Israel at War: Inside the Nuclear Showdown With Iran Read Online Free Page A

gutting Likud. At the time, Netanyahu was a member of the Knesset and a member of the opposition. His Likud Party held only twelve seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament. A shell of its former greatness, Likud was in its weakest political position since its creation by Menachem Begin in 1973, when the party captured a stunning thirty-nine seats.
    Today, of course, everything is different. Netanyahu is no longer an observer; he is Israel’s commander in chief. The decision to stop Iran—or not—is not someone else’s to make; it is his.
    Who Is Benjamin Netanyahu?
    What surprises people who don’t know Netanyahu’s history is that in his younger years he never planned on a career in politics—much less ascending to the prime minister’s office. To the contrary, he wanted to go into business. Though he did briefly study politics at Harvard, he actually holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His first jobs out of college weren’t in government; they were in business. From 1976 to 1982, Netanyahu worked in the private sector, including a stint with the Boston Consulting Group, a global business consultancy, where he first met and worked side by side with Mitt Romney, who years later would win the Republican nomination for president of the United States.
    Born in Tel Aviv on October 21, 1949, just a year after the prophetic rebirth of the State of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu—widely known to family and friends by his nickname, “Bibi”—entered the world in the immediate aftermath of his nation’s War of Independence. He was born into a somewhat-secular Jewish family, one that was, like so many Jewish families, reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was an acclaimed Jewish historian. Bibi, his older brother, Yonatan, and his younger brother, Iddo, were taught from an early age that Jews had been isolated and hunted and persecuted and murdered throughout history and had to learn to defend themselves and the land of their forefathers.
    “Jewish history is a history of holocausts,” Benzion Netanyahu once said. 38
    It was a truth Bibi never forgot. After Yonatan became a commander in the country’s most elite army unit, the Sayeret Matkal, Bibi worked hard to secure a coveted spot in “the Unit” as well—a spot he eventually earned. When “Yoni” was killed in an operation to rescue Israeli hostages held in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, Bibi was deeply shaken by the loss. But he resolved to uphold his brother’s legacy of defending the Jewish people.
    In a fascinating twist of history, it was during this period in the mid-1970s that Bibi got to know Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres. Barak was Yoni’s superior in the IDF, and for a time, he was Bibi’s commander as well. Shimon Peres, meanwhile, was Israel’s defense minister. When Yoni was killed in Entebbe, it was Barak who personally informed Bibi of the news, and Barak and Peres together helped comfort and honor the Netanyahu family. Both men attended Yoni’s funeral and played critical roles in a formative time of Bibi’s life.
    That said, Peres and Barak were both members of the left-of-center Labor Party. In time, Bibi gravitated to the right-of-center Likud Party. When Bibi first became prime minister in 1996, he did so by defeating Peres in an incredibly narrow election that came down to just a handful of votes. When Bibi lost the premiership in 1999, he did so to Barak, who was suddenly a fast-rising star on the Israeli political scene.
    Yet upon being elected prime minister again in 2009, Bibi immediately reached out privately and sincerely to both men. Promising to put past political rivalry aside, Bibi asked Barak to join his government as defense minister in order to design a feasible plan of attack against Iran and to prepare the Israel Defense Forces for the most difficult mission of its modern existence. Few expected Barak to