Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's longest~serving PM

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1:20It was meant to be what President Trump has called a little excursion. A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. They have no navy, they have no air force. It's all been blown up and they have no leadership. It's all gone. But three weeks in and there's still no end in sight to the joint US-Israeli war with Iran, the conflict spreading across the Middle East region.

1:52Oil and gas prices spiralling, confusion about what the end game is. Some believe America wouldn't be bombing Iran if it wasn't for this man, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. History will record that President Trump acted to deny the world's most dangerous regime, the world's most dangerous weapons. The longest-serving Prime Minister in the history of Israel. He's dominated his country's politics for a generation. This is the war he's always sought, the culmination of a lifetime obsession with the threat from Iran. Iran has never given up its quest for nuclear weapons. Iran will be capable of producing nuclear bombs within three to five years.

2:36Time is running out. He's tried and failed to get US Democrat administrations involved militarily in the past. With Trump, it seems he's found a willing partner to wage war against the Iranian regime. Netanyahu has amazing access directly to the president. And I'm sure that makes a difference because, you know, it wouldn't have happened under the Biden administration. Over a political career stretching four decades, Netanyahu has polarised opinion. His supporters argue he's the man best placed to protect Israel from its enemies. His critics say he's prioritised his own political survival over what's best for his country and the region.

3:19I don't think it's an overstretch to say at all that he's managed to reshape Israel in his image in the last 20, 30 years that he's been in politics. This is a man with exceptional capabilities and deep character flaws. The world benefits from the former and suffers from the latter. So who is Benjamin Netanyahu and what shaped him?

3:46Benjamin Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1949, the year after the State of Israel was founded. He's the first prime minister in Israeli history to actually have been born in the State of Israel. Bethan McKernan knows his story well. She was Jerusalem correspondent for The Guardian newspaper for four years. He grew up in a secular but very socially conservative environment with very strong ideas about Zionism and about what the future of the, at that point, much younger Jewish state should be. The Israeli-American journalist and political analyst Gil Hoffman. Israel was created under the shadow of the Holocaust and preventing another Holocaust was always what he was told his mission needed to be.

4:33The second of three sons, his dad, Bensian, was a prominent historian and part of the revisionist Zionist movement, which advocated for a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan. Benjamin Netanyahu biographer, Anshul Pfeffer. Well, Netanyahu was brought up by his parents, who had quite staunch Jewish nationalist views. They were both involved in the revisionist Zionist movement, particularly Bensi and Netanyahu, wrote many essays about revisionist Zionism and was for a time one of its main organisers also in North America. Bethan McKernan again. Being around his father's intellectual friends on the right wing of Israeli intellectual society I think was really formative for him and his brothers.

5:24Although Netanyahu, or Bibi as his parents called him, was born in Israel, he spent a fair chunk of his adolescence in the US. He was born in Tel Aviv but then grew up, spent most of his childhood between Jerusalem and Philadelphia, which is where his father was teaching history. So not the usual kind of trajectory for a future national leader, I guess, to spend so much of your formative years in a different country. Marie Bintner was his English teacher at high school in Philadelphia. Talking to us back in 2009, she remembered the young Netanyahu made quite an impression. I can tell you that he was a challenge, very intelligent.

6:07He wrote beautifully, and he took a firm stand on his feelings, even if they ran counter to the class, and he supported it almost lawyer-like with fact, with reference to text, etc. He was just outstanding. Deep, deep voice, slight Israeli accent, tremendously in love with Israel. Israel was first and foremost in his mind. I thought he was very handsome. Made an impression on others too. Most of the girls were gaga over him, but he was critical of the somewhat typical honours English student. He thought they were spoiled. He thought they were not given to hard work as they should be. He would not be moved on that.

7:00His time spent in the US meant Netanyahu grew up bilingual and well-versed in American ways and customs, something that would stand him in great stead later in his career. The Economist's Israel correspondent and biographer Anshul Pfeffer. Well, it was important certainly in the sense that he imbibed a lot of the American culture and many of the mannerisms of middle-class America of that generation.

