Bloomberg深度报道称内塔尼亚胡或在10月27日以色列选举中落败，但其对伊朗、加沙及周边驻军的强硬路线将延续

Late one evening in June, a studio audience on Channel 14 — Israel’s equivalent of Fox News — was told that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on his way to the set. This was for a nightly 9 p.m. show called The Patriots, with anchors who swear by him and an audience that adores him. Netanyahu doesn’t make himself available often, so the mood grew boisterously expectant after the surprise visit was revealed. He made them wait because the premier was, as he often is, late. Host Yinon Magal, a former legislator and prominent hawk in the national religious camp, killed time reading amusing news items and mocking the opposition. Finally, with the show butting up against its scheduled ending at 10:30 p.m., there Netanyahu was, accompanied by his usual retinue of burly security guards, a few aides and his wife, Sara.

As the entourage entered the studio, the audience broke out in a rendition of “Bibi, King of Israel,” a variation on a well-known folk song — an homage to the biblical King David who “lives and endures” — using Netanyahu’s universally accepted nickname.

After seats were taken and thanks expressed, Magal began: “Mr. Prime Minister, what’s the situation? Is it over? Have we won?” No explanation was needed. The host was referring to the years of combat Israel had been engaged in since the shock assault by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, opening conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran that have killed tens of thousands, wreaked havoc on global energy flows and both unified and strained Israeli society.

Netanyahu, who is turning 77 this month, has the endurance of a thoroughbred despite a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer. He had spent the day in southern Lebanon visiting Israeli troops, yet he looked fresh in his dark suit and bright blue tie. He waited a beat, then began a well-rehearsed nonanswer: “We have had huge accomplishments, huge.” He rattled off a list of leaders Israel had killed from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran by their last names — Sinwar, Nasrallah — so notorious are they in his country. He said Israeli troops now held land deep inside Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. And, he said, Israel had broken through what he called “the fear barrier” surrounding Iran. For decades, no one had dared a military attack on the Islamic Republic. Until Netanyahu, whose warplanes made their way unmolested across the Persian skies to drop their lethal payloads.

“You want to hear more?” Netanyahu asked.

“No,” Magal replied. “I want to know if this is behind us, if this is over.”

The prime minister raised a finger, looked intently at his interlocutor, then around the room. “It will never be over,” he said gravely. “You want to live? In the Middle East? In the world? It will never be over.”

Then he grew a bit testy. Israel is far more powerful than it was three years ago, he said. Hamas no longer held any hostages, people who’d been chained in airless Gaza tunnels for months on end, a wound that deeply scarred the country. That’s over! he exclaimed, then looked around and said, “What, no applause?”

On cue, clapping rang out. But it was accompanied by uncomfortable laughter.

As Israelis prepare to go to the polls on Oct. 27, Magal’s question hangs in the air: Is it over? Netanyahu has repeatedly promised “total victory,” yet with what seems like endless wars, hundreds of days of reserve duty for soldiers, soaring national debt and the country’s growing isolation, few Israelis feel victorious. The prime minister says Israel will have to become a “super Sparta,” on constant war footing as long as Iran and its allied militias in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen remain standing. His grand promise — a safer, more stable Middle East, which he insists he’s uniquely qualified to achieve — remains unfulfilled.

It’s no secret that much of the world hopes any new government won’t include Benjamin Netanyahu. Wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza and blamed for luring US President Donald Trump into the Iran war, the man who says he saved Israel from oblivion is largely viewed abroad as a menace. Public support for the Jewish state, especially in the US, its most important ally, has fallen to record lows. And those who stand by Israel as a Jewish refuge and homeland are often quick to distance themselves from Netanyahu.

Within the country itself, plenty feel the same way, but for different reasons. They believe that the man in power when thousands of Hamas operatives swarmed in from Gaza and killed and abducted hundreds should ask the nation’s forgiveness, step aside and face an inquiry into the single deadliest day in the country’s eight-decade history. Netanyahu has refused to do any of that. Many also point to indictments against him inside Israel — alleging bribery, fraud and breach of trust — and argue that his efforts to increase executive power and weaken the Supreme Court are shameful, antidemocratic attempts to sidestep the judicial hammer. Netanyahu declined to be interviewed for this article.

