienced politicians, so 46 was

like 30

in normal politician years.

He also inherited a genuinely difficult mandate.

Remember, he had really risen to prominence as being the anti-Oslo guy during

the Arabian

era, but had just won the election promising to deliver Oslo in a way that was

good for

Israel.

It sounds like two mutually-exclusive things, well, you're not wrong, although

it might

not have appeared to be that way at the time.

BB was under immense pressure from the Americans to keep moving forward with

the peace process,

and unilaterally withdrawing would have handed an international PR win to the

Palestinians

who would then be able to say that they were the reasonable ones and that

Israel was just

being too difficult to deal with.

So, instead, Netanyahu tried to do what any good politician would do, stall for

time.

His goal was essentially to keep Oslo alive on paper to avoid blowing up his

relationship

with Washington, while also interpreting and implementing it slowly enough that

it never

actually came to fruition.

And a quick fourth wall break here to highlight something important about BB's

character.

This is an approach he will use again and again and again.

Seriously, just keep a mental counter of every time this becomes his core go-to

strategy

over the coming years on West Bank settlements, on the October 7th Commission,

on Lebanon,

the Netanyahu trademark move is always don't say no, don't say yes, and just

keep stalling

until time can do the work for you.

However, that doesn't mean this approach was flawless.

Where Oslo was concerned, it came with tons of issues.

The biggest being that in order to keep Oslo alive, he had to, you know,

actually do stuff.

And by stuff, we mean real, genuine concessions.

The first of those came in the form of the Hebron Protocol in January 1997,

less than

one year into his premiership.

After signing, again, onto heavy pressure from President Clinton, Israel

withdrew from most

of the city and transferred control to the Palestinian Authority, though it was

allowed

to keep security responsibilities around the area.

Such withdrawal would have been enormously controversial, given everything that

had been

going on.

But this was no ordinary city.

Hebron is home to the tomb of the patriarchs, which is believed to be the

burial place of

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, making it one of the most significant places in the

West Bank

for Jews.

He was being about as significant to Jews as Badina, as to Muslims or Bethlehem

to Christians.

Netanyahu's agreement, which he was relatively transparent about at the time,

was that Israel

had made this agreement, signed on the dotted line, and had obligations that he

couldn't

simply walk away from.

It was a different time, so while that might seem out of step for the Netanyahu

of 2026,

in the 90s, it felt like something he couldn't indefinitely bespone.

That was hardly consolation for the right, as well as the smaller parties, to

the right

of LeCoultre.

They were pissed.

This was, after all, the no-nonsense guy, giving up not just random territory

in the

West Bank, but habronable places.

This could not stand, and even Benzion felt that this was a bridge too far.

He had spent decades by this point, arguing that territorial concessions made

Israel weaker,

and now he ripped into his son for falling into that camp as well.

Now the obvious answer to BB's issues on the right would be to play to the

country's

centre, especially those who didn't particularly care about settlements, but

did care a great

deal about, you know, not getting killed in terrorist attacks.

Those security dividends were nowhere to be found, though.

The Oslo framework had created expectations of cooperation, but on the ground,

Ramallah's

ability to actually enforce it was pretty lacking.

The Palestinian Authority had just come into being, and had a chronic case of

not having

the ability or desire to meaningfully crack down on security threats.

So it was still falling heavily on the Israelis to do the heavy lifting, which

inevitably

resulted in many Palestinians feeling that the peace process may have brought

them independence

in name only, given that Israel still retained enormous security powers across

much of the

West Bank.

Side bombings continued in 1997, including the high profile of Makhana Yiduhar

Market bombing

in Jerusalem.

While the overall number did decline from the previous year, nobody was exactly

calling

the situation on the ground, stable.

And while the right was still fuming over the continued concessions being made

in the

name of peace, which they increasingly felt was a one-way road where Israel was

expected

to concede the world while the Palestinians were free to give up the bare

minimum, Bibi

was also on the far from the more moderate faction in his party, as well as

from Washington.

Foreign Minister David Levy, who represented the more pro-peace framework wing

of Likud,

was rapidly growing in patience.

After a brawn in January 1997, there was zero progress to speak on for more

than a year,

but he ultimately quit altogether in early 1998.

Clinton, too, was losing his patience with Netanyahu.

The president reportedly complained to staff as quoting, "Who the f*** does he

think he

is?

Who's the f***ing superpower here, after one particularly nasty beating with

Israeli

counterparts?"

Ugh, it's funny.

Clinton was able to ultimately get one last concession out of Bibi, this time

through the

Y-River negotiations.

The outcome called for further Israeli withdrawals in exchange for additional

Palestinian security

measures, which Bibi did with his now-classic approach of implementing bits and

pieces,

only to stall at the very first rounds.

This was a brawn all over again, only this time it actually broke the

government entirely.

The right was even more angry that not only was Israel making further

territorial concessions,

but it was one of their own that was doing so.

When Bibi tried to form a lost-minute unity government with labour amid mass

defections,

they too rejected him, basically saying that he wouldn't be committed to the

peace process

and was merely looking for a last-ditch effort to hold up his premiership.

By late 1998, the Knesset voted to dissolve itself again, and the country was

once again

headed for elections.

But while things would go badly for Netanyahu this time around, it would not be

the end

of him.

While a few in Israel might have believed it back in the last years of the 20th

century,

they would all still know Bibi's name nearly three decades later.

In the wilderness.

Now in the election case, it was a wipe-out for Netanyahu.

In May of 1999, still operating on the PM as a separate vote system, centrist

Ehud Barak

beat him handily, 56-44%.

Barak had run on a campaign of "let's finish Oslo" and "get out of Lebanon"

where the

IDF had been occupying for nearly two decades.

Bibi's efforts to store for time on the peace process had worked in the narrow

est sense.

But because of the numerous back and forths on the whole thing, nobody really

knew where

he stood anymore, something Barak was able to use to its advantage.

Plus, the two ballot system allowed pretty much everybody in the country who

disliked

Bibi to simply vote Barak, while then casting their other vote for the party

that more neatly

fit their politics.

Netanyahu was only 49 at the time, and given how poorly the first premiership

had gone,

it seemed reasonable to assume that it had to find something else to do, if not

a life

outside of politics, then at least outside the public eye.

He quit entirely not just as a liquid leader, but from the Senate itself within

just a

week of losing.

He took up a job as a senior consultant for an Israeli telecom company, which

was made

for some rather interesting phone calls when clients realized they were

speaking to the

former prime minister.

On the side, though, he was also travelling frequently to the United States to

do what

many American ex-politicians, especially former presidents, do.

Go on speaking tours.

This turned out to be a hell of a side give to him.

Despite the pretty disastrous showing in Israel, Bibi was still a well-known

and overall well-liked

figure with the American public and political class more broadly.

Actually, counts vary, but by some estimates.

He could bring in $40,000 to $60,000 per appearance, sometimes even more

depending on

where it was.

Mostly, this consisted of higher education institutions, including the

University of Pennsylvania

and Trinity University, along with a few Jewish organisations as well, like H

illel.

If he wanted to, he could have kept this up and lived a pretty lavish life from

then on

out.

But as you know, that's not how it went down.

Back in Israel, the initial honeymoon phase with their new PM was long since

over, and

if anything was starting to look like Barack was blowing it even worse than B

ibi had.

President Clinton was pushing hard for another summit between Israel and

Palestine and was

able to get it in the summer of 2000 at Camp David, but Barack's coalition was

already

buckling for much of the same reason Bibi's had.

His coalition consisted of at least seven parties, nine if you count the

parties that

merged into Barack's one Israel platform, and three had already quit before

Camp David

even kicked off.

And this is the heart of just about all Israeli government breakdowns, given

how many factions

are at play, coalitions often struggle to agree on just about anything, and

this was

no exception.

It contained the secular Moretz party on the one hand, along with the ultra-

author dogs,

also known as Haredi parties, Shass and United Torah Judaism on the other, and

a whole host

of various other guys who disagreed on a number of other issues.

Camp David's ultimately went nowhere, which left Barack in the worst possible

position.

He'd put himself out there as willing to make some concessions, come up anti-

handed,

and had already lost part of his coalition for having done so.

Things were made even worse when Likud's new leader Ariel Schorom visited the

Temple

Mount, home of the Dome of the Rock, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

It's the holiest site in Judaism, but after Israel took control of the city of

1967,

the arrangement was that Jews could visit, but not pray there.

This was considerably less controversial at the time, because Israel's own

chief rabbinate

also opposed Jews ascending the Mount on religious grounds.

But that had changed over the years.

With more Jews arguing now that they should have the ability to pray there, it

became

an increasingly prominent issue among religious Jews.

Schorom's visit became an immediate flashpoint, and within days, the violence

that came to

be known as the Second Dafada was underway.

Israelis very quickly began seeing the sorts of attacks that Netanyahu had

spent years

warning about.

There were numerous high-profile ones that we aren't able to go into depth here

on,

but a few include two Israeli reservists who accidentally entered Ramallah, who

ultimately

were lynched by a Palestinian mob, along with a roadside bomb detonating on a

school bus

near Kafar, Durham.

Those attacks continued at a hauntingly frequent rate, and by December that

year, Bragg's

government was finished.

Ironically, it was the guy that Bragg had replaced, who was suddenly back in V

ogue.

