Review: In his memoir, Benjamin Netanyahu glides through his life story
” was written in longhand over nine months and was scheduled to be published in English and Hebrew in November. But when the most recent Israeli elections — the fifth in less than four years — were set for Nov. 1, the tome, weighing in at more than 650 pages of text, was published instead in mid-October, quickly finding a spot on many bestseller lists.
, a memoir, especially by a politician, is always a defensive exercise, but a “biographer is an artist under oath.”,” by the respected Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, reveals Netanyahu’s genius at reframing his own story.Netanyahu’s many fans, arguably even more on the American right than among the Israeli public, will relish the way he shapes his life story as a unique, uncompromising — and much-maligned — defender of Israel as a Jewish state against its many enemies, domestic and foreign.
He published a book of Yoni’s letters and led a conference on terrorism created in Yoni’s name, which convened twice and enabled Netanyahu to associate with a growing number of Western conservative politicians and activists, keeping alive his connection with a brother whose heroic dimensions only seemed to expand over time.
As Pfeffer relates, Yoni was accused of acting against orders by opening fire on Ugandan soldiers, exposing himself to return fire that probably killed him. His family insists he was killed by the German commander of the hijackers. Pfeffer concludes that the creation of the latter scenario suggests “to some that the family felt that being felled by an ‘inferior’ African soldier was somehow a lesser way to die.”Bibi surely cannot be faulted for idolizing Yoni even more in death than in life.
If father-son relationships are complicated, so are marriages. Netanyahu could be forgiven, in his own book, for glossing over the dissolution of his first two marriages and for mentioning the daughter he had with his first wife only once. His third and current wife, Sara, is awarded pride of place.
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