Even some who question the strength of the evidence against him say he’s increasingly isolated and that a prudent leader who once relished debate has stopped listening. “An old-fashioned Reagan Republican has turned into a French king,” says Ari Shavit, an author who used to view Netanyahu with respectful disagreement but now considers him a danger to his country.

Netanyahu’s opponents point to the inclusion in his governing coalition of right-wing and religious extremists: Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister whose toxic rhetoric and exclusionist policies have pushed Israel away from secular democracy; Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who advocates annexation of the West Bank, sparking rampages by extremist Jewish settlers through Palestinian villages; and ultra-Orthodox parties that trade their loyalty for subsidies to support a profoundly antimodern lifestyle and freedom from military conscription.

Finally, there is the way Netanyahu has turned his Likud party into an instrument of personal loyalty. What was once a conservative-secular alliance espousing views ranging from trickle-down economics to equal rights for Arabs has turned into the party of Bibi. The tallest tree in the forest, he casts such a shadow that little has been able to grow underneath. Add it up and Israel’s longest-serving premier is consistently trailing in the polls.

Two things must be said immediately. He may eke out a win or — due to Israel’s complex coalition system — force another election, which would leave him in power for many months until a second vote can be arranged. This occurred repeatedly from 2019 to 2022, when Netanyahu led several caretaker governments. But, more important, the security doctrine he champions — opposition to a Palestinian state, stifling Iran’s nuclear ambitions, stationing troops in neighboring countries to neutralize perceived threats and the insistence that peace comes from strength, not the other way around — is now utterly mainstream.

Polls show at least three-fifths of Israelis lack trust in Netanyahu, apparently fed up with his broken promises and the elevation of his wife and sons into a kind of royal family. But few have soured on his geopolitical outlook. All mainstream parties, representing some two-thirds of the electorate, have embraced his hawkish skepticism toward Arab and Muslim intentions.

Gadi Eisenkot, his most likely successor, is running ahead of him in most polls. His Yashar party is projected to win some 22 seats, versus 20 for Netanyahu’s Likud. Eisenkot, 66, offers a sharp contrast to the prime minister: Of Moroccan origin in a country long dominated by Europeans, with a son who was killed in the Gaza war, he comes off as a man of the people. But when it comes to security, which most voters say is their top concern, there’s little daylight between the two. Eisenkot has repeatedly said he will never permit a Palestinian state, and he hasn’t called for the removal of Israeli troops from Gaza, Lebanon or Syria. “No matter who wins, there will be no fundamental shift in our policy,” says Michael Oren, a politician and historian who served as Israel’s ambassador to Washington from 2009 to 2013. “It may even be a more aggressive policy.”

It’s no small irony that the event driving the Israeli public to more fully embrace Netanyahu’s viewpoint was the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, which he and his vaunted intelligence establishment failed to anticipate. Most of the world saw in that attack the unfiltered rage of the oppressed and concluded that, while Israel had every right to strike back at Hamas, it also needed to do more to accommodate Palestinian national ambitions. In Israel, the public joined the prime minister in drawing the opposite conclusion: The assault showed the reach and brutality of the Iranian “Axis of Resistance” and made clear that Palestinians will stop at nothing to destroy the Jewish state.

In other words, Israel no longer needs Bibi to pursue Bibi-ism.

Netanyahu, the son of a scholar of Jewish history who was an outsider in his field, a right-winger in a sea of liberals, was bred on skepticism. Benzion Netanyahu embraced the arguments of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a leader of the Revisionist Zionism movement early in the 20th century who challenged the accommodations of the mainstream Labor movement. The Revisionists were territorial maximalists, calling for the Jewish state to include both sides of the Jordan River, meaning most of the Kingdom of Jordan. A pro-Jabotinsky hymn at the time went, “The Jordan has two banks: This one is ours, the other one too.” A century before the Hamas attack — in November 1923 — Jabotinsky wrote that the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state that exhibited any weakness, invoking the image of an “iron wall” for his nation’s protection. “The only way to reach an agreement in the future,” he wrote, “is to abandon any notion of seeking an agreement today.”

