George Gilder - The Israel Test

Although historians and journalists generally describe Jabotinsky and the elder Netanyahus, Nathan and Benzion, as extremists and reactionaries, the subsequent history of Israel vindicates their “Greater Israel” vision over the more accommodating posture of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and their followers. The prevailing notion of a diminutive Israel, with its constant offers to give up yet more land for peace, and with regular unilateral relinquishments of territory, has won the Israelis no gratitude or support whatsoever in the international community and has achieved little discernible peace.

Netanyahu’s Zionist roots and fiery passion for his country implies no parochial patriotism. More than any other foreign leader and even more than many American politicians, he is immersed in American political culture and has deeply influenced the American political debate. After his graduate studies in business at M.I.T, and government at Harvard, he went to work at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) at the height of its influence and success in the late 1970s. Among his more notable colleagues and friends was Mitt Romney. Under the leadership of Bruce Henderson, carried on in a spin-off company by William Bain, BCG developed the learning curve and explained the resulting competitive dynamics of price cuts. BCG taught that aggressive price cuts and the attending increase in unit volume of sales are the most effective strategy in business, leading to a cascade of benefits, including greater market share, lower costs, higher margins, and competitive breakthroughs on the learning curve as larger production volumes yield experience. Fully aware of the close analogy with the dynamic global impact of tax-rate reductions, the BCG analysts supplied the most sophisticated version of the microeconomics of supply-side philosophy.

Working at BCG for two years, Netanyahu grasped the underlying assumptions of supply-side tax cuts as early as any American politicians, including Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan. During the early 1980s, in the heyday of the Reagan administration, Netanyahu served as the dashing and flamboyant political attaché to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, where he became a media favorite and friend of key members of the Reagan circle such as Kemp and Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schultz and UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. A cynosure for leading American Jewish businessmen, notably Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, he was willing to debate any of Israel’s critics, such as Columbia University’s Palestinian apologist Edward Said, and was able to crush most and hold his own with all. From his Washington debut, he went on to become Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, extending his charismatic presence to New York. Among his fans were talk-show host Larry King and John Stossel of ABC News.

All in all, the Netanyahu family has been more successful in the United States than in Israel. Not only did his father Benzion attain his greatest eminence as a historian of the Spanish Inquisition teaching at Cornell, but no fewer than six of Benzion’s brothers became steel magnates in the United States under the name Milo, adopted upon immigrating to America.

Bibi always kept in touch with his American uncles, and after hearing him speak on terrorism before a joint session of Congress after 9/11, his Uncle Zachary proudly observed that if his nephew had not been born in Tel Aviv, he might have become the first Jewish president of the United States. After his May 2011 appearance before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Republicans spoke longingly of finding a birth certificate for him somewhere in the file cabinets of some Pennsylvania town.

As prime minister in the 1990s and finance minister under Ariel Sharon from 2003 to 2005, Netanyahu led the drive to liberate and recast the Israeli economy as the leading force for prosperity in the Arab world — if only the Arabs would see it. Even if his dream of a transformation of the regional economy succeeds, however, no legacy of tax cuts, hedge fund performance fees, and single taxation of venture investors would prompt anyone to talk of Netanyahu in the same breath as Winston Churchill. Netanyahu’s Churchillian role and reveille has come on the issue of Islamist terrorism: the global jihad against the United States and Israel. Just as Churchill gained a prophetic advantage by paying close attention to the early rhetoric of Adolf Hitler and his disciples, Netanyahu understands that the best way to grasp the intentions of organizations such as al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian mullahs is to listen to what they have to say.

Even more than Churchill, Netanyahu has been a warrior since his early years. Before entering college, he joined the elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit — the secret Sayeret Matkal — or 269, that served as a spearhead for the Israel Defense Forces in their combat against terrorism. It was this unit that later led a retaliatory attack against the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Village attack on Israeli athletes by killing three of their leaders. Among the targets of his first operation with the unit, in 1968, in response to a mine attack on a bus full of young Israelis, was Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian was targeted for capture by a paratroop recon team, while Netanhayu’s unit rescued injured members of an ambushed tank team. Arafat managed to escape disguised as a woman.

Toward the end of 1968, Netanyahu participated in a successful counter-terror operation against Middle East Airlines and Libyan Arab Airlines, destroying fourteen unoccupied planes at the Beirut International Airport in retaliation for an attack by Palestinian terrorists. Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had arrived in Athens from Beirut airport and fired on an El Al jet, killing an Israeli citizen, wounding a stewardess, and damaging the aircraft. Netanyahu also played a key role in securing the release of 40 hostages from a hijacked Sabena Airlines plane at the Ben-Gurion Airport. (He was wounded in the arm by accidental friendly fire.)

In May 1969, he nearly lost his life in an action against Egyptian forces that had been laying traps for the Israelis near the Suez Canal. The team succeeded in destroying an Egyptian truck loaded with weapons, but two days later Egyptian troops opened fire on Netanyahu’s inflated rubber boat operating in the canal. Laden with ammunition for his machine gun, Netanyahu discovered that he could neither swim nor disengage himself from his sling full of ammunition. He had all but drowned by the time he was rescued by a naval commando named Israel Assaf, who happened to notice bubbles of foam on the surface, felt for a head under the water, and extracted Netanyahu by his hair under intense Egyptian fire.

The impetus for Netanyahu’s unyielding emphasis on the terrorist threat was the death of his brother Jonathan who had led the key commando rescue team at Entebbe in Uganda in 1976. A group of seven terrorists had seized an Air France Airbus on a flight to Paris from Tel Aviv. Bearing guns and grenades, they forced the pilot to fly to Libya to refuel, and then land at Entebbe, Uganda, 2,500 miles from Tel Aviv. Declaring the principle of no compromise with terror, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the elite unit to fly to Entebbe, kill the terrorists, free the 103 Jewish hostages who remained after the gentile passengers had been released, and bring them home. The operation was a stunning success. Only three hostages were killed in the fighting. An additional hostage — an elderly woman who had become ill in Uganda — could not be rescued because she had been taken to a hospital in Kampala; she was later murdered in her hospital bed under the orders of the brutal Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin. But Jonathan, guiding the troops from outside the terminal, was shot dead by a Ugandan soldier from the top of the airport control tower.