Phoebe was out-polling him by a healthy margin, but there was a snag.

Because he had quit not just the lakud but the Knesset entirely, he didn't

qualify.

The Knesset ultimately held a special election for the Prime Minister only,

without dissolving

the body itself, so Phoebe was effectively locked out of the running.

Still, he didn't have to be PM to be seen as vindicated for his skepticism

towards the

peace process.

And even though he had made concessions, they needed the result in the huge

waves of

violence that were the second in Tafada, nor with a anywhere near as large as

what Camp

David had been eyeing.

Over the next few years, this vindication would only deepen as terrorism hit

various

parts of the world, from 9/11 in the US to the 7/7 bombings in London and the

Madrid

train bombings.

Soon, Phoebe was more or less back in his glamour days from the Reagan era,

where he

served as the go-to security guy when it came to matters of combating terrorism.

In 9 days of the Twin Towers falling, he was testifying before Congress about

terrorism,

and over the following year became one of the loudest Israeli voices pushing

Washington

toward war with Saddam Hussein.

Writing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, he said back in 2002 that

Saddam was, quote,

"rapidly expanding his arsenal of biological and chemical weapons" and who is

feverishly

trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

End quote.

Now, that prediction would age extremely poorly once Saddam's supposed weapons

stockpiles

turned out to have been imagined.

But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that hardly pushed to Bebe off-center

stage.

If anything, the world had suddenly shifted back towards the kind of politics

he had

built his entire career around, and back in Israel it was now looking like

their circumstances

would soon allow him to make a comeback.

A slow comeback.

Now, with Bebe out of the running, it was LeCoud's Ariel Sharon, who ultimately

got

to cash in on Barack's collapse.

Sharon absolutely mopped the floor with the man winning 62-38% and taking LeC

oud back

into power.

Because it wasn't a full parliamentary election though, LeCoud held only 19 of

the

Knesset's 120 seats from the 1999 race, which made governing pretty much

impossible.

In 2002, the coalition finally collapsed and the country was once again headed

for elections.

It was here that Bebe saw his chance to make a comeback and decided to throw

his hat into

the ring, not just for a seat in the Knesset, but for the top spot.

He ran against Sharon for LeCoud leadership, although in this case, Sharon was

able to

win relatively comfortably, essentially arguing that Bebe would be welcome back

in the government,

but that after his first premiership, putting him right back on the top was a

disaster waiting

to happen.

LeCoud ultimately won in the elections the following year, which all but

guaranteed

Netanyahu a lasting seat at the table.

For just about anyone with a pair of eyes though, it was clear that he was

still gunning

for Sharon's seat, which left a pretty awkward question.

What do you do with a former PM who has just run for your position?

Now, for our British audience, this will likely revive memories of all the

maneuvering that

Theresa May had to do as Prime Minister to keep Boris Johnson from taking her

job.

And while we can't imagine many other channels going all in on the aerial

Sharon Theresa May

comparisons, the wrong facing both of them and its ultimate outcome was broadly

similar.

Like May, Sharon had to worry that keeping Bebe outside the government entirely

would

leave him, as the saying goes, outside the tent pissing in, hence why he had

already appointed

him as Foreign Minister back in November 2002.

But once LeCoud won the elections a few months later, Sharon decided that

keeping his main

rival in such a high profile role that naturally played to his core issues was

even more dangerous.

In the end, Sharon decided that finance was the perfect spot for Netanyahu.

The Israeli economy was in pretty terrible shape at the time, that had been

struggling

throughout the second in Tafata, as carbombs had either helped for for business, nor were

exactly welcoming to foreign investors.

They were also still reeling from the collapse of the tech bubble at the turn

of the millennium,

and whoever took finance was going to have to hand out some extremely unpopular

medicine.

If Netanyahu failed, Sharon's most dangerous rival would take the blame.

If he succeeded, well, Sharon's government got a functioning economy out of it.

He accepted, but reportedly only after securing broad freedom to pursue his own

economic

program with Sharon's backing.

As it turned out, he's reforms paid off.

People usually forget just how left-wing Israel was as its founding, but it was

essentially

set up as a quasi-socialist state, and spent its first several decades being

governed by

almost exclusively labor politicians.

And while the country had moved beyond that in the decades since, the economic

law regulating

it hadn't gone as far.

The country had begun to deregulate back in the 80s, so it's not like Bebe walt

zed into

the finance ministry and discovered capitalism, but he very much hit the

accelerator and essentially

turned himself into an Israeli equivalent of Margaret Thatcher.

And how about that for a mental image?

His economic recovery plan, shaved government spending across the board,

especially welfare

payments, cut personal income taxes from as high as 60 percent, and

dramatically reduced

the state's role in the economy.

But, as with Reagan and Thatcher in their respective countries, this split

Israeli society in two.

Those who loved Bebe and thought he was ushering in a new golden age for Israel, and those

who thought he was selling the country down the river, organized labor, fought

his reforms

bitterly.

But the economy did begin to recover.

After the anemia growth of just 1.5% in 2003, it accelerated to 4.2% in 2004

and 5.2% in

2005, all while inflation crashed down from 6.5% to 1.2% in 2004, unemployment

also began

to fall.

Foreign investment came trickling back, and by the time Bebe left the finance

ministry,

the economy was in a lot better shape than when he took over.

The security guy had just taken on the economic challenge multiple pre-amiers

hips had struggled

with and won.

And while it made plenty of enemies in the process, Netanyahu had also created

a new base

of voters to draw on.

Some that would serve him well several years down the line.

Yet the story of this era is not just Bebe's deregulating markets, while

Israeli Golden

Gekko does coke offer, hooker and declares, "Sabiq is for wimps."

No, it's also an era in which massive changes were underway in the Palestinian

areas, changes

that would eventually come to transform Netanyahu's career.

The withdrawal

When it comes to the question of Israeli settlements, attention is usually

focused on the West Bank

Since Israel started building them in the late 1960s, the vast majority of

settlements

went there and the West Bank is where both the largest and most populated exist.

But they also had settlements in the Gaza Strip.

The "had" there, by the way, is the operative word, because they don't exist

anymore.

And the story of how they vanished is one of the more peculiar episodes of

Israeli politics,

one that has formed the backbone of Netanyahu's arguments ever since.

The Palestinian Authority, along with the PLO before it, had gone to enormous

lengths to

secure an Israeli withdrawal from the settlements.

It was the defining issue and one that had toppled numerous Israeli premiers

hips.

Ariel Sharon was about the last guy anyone would have expected to preside over

any large

scale withdrawal, given the impact the Second Divada had on Israeli willingness

to negotiate,

along with the fact that he had spent decades being one of the settler

movements' biggest

champions.

And yet, by 2003, Ariel Sharon was preparing to pull every Israeli settler out

of the Gaza

Strip, about 8,000 of them in total.

Not more.

He was prepared to do so unilaterally, without asking, much less securing any

concessions

from the Palestinians.

Can David may have been controversial, but Israel was at least going to get

something

from it.

This time around?

Yeah, not so much.

Now, the reasons behind it were not exactly altruistic humanitarianism, nor

were they some

unilateral gesture of goodwill in the hopes of winning Palestinian hearts and

minds.

No.

This was more of a hard-headed approach to the matter.

Those 8,000 settlers were a tiny minority amidst the enclaves more than 1

million strong

Palestinian population.

They also weren't based in a few well-defended positions, but rather spread

across the Strip

in small villages that made defending them both difficult.

And here's the key part, bloody expensive.

That had long been an issue.

But it came to the forefront, during the Second Divada, when IDF soldiers who

were repeatedly

attacked and killed while defending the settlements.

Basically, the thinking from Sharon was that if Israel was going to do

settlements, and

let's be clear, he absolutely wanted to keep doing them, then they had to make

sense.

The ones in the West Bank cleared that bar, especially given that the territory, known

as Judea and Samaria, in the Torah, plays an enormous role for Judaism.

Garza was far less important and largely did not clear that bar.

And as a result, Garza had to go.

For viewers familiar with the BB of today, you might be imagining him reading

this proposal

with absolute horror, and indeed the BB of today, does argue that the move was

damn

near heresy.

But the BB of the mid-2000s actually voted in favor of the proposal several

times in 2004

and early 2005.

Still, when the cabinet approved its implementation in February 2005, he voted

against.

He since used that to defend his reputation on the matter, arguing that his

earlier votes

in favor were to buy himself time at finance so that he could finish his

economic reforms.

There is some reason to buy that one.

Even the BB of the time almost certainly wouldn't have come up with such a

proposal, and voting

against his own government earlier could have guaranteed him a relocation to

the backbenches.

Whatever the rationale, the Garza withdrawal went ahead in the summer of 2005

and was enormously

controversial on the right.

BB himself had seen his entire premiership collapse because he pulled out of a

bronze,

and he at least got something to show for it.

But now the shurong guy pulled out unilaterally from Garza.

That was bridged too far on the right, which was made worse by the settlers who

refused

to leave.

The IDF ultimately had to deploy force, and the images of soldiers dragging

Israeli women

and children out of their homes played just about as well as you'd expect.

In fact, it was so controversial that shurong ultimately quit his own party.

He left Likud and started a new one, Kadima, because of how hated this policy

was, which

also collapsed the government and triggered another wave of elections.