This sums up Netanyahu’s outlook, now shared by most of Israel. Born in Tel Aviv in 1949 and raised in Jerusalem, Netanyahu is the middle of three sons. His flawless American English comes from his teenage years in suburban Philadelphia, where his father taught at Dropsie College (a Jewish studies institute later absorbed into the University of Pennsylvania) after failing to obtain a university position at home — partly because of his unpopular views. All three brothers were ambitious and gifted. But the oldest, Yonatan, known as Yoni, was the golden boy destined for greatness.

Classmates and teachers recall in both Yoni and Bibi a serious worldliness. They held themselves apart and debated politics with adults as their equals. David Richman, a classmate whose father, Ike, founded the Philadelphia 76ers, says that when the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations visited their high school in 1967, he and Bibi showed the older man around. The ambassador asked young Netanyahu what it was like to live there. “It’s awful; they don’t care about anything or know anything,” Richman recalls Bibi responding. “All they want to do is get laid.”

Leaving their parents, their younger brother (Iddo, now a radiologist and novelist in Israel) and the vacuous American suburbs behind, Bibi and Yoni moved back to Israel to serve in the military. They eventually became commanders of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit focused on special operations and were both wounded in action. Bibi had been accepted to Yale but never went; Yoni did a year at Harvard before transferring to Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

Like their father, they viewed Jewish history as a series of tragedies made worse by the Jews’ naive willingness to believe in the goodwill of their opponents. In 1973, Yoni, whose published letters are filled with dark philosophical musings, wrote to Bibi, “Self-delusion has always plagued the Jews.” For Bibi, a loner obsessed with books, especially history, Yoni was a rare intimate.

In the summer of 1976, as the US was celebrating its bicentennial, Palestinians and Germans hijacked an Air France flight after it left Tel Aviv, ultimately landing in Entebbe, Uganda, intending to exchange passengers for Palestinian prisoners. Israel asked Yoni to lead a daring military rescue, which by most measures was a brilliant success. Commandos saved 102 of the 106 hostages while killing all the hijackers and dozens of Ugandan soldiers who were collaborating with the Palestinians. There was a single Israeli military casualty: Yoni Netanyahu.

The entire nation mourned his death. Bibi — who had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in architecture and business administration and had an entry-level post at Boston Consulting Group (alongside a youthful Mitt Romney) — left a promising US business career and found himself thrust into public life. In 1982 he joined the embassy in Washington. Two years later, he became Israel’s representative to the United Nations.

Netanyahu returned to Israel in the late 1980s and joined Likud, the once-minority conservative party that was ascendant after unseating Labor from decades of dominance. With no political base, he had to compete against the sons of well-known leaders, the so-called princes of the party. By 1993 he had managed to elbow them out of the way to become leader of Likud.

When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo peace accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization that year, setting up a Palestinian Authority to administer the West Bank and Gaza, a century-old conflict appeared to be nearing its end. Comparisons were made to Northern Ireland and the once seemingly intractable disputes between France and Germany. But Netanyahu said the deal was nothing but a guarantee of future conflict. He called Rabin naive, which by Likud standards was mild; others called the prime minister a traitor.

In November 1995, Rabin took part in a rally in Tel Aviv, joining performers in “A Song for Peace” (“Lift your eyes with hope not through the rifles’ sights / Sing a song for love and not for wars”). As he left the stage, he was assassinated by a pistol-wielding Jewish extremist. Labor’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, quickly took control, accelerated Israeli troop withdrawals from West Bank cities and called early elections, confident that the global embrace of Israel’s path of peace would propel him to a decisive victory

But — foreshadowing a repeated pattern — a nascent Palestinian Islamist movement called Hamas, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, carried out a series of devastating bus bombings that killed dozens of Israelis. Hezbollah in Lebanon, with a similar ideology, was firing missiles at Israel’s north. Although the violence did little to soothe voter nerves about coexistence, it was still widely assumed Peres couldn’t lose. Netanyahu, advised by US public opinion maestros on tapping into fear and identity for political gain, squeaked out a shock victory. It was like Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the US in 2016 — a populist revolt almost no poll or pundit anticipated.

Netanyahu, who couldn’t have been more secular, understood that voters whose families had emigrated from across the Middle East had a deeper sense of Jewish identity than the European elite, and they felt it slipping away with the peace process. At one point, while visiting the spiritual leader of Mideastern Israelis, a hot mic caught him saying, “Leftists have forgotten what it is to be Jewish.” The foreign-educated, patrician son of a scholar saw his chance to lead a revolt against the elite.

