Bibi: My Story

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Mr President,’ I said, ‘would you let a regime that wants to annihilate you set up a state at the George Washington Bridge? Of course not. Neither would we.’ When he was with Rivlin,” Netanyahu writes, “Trump blurted out, ‘Bibi doesn’t want peace.’ For some unfathomable reason, this bombshell wasn’t leaked.” Peter Robinson: Last question, "Bibi: My Story". "My parents' generation was tasked with founding the state of Israel. My generation was tasked with securing its future." Your parents' generation succeeded.

In his memoir, Netanyahu doubles down on his embrace of the Covid vaccine and regrets easing up too early on pandemic closures, in hindsight a “cardinal mistake”. Here, the divide between Netanyahu and the other members of the populist right could not be starker. For him, modernity matters. Bibi Netanyahu: Right, okay. Well there's a sixth eye, it's called the I, Israel. And Israel's contribution to American intelligence over the years is very, very significant. And you can talk to some of your, of the people who are familiar with this, and they'll tell you just how, it's growing all the time. So the answer to the question that you raised, is we need an alliance of democracies who are innovative and resolute in shoring up our common civilization by increasing our power. Perhaps not through our numbers, although our numbers can grow too, but through our hearts and minds. You need both minds, very good minds, but you need a solid heart too. Benjamin Netanyahu is the longest serving prime minister of the modern state of Israel. His autobiography helps explain why. Hardly a charm offensive, this is a straightforward account and defense of the author’s hard-line positions. Starting in Russia, Netanyahu’s direct progenitors crisscross the globe with notable stops in the United States, Great Britain, throughout Europe, and the city that is the focus of their aspirations, Jerusalem. Into this family, Yonathan, Benjamin, and Iddo are born. The boys grow up with their father’s career taking them between Israel and the United States, into young men and serve in the armed forces for Israel, when personal tragedy strikes the family. This tragedy directs Mr. Netanyahu to assume leadership of an international counterterrorism foundation.

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In the latest election, Netanyahu accomplished what few of his peers ever could: He won what passes in Israel as a resounding victory, granting him the opportunity to become prime minister for a third time. And rather than reading like a typical self-serving retrospective, a classic bid for immortality, his memoir now becomes a reintroduction to a man who has rarely been out of the public eye for a quarter-century . . . [and] serves as an essential window into his character." Bibi Netanyahu: There is rising, not enough, but it's rising. And the same thing by the way I do with the Orthodox community, the two lower income classes, if you will, groups in Israeli society. I am encouraging, in some ways also pushing, into the free market, because with both of them, I limited child allowances, which was very difficult politically, 'cause they were having incrementally growing child allowance, so when you got to the sixth child, from there and beyond, you could live on hundreds of dollars in today's money, hundreds of dollars for each child, and so you could just live off having a lot of children. And that is a demographic and economic suicide for the state of Israel. So I cut the child allowances to the level of the first child and basically, how shall I say this, actively encouraged both groups to enter the job market, which they did. And so participation in the job market in Israel, which was well beyond, below the OECD average is now right there where it is.

Peter Robinson: The other way around, okay, all right. So if it's true that the United States now find itself in something like the same strategic box that Israel has always been in, outnumbered, often outspent. You have to be smarter, you have to be innovative.

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Netanyahu is the rare politician who never goes off-message. Nearly every politician, once you switch off the cameras and recording devices and close the reporter’s notebook, allow themselves to relax and switch out of campaigning mode. That’s when you might hear from them a few revealing words or see a different character, which sadly you can’t use in your reports. With Netanyahu that rarely if ever happens. His off-record persona is nearly identical to his on-record. He has the rare ability to fully convince himself of his political message, even if the message has changed. And his book reflects that perfectly. Peter Robinson: So let me try a thought out on you. This is, I'm not sure, I'm not at all sure I'm right about this, but it strikes me as plausible. I'd like to hear what you make of it. Observation about American strategy. Since at least the Civil War, the American way of war has relied on superior materiel. Grant just grinds down Robert E. Lee, and that's how the Civil War ends. And in the Second World War-