The tragic thing, though, is the precedent it has set for both sides ever since, following

the first withdrawal Garza held its first elections in a decade, and Hamas

placed first.

The group used that electoral win to forcibly take full control of the strip in

June 2007,

from which point they used the strip as essentially a forward-launching base

into Israel.

For Israel, despite the intention behind the withdrawal not being aimed at

winning hearts

and minds, the less untaken from it nonetheless was that nothing short of the

destruction of

their state would suffice for the Palestinians.

This was only further confirmation of what Bibi and other anti-Ozlo people were

saying,

even though Oslo had been reached under completely different circumstances with

completely different

incentives.

In their eyes, withdrawal was weakness, and ravine and other peacenix were

fools for having

thought otherwise.

From a Palestinian perspective, there's also set a problematic standard.

Later in life, Arafat had committed the PLO to a two-state solution.

So long as it could yield real results for the Palestinians, and they got

precious little

to show for it, Hamas hadn't taken over Garza yet, but they were able to argue

that

it was their pressure, or in other words, bullets and bombs, that sent the

Israelis

packing.

Mahmoud Abbas, who had succeeded Arafat earlier that year, insisted that

negotiations and

to cease far had helped bring about the withdrawal.

Again, that wasn't either signed as intention before any of this went down, but

as is so

often the case in geopolitics, intentions are very much a secondary concern,

and what

really matters is the end result, along with the precedent those results set.

A second chance.

The Garza withdrawal resulted in one more casualty we didn't get to in the last

chapter.

Likud itself.

It's not unheard of for parties to lose their top figure, but having the top

guy just up

and walk out with nothing more than a good luck is not an everyday occurrence,

especially

when the man is also a prime minister.

For the entirety of Likud, this was an earthquake.

Many of its senior M.Ks went with Sharon to Kadima, maybe as you might have

guessed, who

was not going to be joining the defection.

Likud had a leadership election, less than a month later, and Netanyahu beat

Foreign

Minister

Sylvan Shalom by roughly 45-33%. He was back in charge of the party, but he had

abandoned after

his 1999 defeat. But what exactly he was in charge of was considerably less

impressive than before.

Controversial as the withdrawal was on the right, Kadima was sort of having a

moment with

centrist Israelis who were relieved that their sons and daughters were no

longer on the line to

defend settlements in Gaza. They were soaring in the polls, while Likud was

going through a

serious identity crisis. Beebe had his track record to run on from finance, but

beyond that,

where he actually stood on the questions of the day, was still sort of a

question mark.

He would present himself as the security-oriented candidate. No doubt, that one

never changes, but

he had also voted four times for the withdrawal in the first place, which was

going to be difficult

to explain to the electorate. By the time the election was held in 2006, Israel

had also

done away with the split ballot voting system for PM, so Netanyahu wouldn't

have that working for

him either. And to say things didn't go well would be the understatement of the

century.

The Kad collapsed from 38 seats in 2003 to just 12, placing 4th in the worst

showing in the party's

history. Some of this was beyond Beebe's control, given that the party had just

been split in half

after all, but some of it was more personal. His party had long had strong

support with

Mizrahi Jews, which is where his economic legacy came back to bite him.

To understand why, you have to go back in time to Likud's first victory in 1977

when Menacean began finally broke Labour's monopoly on Israeli governance.

The country's old establishment had been overwhelmingly Ashkenazi Jews, those

families who came from Central and Eastern Europe intended to be secular and

had dominated

the country since independence. Mizrahi Jews on the other hand, were those

whose families came from

the Middle East and North Africa, many of whom arrived in the 50s. They often

felt like second-class

citizens, which was not helped by the numerous, numerous hot takes from the

first Israeli PM,

David Ben-Gurion, about them, ranging from those Jews from Morocco have no

education,

their customs are those of Arabs, to elsewhere arguing that "their human values

need to be

changed from the ground up." Quite some hot takes, their mates. So yes, Labour

wasn't winning too

many voters there. Likud, despite being run by Ashkenazi, won them over by

simply not being

dicks to them, and largely held them as a core constituency for the decades

that followed.

That did leave baby in a bit of a bind, though, as Mizrahi were also on the

receiving end of many

of the cuts that he orchestrated during his time at finance. In the aftermath

of the 2006 election,

it was genuinely uncertain as to what Bibi and Likud more broadly had in store

moving forward.

When it comes to rebuilding a political party, taking it over just before this

epic of a setback does come with a few perks, namely that you have

significantly more say

over it with far fewer people jockeying to take it over. Some of that was

simply because a lot

of the big weeks in Israel were collectively thinking to themselves, "Who would

want that party?"

Nonetheless, he called for and won a leadership race in 2007, with nearly 75%

of the party's support.

It might have been reduced to tiny party status, but hey, it was his tiny party

now.

Increasingly, Bibi began to pivot away from the question of Palestine and

towards Iran.

Hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had taken office back in 2005, and by all

indications was pushing

ahead with the nuclear enrichment program, which Tehran insisted it was for

peaceful energy purposes,

but which many in Israel were convinced was a smokescreen for acquiring a nuke.

Israel wasn't alone in thinking this. The political umbrella of the dissident

Iranian

paramilitary group Majahadine Erkalk, or MEK, went public with reports that

Iran

had been building a secret nuclear program, a report that caused a major global

crisis when

it landed. Well, if there's one thing you could say about Bibi, it's that he's

a firm believer

that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. As stories of Iranian

centrifuges caught

on in the press, his rhetoric became apocalyptic. Speaking of awesome 5,000

attendees of the United

Jewish communities annual gathering that year, he declared that, quote, "It's

1938, and Iran is

Germany," nor was Israel the only place that he was making that argument. In

the US, he was constantly

on television warning of the threat that Iran posed not just to Israel, but to

the wider world.

Given Tehran's periodic inclination to threaten to turn various countries into

seas of flames,

it was not a hard sell. But while Bibi was busy rallying the troops around the

threat of Iran,

the guys at the top in Israel were falling apart. A war with Hezbollah, there's

going to be a lot

of those who had badly damaged the government of Ikhud Olmert, who had taken

over as PM in 2006.

Some corruption charges were beginning to look like they might finish him off.

By the time 2009

rolled around, it was election time in Israel, and after a decade, Bibi was

finally looking as though

he might take back his old job. Coming early 2009, Israel wasn't the only one

with a new leader,

Netanyahu took charge in Jerusalem within a couple of months of Barack Obama

doing the

same in Washington. Beyond timing though, the two couldn't have had less in

common.

Obama was essentially an optimist when it came to foreign policy. He believed

there was nothing

you couldn't sit down with your rivals and reach an agreement on. Netanyahu, as

should be rather

clear by now, believes the complete opposite, strength, resolve, and military

readiness are the

only things that achieve lasting wins. It didn't take long for the two leaders'

differences to

come to the surface. Less than half a year into his presidency, Obama flew to

Cairo to give his

a new beginning speech. It was essentially a reconciliation pitch to the Muslim

world,

presenting a different United States than the version under George W. Bush,

and it quoted from all three Abrahamic faiths, holy texts, in a attempt to say,

"There's not that much differentiating us." The most relevant part of that for

today, though,

had to do with the Palestinian issue. Obama not only demanded a complete halt

to further

settlement construction in the West Bank, which a select few U.S. presidents

had similarly

called for in the past, but described them in far-hearted terms, including by

saying,

"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli

settlements."

Jerusalem had zero warning that this would be taking place, and was further

angered by the fact

that Obama flew to multiple Arab countries without stopping in Israel. But

while the Jewish state

would perhaps rightly read this as a snub, that doesn't mean Bibi had the

bandwidth to

respond in kind, still haunted by his failed first premiership. Netanyahu knew

he couldn't

pick a direct fight with Washington and hope to win, all of which led to his

response at

Bar Elan University, a week and a half after Obama's Cairo speech.

For the first time in his political career, Bibi used the words "Palestinian"

and "state"

in the same sentence. There was, of course, a "gas-assized" asterisk attached

to the proposal.

Palestine would have to recognize Israel not just as a state, but as "the

nation-state" of the

Jewish people give up the right to return inside Israel's current borders,

surrender control

over its own airspace, and in case that list was not exhaustive enough,

agree that Jerusalem would remain under-united Israeli control in perpetuity.

The idea was twofold. Show Americans that Israel was taking Palestinian demands

seriously,

while also loading the solution with so many poison pills that Palestinians

themselves would

never accept it. But for the optimists in Washington, this was basically a case

of,

"Say you tell me there's a chance?" Netanyahu even gave Obama something

concrete on settlements,

agreeing to a 10-month partial freeze on new construction.

Really, though, it was just another way to kick the can down the road.

The talks that were to accompany the freeze went nowhere, making the whole

affair effectively pointless.

But of course, settlements weren't the only question in this era.

There was also the issue of Iran and the extent to which its nuclear program

was advancing.

And it's here that Bibi at last had his chance to shine.

Iran's top scientists began turning up dead, although this was a warm-up

compared to the

Stark's net virus, reportedly developed jointly by the US and Israel,

which infiltrated Iran's Natanz and Richmond facility and caused hundreds of

centrifuges

to essentially self-destruct, while feeding operators' normal-looking readings.

Slowing the program and stopping it entirely were two entirely separate things,

though.

