Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu (born October 21, 1949, Tel Aviv [now Tel Aviv–Yafo], Israel) is an Israeli politician and diplomat who served as his country’s prime minister three times (1996–99, 2009–21, and 2022– ) and was the longest-serving prime minister since Israel’s independence.

Early life and political career

In 1963 Netanyahu, the son of the historian Benzion Netanyahu, moved with his family to Philadelphia in the United States. After enlisting in the Israeli military in 1967, he became a soldier in the elite special operations unit Sayeret Matkal and was on the team that rescued a hijacked jet plane at the Tel Aviv airport in 1972. He later studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.B.A., 1976), taking time out to fight in the Yom Kippur War in Israel in 1973. After his brother Jonathan died while leading the successful Entebbe raid in 1976, Benjamin founded the Jonathan Institute, which sponsored conferences on terrorism.

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Israel: Netanyahu’s first premiership

Netanyahu held several ambassadorship positions before being elected to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) as a Likud member in 1988. He served as deputy minister of foreign affairs (1988–91) and then as a deputy minister in Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s coalition cabinet (1991–92). In 1993 he easily won election as the leader of the Likud party, succeeding Shamir in that post. Netanyahu became noted for his opposition to the 1993 Israel-PLO peace accords and the resulting Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

First term as prime minister (1996–99)

The governing Labour Party entered the 1996 elections with weakened electoral appeal following Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995 and a series of suicide bombings by Muslim militants early in 1996. Netanyahu eked out a victory margin of about 1 percent over Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the elections of May 29, 1996, the first in which the prime minister was directly elected. Netanyahu became the youngest person ever to serve as Israel’s prime minister when he formed a government on June 18.

Unrest dominated Netanyahu’s first prime ministership. Soon after he entered office, relations with Syria deteriorated, and his decision in September 1996 to open an ancient tunnel near Al-Aqsa Mosque angered Palestinians and sparked intense fighting. Netanyahu then reversed his earlier opposition to the 1993 peace accords and in 1997 agreed to withdraw troops from most of the West Bank town of Hebron. Pressure from within his coalition, however, led Netanyahu to announce his intention to establish a new Jewish settlement on land claimed by the Palestinians. He also significantly lowered the amount of land that would be handed over to the Palestinians during Israel’s next phase of withdrawal from the West Bank. Violent protests, including a series of bombings, ensued. In 1998 Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat participated in peace talks that resulted in the Wye Memorandum, the terms of which included placing as much as 40 percent of the West Bank under Palestinian control. The agreement was opposed by right-wing groups in Israel, and several factions in Netanyahu’s government coalition quit. In 1998 the Knesset dissolved the government, and new elections were scheduled for May 1999.

Netanyahu’s reelection campaign was hindered by a fragmented right wing as well as by voters’ growing dislike of his inconsistent peace policies and his often abrasive style. In addition, a series of scandals had plagued his administration, including his appointment in 1997 of Roni Bar-On, a Likud party functionary, as attorney general. Allegations that Bar-On would arrange a plea bargain for a Netanyahu ally who had been charged with fraud and bribery led to a series of confidence votes in the Knesset. With his core political support undermined, Netanyahu was easily defeated by Ehud Barak, leader of the Labour Party, in the 1999 elections.

Netanyahu was succeeded as head of Likud in 1999 by Ariel Sharon but remained a popular figure in the party. When early elections were called in 2001, Netanyahu, who had resigned his seat in the Knesset and thus was ineligible to run for prime minister, unsuccessfully challenged Sharon for leadership of the party. In Sharon’s government, Netanyahu served as foreign minister (2002–03) and finance minister (2003–05). In 2005 Sharon left Likud and formed a centrist party, Kadima. Netanyahu was subsequently elected leader of Likud and was the party’s unsuccessful prime ministerial candidate for the 2006 Knesset elections in which Likud secured only 12 seats to Kadima’s 29.

Second stint as prime minister (2009–21)

The election of February 2009 saw sizable Likud gains as Netanyahu led the party to 27 Knesset seats, finishing a single seat behind Kadima, led by Tzipi Livni. Because of the close and inconclusive nature of the results, however, it was not immediately clear which party’s leader would be invited to form a coalition government. Through the course of coalition discussions in the days that followed, Netanyahu gathered the support of Yisrael Beiteinu (15 seats), Shas (11 seats), and a number of smaller parties, and he was asked by Israel’s president to form the government, which was sworn in on March 31, 2009.

In June 2009 Netanyahu for the first time expressed qualified support for the principle of an independent Palestinian state, with the conditions that any future Palestinian state would have to be demilitarized and would have to formally recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Those conditions were quickly rejected by Palestinian leaders. A brief round of negotiations in 2010 broke down when a 10-month partial moratorium on building settlements in the West Bank expired and Israel refused to extend it. The peace process remained at a standstill for the rest of Netanyahu’s term.

Netanyahu also took a hard line in foreign affairs, lobbying for the international community to take stronger action against Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which he described as the greatest threat to Israeli security and world peace. He also expressed pessimistic views regarding a series of popular uprisings and revolutions in the Arab world in 2011 that were collectively referred to as the Arab Spring, predicting that new Arab leaders would be more hostile to Israel than their predecessors.