The book has not yet been released but, despite my dislike for him brought about by years of anti-Netanyahu sentiment promulgated by the media, I decided to buy the audio book. This was driven by Bibi's recent resurrection in Israeli politics. Until listening to the audiobook, I had considered Netanyahu to be arrogant, a promoter of his brand and abrasive. On the plus side, I now consider him to be of brilliant intellect, financially astute and an avid historian. Although he is probably corrupt and, disgustingly, has brought in the right wing crazies just so he can cling to power, he is the best thing that has happened to Israel. It is due to his experience gained at Boston Consulting Group that he has turned Israel into the economic high tech powerhouse it is today. He deregulated the financial markets, championed privatisation, and, on his watch, GDP per capita soared and the deficit shrank. He is the father of the high tech sector and personally designed the plans to ensure Israel's universities churned out engineers and computer geeks. For these economic reasons (and the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran), Israel's new friends in the Arab world, being UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, signed the The Abraham Accords in 2020. Saudi Arabia will likely follow soon. These accords are a "series of treaties normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel. In the span of five short months, these four Arab states joined Egypt and Jordan in making peace with Israel. The agreements were called 'The Abraham Accord' in honor of Abraham - the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" Benjamin Netanyahu's autobiography is one of history’s great Zionist texts. Most politicians’ autobiographies are turgid affairs . . . Then there is Benjamin Netanyahu’s autobiography, which is not a politician’s autobiography at all, but an adventure story dressed up as one. It is a Tom Clancy novel written for a Tom Cruise movie adaptation, posing as a normal politician’s memoir.” I almost through with Netanyahu’s book heading to the Abraham Accords at the end, which have become a testament to the humanity of those around Israel who seek peace and recognize its legitimacy. I shall know more about Israel and a hero and a story than most citizens in this country. Others might consider this journey with Netanyahu and discover a hero and a story that is worth illuminating. Netanyahu now reveals that he deployed further visual aids for Trump, who even so early in his presidency was known not to read briefing papers, to become bored easily and to prefer advice framed in reference to his own interests. Bibi Netanyahu: Yeah it is, because of the nature of the regime. Not only the power it amasses, but you know, Napoleon says power is mass times volition, times will.

Book Review | Bibi: My Story

Peter Robinson: Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu, the once and future Prime Minister of the state of Israel, and the author of "Bibi: My Story". Thank you.

Netanyahu cites Friedman’s description of how Trump subsequently “leveled into Abbas … demanding to know who he really was, a peacemaker as he claimed in Washington or a terrorist as he proclaimed on the tape”. Based on the latest polls, he has a serious shot at re-election but is not quite there. A win could mean immunity from prosecution. That decision will rest with his coalition partners – if he wins. There was certainly a point towards the end of 2021, when the new Bennett-Lapid government which had seemed so precarious from the start, looked like it may actually survive a while longer, after passing the state budget in November, when Netanyahu instructed his lawyers to start negotiations with the attorney-general over a possible plea bargain. That would have meant him receiving a reduced sentence in his long-going corruption case which at the very least would have barred him from running again for office for years to come. But the talks came to nothing and then the government lost its majority in early April and things began to look a lot different. It includes, among other topics, Mr. Netanyahu’s upbringing and education in both Israel and the United States, his own military service with a branch of Israel’s special forces, the Sayeret Maktal, his entry into business and then Israel’s diplomatic service in Washington during the Reagan administration, and, of course, his various terms as Prime Minister and leader of the opposition. While any autobiographer can be expected to put the facts about his or her life in the best possible light, what emerges—independent of what Mr. Netanyahu writes about himself—is a picture of a highly competent man of many, varied talents and someone who has much to teach about leadership. Following the interview, there was a brief conversation about Bibi’s writing process and the political biographies that influenced him.One wonders what he would have made of this book — perhaps this review provides at least part of the answer. Peter Robinson: But, sorry. You said you were a 19th-century man? Yeah, my father was a quintessential 19th-century intellectual, one of these great scholars of old, and that's the tradition that I was born. So he would, when I was young, when I was a little boy, I found my homework, my notebooks from history class in the fifth grade. And I see these fantastically learned essays about the Maccabees, about Hellenism and so on, and he clearly dictated it to me. I wrote it in my child's handwriting. So you know, I got A's history always. I got A's generally, but I got A's in history. So then he said to me, "You write, I'll edit." And then he said to me, "You edit," and he taught me how to write and how to edit. And at a very young age, I do both. In contrast to Netanyahu’s cultivation of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, Jabotinsky strongly opposed Abba Ahimeir and the maximalists in his Revisionist movement. Jabotinsky never wavered in his opposition to authoritarianism and illiberal thought. He died in the US in 1940, attempting to create a Jewish army to fight the Nazis.