And Bibi would soon discover that the former was a hell of a lot easier than

the latter.

Betting on Red

The next few years saw a steady sirering of the Obama-net-in-Yahoo relationship

particularly after a speech that Obama gave in May 2011,

where he argued not just that there should one day be a Palestinian state,

but that it should be based around the borders drawn in 1967.

In practice, that would have meant Israel giving up most of the West Bank,

while negotiating to keep some of the larger settlement blocks.

What followed would be an epic, bust-up, not exceeded at the Oval Office

until Donald Trump and J.D. Vance decided to lay into Vladimir Zelensky.

In front of the press pool, Bibi spent nearly ten minutes lecturing of

armor about why his proposal was unacceptable.

Those 1967 lines, he argued, were indefensible,

and whatever agreement eventually emerged would have to reflect the fact

that in Netanyahu's words, history will not give the Jewish people another

chance,

and not so subtle reference to the Holocaust.

And while that might sound a bit dramatic to Western ears,

voters in Israel certainly didn't think so.

By now, Gaza was entirely under the control of Hamas,

from where they routinely fired rockets into Israel.

And while the Gaza Strip is mostly surrounded by deserts,

say for Ashkelon and Ash Dodd, the same is not true of the West Bank.

The land there directly overlooks major population centers,

including Jerusalem, usually from higher elevations.

As such, the fear was that a withdrawal to the 1967 borders

would end with rockets crashing down onto scores of Israeli homes.

Still, the problems between Bibi and Obama

weren't just disagreements about the West Bank.

As he grew worried about Iran's nuclear dash,

Netanyahu began to consider military action against Tehran.

In an effort to cover his arse should things head south,

he pushed Obama for assurance that if they actually went through with it,

Washington would have his back.

From 2026, we can see that Obama's call on this was right.

He essentially told Bibi that if he went ahead with it,

it would be a disaster.

Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton, who was then Secretary of State,

said in an interview that she spent hours on the phone with Netanyahu and

others,

often with the Israelis saying things like,

"Our planes are on the tarmac,"

which is code for, "We're about to start bombing."

Her response to that ended up being,

"Well, good luck," and that Israel was always playing games with Washington.

The relationship had gone so far south that Jerusalem had lost any hope in

Obama.

So Bibi pivoted.

Obama was staring down his reelection bid in 2012 against Mitt Romney,

and polls showed that it was set to be close.

From Netanyahu's perspective, there were two important things in Romney's favor.

First, he worked with Bibi while in Boston,

so the two were already on good terms.

Second, he was not shy to blast Obama for being insufficiently supportive

of what he described as America's greatest ally in the region.

For Netanyahu, this was simply too tempting,

even if it did mean breaking with decades of Israeli policy of staying out

of domestic U.S. politics.

Democratic and Republican administrations had disagreed with Israeli

governments

plenty of times before,

but there was a difference between fighting with whoever happened to control

the White House

and appearing to weigh in on an American election.

By 2012, Bibi came just about as close to crossing that line as one could

imagine

without actually stepping over it.

He stopped short of formally endorsing Romney,

but did just about everything else.

He met privately with Romney that summer,

and then the two attended a public event in Jerusalem,

which reinforced the impression that Israel's PM had a clear preference

on who the next president should be.

At the same time, Republican-aligned groups were spending heavily on efforts

to weaken Obama's support with Jewish voters,

who historically vote overwhelmingly Democrat.

The most prominent example of this was Sheldon Adelson,

who had become by this point one of Netanyahu's most important allies

on both sides of the Atlantic.

Five years earlier, Adelson had founded Israel Hayam, a free daily paper

that quickly became the most read in Israel.

This was not some factual, down-the-middle paper, though.

It developed the nickname "Bibi Tottenham," or basically "Bibi Paper,"

for just how loyal it was to him.

Stateside, who were simultaneously becoming one of the replicability's biggest

donors,

this theme of LeCoud and the GOP essentially teeming up.

However, unofficial it may be is one that has not gone away since.

There was one problem with this strategy, at least at the time.

It were only lost.

The anti-Obama ads aimed at Jewish voters,

who by this point largely seemed to want nothing to do with Israel's PM,

failed badly with the overwhelming majority backing Obama for a second term.

That may have been a bit of an embarrassment for Bibi,

but far worse was the fact that he was now staring down four more years

with the guy he had not so discreetly hoped to oust.

American presidents are often more free to pursue whatever policies they want

to go

after during their second term, as they have no re-election bid to think about.

Just witness how Trump is acting in his second term.

If there was one thing both Bibi and Barack could agree on,

it was that it was going to be a long four years.

No holds barred.

After everything that had gone down between them,

you might be thinking to yourself,

Simon surely Obama would have realized that Netanyahu wasn't

really willing to work on a two-state solution.

Well, dear viewer, we hate to say it,

but Obama was either too patient or too naive,

because the rest of his administration would be like that colloquial definition

of insanity,

doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

John Kerry had taken over as Secretary of State from Hillary

around the start of the second term,

and threw himself into restarting negotiations between Israel and the

Palestinians.

Over the next nine months, Kerry was back and forth between the two sides.

He was able to get Israel to release Palestinian prisoners,

and got Abbas to hold off taking gasses to international courts.

But by this point, there were minor side issues,

and the overarching issues that actually defined the Israel-Palestine conflict

were increasingly out of conversation entirely.

It was that old Netanyahu playbook we've seen before.

String things out, run down the clock,

and wait for circumstances to change.

Correctly, as it turned out,

Bibi was hoping the more pro-Israel president would replace Obama.

But not before the American president gave Netanyahu the shock of a lifetime.

It turned out that Washington had been engaged

in secret negotiations with Iran over their nuclear program.

For Netanyahu, this was like getting sucker punched in the stomach

while simultaneously discovering that his wife was having an affair.

To make matters worse, there was nothing he could do.

All he could do was hope the Iranian hardliners sank the deal,

which they were at least able to stall until Iranians elected the reformist

Hassan Rouhani later that year.

And under Rouhani, the deal got rolling again.

Within months, Iran and the US had reached an interim nuclear agreement,

which Netanyahu slammed as a "historic mistake,"

arguing that this would pave Tehran's path to a bomb.

Beyond that, Bibi was furious that the deal didn't take into account

Iran's ballistic missile program,

or its highly sophisticated proxy network across the Middle East.

In the end, Netanyahu chose a strategy

that's still reverberating through US politics to this day.

With Democrats in lockstep behind Obama,

he chose to instead throw his lot fully in with the Republicans.

Israel's ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermot,

formerly held joint US citizenship and was raised in Florida,

worked hand-in-hand with Speaker of the House, John Boehner,

to arrange for Bibi to address a joint session of Congress on the subject of

Iran.

On March 3, 2015, Netanyahu walked into the House chamber and made his case.

The way that he worded it was that a deal with Iran wasn't eliminating Iran's

path to a bomb,

but just delaying it.

For all this pissed off the White House,

Obama never really brought the hammer down on Netanyahu.

This was partially because of the political atmosphere at the time.

Both parties remained committed to preserving the relationship with Israel.

Obama very much wanted his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

to beat Donald Trump and be his successor, so he was boxed in.

As a result, Washington continued supplying Israel with considerable military

aid,

and in September 2016, the two governments actually signed a new

10-year, $38 billion security package, which was the largest US military aid

commitment

ever made at the time.

The only actual move against Netanyahu that Obama would make

came in the weeks of his presidency after Hillary had already lost the election

to Trump.

That December, the UN Security Council voted on Resolution 2334,

declaring Israeli settlements in the occupied territories to have

no legal validity and demanding future constructions stop.

Israel had long counted on the US and their all-powerful veto to save them in

such situations.

But Obama instructed UN ambassadors to mount the power to abstain,

allowing it to pass 14-0.

Bibi was furious, even if its passage didn't have any practical consequences

for his government or plans in the West Bank.

But by then, Obama was already yesterday's news,

and the new guy was looking like the sort of man

Netanyahu could do business with.

Everything he wants.

Despite everything that we know today about how the Bibi-Trump relationship

developed,

it's worth reminding ourselves that in 2016, it wasn't totally clear

just how pro-Israel the new president would turn out to be.

Trump had been pretty supportive of Israel on the campaign trail,

but had campaigned as being the anti-long-time US foreign policy guy,

especially as pertains to the Middle East.

And while that was mostly aimed at conflicts that were widely unpopular in the

states,

including the Iraq War, it also included Israel.

Trump himself had said that he wanted to give the Israel-Palestine issue a shot

and insisted that it be neutral on the matter.

Hillary Clinton had actually criticized Trump as being insufficiently

supportive of Israel,

saying that, quote, "We need steady hands, not a president who says he's

neutral on Monday,

pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who knows what on Wednesday, because everything's

negotiable."

Netanyahu figured Trump out pretty quickly, though, and once he did,

he couldn't have been happier with the new US president.

Trump wasn't just an improvement after Obama,

but quite possibly the most pro-Israel president in American history.

Sheldon Adelson, who clearly saw the potential for a closer alliance,

would come to serve as a bridge between the two.

He threw his weight behind Trump in 2016,

becoming one of the biggest Republican donors of the cycle.

And there were genuine reasons to think Trump and BB could be best friends.

