Where Benjamin Netanyahu appears
196 total
… said. I told her how extraordinary it felt to have the prospect, at least, of leading Labor in opposition to Bibi, without the need to confront, or to inflict personal hurt, on Shimon. But I added: “It seems a bit too good to be true.” It...
ven unnecessary. Bibi was beginning the negotiations to form a government, and that process was likely to take at least a few weeks. Shimon had yet to signal whether he did intend to stay on. Still, when he invited me for a late-night chat...
…at the outline of a possible peace agreement with Assad was already in place. I frankly wasn’t confident that Bibi was the man to lead it forward. Yes, he was smart. He was organizationally astute. He’d been a good sayeret officer. Yet as I...
…y to make peace with the Palestinians, at the price of ceding control of part of the biblical land of Israel. Bibi had gone through the motions of urging restraint. But politically, he had ridden their wave. It was hard not to see his victo...
mpaign suddenly flooded Israel with blue-and-white banners under the slogan: Bibi, Tov la Yehudim. “Bibi is good for the Jews.” Would it swing tens of thousands of votes among the Orthodox voters who were the main target? It was impossible...
…himon seemed to convey the sense that merely being in the same studio with a pretender as raw and untested as Bibi was offensive. When each of the candidates was given the opportunity at the end to ask a single question of the other, Peres...
Rabin, Begin... Bibi, we know each other well, from the days when you were an officer under my command. A young officer, and a good one. Prime Minister is the most important and serious role in this country. Bibi, it’s not yet you. We need...
…accident seemed likely to deal a further blow to his efforts to convince Israel’s voters that he, rather than Bibi, was the man best placed to lead the country. “We’re in trouble,” he said. Yet within days, it became clear that our basic ca...
going be a headto-head television debate. In the meantime, though Bibi might be many things, he wasn’t stupid. He was already telling voters that while Peres was making deals with Arafat, ordinary Israelis were being left to wonder where th...
…iplomatic opportunities could he as president, and we, exploit in the search for peace? And, finally, what if Bibi won? I dare say this first meeting was more memorable for me than for the president. But it would turn out to provide a found...
…d shared a newspaper cover in 1986 predicting that he and I would end up facing each other at the ballot box: Bibi Netanyahu. Positioning himself as the fresh young face of Israeli 275 politics and vowing to defeat Labor, Bibi had seized on...
…ing out how to square what I felt I needed to say, with what many in the audience, and certainly Ben-Zion and Bibi, would expect me to say. Not only was Yoni being mourned across Israel after Entebbe. He was being elevated – in the spirit o...
…salem for Yoni’s funeral. Or to hear Shimon Peres praise him in terms I knew must have filled his parents and Bibi, too, with enormous pride. Shimon described him as “one of Israel’s finest sons, one of its most courageous warriors, one of...
…the following year to train as an armored officer, I made Yoni my deputy. However different in some ways, the Netanyahu brothers were close. They seemed almost driven, to excel and to succeed. As I got to know them both, I sensed that the d...
…ld instead take control of our own destiny, building and developing and securing our own country. Now, I told Bibi, he was back in the mindset of the galut. Yes, al-Qaeda, and more recently Islamic State, were real dangers. The prospect of...
…iplomatic opportunities could he as president, and we, exploit in the search for peace? And, finally, what if Bibi
…ers burned pictures of him, or passed out photos of him dressed in an Arab keffityeh, or even a Nazi uniform. Bibi had publicly declared that opposition to the agreement must remain within the bounds of the law. Yet as he addressed the bayi...
Lauder, or explicitly accuse Bibi of hypocrisy. But his reply — and Bibi’s visible discomfort — were just as effective. Smiling sardonically, he said: “I know your outbursts, and they won’t do you any good.” He challenged Bibi to just “look...
…d not do. This time, the Israeli television debate came earlier in the campaign, a month before the election. Bibi, Yitzhik Mordechai and I were all invited, as the three main candidates. But I told the TV people I had a conflicting persona...
Israelis and Palestinians, particularly Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But hey, that was then. A second-term president has committed himself early in 2013 to a trip to Israel and has an Energizer bunny in Secretary of State John...
