Post by pieter on Sept 9, 2017 16:11:41 GMT -7
Benjamin Netanyahu
![https://i.redd.it/8qq95zebibkz.jpg](https://i.redd.it/8qq95zebibkz.jpg)
Benjamin Netanyahu as Sayeret Matkal soldier circa 1968
In my point of view Netanyahu is a smart, strong, experienced, shrewd, tactical, strategic, Machiavellist, and a good pupil of the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (German: [ʃmɪt]; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) and the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. He and his rightwing Likud party merge Conservatism with National liberalism, National conservatism, Economic liberalism, Right-wing populism, Revisionist Zionism and Liberal conservatism. Likud is affiliated with the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE) which is connected to the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) political group in the European Parliament. And in the USA Netanyahu and his Likud are linked to the rightwing of the Republican party, to Trump, Christian Zionism, Evangelicals, Donald Trump and conservative Democrats.
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 (IDF) in 1967, he became a soldier in the elite special operations unit Sayeret Matcal 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.
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 Rabin’s coalition cabinet (1991–92). In 1993 he easily won election as the leader of the Likud party, succeeding Yitzhak 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.
The governing Labour Party entered the 1996 elections with weakened electoral appeal following 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.
![https://images1.ynet.co.il/PicServer4/2016/01/06/6740212/674021001001697640360no.jpg](https://images1.ynet.co.il/PicServer4/2016/01/06/6740212/674021001001697640360no.jpg)
Benjamin Netanyahu at Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral
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 Yāsir ʿArafāt 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.
![https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/81702000/jpg/_81702682_dfc85ab6-b2fa-47cf-b042-c6b36e0be57d.jpg](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/81702000/jpg/_81702682_dfc85ab6-b2fa-47cf-b042-c6b36e0be57d.jpg)
Benjamin Netanyahu (right) and Yasser Arafat at Wye Convention Center (Oct 1998)
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.
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.
n 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 also 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.
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 centre than his previous one. A reinvigorated centre-left had emerged, led by Yesh Atid, a newly formed party that had campaigned on middle-class socioeconomic concerns. 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, 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. President 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 centre-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.
![https://i.redd.it/8qq95zebibkz.jpg](https://i.redd.it/8qq95zebibkz.jpg)
Benjamin Netanyahu as Sayeret Matkal soldier circa 1968
In my point of view Netanyahu is a smart, strong, experienced, shrewd, tactical, strategic, Machiavellist, and a good pupil of the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (German: [ʃmɪt]; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) and the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. He and his rightwing Likud party merge Conservatism with National liberalism, National conservatism, Economic liberalism, Right-wing populism, Revisionist Zionism and Liberal conservatism. Likud is affiliated with the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE) which is connected to the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) political group in the European Parliament. And in the USA Netanyahu and his Likud are linked to the rightwing of the Republican party, to Trump, Christian Zionism, Evangelicals, Donald Trump and conservative Democrats.
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 (IDF) in 1967, he became a soldier in the elite special operations unit Sayeret Matcal 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.
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 Rabin’s coalition cabinet (1991–92). In 1993 he easily won election as the leader of the Likud party, succeeding Yitzhak 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.
The governing Labour Party entered the 1996 elections with weakened electoral appeal following 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.
![https://images1.ynet.co.il/PicServer4/2016/01/06/6740212/674021001001697640360no.jpg](https://images1.ynet.co.il/PicServer4/2016/01/06/6740212/674021001001697640360no.jpg)
Benjamin Netanyahu at Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral
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 Yāsir ʿArafāt 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.
![https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/81702000/jpg/_81702682_dfc85ab6-b2fa-47cf-b042-c6b36e0be57d.jpg](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/81702000/jpg/_81702682_dfc85ab6-b2fa-47cf-b042-c6b36e0be57d.jpg)
Benjamin Netanyahu (right) and Yasser Arafat at Wye Convention Center (Oct 1998)
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.
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.
n 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 also 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.
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 centre than his previous one. A reinvigorated centre-left had emerged, led by Yesh Atid, a newly formed party that had campaigned on middle-class socioeconomic concerns. 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, 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. President 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 centre-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.