One of the few issues that Trump had been consistent on for years

was the threat that Iran posed to the world,

and he spent the entirety of the 2016 campaign blasting Obama for having been

too weak and giving Tehran two favorable terms.

As such, it wasn't long before the new president had set out dynamiting his

predecessor's legacy.

Before his first year was over, Trump had moved to recognize Jerusalem as the

capital of Israel,

and ordered the US embassy move there.

This was something that previous presidential candidates had campaigned on for

decades,

on a bipartisan basis, but ultimately didn't pull the trigger on,

usually because of ongoing rounds of discussions with the Palestinians.

The fact that he did this so early in his administration was a clear sign of

things to come.

Palestine was a conflict of the past. It has held up presidential ambitions in

the region

for so long and gone absolutely nowhere, so it was just time to move on.

Remember that one, because it's going to play a big role going forward.

It should be knighted here, by the way, that some of Netanyahu's most

enthusiastic supporters in the US

were not necessarily Jewish at all.

BB had spent years developing relationships with evangelical groups like

Christians United for Israel or CUFI.

Many evangelicals were actually more enthusiastic out of the embassy move than

Jews,

something that Trump himself remarked on at the campaign,

stopped saying, "That's for the evangelicals. They're more excited about that

than Jewish people."

Aside from recognizing Jerusalem, there was a move by the US to recognize

Israel's sovereignty

over the Golan Heights, which Israel had captured from Syria in the aftermath

of the Six-Day War and later annexed.

And then, of course, there was the fate of the nuclear agreement.

Now, the way this gets remembered today is that Trump walked into the Oval

Office

and on day one basically fed the agreement into the shredder.

In reality, though, it was a little more complicated than that.

Iran was initially complying with the deal, and first term Trump clearly felt

he couldn't just

rip it up because he thought Obama sucked.

So, BB helped him find a reason.

In January 2018, Mossad carried out a covert raid on a nuclear archive facility

in Tehran

and made off with no fewer than 100,000 documents and digital files

without anybody noticing.

Those files showed that prior to 2003, Iran had gotten way further on the

nuclear program than

they had admitted, or anyone had suspected, including warhead design,

underground testing,

and plans for several nuclear weapons.

The extent to which people ever really bought the whole nuclear program is only

for energy.

Line from Tehran is questionable, but if anyone was still under that impression

this just about killed whatever was left of it.

It also boosted the argument that Tehran was inherently untrustworthy about its

program.

In light of this, and true to his campaign promise, Trump withdrew from the JCP

OA.

He followed the withdrawal with his maximum pressure campaign,

re-imposing sanctions and trying to cripple the Islamic Republic economically.

For Netanyahu, this must have been like blowing out the candles on his birthday

cake

and realizing that all of his wishes have come true.

Just two short years ago, he'd been stuck with a Democrat president who was

soft on Iran,

cared about the Palestinians, and froze him out of important negotiations.

And now here he was, watching a Republican not just take a harder line with his

enemies,

but go further than most presidents had ever gone before.

But while this may have been the high point for BB regarding America,

remember the rule of gravity.

What goes up must eventually come crashing down.

Go around them.

For all the victories that Netanyahu had been racking up with the Trump

administration,

there was still one problem that never really went away.

The Palestinians.

By this point in the late 2010s, talk of a two-state solution had basically

gone

from being a serious policy proposal to an unfunny joke.

Some in the international community were still calling for it,

but it hadn't gone anywhere meaningful since the Clinton administration.

And still, it remained something that Israel could not shake off.

Not to imply that Jerusalem cares particularly about all the UN resolutions.

What Jerusalem does care about is the fact that ever since their independence

in 1948,

they've been the old kid on the block.

The overwhelming majority of the Arab world still refused to recognize them.

They were able to win over Egypt and Jordan.

But outside of that, nobody dared to move in favor of normalization.

The reason?

The ongoing dispute with the Palestinians.

By this point, BB had arrived at a two-prong approach.

First, make sure there was never one unified Palestinian leadership capable of

forcing the

issue back onto the table, especially not one palatable to the international

community.

And second, convince the Arab world that they didn't need to wait around for

the

Palestinian situation to be settled before dealing with Israel.

The first part created one of the more surprising elements of Netanyahu's

premiership, his policy towards Hamas.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank was no friend of Israel,

but it recognized their right to exist and was far easier for countries around

the world to get

hyped. Seen through that lens, Hamas was actually something of an asset for

Israeli interests,

which Israeli ministers said on the record, while the PA was a liability.

If Hamas was able to keep its hold on Gaza, while the PA increasingly looked

too weak to

govern even its carved-up equivalent of the West Bank, the Netanyahu could

throw his hands in the

air and say, "See? I have no partner to work towards peace with."

And so, in 2018, his government encouraged Qatar to begin funneling millions of

dollars

into Gaza to prop up Hamas, while increasingly squeezing the PA financially.

Officially, this was about keeping Gaza from collapsing, but at a LeCoud

meeting in 2019,

Netanyahu was reported to have made his motives far more explicit.

Anyone opposed to Palestinian statehood should support the money flowing,

because this cash helped prevent one from emerging.

Now, there's more to that story.

Of course, even without any Israeli influence, the PA has been spectacularly

corrupt and incompetent.

Their current president, Mahmoud Abbas, is currently 90 years old and serving

the 22nd

year of a four-year term. He's just refused to hold elections ever since.

Still, Netanyahu's strategy at the time seems clear, and it also seemed to work

An absolutely massive breakthrough came in 2020 with the Abraham Accords.

The deal was originally between the UAE and Israel to normalize relations,

though it would later go on to include Bahrain and Morocco, and was signed at

the White House,

with a delighted-looking Trump standing between the two.

Even more importantly for Netanyahu, the deal seems to have come together

not because Abu Dhabi was desperate to make money and willing to overlook the

Palestinians

to do so, but because they were getting increasingly worried about Tehran.

Abu Dhabi, along with much of the Sunni Arab world,

was deeply alarmed by the concessions it saw Washington being willing to make

to Iran.

For them, the issue wasn't nukes, but Tehran expanding its influence via proxy

forces.

They believed that the sanctions relief that JCPuhr provided Iran

would allow Tehran to funnel additional cash into building up those forces

across the region,

and were largely vindicated in that fear.

This was not helped by Obama saying that Saudi Arabia,

longed the major Sunni power, and Iran needed to share the neighborhood.

That fear increasingly pushed the Gulf states and Israel into the same camp,

even if neither side was particularly eager to advertise it at first.

Intelligence sharing and quiet security cooperation have been blossoming for

years,

largely out of concern that they could not rely exclusively on the US for

protection.

But while the 2020 deal sought Netanyahu's score a major win at home,

the wheels were actually coming off.

It wouldn't have been long before Israel's consummate survivor was forced to

experience

something he hadn't felt in a long time, the sting of political defeat.

Vote, vote, vote.

Even as his foreign policy was working out perhaps even better than he had

expected,

Beebe's domestic political career was being sunk by a steady drip drip of

scandals.

Israeli police had spent years investigating him over a series of corruption

allegations,

and by 2019, they had developed three separate criminal cases.

The first, known as Case 1000, included some $200,000 worth of cigars,

champagne, and other gifts that Beebe and Sarah had received from their well-

off friends.

In exchange, they had used his position in Israel's political system to help

set friends with various

personal and business matters. Case 4000, though, was easily the most serious

of the bunch.

Prosecutors accused Netanyahu of handing out regulatory favors from his

government position,

worth hundreds of millions of shekels to Israeli telecom giant Bezek,

in exchange for favorable coverage on their affiliated news website, Walla.

This case added a bribery charge on top of your more average run-of-the-mill

corruption charges.

Netanyahu denied the whole thing, butchering all three cases as an effort by

hostile prosecutors,

police, and media figures to get done through the courts.

What his opponents had thus far proven incapable of doing on the ballot.

Whether or not a year by that explanation is something that we'll leave up to

you,

but politically speaking, this was becoming a serious problem.

In February 2019, the Attorney General announced his intention to indict

Netanyahu,

pending a hearing just as the country was heading into an election.

Initially, the April 2019 election appeared to be another victory for Beebe.

Likud won 35 seeds, and there appeared to be enough seats among the smaller

right-wing parties

to get Netanyahu back into government. The key word there, though, is initially.

One of those right-wing parties was led by Avigdor Lieberman, a former

Netanyahu ally,

who had quit an earlier coalition over the belief that Beebe was too soft on

Gaza.

The two had largely patched that difference up, but Lieberman, who represented

a more military-oriented

faction of the Israeli electorate, refused to take part in a coalition unless

two specific parties

shass and united Torah Judaism accepted changes to Israel's conscription policy.

Those two parties represent Israel's Haredi population, who have historically

been exempted

from the draft. When Israel was founded, they were a tiny part of the then

overwhelmingly secular

country, but between birth rates and immigration, they now make up around 14%,

and more than a third

of all Jewish babies born in Israel, a Haredi. As such, exemption is today a

major political issue.

