BIBI

Long-winded memoir from the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history.

Two themes run throughout the monotonous narrative: Netanyahu’s admiration for his older brother, Yoni, who was killed during the special operations raid to free hostages taken by terrorists at Entebbe Airport in 1976, and the constant necessity of Israel to defend itself against aggressors. Born in Tel Aviv in 1949 to secular Jews with deep Zionist family ties, Bibi, as he was called, lived in various places in the U.S., including a stint as a student of architecture at MIT, but the excitement over the Six-Day War in 1967 brought Bibi swiftly home to start his military training. Yoni’s untimely death inspired his work in founding The Jonathan Institute, an organization against international terrorism, through which he would first meet many of the conservative intellectuals who supported his later political campaigns. From businessman to appointed “deputy chief of mission” in Israel’s embassy in Washington, D.C., Bibi made his mark as a public communicator of Israel’s point of view. “I tried to speak my mind, speak my heart, and above all speak plainly,” he writes in characteristically flat fashion. After a few years as a U.N. ambassador, the author ascended the ladder in the Likud Party, and he narrowly beat Shimon Peres for the position of prime minister in 1996, when he was just 46. Beginning in 2003, when he became finance minister, his “free market revolution”—privatization, cutting welfare, and crushing unions—picked up steam. Reelected as prime minister in 2009, he doubled down against Iran’s nuclear capabilities and in destroying terrorist networks, especially Hamas. He famously came to loggerheads with Barack Obama, while with Donald Trump, he was able to see several “missions accomplished”—e.g., normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and the moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Now the leader of the opposition party again, Netanyahu seems to be scheming for a return to power.

Hardly a charm offensive, this is a straightforward account and defense of the author’s hard-line positions.