7:30But him it was very clear at the age of 18, even though he had been accepted to Yale, he made it quite clear that he would be returning to Israel. In 1967, at the height of what in the West was the summer of love, Netanyahu moved back to Israel to do military service. He trained as a combat soldier, then joined Israel's equivalent of the British SAS, just like his elder brother had done three years earlier. Jonathan, or Yoni, something of a role model for the younger Benjamin. They were extremely close. They had, you know, like many kids whose families emigrate or spend years outside, away from the country where they were born, for him and Yoni, even though there were about three years between them, there was this very close relationship and there were hundreds of letters that they sent each other in the 60s and 70s.

8:21In the military, Netanyahu earned a reputation for being calm under pressure. During his time in Sayeret Metcal, which is the most elite special forces unit in the IDF, where he was a captain. So those leadership skills, I guess, were apparent quite early on. Military career over, he returned to America to study. But... Both in 1967, in the Six-Day War, and in 1973, in the Yom Kippur War, you know, He stopped what he was doing and he flew straight back to Israel to fight and to defend his homeland and his family.

9:02He took part in a number of high-risk missions, hostage rescues, covert operations behind enemy lines. Not for the faint-hearted, he later told the US public policy think tank, the Hoover Institution. I served in an elite unit and had several brushes with death. I nearly drowned in a firefight in the middle of the Suez Canal. I was wounded while storming a hijacked airplane. Almost froze to death? Almost froze to death in Syria, in Syrian Golan Heights. I was bitten by a scorpion and lived to talk about it. Politicians in Israel, a lot of them have got illustrious military careers, but I don't think that that downplays at all, that he has faced extremely dangerous situations and he's risked his life and he has been very brave in the service of his country.

9:53Yom Kippur war over, Benjamin returned to America once again to focus on a planned, lucrative career in business management, leaving big brother Yoni in the military back in Israel. Then, in June 1976, tragedy. Good evening. An Air France jet was hijacked by Palestinian guerrillas today. On board, nine Americans, some 80 Israelis and 157 other passengers. The hijackers flew the plane to Entebbe in Uganda and set a deadline for the release of 53 Palestinian prisoners held in several countries, after which they would start killing Jewish hostages, Israel's elite forces unit launching an audacious rescue mission.

10:36This is Israel broadcasting from Jerusalem. All the hostages in Uganda have been rescued by Israeli forces. The Israeli commanders were dressed in civilian clothes. In a short battle, the Israeli paratroopers took control of the Entebri air terminal, released the hostages and the Air France crew, loaded them aboard their own planes and headed out again. The terrorists, whose number had been put as high as 10, were wiped out. Only one Israeli soldier died in the operation, the unit's commander, Yoni Netanyahu, Benjamin's older brother. Gil Hoffman, former chief political correspondent for the Jerusalem Post.

11:14That thrust Netanyahu into the role as the leader of the family and the future leader of the Israeli right. It was supposed to be his brother. He was supposed to be someone who would make a lot of money living in America, and now he had to lead. Anshul Pfeffer again. The Oni's death had a huge impact on Netanyahu. So he was certainly shattered by losing probably the person he was closest to. And it also put him at a very young age in the public limelight because he only had been killed in what was one of the most celebrated of Israeli military special operations. And since he was dead and most of the other officers were members of special forces, they couldn't talk.

11:59And all of a sudden, Bibi Netanyahu hadn't been in the operation but had been before that an officer in the same unit, almost became a spokesperson both for the dead Yoni and for this event, which I think captured the imagination of a lot of people in the West and has been seen ever since as sort of a prime example of how a special operation unit can both rescue hostages and fight terror organizations. So Bibi became a very in-demand speaker in America and in Israel, and that was certainly a boost for what would become a few years later, his public career. After his brother's death, Benjamin Netanyahu founded an anti-terrorism institute in Yoni's memory.

12:44He organised conferences and edited a book on combating international terrorism. Then he went into diplomacy. He was appointed a senior diplomat in the United States at the age of 30 without any civil service or diplomatic experience and that was also the stepping stone to what would become his meteoric political career. In the 1980s, he served as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, was very effective, a great communicator, says political consultant George Birnbaum, who would later go on to be Netanyahu's chief of staff. Yeah, I mean, he was one of these people that when you walk into a room, he's a larger-than-life individual.

13:25He owns the room, and not because he's boisterous or gregarious, it's just his presence. and I'd met many politicians before, and he just had a presence and a charisma that was unbelievably strong and completely natural. Though perhaps not that natural to begin with, says Bethan McKernan. Apparently, when he was Israel's ambassador to the UN in the mid-80s, so very beginning of his career in public life, he had a video camera and he would, you know, sit on the bed and he put the video camera on and he would just practice giving speeches until he got good at it. I think it's less inborn talent and more just drive and dedication and effort.

