Everybody hates Bibi — but he keeps on winning

It’s the defining anecdote for any article of this type, repeated ad infinitum without entirely losing its resonance: After his first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Bill Clinton reportedly asked a circle of aides: “Who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f**king superpower here?”

That was in the summer of 1996, just after the 46-year-old Netanyahu had won his first election as leader of the Likud party. He was already a media star in the U.S., familiar to CNN viewers as an Israeli government spokesman during and after the first Gulf War. He spoke flawless American English, having spent much of his childhood in upstate New York and then attended MIT, where he earned multiple degrees. No one mistook Bibi — a nickname deployed in countless New York Post headlines — for a liberal even then, but his affect and demeanor suggested an energetic pragmatist fashioned by the neoliberal era, ready to lead the Middle East into the future.

Clinton was the first president to perceive the powerful will and lust for dominance beneath Netanyahu’s telegenic surface, but he certainly wasn’t the last. Nearly 30 years later, Donald Trump finds himself facing Clinton’s rhetorical question in a new register, as Netanyahu has started a war without him and reduced Trump to a non-comic sidekick role. Bibi has relentlessly pursued his vision of the Middle East’s future, in defiance of nearly unanimous opposition from the rest of the non-American world, and is closer than ever to realizing it.

Now that Israel’s longtime leader has rolled the dice on a long-anticipated war with Iran, clearly aiming for a “death blow” against the greatly weakened theocratic regime in Tehran, it’s time to appreciate the scale of his accomplishment, and the extent to which he has been underestimated. How long this war will last and where it will lead is unknowable, and the possibility of catastrophic blowback — either now or in the future — for Israel, the region and the entire world is unmistakable. 

Don’t misunderstand my tone as laudatory: In 17-plus years as prime minister across four decades, Netanyahu has continually outdone himself in viciousness, criminal depravity and shamelessly immoral or amoral statecraft. He has turned a controversial but undeniably democratic and dynamic nation into a semi-authoritarian armed fortress and a global pariah. Whether or not Israel under Netanyahu practices apartheid or has committed genocide are ideological or semantic questions, largely determined by one’s prior assumptions. But the facts about brutal expansionism in the West Bank and mass death in Gaza speak for themselves. 

There’s no point in denying, however, that according to his own dark theory of geopolitical reality, Netanyahu has created the conditions for decisive victory. He did not plan or facilitate the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 (contrary to various internet conspiracy theories), but in a real sense it served his purposes. He exploited that traumatic event to launch the invasion of Gaza, where Israeli forces have committed war crimes on a nearly indescribable scale, with the active if not enthusiastic support of two American presidents from opposing parties. If Trump’s glorious vision of a luxury beachfront resort remains unlikely to be fulfilled, what will actually become of Gaza is almost too painful to contemplate.

While the destruction of Gaza was in process, Israeli agents also executed a startlingly effective attack on Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported militia operating mainly in Lebanon, decapitating its leadership with missile attacks and the now-legendary exploding pagers. Conventional wisdom among Middle East analysts had held in recent years that Hezbollah was a well-armed and well-organized operation, prepared to wage a debilitating long war against Israel. So much for that.

There’s a discernible pattern here that I don’t claim to understand, although I'm afraid the most likely explanation can be summed up with the words “military-industrial complex.” Foreign policy analysts routinely, and often wildly, exaggerate the threat level posed by anti-American or anti-Western forces, presenting them as shadowy hordes ready to overrun civilization at any moment. Consider, for instance, the Soviet military in the ‘80s, Saddam Hussein and the Republican Guard, al-Qaida and its numerous unappetizing offshoots, North Korea, the Gadhafi regime in Libya and, oh yeah, the Assad regime in Syria — which abruptly collapsed last December in a manner that didn’t carry obvious Israeli fingerprints but really didn’t need to.

Whether Israel’s spectacular assault will succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear capability and bringing down the regime, or — as in the fantasies of Fox News, John Bolton and all those “mainstream” Republicans we’re supposed to miss so much — will drag the U.S. into yet another disastrous overseas war, remains to be seen. But Netanyahu has played one more American president for a chump, which should come as no surprise. He used Trump’s compulsive need to be the center of attention, and his delusions of being a master dealmaker, as a smokescreen and then shoved our supposedly anti-interventionist president (like all others before him, to be fair) to the sidelines as a cheerleader and collaborator. 

Sure, Trump gets to claim he was for Bibi's war all along and only pretended to be against it (or something). He isn't fooling anyone, and he's making core MAGA supporters distinctly uncomfortable. They voted for a lot of things that don't make sense, but carrying water for Israel was definitely not on the list. Trump badly wanted the so-called win of cutting a deal with the Iranians, even if that deal looked almost exactly like the one Barack Obama made a decade ago, which Trump then ditched. It still would have been better than his supposed deal with China on trade or the Houthi regime in Yemen on shipping, both of which amount to plenty of bluster followed by retreat. Instead he got thoroughly pantsed by Netanyahu, and has to pretend he didn't notice.

Netanyahu has outlasted four American presidents — five if you count Trump’s first term, which certainly looks like a different era from here — and keeps coming back for more, like the villain in a slasher-movie sequel. Somehow or other he has bent all those very different men to his will, gaslighting them into convincing themselves that he will accept some version of a peace settlement short of his obvious goal, which is twofold: Crushing any realistic possibility of an independent Palestinian state, and establishing Israel as the region’s unchallenged hegemonic power. If I had to guess right now, he's gonna get both of them.

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“Gaslighting” has become a journalistic cliché detached from its original meaning, but it definitely fits in this case. Netanyahu has seduced and manipulated one president after another in much the same way an abusive lover does, because he understands the underlying dynamics of the relationship — in this case, the upside-down relationship between the U.S. and Israel — much better than they do. He persuades them that they control that relationship and are making their own decisions for their own reasons, trusting that the mind-bending drug of American narcissism will prevent them from noticing that they are simply following the contours of his script. It hasn't failed him yet.

Netanyahu has survived numerous political scandals, a criminal indictment, months of angry street protests and a series of extramarital affairs, not to mention the greatest Israeli intelligence failure in 50 years that led up to Oct. 7, 2023, for which he has refused to accept any responsibility. He is at least as much loathed as loved by the Israeli public, and in recent years has hardly ever commanded majority support. But his domestic opponents have never been able to finish him off and he has shamelessly exploited every new crisis, many of them self-inflicted, to avoid electoral defeat and further consolidate his power. 

If that sounds like someone we know, it should. But it’s Trump who took lessons from Bibi, not the other way around. I can’t imagine a more damning indictment of our age than this: If our civilization survives long enough for historians to look back at the first quarter of this century, it won’t be Trump or Obama or Vladimir Putin who stands out as its defining figure. It’ll be this guy.