Benjamin Netanyahu,

Now Israel’s prime minister for a third time, frames himself as a principled defender of the Jewish state and highlights his important relationships, while avoiding complexities

deeply troubled — was disliked by many of his men and was hounded by his father’s unrelenting expectations. Others at the scene have disputed the Netanyahu version of events that fateful day.

As Pfeffer relates, Yoni was accused of acting against orders by opening fire on Ugandan soldiers, exposing himself to return fire that probably killed him. His family insists he was killed by the German commander of the hijackers. Pfeffer concludes that the creation of the latter scenario suggests “to some that the family felt that being felled by an ‘inferior’ African soldier was somehow a lesser way to die.”

Whatever the truth, Bibi surely cannot be faulted for idolizing Yoni even more in death than in life. But the adulation makes no room for ambiguity — and that says as much about the surviving brother as it does about the dead one.

Similarly, there’s no room for ambiguity in his depiction of their father, Benzion, a scholar of medieval Jewish history and, in Bibi’s eyes, a brilliant, prescient and (again) often maligned activist on behalf of Zionism and the Jewish state. The elder Netanyahu eschewed compromise, believing that Arabs would never, ever accept Jews and that the only way to prevent another Holocaust was through unmitigated strength and assiduous wooing of supportive publics and political leaders.

He is rightly credited with helping to persuade the Republican and Democratic parties to support the establishment of a Jewish state in their 1944 platforms. Netanyaju writes: “My father was thus one of the de facto progenitors of America’s bi-partisan

“Bibi: My Story”

by Benjamin Netanyahu (Threshold, 2022; 724 pages)

support for the state of Israel and the first to bring it into practical fruition. It was ironic that decades later I would be falsely accused of not appreciating the importance of American bipartisan support for Israel when in fact my own father had initiated it.”

But beneath Benzion’s rigid, polarized worldview was a confounding irony: He didn’t much want to live in Israel and didn’t want his sons to, either. As Pfeffer recounts, the elder Netanyahu relocated his family to the United States when he secured academic employment there, and he was highly critical of his boys when they returned to serve in the Israeli military.

“Benzion’s sons were incapable of fully confronting the contradictions between their father’s Zionist ideals and his living in America,” Pfeffer writes. Instead, they sought to mollify him. In his memoir, Bibi shapes his antipathy and estrangement into a principled stand. In that version of Netanyahu’s life, defiance is forgotten, filial devotion is all that matters.

Political resilience

If father-son relationships are complicated, so are marriages. Netanyahu could be forgiven for glossing over the dissolution of his first two marriages and (perhaps) for mentioning the daughter he had with his first wife only once. His third and current wife, Sara, is awarded pride of place.

His descriptions of her are so unceasingly laudatory that she appears superhuman. Her political advice is always spot-on, her charitable works magnanimous and cruelly overlooked. And the care she showered upon their two sons, Yair and Avner! Netanyahu compares it to “a lioness guard (ing) her cubs.”

Not only was all this ignored by the media, but “Sara sustained an endless campaign of character assassination ... a vicious onslaught (that) went on for more than twenty years!” he writes.

But Sara Netanyahu is unlike any other politician’s wife in Israel. As Pfeffer recounts, during the middle of a political campaign in 1993, Netanyahu publicly acknowledged an affair and begged Sara to reconcile. The resulting agreement stipulated that Sara would accompany her husband on all his major public engagements and foreign trips; that she would have full access to his schedule; and that she would vet appointments of members of his staff.

She pleaded guilty in 2019 to misusing state funds and is a subject in an ongoing corruption trial accusing both Netanyahus of illegally receiving gifts, jewelry and Champagne. So the many investigations that have threatened the Netanyahus — at least when he is out of office — have a degree of public legitimacy. Sara chose political power, her husband granted it, and accountability flows from that.

What’s left unsaid in a political memoir is also meaningful. Ordinary Palestinians are missing from Netanyahu’s own story, even though his government has occupied Palestinian territory for 55 years. He has long insisted that the greatest threat to Israel is from Iran; the reader can decide whether that singular focus is justified or a skillful way to change the subject from Israel’s assertion of political oppression that many believe stains the nation’s soul.

Netanyahu’s political resilience is unparalleled in Israeli history, and for that reason alone his memoir serves as an essential window into his character — as long as it is read with the proper perspective. As Carlos Lozada observed earlier this year in The Washington Post, the writings of any politician “should not be taken at face value; the purpose is to obscure as much as to reveal, the content is propaganda more than truth . ... But as with all political writing, propaganda is enlightening because it reveals something about how its purveyors wish to be perceived.”

Eisner, who wrote this for The Washington Post, is the director of academic affairs at the Columbia Journalism School. She is writing a book about Carole King.