From Entebbe to The Hague: The Insane Story of Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu’s life reads like a political thriller that refuses to end. A commando whose brother became a national martyr, a polished diplomat who sold Israel on American television, a free-market reformer who became the country’s longest-serving prime minister, a defendant in a years-long corruption trial, and a wartime leader wanted by the International Criminal Court — he is still in office at 76 and heading into another election. Few modern leaders have stacked so many contradictions into one career.
He was born Binyamin Netanyahu on 21 October 1949 in Tel Aviv, months after Israel’s independence, the first prime minister born in the state itself. His father, Benzion, a Warsaw-born historian and Revisionist Zionist, studied the Spanish Inquisition and preached that Jewish survival required uncompromising strength. His mother, Tzila Segal, came from a family that had moved from Lithuania via Minnesota to Ottoman Palestine. The family spent years in Philadelphia while Benzion taught; the teenage Bibi used the Americanized name Ben Nitay.
In 1967 he returned to Israel, enlisted, and joined Sayeret Matkal, the elite unit his older brother Yonatan — Yoni — would later command. He took part in the 1972 rescue of a hijacked Sabena airliner at Tel Aviv airport and fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, rising to captain. He then studied architecture and management at MIT, with additional work at Harvard, and briefly consulted at Boston Consulting Group.
The event that defined the family came on 4 July 1976. Yoni, leading the Entebbe hostage rescue in Uganda, was the only Israeli commando killed. Bibi was in the United States and drove to Cornell to tell their father. He later founded the Jonathan Institute to study terrorism. The Netanyahu name entered Israeli mythology.
His English and media fluency made him a natural diplomat. He served as deputy chief of mission in Washington, then as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988. He entered the Knesset with Likud in 1988, became party leader in 1993, and won the first direct election for prime minister in 1996 after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination — at 46, Israel’s youngest prime minister. Critics on the left blamed the right’s rhetoric for the climate that produced the murder; Netanyahu’s camp rejected that. He lost in 1999, went into business, then returned as finance minister from 2003 to 2005. He pushed tax cuts, privatization, and market reforms that supporters credit with helping turn Israel into a high-tech “startup nation.” He resigned over Ariel Sharon’s Gaza disengagement.
Netanyahu became prime minister again in 2009 and held the job almost continuously until 2021. That long stretch included the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco under the first Trump administration. Trade and security ties with those states grew. He also spent years warning about Iran’s nuclear program, famously holding up a cartoon bomb at the UN. Housing prices soared; the cost of living remained a chronic Israeli complaint.
His personal life was messy. He married three times: first Miriam Weizmann, with whom he had a daughter, Noa, who later chose an ultra-Orthodox life; then Fleur Cates after an affair while Miriam was pregnant; then Sara Ben-Artzi in 1991. They have two sons, Yair and Avner. Extra-marital affairs became public. Sara’s influence and spending have been constant political flashpoints.
Indicted in 2019–2020 on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in three cases — gifts from billionaires, an alleged deal with a newspaper publisher, and regulatory favors for the telecom firm Bezeq in exchange for favorable coverage — Netanyahu refused to step down. He called the cases a political witch hunt. In June 2026 he finished 98 days of testimony over 18 months. Judges reiterated a 2023 view that the bribery charge in the Bezeq case would be hard to prove. The trial continues. He remains presumed innocent.
After a brief period out of power he returned in December 2022 at the head of a coalition that included far-right parties. A planned judicial overhaul triggered massive protests. Then came 7 October 2023. Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took roughly 250 hostages — the deadliest day in the country’s history.
For years Netanyahu’s governments had treated Hamas as containable, allowing Qatari cash into Gaza to buy quiet and avoiding a major ground war he had previously argued would trap Israel in governing two million Gazans. Intelligence and military reviews later described a failed “conception.” Independent inquiries criticized political leadership for undermining decision-making and ignoring warnings. Netanyahu has largely blamed the security establishment and rejected personal responsibility. Former defense minister Yoav Gallant and others have called his post-attack narrative false.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza produced enormous destruction. Palestinian health authorities and the UN reported tens of thousands of deaths. Israel said it targeted Hamas, which embedded among civilians. Critics accused Israel of insufficient distinction and of using starvation as a method of war. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel rejects the court’s jurisdiction and calls it politicized and antisemitic. Appeals have failed; the warrants remain in force. Several ICC member states would be obliged to arrest him if he visited.
A U.S.-brokered ceasefire in October 2025 returned the last living hostages. The last deceased hostage’s remains were recovered in January 2026. Later phases — Hamas disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, a new governing arrangement — stalled. Israel still controls large parts of Gaza. Sporadic fighting continues. Coalition partners have pushed settlement expansion and opposed a Palestinian state.
Israel also fought Hezbollah in Lebanon and, with the United States, conducted major campaigns against Iran in 2025 and 2026 aimed at nuclear sites, scientists, missiles, and leadership. Netanyahu has called these historic victories that delayed an existential threat. Critics say the wars did not produce the decisive political outcomes advertised, strained relations with Washington, and left Israel more isolated in parts of Europe and the Global South. Saudi normalization, long the Accords’ hoped-for prize, has not arrived.
As of early September 2026, Netanyahu is still prime minister. The Knesset has dissolved. Elections are set for 27 October. Polls have often shown his bloc struggling; he has spent decades proving that written-off politicians can still form governments.
Supporters see a leader who liberalized the economy, kept Iran’s nuclear program on the agenda when others preferred to look away, expanded Israel’s diplomatic map beyond the old peace-process framework, and refused to blink after the worst attack in the country’s history. Detractors see a politician who hollowed out institutions, prioritized coalition survival and his own legal strategy, presided over a catastrophic intelligence failure, and conducted a war whose human and diplomatic costs will define Israel for a generation.
Both descriptions can be true at once. That is why the story feels insane. The same man who once stormed a hijacked plane as a young officer now cannot easily travel to many Western capitals, is on trial in Jerusalem, is wanted in The Hague, and remains the central figure in Israeli politics more than thirty years after he first took the Likud helm. The next chapter will be written by Israeli voters in a matter of weeks.
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