Man on a Mission 2: Slick Willie Strikes Back
Book Review—Benjamin Netanyahu's Bibi: My Story
“Don’t come back if you don’t complete the mission.”
—Meir Har-Zion (“Israel’s most famous warrior”) to future prime minister Bibi Netanyahu
In Part I of this review, I discussed the early life of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. His upbringing in Israel and America, his service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and especially the death of his brother Yoni during the raid on Entebbe had instilled in him a deeply-ingrained sense of mission to protect the Jewish state, to “cling to our country with our fingernails.” Indeed, the word mission appears in his new autobiography, Bibi: My Story, 116 times.
In this installment of my book review, I’ll describe the early days of this mission: The Jerusalem Conference that he organized, which turned the way governments think about terrorism upside down, his rise through the ranks of diplomatic and Likud Party posts, and his first stint as Prime Minister, during which he was under constant fire from US President Bill Clinton.
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