14:07You know, he knew what he had to do and he set out to do it. The English-speaking Netanyahu became a familiar face, a regular pundit on American TV news programmes, defending Israel, warning of threats, particularly from terrorism. At the end of the 80s, he turned his attention to domestic politics, was elected to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, and rose rapidly. By 1993, he had become leader of the main right-wing Likud party. Gil Hoffman again. Well, he came back from his posting as Israel's very high-profile ambassador to the United Nations, this international star who knew how to talk to the world.

14:45That was seen as something that nobody else could do like him. And so because that was so respected, that helped him rise through the ranks of the Likud very quickly. pass up the other Likud princes, the sons of the founders of the party. He brought a very American mentality. As Likud leader, Netanyahu took an unapologetically hard line on security, including when it came to the clerics leading Iran. Hugh Lovett is senior policy advisor at the European Council on Foreign Relations, focusing on Israel and Palestine. Going back to at least 1992, Netanyahu has been warning about the dangers that Iran poses, in his view, to Israel and to the world.

15:29And in 1992, he's on record calling for a US-led war against Iran to topple the regime. And this is a message that he's been repeating throughout his political career. And some people would describe Netanyahu as quite messianic in that regard, like always warning of the dangers of Iran. Netanyahu's concerns are to a certain extent, you know, Israeli concerns and are rooted in, I think, legitimate Israeli concerns. First and foremost, it is, of course, that the Islamic Republic of Iran, since the 1979 revolution, has positioned itself as an anti-Israel country. This is Netanyahu speaking to America's CBS News back in 1995.

16:10Iran will be capable of producing nuclear bombs within three to five years. It didn't happen, but it didn't deter him either, says The Guardian's Bethan McKernan. He really does think and feel that Israel faces existential crises on its doorstep from Iran, from various quarters, and his brother died defending that. So, you know, that's a very sincere guiding principle in his life, I think. And that did have a significant impact on how Netanyahu saw politics and what politics was for, you know, the defense of the people.

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19:02Netanyahu was a fierce critic of peace negotiations with the Palestinians too. The Prime Minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, and his government tried to open a peace process with Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. The plan, brokered by the US, to gradually cede power to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, a framework for a two-state solution. Now Netanyahu opposed that. Jonathan Reinhold, professor of international politics at Israel's Bariland University. He felt that Israel had to retain sovereignty, particularly in security terms, for all of that land, and so he tried to erode the Oslo Accords.

19:43Netanyahu built his political profile, rallying support against the process. Then in 1995, events in Israel made headlines around the world. The Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the architect of the Middle East peace process, has been assassinated. He was shot tonight as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv and died shortly afterwards in hospital. Yitzhak Rabin's murder led to early elections, opening the door for Netanyahu. When it came to campaigning, his approach was very media-savvy, markedly different to that of some of his rivals, recalls former Jerusalem Post chief political correspondent Gil Hoffman.

20:20He brought political strategists with him. Instead of what all the other candidates did and staying outside all day where the voting was happening and shaking hands all day and sweating, he would stay in an air-conditioned truck van and he would go out every hour for 10 minutes and in between he would shower and change his shirt. So he would always look vibrant when he came and met with people. It increased his allure. Netanyahu pulling off a surprise victory, winning by less than 1 % of the total number of votes cast. Age 46, Bibi becoming Israel's youngest ever prime minister. He had a troubled first term, not least managing a peace process he'd campaigned against but inherited from the previous Labour government.

21:14But, says Jonathan Reinhold, when in power, Netanyahu reluctantly went along with it. He would say, I'm not saying I'm totally ideologically opposed, but I'm going to behave in a way as to make it difficult to proceed. Now, he had a great partner in that called Yasser Arafat, who also made it extremely hard to proceed because he was never really committed to the process and to peace with Israel. Netanyahu blamed the Palestinian leadership, saying they weren't meeting their security obligations. Elsewhere, he became mired in a series of scandals, was criticised by nationalists for giving up control of territory in parts of the West Bank under extreme pressure from President Clinton.