Netanyahu was caught. There was no way either of the Haredi parties would budge

on the issue,

but Lieberman wouldn't back down either. And so began a rollercoaster for

few years in Israeli politics, as election after election ultimately began

boiling down to a single

fault line. How did you feel about Netanyahu? You could be as right-wing as

they come,

a practicing orthodox Jew and pro-settlements in the West Bank and still end up

on the opposite

side of the aisle because you thought BB had to go. This dynamic further

hardened in early 2020,

when Netanyahu was formally indicted on charges of fraud and breach of trust in

all three corruption

cases. It wasn't required to resign, but from then on, his legal survival was

impossible to

completely separate from his political survival. Israelis went to the polls an

additional four

times over the next four years, largely because the country's political system

was structurally

unable to answer the question of who should govern. One of those times, in

March 2021,

Netanyahu's party once again placed first, but had no clear path to getting a

majority of seats

in the Knesset. The coalition he had hoped to ride to victory came up nine

seats short of

a majority, and by this point, other right-wing parties had emerged that

campaigned on a platform

that was

basically right-wing stuff but never BB. Parties that simply could not enter

into a coalition with him.

For the first time since his 2009 victory, Netanyahu found himself locked out

of power.

This paved the way for quite possibly the most ideologically peculiar coalition

in Israeli history.

Nef Tali Bennett, largely to BB's right, teamed up with the more centrist

Yair Lapid's Yesh Artid, along with a whole host of other parties, including Ra

'am,

one of the Arab parties in the Knesset.

And for the first time in a decade, Israel had a majority government

without Benjamin Netanyahu sitting atop it. As the new government led by Nef T

ali Bennett to

office, Netanyahu made one final speech as PM to the legislative body, simply

saying,

"We'll be back. With God's help, it will happen a lot earlier than you think,"

end quote.

And do you know what? He was right. A difficult coalition

The floor with Bennett's coalition soon became apparent.

While everyone involved agreed that Netanyahu was an embarrassment and

liability,

that was about as far as it went.

When it came to actually governing the country on a daily basis,

there was precious little holding the thing together.

In the end, the coalition managed to limp on for a little under a year,

with BB looking for any and we really mean any issue that could pick off enough

members

to bring the whole thing down.

By spring 2022, heads succeeded.

Defections from Bennett's own Yamina party cost the coalition its majority.

By June, it was clear that the government had reached its end.

Bennett agreed to dissolve the Knesset, handed over the reins to Yair Lapid to

serve as the

caretaker PM and the country headed off for its fifth election.

For Netanyahu, that meant the comeback he had promised was within reach,

but he was going to need every single vote that he could muster.

The problem was that two of the smaller parties he needed,

religious Zionism and Jewish power, were pulling dangerously close to the

minimum threshold required to make it into the Knesset.

If either fell below it, those votes would effectively disappear,

potentially taking BB's comeback with them.

Out of desperation, he personally broken an agreement,

bringing the two together on a single electoral slate to ensure every last vote

mattered.

It worked and the United Party platform won a total of 14 seats,

which would come to play a central role in his premiership.

But in a country where most parties are some variation of right wing,

even the words far right don't really do these guys justice.

Bezalose Motrich's religious Zionism party is extreme in its own right.

But it's Itamar Benghvir's Jewish power party that takes the cake.

Benghvir was convicted of supporting a designated terrorist organization under

Israeli law back in 2007, and the IDF had refused to draft him because of how

extreme he was.

He was also well known for keeping a portrait of Barack Goldstein in his living

room,

the Jewish extremist who had massacre 29 worshippers in Hebron in 1994.

And while he did ultimately take the picture down,

he admitted he only did so because it was causing too much drama given his

electoral ambitions.

Yet, when it came to forming a government,

BB didn't just stick him somewhere where the damage to be able to do was

minimal.

Benghvir was handed the Old Public Security Ministry,

which he demanded be refashioned as the National Security Ministry.

From there, he's basically run the country's police ever since.

Smotrich, meanwhile, will get the finance ministry,

which includes substantial powers over civilian affairs in the West Bank.

And here we get to the weirdest part of the government

BB cobbled together in 2022.

While many in the West saw it as just more evidence of Netanyahu drifting ever

further to the right,

for those that follow Israeli politics, it was all sorts of strange.

Sure, BB had been willing to do business with them, especially Smotrich in

years gone by.

But he had built and then rebuilt his entire party,

and partially the country,

around being a westernized outpost in the Middle East,

in no small part by trying to keep religious extremists away from real

governing power.

He had even gone to great lengths to keep a hardline religious nationalist man,

named Moshe Feiglin, as far away from power as possible.

And while Feiglin did win a sport on Likud's ticket by way of the party's

primary system,

he ultimately quit, having been targeted by BB.

So exactly why he was willing to hand two genuine extremists this much real

power

was something he needed to answer.

During a conversation on NPR in the U.S. when he was asked point blank what he

was doing in an

alliance with someone like Benkvere, BB didn't blink.

He simply stated, "They are joining me. I'm not joining them.

I'll have two hands firmly on the steering wheel."

Just how effective he's been at holding back the more extreme partners in his

coalition is for

you to judge. Within days of taking office, netting out his government was

already moving on

another project that would consume much of the year. Conservatives had long

argued that the

Supreme Court had steadily granted itself powers that it was never supposed to

have.

This wasn't entirely without merit. Israel, much like the U.K., has no single

codified constitution

with its parliament being extraordinarily powerful.

Unlike Westminster, though, whose acts are ultimately sovereign and can supers

ede the high court,

Israel's Supreme Court started to treat its basic law as giving it the

authority to strike down

the Knesset's legislation. The exact specifications of this are a conversation

for another date,

but long story short, the government proposed solution went way further than

merely seeking

to restore balance. Instead, it would give the governing coalition far more

control over

appointments while dramatically cutting the court's ability to check it.

Once the details came out, the backlash was overwhelming.

On a weekly basis, hundreds of thousands of Israelis began marching through the

streets

of Tel Aviv. The protests spanned Israeli society, but contained one particular

that was of great concern to Netanyahu, the military.

A growing number of reservists, including pilots and intelligence personnel,

warned that they would stop volunteering if the overall went through.

Defense Minister Jive Gallant, who went public with his concern that the

political crisis

was beginning to damage military readiness. Netanyahu tried firing, and that

only made things worse,

setting off another explosion of protests, and even a general strike that shut

down parts of the

country. Vibi ultimately bagged down and paused much of the overhaul, though

his government later

pushed parts of it through. While all this was going on, Vibi was desperately

trying to get

control of the situation. In no small part, there were a continued play on the

international front.

At the time, it was starting to look like Saudi Arabia, always symbolic for

hosting both Mecca

and Medina, two of the most holy cities in Islam, might be on its way to

following in the Emirates

footsteps and joining the Abraham Accords. As it would turn out, though, Hamas

had other plans.

October

The story of October the 7th has been so well told by now that we won't cover

it in any depth there.

I mean, you'll almost certainly already know the details, the worst Israeli

intelligence

failure since the onkapore war, if not ever. The brutal massacre of hundreds of

civilians,

including festival goers, children and the elderly, some shot, some tortured to

death,

some burned alive in their homes. The horrific sex parlance that accompanied a

terror attack

so deadly it has been called Israel's 9/11. It's also the single event that

reshaped the Middle East

in ways the world is still coming to terms with. But for Netanyahu, in autumn

of 2023,

it was also something else. Fine evidence that his Gaza policy had been an un

mitigated disaster.

As we discussed earlier, Vibi had been personally involved in keeping Qatari

money flowing to Hamas

for years on the theory that a bought-off Hamas was a contained Hamas. And that

was public knowledge

in Israel. By lunchtime on October the 7th, that theory was dead, and as the

country grappled

with the worst loss of civilian life in its history, it was starting to look

like curtains for Likud.

There was a very personal piece to this attack, too. The leader of a mass in

Yaya Sinwah, had previously been imprisoned in Israel, but was released in 2011

as part

of a prisoner exchange. While Netanyahu was not the first PM to agree to a lops

ided release of a

large number of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a much smaller number of

Israelis,

he had been the one who'd signed off on Sinwah's release. And that wasn't

secret either.

Within a week of the attacks, one poll had Likud collapsing in a hypothetical

election

from 32 seats down to just 19, while former IDF Chief Benny Gantz's National

Unity Party

surged all the way to 41. Israelis had looked around during the chaos of the

attack and decided to

blame the man who had spent years telling them that he was the only one who

could stop

exactly this sort of thing. The self-starred security guy had now overseen the

worst security

lapse in modern Israeli history. Netanyahu also didn't win himself any sympathy

points in the aftermath, while several senior Israeli officials, including IDF

Chief of Staff

Herzi Helavi and Shin Bette, Director Ronan Barr, began publicly accepting

their share of the blame.

Netanyahu sidestepped the question entirely, insisting that investigations into

how the attack

happened would come after the war that was to come. In fact, he actually even

tried to deflect

blame by insisting that none of his security chiefs had ever warned him that

Hamas was planning

an attack and that they had actually informed him that the group was deterred.

The backlash

from that was the immediate and intense, even Gantz couldn't stomach that one,

and blasted

BB for trying to shift blame during a national emergency. Ultimately, Netanyahu

deleted the

post in a matter of hours and issued a very rare apology, saying, "I was wrong.

I apologize."

Beyond late night tweets, Netanyahu's overarching strategy in response to the

attack

was far more BBS. Win the war and make sure something like that can never

happen again.

And on that front, he would find the public willing to ride along with him.

