Benjamin Netanyahu

Prime Minister of Israel
Incumbent
Assumed office
31 March 2009

President : Shimon Peres

Preceded by : Ehud Olmert

In office
18 June 1996 – 6 July 1999

President : Ezer Weizman

Preceded by : Shimon Peres

Succeeded by : Ehud Barak

Leader of the Opposition
In office
2006 – 2009

Preceded by : Amir Peretz

Succeeded by : Tzipi Livni

Minister of Foreign Affairs
In office
2003 – 2005

Preceded by : Shimon Peres

Succeeded by : Silvan Shalom

Minister of Finance
In office
2002 – 2003

Preceded by : Silvan Shalom

Succeeded by : Ehud Olmert

Born : 21 October 1949 (age 60)
Tel Aviv, Israel

Political party : Likud Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Sloan School of Management

Religion : Judaism

He previously held the same position from June 1996 to July 1999 and is currently the Chairman of the Likud Party. Netanyahu is the first (and, to date, only) Israeli prime minister born after the State of Israel’s foundation. Netanyahu was Foreign Minister (2002–2003) and Finance Minister (2003–August 2005) in Ariel Sharon’s governments, but he departed over disagreements regarding the Gaza Disengagement Plan. He retook the Likud leadership on 20 December 2005.[1] In the 2006 election, Likud did poorly, winning twelve seats.[2] In December 2006, Netanyahu became the official Opposition Leader in the Knesset and Chairman of the Likud Party. In August 2007, he retained the Likud leadership by beating Moshe Feiglin in party elections.[3] Following the 10 February 2009 parliamentary election, in which Likud placed second and right-wing parties won a majority,[4] Netanyahu formed a coalition government.[5][6] He is the brother of Israeli Special Forces commander Yonatan Netanyahu, who died during a hostage rescue mission, and Iddo Netanyahu, an Israeli author and playwright.

Family, education, and personal background

Related to the Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna (the Vilna Gaon) on his paternal side,[7] Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv,[8] to Cela (Tsilah; née Segal) and Benzion Netanyahu (original name Mileikowsky). His mother was born in 1912 in Petah Tikva, part of the future British Mandate of Palestine that eventually became Israel. Though all his grandparents were born in Lithuania, his mother’s parents emigrated to Minneapolis in the United States.[9] Netanyahu’s father is a former professor of Jewish history at Cornell University,[10] a former editor of the Hebrew Encyclopedia, and a former senior aide to Zeev Jabotinsky, who has remained active in research and writing into his 90s. His paternal grandfather was Rabbi Natan Mileikowsky, a leading Religious Zionist rabbi and JNF fundraiser.[11]
Born in 1949 in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu was the first Israeli Prime Minister to be born in the State of Israel. (Yitzhak Rabin was born in Jerusalem, but prior to the 1948 founding of the state.) When Netanyahu was 14 years old, his family moved to the United States and settled in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he graduated from Cheltenham High School. In his childhood, an older relative also named Binyamin was then called ‘Bibi’, and Netanyahu’s family also dubbed him ‘Bibi.’[12] To this day, he speaks English with a pronounced American accent.
Netanyahu’s older brother, Yonatan, was killed in Uganda during Operation Entebbe in 1976. His younger brother, Iddo, is a radiologist and writer. All three brothers served in the Sayeret Matkal reconnaissance unit of the Israeli Defense Force – Benjamin from 1967 to 1972 as a captain. He earned a B.S. degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975, an M.S. degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1977, and studied political science at Harvard and MIT. After graduate school, Netanyahu worked at the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Massachusetts, and eventually returned to Israel.[13]
Following a brief career as a furniture company’s chief marketing officer, Netanyahu was appointed by Moshe Arens as his Deputy Chief of Mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC in 1982. Subsequently, he became Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, serving from 1984 to 1988. He was elected to the Knesset in 1988, and served in the governments led by Yitzhak Shamir from 1988 to 1992.[13] Shamir retired from politics shortly after Likud’s defeat in the 1992 elections. In 1993, for the first time, the party held a primary election to select its leader, and Netanyahu was victorious, defeating Benny Begin, son of the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and veteran politician David Levy[14] (Ariel Sharon initially sought Likud party leadership as well, but quickly withdrew when it was evident that he was attracting minimal support).
Netanyahu has authored several books, including two on fighting terrorism. He has a daughter, Noa, from his first marriage to Micki Weizman. His second marriage was to Fleur Cates, who converted to Judaism because only her father was Jewish. He is now married to his third wife, Sara, with whom he has two sons: Yair and Avner.[13]
In the first half of 2008, doctors removed a small colon polyp that proved to be benign.[15]
Netanyahu became a grandfather on 1 October 2009, when his daughter Noa Netanyahu-Roth (married to Daniel Roth) gave birth to a boy, Shmuel.[16][17]
Netanyahu is a fan of the soccer team Beitar Jerusalem.[18][19]

Prime minister (1996–99)

In 1996 Israelis elected their Prime Minister directly for the first time. Netanyahu hired American Republican political operative Arthur Finkelstein to run his campaign, and although the American style of sound bites and sharp attacks elicited harsh criticism from inside Israel, it proved effective. (The method was later copied by Ehud Barak during the 1999 election campaign in which he beat Netanyahu.) Netanyahu won the election, surprising many by beating the pre-election favorite Shimon Peres. The main catalyst in the downfall of the latter was a wave of suicide bombings shortly before the elections; on 3 and 4 March 1996, Palestinians carried out two suicide bombings, killing 32 Israelis, with Peres seemingly unable to stop the attacks. Unlike Peres, Netanyahu did not trust Yasser Arafat and conditioned any progress at the peace process on the Palestinian Authority fulfilling its obligations – mainly fighting terrorism, and ran with the campaign slogan “Netanyahu - making a safe peace”. However, although Netanyahu won the election for Prime Minister, Labor won the Knesset elections, beating the Likud–Gesher–Tzomet alliance, meaning Netanyahu had to rely on a coalition with the Ultra-orthodox parties, Shas and UTJ (whose social welfare policies flew in the face of his capitalistic outlook) in order to govern.
Upon his election, Netanyahu was the youngest person in the history of the position. He had a rocky relationship with American President Bill Clinton, who made some very unflattering remarks about him in the presence of Aaron David Miller.[20] The White House spokesman at the time was Joe Lockhart, who described Netanyahu in an interview as “one of the most obnoxious individuals you’re going to come into - just a liar and a cheat. He could open his mouth and you could have no confidence that anything that came out of it was the truth.”[20]