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This week we commence the story of Benjamin Netanyahu. The 75-year-old has become Israel’s longest serving prime minister despite never winning the love of his people, his international allies or even his political colleagues. Now he is accused of prolonging Israel’s horrific wars in Gaza and Lebanon to preserve his own power and save himself from prosecution for corruption. How did the man known even to his foes as Bibi rebound from so many scandals and defeats to become the dominant force in Israeli politics, and what does that say about the country Israel has become? If you haven’t heard our two-parter on Zionism, now is a good time – Apple / Spotify – because these episodes are a kind of sequel.

We begin with the influence of Bibi’s father and grandfather and the flinty, paranoid doctrine of revisionist Zionism. Netanyahu’s aggressive, ultra-conservative worldview was also shaped by his studies in the US, his combat experience in Israel’s wars of survival, and the dramatic loss of his beloved older brother Yoni during the 1976 raid on Entebbe Airport. After the revisionist party Likud ended Labor’s three-decade hegemony, he found his calling as a great communicator, bullishly promoting Israel’s interests, from television to the United Nations, throughout the 1980s.

Netanyahu’s first eight years in the Knesset coincided with the First Intifada and the Oslo peace process. In a time of hope for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he offered cynicism and fear. When peacemaking prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Netanyahu was blamed for stoking the far right and he seemed finished politically. Yet within a few months, he was Israel’s youngest ever prime minister.

What has influenced Netanyahu’s bleak and spiky understanding of Jewish history and his role in it? How did such a widely disliked character achieve such surprising success? And how did Israel itself change during those tumultuous decades of frequent wars and elusive peace? To understand where the country is now, you need to understand the man.

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Reading List

Books

Neill Lochery - The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Benjamin Netanyahu - A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993)

Benjamin Netanyahu - Bibi: My Story (2022)

Anshel Pfeffer - Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu (2020)

Ari Shavit - My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel: Updated edition (2015)

Avi Shlaim - The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)

Articles

David Margolick - ‘Star of Zion’, Vanity Fair (1996)

David Remnick - ‘The Outsider’, New Yorker (1998)

Joshua Leifer - ‘The Netanyahu doctrine’, Guardian (2023)

David Remnick - ‘The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition’, New Yorker (2024)

Donald McIntyre - ‘How Netanyahu gambled with the Fate of Israel’, Tortoise (2024)

John Jenkins - ‘Netanyahu’s all-out war’, New Statesman (2024)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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