Israelis might have been pissed off at their PM, but they were downright livid

with Hamas.

Their appetite for what they were willing to tolerate in terms of longer-term

military commitments

began to shift accordingly. The old approach of periodically bombing Hamas,

degrading its

capabilities and hopefully buying a few years of quiet, only to repeat the

process all over again,

known in security circles as mowing the lawn, was out. And more importantly, a

core thesis of Israeli

security had also been shattered, which was the idea that a strong border would

be able to withstand

whatever its enemies would be able to throw at it. Those shifts meant that

whatever was to come

next was not going to be merely a conventional battle to punish Hamas, take out

some of its

leaders, or even to cripple it as an organization. Rather, this was pitched as

being the final battle,

and BB was crystal clear in his language. Israel had to quote, "Remember what

Amalek did to you.

We remember, and we fight." That's a reference to a series of clashes in the

Hebrew Bible,

which have come to symbolize a kind of permanent existential enemy of the

Jewish people.

Now, to be clear, we're not hitting Netanyahu for using religiously inspired

language. This is,

after all, the Middle East, where religion is at the heart of daily life. But

the association

between Amalek and either Hamas, Gazans, or both, is enormously inflammatory

and served to

dehumanize the population of the Strip before the IDF rolled in. And what was

to come would be only

one of a large number of conflicts that BB was about to launch. Conflicts that

would reshape

the entire Middle East. Total War. Netanyahu has spent the better part of 20

years arguing that

his country's withdrawal from Gaza was a historic mistake, and he was now going

to get the chance

to demonstrate what his alternative looked like. And it turns out to be much,

much more ambitious.

The plan was to roll into Gaza, destroy Hamas both as a military and governing

force,

bring the hostages home, and make sure that Gaza would never be able to pose

any kind of

threat to Israel. In other words, Israel was going for total victory.

Now, as you might imagine, getting from point A to point Z left a considerable

amount of question

marks along the way. Hamas had basically total control of the entire enclave

since 2007,

and it showed they had constructed a labyrinth of underground tunnels inside

which they were

able to stash all their various weapons. Even if the IDF managed to find and

destroy the tunnels,

though, there was still the question of everything sitting above ground. Gaza

is one of the most

densely populated places on Earth, with Hamas building parts of its military

infrastructure

in, around, and under civilian areas. Any combat operation in these conditions

was going to be

ugly. Israel ultimately could, and ultimately did, inflict extreme damage on

Hamas' military

capabilities, but it came at an enormous cost. And when we say enormous, we're

not exaggerating.

By the summer of 2024, the UN estimated that roughly nine out of every 10

people in Gaza

had been displaced from their homes. And a few months later, another report

estimated that the average Gaza had been displaced six times, with some as many

as 19.

That was Israel's strategy to get around the issues of operating in such a

densely populated area,

evacuate them. The only problem with that, of course, is that Gaza was already

overcrowded,

so when nine out of ten residents were told to move, there was nowhere for them

to go.

Hundreds of thousands of them ended up crammed into tent camps and makeshift

shelters with

inadequate water, food supplies, or waste disposal infrastructure.

And even after evacuation orders were lifted for certain areas, many simply had

nowhere to

return to. By 2024, nearly 62 percent of Gaza's housing stock had been either

damaged or destroyed.

Today, that number exceeds three-quarters, and some estimates put it as high as

92 percent.

Even Washington was starting to lose patience under the Biden administration.

After an Israeli airstrike killed seven world central kitchen aid workers in

April 2024,

Biden got Bebe on the phone and opened with "Bebe Man, what the f*** doing?"

When Netanyahu pushed back, Biden reminded him that he could cut Israel off

from military aid

at the snap of a finger, saying, "You think I'm Santa Claus? No Santa and

Israel, pal."

Ultimately, though, this threat never really materialised.

Biden held up one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, but pretty much all other aid

carried on unabated.

Internationally, though, it's a different story. South Africa was at the

forefront of this effort,

bringing Israel before the International Court of Justice in December 2023,

accusing the country

of committing genocide in the enclave. The court still hasn't ruled one way or

the other,

and is likely still years away from a final verdict.

The International Criminal Court did issue a restaurant in Netanyahu, along

with then-defense

minister, Yoav Gallant, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,

including the use of

starvation as a method of warfare. Netanyahu categorically rejected the entire

indictment

against his government. In his view, Israel was conducting a war of self-

defense against a group

that had proven his father's endless warnings right. The second you let your

guard slip,

they will destroy you. What's more, BB argued, a mass intentionally hit behind

civilian populations

in order to maximise the cost of fighting them. Sure, civilians might be dying,

but that was what

happens when terrorists use ordinary people as human shields. Again, you'll

already have your own

views on this, and we're not here to try and change them. But we will highlight

one criticism

that people began making, even at the time. What was Netanyahu's theory of

victory here?

What exactly was supposed to replace Hamas if this total victory was actually

achieved?

BB refused to simply hand Gaza over to the Palestinian Authority in the West

and there were genuine concerns that the PA would be able to even govern it

anyway.

Well, at the time of recording, we still don't have a clear answer to those

questions.

The Israeli Defense Forces are currently occupying somewhere around 70% of the

strip,

and while the restrictions on food coming in have improved to a degree,

the situation there remains dire. By August 2026, Gaza's Health Ministry

was reporting that more than 73,000 Palestinians had been killed since the war

began,

and while there's some debate over the precise figures, plus the mixing of

combatants and civilians

in the count, no one is arguing that the war has been anything but massively

destructive.

Gaza has truly taken on an outsized role in the Middle East and beyond,

nowhere more so than in BB's own thinking.

October 7th had upended the previous thinking on what could and couldn't be

tolerated on Israel's

border, and Gaza was only one of the threats he wanted to deal with.

The War widens.

To see where else BB had a site set, we need to rewind a little bit as well.

The Iranian proxy force in Lebanon had opened fire from their territory the day

after October 7th,

trying to walk a delicate balance between supporting Hamas without going so all

out

that Israel would be forced into a two-front war with them.

That's not to say they were delicate here, some 60,000 Israeli civilians had to

evacuate

their homes in the country's north. But for most of the first year, the

balancing act

mostly worked. Israel wanted to be fully focused on Gaza, and Hezbollah were

just going to have to

wait. But to be clear, this was just a temporary reprieve.

The new Israeli security doctrine demanded enemies not be allowed to build up

forces

along their borders. So, on September 17th, 2024, Netanyahu authorized one of

the most

audacious operations in Mossad history, Operation Grimbeeper.

You see, Hezbollah had grown concerned that Israel was tracking their phones,

so they decided to go old school, switching over to pages.

In a twist of fate, though, Mossad had managed to set up a decoy company

selling pages which

contained explosives hidden in them. Hezbollah, in one of the worst procurement

decisions of all time,

chose this company to do business with. It would only be in September of 2024

that

the group's leadership would discover a what an error that made.

Over two days, the pages started blowing up across Lebanon, killing at least 42

and

wounding more than 3,000. While innocent civilians were among those caught up

in the blasts,

including Hezbollah members who unthinkingly grabbed Dad's page for him from a

purely

military perspective, the operation was a success. When it was all over, the

guys running Hezbollah

were the ones who had, just a week prior, but deemed too junior to have their

own pages.

As for BB, well, he was more than happy to make sure Israelis knew the order to

trigger blasts

came from his office. The pages, though, were only the first round of what was

to come.

Over the following weeks, Israel launched a massive air campaign across Lebanon,

killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a strike on Beirut, and then

invaded parts of the

country's south. By the time it was over, more than a million Lebanese, a fifth

of the little

country's population had been displaced. If Israel's plan for what was to come

next in Gaza

seemed haphazard, though, Lebanon was practically an afterthought. Israel's a

long history of

intervention in the country, including an 18-year occupation that ended in a

rather

unceremonious withdrawal in 2000, and BB largely seems to have decided that

Lebanon

just wasn't worth that much focus. At the end of 2024, he accepted a joint U.S.

and

French proposal that called for Hezbollah to move north of the Latani River and

the Lebanese Armed

Forces to move in to ensure the area stayed demilitarized. The problem with

that was that it

required a state functional enough to oversee all of this across the entire

Lebanese south,

which the government in Beirut at the time was anything but. The country had

been without a

president for over two years on account of Hezbollah blocking parliament. If

they couldn't even

overcome Hezbollah on that, then how were they supposed to demilitarize the

nation's south?

There was one other major event to influence Netanyahu's thinking that year,

though.

In late 2024, longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was overthrown, and

while the ins and outs are a

little too complex for this video, the key point is that it gave BB an extra

reason to believe

Israel could wipe out all of its enemies. By this point, Hamas was in ruins,

Hezbollah was still reeling from grim beeper, and now Iran's closest Arab ally

had been forced

to flee to Moscow. And that seems to have drawn BB's attention back to Tehran.

Suddenly looking

isolated and vulnerable with its proxy network decimated, the Islamic Republic

was clearly

a shadow of its former self. And that seems to have convinced Netanyahu that

now was the perfect

time to fulfill his other great security ambition. All the marbles.

For all the enemies that Netanyahu had accumulated over his career,

there's always been one sitting above the rest. Hamas could massacre Israelis,

Hezbollah could fire thousands of rockets across the border, and the Houthis

could do

their thing off the coast of Yemen. But in BB's telling of the story, these

were secondary issues,

symptoms of the great sickness that had long plagued the Middle East, Iran.