At 46, Netanyahu became Israel’s youngest prime minister ever. Given what a Trumpian populist he is today, it’s noteworthy that back then he was a cautious institutionalist, akin to a moderately conservative US Republican congressman. He focused on two things: combating Iran and deregulating the economy. He privatized state companies, introduced competition to phone service and eased foreign currency controls.

He faced opposition from both sides: on the left for his economic liberalization and for slow-walking the Oslo peace process, on the right for not simply calling off negotiations with the Palestinians. And there were early accusations of small-time corruption — alleged padding of his expense account (the case was ultimately dropped without charges). He lost the premiership in 1999 to Labor’s Ehud Barak, but Likud returned to power in 2001, led by Ariel Sharon. Two years later, Sharon appointed Netanyahu finance minister.

Many assumed it was a way to bury a rival, keeping him away from a higher-profile position. But Netanyahu seized the opportunity, remaking the Israeli economy just as the global internet boom was getting underway. Even those who detest Netanyahu credit him with turning Israel away from a tepid agrarian collectivism toward the free-market digital mastery that spawned listings on US stock exchanges by Israeli tech companies — Check Point, Waze, Mobileye, Wiz and dozens more. When Netanyahu entered the Finance Ministry in 2003, Israel’s gross domestic product per capita was $19,000; today it’s $70,000. Germany’s, by contrast, was $31,000 in 2003 and is $65,000 now.

Business leaders didn’t share Netanyahu’s geopolitics but were thrilled by the economic liberalization. The stock exchange surged and the shekel strengthened as he vowed to put the public sector on a diet and amply nourish private industry. “I found him to be bright, strategic, analytical,” says Ronald Cohen, a co-founder of the private equity advisory firm Apax Partners, recounting a 2005 breakfast with Netanyahu to discuss buying the state telephone company. Those days are long gone for Cohen, who spent most Saturday nights in 2023 with hundreds of thousands of others on the nation’s streets in anti-government protests. Netanyahu “is dismantling Israel’s democracy and creating huge harm to its security, economy and society,” says Cohen, who divides his time between England and Israel. “Far from sacrificing himself for the state, as it once seemed, he’s now sacrificing the state for himself.”

That’s a common sentiment among the country’s security establishment as well. A dozen top retired officials interviewed for this article — former ministers, intelligence chiefs, national security advisers — who once happily worked hand in glove with Netanyahu now consider him a threat. “I was a great admirer,” says Amos Gilead, who spent three decades at the top of the army and Defense Ministry and now runs a university think tank near Tel Aviv. He recalls briefing a newly elected Netanyahu, in 1996, on the threat from Iran, with its religious vision of exterminating Israel. “He said this will be the mission of his life,” Gilead says. But over the past decade, Netanyahu began “leading us toward national suicide,” abandoning open debate and imposing a kind of autocracy. “He’s the best politician in Israel’s history,” he says, “and I blame him for everything that is going wrong today.”

One former top aide who continues to hold the premier in high esteem is Ron Dermer, who was born and raised in Florida and studied at the University of Pennsylvania before immigrating to Israel. He’s been at Netanyahu's side for almost three decades, most recently as his strategic affairs minister, and before that as ambassador to Washington. Dermer recalls a two-hour meeting in 2000 about free markets, the Iranian threat and Israel’s relations with the world. At the end, Netanyahu asked whether he’d join the quest to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Dermer was all in, and a quarter century later, he still is. “I was happy to play Robin to his Batman,” Dermer says. “If he says thank you once a year, that’s plenty.”

Netanyahu would be the first to tell you that, among potential Israeli leaders, Netanyahu is by far the most capable, and Dermer sees eye to eye with him on that. This issue of Netanyahu’s self-regard — a kind of messianic mission — has been a matter of endless debate. On one side are those who believe he’ll stop at nothing to accumulate power for himself and his family. On the other are those who say that his mix of savvy and ambition has always been at the service of the Jewish nation; he could easily have gotten rich rather than dedicate himself to public life. “Every morning, Bibi looks in the mirror and sees a direct line from Moses, King David, Yehuda Maccabee and Herzl,” says Zvi Hauser, a former top aide. Hauser says Netanyahu considered himself uniquely suited to protect and promote his people at a dangerous moment. Yet the Oct. 7 attack proved he was misled. He failed to protect his people, and it’s far from clear whether his response will redeem him.

