Here is a brief excerpt from a ” classic” article by David Rdemnick for The New Yorker, published in 1998.
Heraclitus once observed, Everything changes, nothing changes.” That is certainly true of some so-called “leaders,* including Benjamin Netanyahu and a former U.S. President who was the first to be impeached not once but twice and will probably be the first to be indicted not once but perhaps several times.
Credit: Photograph by Arnold Newman / Getty
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If Paris is the City of Light, Jerusalem is the City of Opinion. Here it rains opinions. The desert blooms on the moisture of harangue. The rarest phrase in the fifty-year-long history of Israel is “No comment,” and certainly no one has ever uttered the following sentence: “I have no comment on Bibi.”
Left or right, everyone refers to the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, by his childhood nickname, though familiarity in his case has not bred affection. The strangest thing about Netanyahu is that although he commands support—his stalling tactics on the peace process have won him a center-right majority—he commands little respect. One afternoon, I went to see David Bar-Illan, a former concert pianist, who is among Netanyahu’s closest aides and very few friends. On matters of policy, Bar-Illan is a spinmeister extraordinaire, the fellow who happily goes before the camera crews to defend the latest action of the Prime Minister. And yet when we were talking about Bibi’s attempts to win over the ultra-Orthodox vote despite his own ultra-secular habits, even his admission of adultery, Bar-Illan rolled his eyes and spoke on the record in a way no Washington equivalent ever would.
“Finessing his being secular was nothing compared to other things, like adultery,” Bar-Illan said. “One thing is to have an affair with a shiksa—but a married woman! With a shiksa, even the rebbes do it. But a married woman! Now Bibi’ll go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, maybe he’s gone to the Western Wall, or he’ll say the phrase ‘With God’s help.’ But he’s not fooling anyone.”
The rhetoric of Israeli democracy has always been noisier than the American brand, but talk about Netanyahu is unhinged. One of the first things I did on arriving in Jerusalem was to call Yitzhak Shamir, the previous Likud Prime Minister. Shamir picked up his phone on the first ring, as if he’d been waiting for the call all week. “Bibi?” Shamir said in his exhausted Old World accent. “He is not a very trustworthy man.”
There was a long pause at the other end of the line, as if Shamir felt he had said quite enough to cover the subject. In his view, after all, Bibi concedes too much to the Arabs and has diluted the Likud Party. “He’s too egotistical. I personally have no contact with him,” Shamir went on. “He’s a man who is not very popular. He’s a talented, successful man. He made it at a young age. He had many advantages. But people don’t like him. I wouldn’t say he is admired. I don’t believe he believes in anything. He has a huge ego. People don’t like such people. I don’t like him.”
And so on. After Shamir had unburdened himself, I called Shimon Peres. Running on a platform of moving quickly on the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians, Peres lost the 1996 election to Netanyahu, who captured the support not merely of the hard right but also of many Israelis who thought Yitzhak Rabin and Peres had gone too far, too fast. Peres also picked up on the first ring. He was leaving for China in five minutes, he said, but he managed to take ten to tear a hole in his successor. “We’ve lost so much, and for nothing,” Peres said wearily. “Netanyahu’s only consideration is his own coalition. He’s always worried about losing power—that is always his first priority. In the meantime, we’ve lost the trust we built up, we’ve lost the Arab world, we’ve lost the respect we won throughout the rest of the world. All this makes it appear that we are a bizarre nation. To achieve peace and not follow through is bizarre.”
Netanyahu, who is forty-eight, is the first Israeli Prime Minister to have been born after the founding of the state. As a result, perhaps, many Israelis sense in him a distinct lack of gravitas. He often strikes people as a younger man trying to make an impression, and only suffering for it. When I went to interview Netanyahu, in his office, he began the session by lighting up a big cigar, a Davidoff. You knew it was a Davidoff because he left on the ring. Nor did he offer one to his guest: Bad manners? Low supplies? He then proceeded to fill the room with so much smoke that his young press aide, a friendly fellow from Dubuque named Michael Stoltz, reacted as if he’d been trapped in a garage with the car running. Stoltz could have died a slow death, I thought, and Netanyahu would not have stopped his pompous puffing.
The riddle of Netanyahu is that so many Israelis find him personally insufferable, and yet if there were an election tomorrow he would almost certainly defeat the Labor standard-bearer, his old military commander and role model, Ehud Barak. The Orthodox know all about Bibi’s secular indiscretions—the pandering, the philandering. The far-right nationalists cannot yet decide whether he wants to kill the Oslo peace process (as they would like) or not. Both the Russian émigrés and the Sephardim know that he is not one of them. Nevertheless, these outsider constituencies believe that Bibi is better for their interests than the Ashkenazic élites of the Labor Party.
The left, of course, cannot bear Netanyahu. In their view, Bibi has “killed the peace,” eradicated the historical chance symbolized by the 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords with the Palestinians. Bibi’s enemies see him as an incompetent, unimaginative, and cynical politician with a singular gift for staying in office. “Netanyahu knows very well what he wants,” Uri Savir, who had been Rabin’s chief negotiator in Oslo, told me, “and the main thing is to steer Israel in the direction of a mutual-deterrence policy, because he does not really believe in real peace. He does not believe in a new quality of relations. He also sees everything through the eyes of a political animal and he wants to be reëlected. Everything he does is to play to his right-wing constituency. To appeal to them, he uses the buzzwords that appeal to their ghetto mentality.”
There are still many on the left who blame Netanyahu for helping to whip up an atmosphere of hatred that led to the Rabin assassination. Nevertheless, Bar-Illan insists that one day soon all Israelis will end up marveling at Netanyahu’s guile and ideological agility. “Bibi wants to out-Begin Begin,” Bar-Illan told me, meaning that he will do something even more shocking than Menachem Begin did when he signed the Camp David accords, in 1978, promising to give the Sinai back to Egypt and bringing about peace between Israel and its most powerful neighbor.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He has written many pieces for the magazine, including reporting from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe, and Profiles of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Katharine Graham, Mike Tyson, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Remnick began his reporting career as a staff writer at the Washington Post in 1982, where he covered stories for the Metro, Sports, and Style sections. In 1988, he started a four-year tenure as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent, an experience that formed the basis of his 1993 book on the former Soviet Union, “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.” In 1994, “Lenin’s Tomb” received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism.
Under Remnick’s leadership, The New Yorker has become the country’s most honored magazine. It has won fifty-three National Magazine Awards, including multiple citations for general excellence, and has been named a finalist a hundred and ninety-two times, more than any other publication. In 2016, it became the first magazine to receive a Pulitzer Prize for its writing, and now has won six, including the gold medal for public service. Remnick’s personal honors include Advertising Age’s Editor of the Year, in 2000 and 2016, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 2016.
Remnick has written six books: “Lenin’s Tomb,” “Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia,” “King of the World” (a biography of Muhammad Ali), “The Bridge” (a biography of Barack Obama), and “The Devil Problem” and “Reporting,” which are collections of some of his pieces from the magazine. Remnick has edited many anthologies of New Yorker pieces, including “Life Stories,” “Wonderful Town,” “The New Gilded Age,” “Fierce Pajamas,” “Secret Ingredients,” and “Disquiet, Please!”
Remnick has contributed to The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and The New Republic. He has been a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and has taught at Princeton, where he received his B.A., in 1981, and at Columbia. He lives in New York with his wife, Esther Fein; they have three children, Alex, Noah, and Natasha.