Domestically, Netanyahu faced growing economic discontent among the middle class and the young. In the summer of 2011, large street protests spread throughout Israel, decrying social and economic inequality and calling on the government to increase its support for transportation, education, child care, housing, and other public services. The following year his coalition was threatened twice by disagreements with coalition partners over military draft exemptions for Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews. The third and final coalition crisis of 2012 led to early elections after the coalition met an impasse over an austerity budget.

Elections in January 2013 returned Netanyahu to the post of prime minister but at the head of a coalition that appeared closer to the political center than his previous one. A reinvigorated center-left had emerged, led by Yesh Atid, a party newly formed by media mogul Yair Lapid that had campaigned on the middle-class socioeconomic concerns of the 2011 protests. Meanwhile, a combined list presented by Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu had won the largest number of Knesset seats in 2013 but fell short of expectations. After weeks of negotiations, Netanyahu was able to forge an agreement between the Likud–Yisrael Beitneinu bloc, Lapid’s Yesh Atid, Livni’s Hatnua party, and several smaller parties.

In July 2014 Netanyahu ordered a large-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip in response to rocket fire into Israel. At the end of the 50-day campaign, Netanyahu stated that the objective of significantly damaging militants’ capability to fire rockets had been achieved. Internationally, however, the operation was criticized for the high number of Palestinian casualties. By late 2014 serious disagreements had emerged within the governing coalition over budget issues and a controversial bill that would have defined Israel as a Jewish state. In December Netanyahu dismissed Livni and Lapid from the cabinet, triggering early elections set for March 2015.

New tension was injected into the relationship between Netanyahu and U.S. Pres. Barack Obama—already strained by disagreements over negotiations with the Palestinians—in 2014, when Netanyahu emerged as a vocal critic of the Obama administration’s Iran policy, which sought to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue through international negotiations. Netanyahu charged that any compromise would ultimately leave Iran with the option of developing nuclear weapons and that sanctions against Iran should be maintained instead.

In January 2015, with Israel’s elections approaching, Netanyahu accepted an invitation to address the U.S. Congress regarding Iran, which he did on March 3. The invitation was the source of considerable controversy because it had been issued by the speaker of the House of Representatives without notifying the White House—a departure from protocol for visiting heads of state—and because Netanyahu was widely expected to voice criticism of the Obama administration. Critics in Israel and the United States charged that, by openly aligning himself with the partisan opponents of a sitting president, Netanyahu was putting the United States’ bipartisan support for Israel at risk.

As the March 17 election grew closer, analysts predicted that it would be a very close race between Netanyahu’s Likud party and the Zionist Union, a center-left alliance comprising the Labour Party and Hatnua. When results were released, it became clear that Netanyahu and Likud had won the most Knesset seats—30, followed by the Zionist Union, with 24—in a surprisingly decisive victory.

Indictment and coalition troubles

Netanyahu’s fourth term took place in the shadow of four ongoing investigations into bribery and other forms of corruption allegedly committed by Netanyahu and members of his inner circle. In February 2018 Israeli police announced that they had found sufficient evidence to recommend charges of bribery and fraud in two of the cases. In the first case, Netanyahu had allegedly traded political favors for gifts, including expensive cigars, champagne, and jewelry. Lapid, Netanyahu’s political rival and onetime coalition partner, emerged as a key witness in the case. In the second case, Netanyahu had allegedly sought to secure favorable coverage from the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in exchange for cutting the circulation of a rival paper, Israel Hayom. The police recommended charges against several people close to Netanyahu in November for a third case, involving bribery to procure Israel’s purchase of submarines from ThyssenKrupp, but Netanyahu himself was not implicated. In December charges against Netanyahu were recommended in the fourth case, alleging that he had advanced favorable regulatory policies for Bezeq, a telecommunications company, in exchange for positive media coverage in its controlling shareholder’s news outlet. The attorney general promised to examine the three cases in which Netanyahu was implicated together and decide whether to charge him.

Netanyahu’s political allies largely stuck by him as he denied the allegations and refused to step down, but he soon lost support from his coalition partners amid a series of policy disagreements. A truce with Hamas in November, at the recommendation of the country’s defense establishment after the most intense fighting between Israel and the group in years, prompted the resignation of Avigdor Lieberman from his post as defense minister and the withdrawal of his Yisrael Beiteinu party from the coalition, leaving the coalition with a bare minimum of 61 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. At the end of December a deadline loomed to renew controversial Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) conscription exemptions and prompted disagreements among Netanyahu’s remaining coalition partners. The Knesset was dissolved, and early elections were set for April 2019.

For the first time in Israeli history, three sets of elections were held before a new government could be formed, although this appeared to be due to waning political support for Netanyahu’s policies rather than any controversy surrounding his corruption charges. On February 28, less than six weeks before the elections, Israel’s attorney general announced that he would pursue the recommended charges against Netanyahu for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, subject to a hearing. His party performed well in the elections despite the charges, and it appeared that he had won a fifth term as prime minister. But coalition negotiations remained at an impasse because his potential coalition partners could not come to an agreement on Haredi conscription. New elections were held in September with similar results, and again no coalition could be formed.