For Netanyahu’s detractors, the corruption charges he faces are the clearest example of his placing himself above the needs of the people. He’s been accused of accepting gifts of Champagne and cigars and seeking positive press coverage in exchange for rule changes that would benefit certain media companies. Netanyahu denies all the charges, and the judges who’ve been hearing the cases have twice stated that the gravest one — bribery — appears weak.

The trial has generated the kind of spectacle that only the prosecution of a sitting head of government can provide. Due to wartime security concerns, when it came time for Netanyahu to testify, the proceedings were moved from Jerusalem to a small, fortified tribunal in the heart of Tel Aviv, two floors underground, behind massive steel doors. Several times weekly over the past couple of years, a berobed prosecutor interrogated a visibly annoyed Netanyahu in the cramped courtroom as eye-rolling journalists sat just a few feet away, tapping at their laptops and mugging amusement at the premier’s indignation.

In presenting his case, the prosecutor displayed transcripts of various conversations on big screens, a family drama in a nickname-besotted society. Bibi phoned Noni (newspaper owner Arnon Mozes) who spoke with Dubi (editor Dov Eichenwald). The premier’s posture ranged from stoic to furious, and he repeatedly derided the entire thing as a political witch hunt cheered on by a hateful press eager to unseat a leader they’ve been unable to defeat at the ballot box. “This was a political assassination,” Netanyahu said on the last day of his defense testimony this summer, “an attempt to prevent the citizens of Israel from electing who they want.”

The initial charges a decade ago coincided with what many observers pinpoint as the moment the prime minister began to change in ways they consider dangerous. Netanyahu grew more isolated from moderate voices — Dan Meridor, Benny Begin, Tzipi Livni — who urged him to stick to liberal and institutional principles rather than resort to populism. In recent years, he’s been shunned by former allies, surrounding himself with a more insular group in which family has particular influence. “Bibi is not the same person today as he was in 2009,” says Barak, who was his commanding officer in the army, defeated him for the prime ministership in 1999 and served as his defense minister in 2009. “He took the cases against him as a personal attack and went to war against the state that dared put him on trial.”

To make up for flagging support among moderates, Netanyahu embraced the extremists now in his government, insisting he’d be able to control them and use their support for an attack on Iran. He did win their votes for the Iran wars, but his ability to manage them has been increasingly limited — sending Israel’s image abroad into a tailspin.

Hundreds of settlers have destroyed the cars and homes of West Bank Palestinians, stealing their sheep and goats and torching their olive groves. Wary of upsetting his coalition, Netanyahu has remained largely silent about the violence while praising the growth of new settlements that most of the world views as illegal. A dozen countries, including the UK, France and Canada, in September announced a boycott of goods from the settlements, aiming to push Israel back toward a policy of two states. Netanyahu responded by expelling diplomats and vowing that no such thing would happen while he’s prime minister. (It’s worth remembering that in the past he has endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state, albeit demilitarized.)

While he has grown increasingly hard-line over the years, the biggest change came on Oct. 7, 2023. Netanyahu had spent his career arguing that he is uniquely suited to countering risks, even adopting the nickname “Mr. Security.” But he permitted hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar to reach Hamas annually on the theory that its leaders would grow too dependent on the money to risk an attack. And keeping the West Bank under separate governance from Gaza scuttled the notion of a Palestinian state. Hamas leaders kept up a steady stream of false reassurance to Israel, luring Netanyahu and his intelligence chiefs into believing the group was truly deterred — even as it built hundreds of miles of military tunnels and missile factories and trained its foot soldiers for an invasion. In September the daily Haaretz reported that Mohamed bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, had phoned the prime minister days before the attack to warn him that Hamas was planning something dramatic. Netanyahu has denied the report, but it has added to a sense of fury in Israel about his failure to stop the assault.

Oct. 7 was so traumatic that almost no one believed he could survive politically. But Netanyahu and Dermer saw an opportunity to take on Iran’s proxies and, when Trump returned to the White House, Iran itself. Dermer even surmises that the attack may have prevented a more unified and devastating assault by the Iranian axis. It allowed Israel to control the chaos, he argues.