21:57By 1999, he was out, his fragile coalition falling apart, the electorate taking a chance on Labour's Ehud Barak instead. Netanyahu temporarily left politics, but within a couple of years, he was back. Gil Hoffman. He could have retired from politics and gone off and made endless amounts of money, but he came back because he believes that he and only he can save Israel and the world. He was given cabinet roles in Ariel Sharon's government, though in 2005 resigned as finance minister in protest at Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, a move which he argued would create a base for Islamic terror.

22:38It didn't seem to damage his prospects, mind. Within four years Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister again and, says Jonathan Reinhold, seemed to have learned from the mistakes of his first term, becoming more disciplined and strategic, aware of the need to make alliances. If we look at Netanyahu when he becomes prime minister again, beginning 2009, from then until 2015, he is always prime minister of a government with parties to the left and parties to the right. And he is in the middle and he is navigating a policy which is, I will engage in a peace process because it's important to our relationship with the United States.

23:19And I have to demonstrate to the United States that if the Palestinians tick all the boxes, I'm willing to make the compromises. Therefore, you see him saying, yeah, I'm willing to accept a two-state solution when Obama pressures him. These are not things he likes doing, but he's willing to do them because as a statesman, it protects Israel's security and its overall strategic position. So for that period, from about 2009 till the war in 2014 and the collapse of the peace process under Obama, Netanyahu is very pragmatic, very strategic in his thinking. He understands that he has to be seen to be playing along and he has to sometimes make concessions, things that he doesn't want to do, and he does that.

24:06On Iran, if anything, Netanyahu upped the rhetoric. This is a bomb. This is a fuse. In an address to the UN General Assembly in 2012, holding up a cartoon picture of a bomb with a fuse sticking out of the top of it, he didn't mince his words either. By next spring, at most by next summer, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. Three years later, alarmed that President Obama might be close to securing a nuclear deal with Iran, Netanyahu addressed the US Congress to warn against it.

24:52The greatest danger facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons. To defeat ISIS and let Iran get nuclear weapons would be to win the battle but lose the war. We can't let that happen. But away from the international stage, back home in Israel, Netanyahu was facing mounting problems. There were protests against some of his economic policies, an increasing number of clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants, four major conflicts in the space of just over a decade. He was dogged, too, by a number of corruption investigations, which had a destabilising effect on his ability to form effective coalitions, something that's essential in Israeli politics.

25:41What changes in 2015 is that there begin to be court cases against him in Israel. The problem for him was that the parties to the left of him, the centre parties and the left-wing parties said, look, once you are indicted, we cannot serve in a government with you. Yeah, investigation, all right, we'll stretch it a bit. But indictment, that's a red line. In 2019, he was indicted and sent for trial for alleged bribery, fraud and breach of trust, charges he denies. The Guardian's Bethan McKernan. He managed to split the country over whether he's fit to still be in office with these charges hanging over him.

26:23I mean, half of Israeli society sees him as an unfairly maligned, persecuted, great leader, like a man of the people. And the other half of Israel sees him as a lying charlatan who should have left office a long time ago. So his refusal to quit public life and to keep fighting these charges in any way that he can led to this political crisis in Israel, where there were five elections in the space of four and a half years, Netanyahu losing power briefly in 2021 before returning as Prime Minister for a sixth time at the end of the following year. The corruption cases against him ongoing to this day.

27:05So since then Netanyahu has been entirely dependent on parties to the right of him, on the far right, in a way that no Israeli Prime Minister has ever been before. And in order to ensure that he remained in power, Netanyahu actually brokered an agreement between the two most far-right parties. And one of these parties, headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, is considered beyond the pale by the vast majority of Israelis and would not have got into the Knesset unless Netanyahu had brokered this deal. In other words, the existence and now consolidation of the most far right wing party in Israel is a direct result of Netanyahu's desire to stay in office.

27:52And that means that the far right in Israel have had a veto on all Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and that Netanyahu, in order to stay in power, has let them have that veto. And a big part of that comes back to his narrative, that love him or loathe him, believe him or mistrust him, Israel is under threat, strong leadership is vital, and he, Netanyahu, is that leader. Hugh Lovett again. Netanyahu has, with quite some success, been able to portray himself as Mr Security, that Israel is in safer hands when it is Netanyahu that is Prime Minister. Then, on October 7, 2023, everything changed.