The third set of elections was held in March 2020 just before the scheduled start of his trial. The results saw significant gains by Likud, bolstered by an effective get-out-the-vote campaign, but Netanyahu still fell short of enough support to form a coalition. With the backing of the Joint List, a party representing the interests of Palestinian citizens of Israel, Benny Gantz, a retired army general, received the mandate to form a government. As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the country, however, Gantz agreed to form an emergency unity government under Netanyahu’s premiership, signing a power-sharing deal on April 20 that would hand the office over to Gantz after 18 months.

But the emergency unity government, plagued by infighting and criticized for its handling of the COVID-19 crisis, was short-lived. Amid his controversial management of the lockdowns and the economy, and with his corruption trial finally underway, Netanyahu’s popularity plummeted even as the United States secured agreements from several Arab countries to normalize ties with Israel (see Abraham Accords). At the end of 2020 the emergency unity government remained unable to pass an annual budget for 2021, leading to the dissolution of the Knesset. A new round of elections was held in March 2021, and, despite a highly successful COVID-19 vaccination drive in early 2021, Netanyahu and his allies again fell short of a majority of Knesset seats. In June Lapid announced the formation of a broad coalition with Naftali Bennett as prime minister, auguring the end of Netanyahu’s second stint as prime minister.

Electoral comeback in 2022 and reliance on the far right

Netanyahu’s corruption trial was derailed in early 2022 when it was reported that the police had used Pegasus spyware to hack the cell phones of some of the trial’s witnesses. The revelation caused delays in testimony and damaged the trial’s integrity in the eyes of the public. In May Netanyahu’s defense team demonstrated that a key meeting alleged by the prosecution could not have taken place on the date claimed in the indictment, casting further doubt on the strength of their case in the Bezeq allegations.

Meanwhile, as leader of the largest party in the opposition, Netanyahu began taking an aggressive approach toward the ruling coalition. After a senior member of the coalition defected to the opposition in April, splitting the Knesset 60–60, Netanyahu encouraged additional defections in an effort to bring down Bennett’s government. In June he directed his party to vote against the renewal of an emergency regulation, in place since 1967, that allowed Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be governed by civil rather than military administration. The renewal was voted down and the regulation’s expiration date threatened to sow chaos in the legal system. The move forced Bennett to call for the Knesset’s dissolution, which would allow emergency regulations to be extended until new elections could lead to formation of a government.

When elections were held in November, voter turnout was the highest Israel had seen since 1999, and the right-wing bloc saw its greatest performance since 2015. Netanyahu was returned to office with a controversial coalition that included far-right ministers (most notably Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich) in pivotal posts. The appointment of one cabinet minister was revoked by the High Court of Justice because he was serving a suspended sentence. The intervention of the High Court added impetus to the coalition’s controversial plans to bring the judiciary under legislative oversight (with potential implications for Netanyahu’s corruption trial) by amending the country’s basic laws. Attempts to enact such reforms in 2023 led to unprecedented strikes and protests by many Israelis, including thousands of army reservists, concerned over the separation of powers. In August senior military officials warned lawmakers that the readiness of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for war had begun to weaken.

Israel-Hamas War

On October 7, 2023, Israel suffered its deadliest day since its independence when Hamas launched a coordinated land, sea, and air assault. About 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 240 others were taken hostage. The attack, which appeared to have extensive planning, caught the Israeli defense establishment off guard, leading many Israelis to question the government’s lack of preparedness. As Israel began conducting air strikes against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu brought Gantz from the opposition into his emergency war cabinet, both bolstering the military expertise of Netanyahu’s government and reducing his reliance on his far-right ministers in wartime decision-making. A ground invasion began weeks later, bringing the Israel-Hamas War into full swing.

Netanyahu faced severe criticism for his handling of the situation. He bore the brunt of the blame not only for the polarized atmosphere that preceded the October 7 attacks but also for the tremendous strain placed on Israelis by the hostage crisis, the displacement of Israelis near the border with the Gaza Strip, and the mobilization of a large portion of Israel’s working-age population for war. The families of the hostages in particular expressed frustration over Netanyahu’s reluctance to negotiate a cease-fire to secure the hostages’ release, and members of the war cabinet publicly chastised Netanyahu for aiming to “bring about a total victory” and for his delay in articulating a vision for the “day after” the war. Support for Netanyahu and his Likud party plummeted in the polls, falling in October to a distant second behind Gantz and his National Unity party and remaining low into 2024. Although Netanyahu initially drew international support to respond to the October 7 attacks, he grew increasingly isolated as the humanitarian toll in the Gaza Strip mounted. In March 2024 he faced an unusually public rift with U.S. Pres. Joe Biden and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer over an impending offensive in the city of Rafah, one of the only areas in the Gaza Strip still unscathed by the ground invasion and where most of the population was taking shelter.