Netanyahu, the cautious calculator, became a gambler, seeking to do something so big that it would balance out the trauma of the day, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to Pearl Harbor. “After Oct. 7, he became much more risk-oriented,” says Tzachi Hanegbi, Netanyahu’s former national security adviser, who was pushed out last year after urging him to moderate his policies. “It was a new Israel and a new Netanyahu.”

Israel has pulled off some remarkable military and intelligence accomplishments in the past couple of years. Mossad secretly sold booby-trapped pagers to Hezbollah, then exploded them simultaneously in the pockets of thousands of operatives; commandos assassinated numerous enemies deep inside other countries; a 12-day bombing campaign last year did significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program.

Those who backed the Iran war — and even some who didn’t — say it’s too early to pass judgment. If the Tehran regime falls anytime soon, Netanyahu will be vindicated, whether he’s in power or not. The recent spike in antisemitism suggests some criticism of Israel is also about something darker, just as Netanyahu and his father long warned.

But the devastation of Gaza has entered global political discourse as an almost unrivaled contemporary evil that won’t be easily dismissed. The death toll exceeds 70,000, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, including many women and children. Virtually no institution has been left standing, hundreds of thousands of people risked starvation, and most of the 2.1 million residents have been consigned to facing the summer heat, the winter cold and a growing rat infestation in flimsy tents or the bombed-out husks of buildings.

That, along with the military occupations in Lebanon and Syria and the settler violence in the West Bank, has turned the global community against Netanyahu. Many now view Israel as a rogue state, a super Sparta indeed. And the setbacks in the war against Iran, combined with the apparent rebuilding of Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen, raise questions, even within Israel, about how much can be accomplished by military force unaccompanied by diplomacy. Netanyahu maintains that diplomacy will arrive — in due time.

If life in the US these days feels like a 24/7 Trump reality show, Israel is in the grip of a similar syndrome. Netanyahu has run the country for most of the past two decades, and his thoughts and actions dominate discourse at nearly every level. Relationships are strained over him; conversations rarely get very far without his name being invoked. After all this time and especially after the trauma of the Hamas attack on his watch, no one in Israel is neutral about Bibi. Young voters have barely known any other leader.

Nonetheless, there is suddenly a feeling of an era drawing to a close.

This was supposed to have been a season of triumph for Netanyahu, with billboards across the country showing Trump embracing him over the words “Only Bibi can.” But their relationship has appeared rocky since the start of the Iran war, with Trump even calling him “crazy” and suggesting that Netanyahu may wish to retire. This past Sunday, the president reversed himself, issuing a full-throated endorsement of the prime minister and saying he’s the only person who could “finish the job” in Iran. Netanyahu quickly released videos profusely thanking Trump, but it’s unclear whether this last-minute intervention will move the electoral needle. Trump’s own popularity in Israel has plummeted and his political fortunes have darkened ahead of the US midterm elections.

Then there are questions about Netanyahu’s health. In April he announced the prostate cancer (which he initially sought to conceal and now says is in remission), and three years earlier he had a heart pacemaker installed.

Netanyahu continues to assert that only his hard-line vision can guarantee his nation’s safety. Most of his fellow citizens now agree with him. Allowing the emergence of a Palestinian state is, in essence, suicide, he says, and electing anyone but him will lead to it. The question is whether any new head of government can repair Israel’s standing abroad, especially in the US, while remaining true to voters’ security demands.

Toward the end of his 2022 memoir, written in an 18-month interval when he was out of government, Netanyahu expresses the concern that the eight decades of Israel’s existence may end too soon, just like two long-ago efforts at Jewish sovereignty. “In the history of the Jews, they have only three times enjoyed periods of independence — 80 years under David and Solomon, 80 years under the Hasmoneans, and now 80 years of the modern state of Israel.”

Being a moral people, he argues, won’t save the Jews from the conquest and carnage that have been their plight for millennia. More than that, if you harm no one, he says, you’ll be perfectly moral but utterly powerless, led to slaughter yet again. “The rise of Zionism was meant to correct this flaw by giving the Jewish people the power to defend themselves,” he wrote. “Enhancing this capacity was the central mission of my years in office.”Read next: The Shattering of the Middle East’s Most Unlikely Friendship