And by this point, Israel had clearly demonstrated how vulnerable Iran was.

Back in April 2024, after an Israeli strike held senior Iranian commanders in

Damascus,

Tehran launched hundreds of drones and missiles directly at Israel for the

first time.

That back and forth was followed by yet another barrage in October 2024 in

response to Israel

killing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. In both cases, Iranian missiles did

far less damage

than anyone had anticipated, while the Israeli response managed to cripple Iran

's air defenses.

Suddenly, Tehran no longer looked quite so dangerous.

By early 2025, BB believed that a window for dealing with Tehran had been

opened,

though who knew how long it would be before Islam shot. Iran's isolation

combined with

indications from Israeli intelligence that Tehran had resumed secret weapon

ization work

presented a unique window of opportunity, one the Israeli PM was determined to

take.

That same year, Netanyahu authorized Operation Rising Lion to destroy or

severely damage Iran's

nuclear program, via targeted strikes on various facilities, while also

targeting

the ballistic missile infrastructure Tehran could use to retaliate with.

The operation went about as well as BB could have hoped Iran's air defenses

were cut through

like they were Swiss cheese. Israel achieved air dominance over every major

Iranian city within

48 hours or less, and they absolutely wreaked havoc on nuclear sites, missile

facilities,

and more over the course of the 12-day war. Even better, from Netanyahu's

perspective,

this all went down at a time when the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history

had

returned to the White House. While Biden had repeatedly criticized Israel's

conduct in Gaza,

he had largely avoided restricting military aid. At the same time, though,

he was also never going to wave through a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran.

Trump, though, was more than happy to have America join in on the fun,

authorizing the limited Operation Midnight Hammer against Fordeaux, Natanz, and

Ishvahan.

The three nuclear sites Israel was most concerned about. American B2s dropped

enormous bunker-buster bombs on the deeply buried facilities at Fordeaux and

Natanz,

giving Netanyahu what Israel itself simply didn't have the firepower to do on

its own.

Trump ultimately called a truce as the war was approaching the two-week mark.

BB, we can only imagine, was enormously frustrated by this. He initially didn't

even

want to call off the operation, but was ultimately forced to when Trump front

ran him

and preemptively announce to ceasefire on Israel's behalf.

Washington was insistent that they wanted to give diplomacy another shot.

In the end, though, the seeming ease with which the U.S. and Israel won the 12-

day war

were tempt all those involved to do something deeply unwise.

And so we get to the Iran War, a what Jerusalem and Washington called Operation

Roaring Lion,

an epic fury, respectively. Opening with the decapitation strike that killed

much of Iran's

senior leadership, the war appears to have been conceived as a quick conflict.

The American equivalent of Vladimir Putin's three-day special military

operation in Ukraine,

and just like Putin's drive on Kiev, it would soon deteriorate into an endless,

unpopular slog.

For those who want the details, we have produced a lot of videos about the Iran

War

that you are welcome to watch. The fighting also spilled back into Lebanon,

where Hezbollah opened fire on Israel in support of the Islamic Republic,

which prompted another Israeli invasion that displaced over a million.

But for now, we should discuss how it impacted our central figure, Benjamin

Netanyahu.

Despite this arguably being the moment that it spent his entire life planning

for,

it's hard to look at the outcome and conclude that BB was ready for it.

Israel went into the war, openly talking about regime change and encouraging

Iranians to rise

up. At the time of recording, that regime remains in place. Worse, it seems

more hardline than ever.

Recently, an Israeli poll found that more than 90% of the country thinks Iran

won the 2026 war.

Prior to launching the assault, it wasn't uncommon to see headlines in the

worst about how Israel

had humiliated its enemies and reshaped them at least. Today, though, the

feeling seems to be that

Netanyahu finally overreached and may have left his nation far weaker as a

result.

Now, look, since these long-form videos take quite a long time to produce. We

're not going to talk

about the fallout from the Iran War in too much depth. Anything may have

happened since we

pressed record, and we don't want to make some sweeping conclusion, only to

discover that it's

been superseded by events. Instead, we now want to turn our attention to what

may be the defining

question of Netanyahu's career. The question is no longer what he believed

Israel had to do,

but what all of it actually accomplished. Was it worth it?

So, at the end of our video, then, where's that leave us and the Middle East

more broadly?

Well, if there's one thing that Benjamin Netanyahu has been remarkably

consistent about across the

better part of five decades, it's his view of security.

Bibi grew up believing that threats rarely disappear on their own, that

weakness tends to

invite violence rather than goodwill, and the countries which wait until

dangers become obvious

have usually waited too long. Some of this came from his father's deeply

pessimistic reading of

Jewish history certainly, but there was plenty more that reinforced it through

his life. Namely,

that while allies could be valuable and diplomacy could play a role, they were

no substitute for

Israel being strong enough in its own right. No substitute for the absolute

clarity that

comes with the idea that if you hit Israel, Israel hilts back and a thousand

times harder

for most of his political career. Netanyahu's chief complaint was that Israel

hadn't fully

learned that lesson, and in at least that respect, he's decisively won the

argument.

Three decades ago, when he was the leader of the anti-Oslo movement, there was

plenty of support

on both sides of the issue. Today, opposing it is essentially a prerequisite

for office.

Barely one in five Jewish Israelis support a two-state solution, and even Gadi

Isancott,

his main rival to be the next PM, said this summer that people still advocating

for one,

don't understand the depth of the conflict. Bibi obviously didn't move the

country there alone.

The Second Intivada, a mass-taking Gaza, failed negotiations, and October the 7

all shaped it along the way. But he spent decades arguing that this was exactly

where the peace

process would lead, and the Israel of today is far closer to his worldview than

the one that

existed when he entered politics. Whatever historians ultimately make of that

shift,

it guarantees that the name Benjamin Netanyahu will be discussed for decades to

come.

And while we'll never know exactly how things would have played out in a world

where October

the 7th didn't happen, Netanyahu has pushed that argument significantly further

since the attacks.

Strength, in his view, is no longer about deterring Israel's enemies or making

them think twice before

attacking. Israel was already strong on October 6th, and the attack happened

anyway.

Increasingly, it means outright destroying opponents so they can't attack even

if they wanted to.

And that's where his whole "New Middle East" project starts to run in to

serious trouble.

Netanyahu has demonstrated that he's not afraid of using military force. But

that was never really

the question, and proving that Israel is exceptional at blowing things up doesn

't necessarily move

the needle much. Inherently, attached to all of this war and bloodshed was a

promise.

That this was something bigger that a more permanent sense of security would be

waiting on the other

side. And that's the part that's been considerably harder to find. Now look, we

're recording this

before the election, so the result is still up in the air from where we're

sitting. But even if

Bibi ekes out a win, it's hard to argue that the opposition's criticism of his

conduct these

last few years will simply melt away. Naftali Bennett has repeatedly criticized

Bibi for failing

to turn the IDF's battlefield victories into lasting security achievements. Y

air Lapid has

given perhaps the most memorable retort to Bibi speeches discussing his grandi

ose plans for reshaping

the region. He said that Bibi was missing one important word from that, quoting, "Almost.

You almost changed the Middle East. And it always turns out in the end that it

hasn't changed."

Hanging over all that is October 7 itself. Remarkably, nearly three years on

from that day,

there has yet to be an independent state commission into the attack and the

failures that led to it.

This has become a massive issue in the elections, where there has been a steady

stream of news

emerging about what Bibi allegedly knew in the lead up to the attack. In fact,

we dedicated an

entire episode to that and won't rehash all the details here. But the long and

short of it

is that there have been multiple reports that multiple Arab leaders warned him

multiple times

that Hamas was planning something big. And if the reports are to be believed, B

ibi didn't do

much of anything, or at least not enough to make a difference. Eisenhower has

called for

a criminal probe against the PM, while another MK, Avidor Lieberman, is

outright alleging treason.

Even if Netanyahu remains in power or is briefly ejected only to return again,

these criticisms will not go away, not so long as the wounds of October 7

remains so raw.

Especially since the criticism goes beyond the attacks themselves,

and gets to Netanyahu's broader approach to responsibility after October 7.

Yai Lapid, for example, has hammered Bibi for presiding over a government where, quote,

"no one takes responsibility, no one says, I apologize, I'm ashamed," end quote.

While Gant has gone further than anyone else saying "the public is not stupid,

the only reason a state commission of inquiry is not being established is an

attempt to escape

responsibility," end quote. Take it together. Their arguments are that the same

political strategies

that made Netanyahu such a survivor in politics also make him deeply reluctant

to accept

responsibility when something went wrong on his watch. And after three years of

spectacular

success against Israel's enemies, it's hard to argue that the Iran war didn't

go deeply

spectacularly wrong. And that's where we leave Benjamin Netanyahu, heading into

yet another

election after nearly two decades of being in charge. While political bets

against Netanyahu

have historically aged as well as Hummus left out in the Negev Sun, he

genuinely has his back

against the wall this time around. As such, there's a decent chance this video

becomes a sort of

epitaph for his career. Maybe it'll turn out to simply be yet another chapter

in the longest and

perhaps most consequential political career in modern Israeli history. Thank

you for watching.
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