If Yitzhak Rabin is the story of Israel, then Netanyahu is the story of Israel's relationship to America.
Netanyahu wasn't born here, but from high school onward Netanyahu lived two lives: as an Israeli and an American: high school in Philly, IDF, MIT, Harvard, Yom Kippur War, MIT again, Boston financial firm, anti-terror thinktank in Jerusalem, and then the two identities merge: multinational corporate job in Jerusalem, Deputy Ambassador to the US, then Ambassador to the UN. Even when he goes back to Israel to serve in the Knesset (parliament), he becomes the voice of official Israeli policy whenever American news needs an interview. Netanyahu became the dominant politician of his time not because he represented Israel so well to America, but because he represented America to Israelis.
Every day you hear some version on the refrain that Israel is the tail which wags America's dog, but if Israel has disproportionate influence in America, the reason is the same reason Jews succeed in every country and eventually fail: be more native than the natives, beat Americans at being American, so American that they resent you for being a better American than they are. Nowadays every American who goes to Israel comments on how much Israel looks like any place in the US.
But Bibi is not just half-American, he's half corporate American, and it's not the progressive, subversive parts of America Israel seems like, it's the corporate, anonymous, faux-respectable sides. Israeli culture has a life and mind of its own, subversive in a completely different way from its American countercultural counterparts, but go around any skyscraper or office park or minimall and ask yourself if you can tell which country you're in.
If Bibi were all American, he'd have been the second Ronald Reagan every Republican's hoped for ever since - a Ronald Reagan who actually who actually runs his government. Even as a half-Israeli, Bibi gives better speeches in English than most American presidents. To Israeli politics he brought American techniques of corporate messaging, TV presentation, negative campaign ads, economic deregulation, tax cuts, welfare reform and streamlined government assets.
It was American economics which got him back to his nearly 15 year reign, but it's masterful American style bullshit that keeps him there: promising Obama a Palestinian state he obviously had no intention of keeping, promising there would never be a Palestinian state a day before his re-election and going back on his 'un-promise' the day after, telling voters to vote for him so as to 'dilute high Arab turnout' then promising Arabs the day after he won 'I value your contributions and I value you.' Nothing is more American than Israel's 2018 "Jewish nation state" law which manages to strip minorities of their rights precisely by saying nothing about them.
And yet I never got it. For years, I hated him for the opposite reason to why I now hate him. On the 'matzav' (what Israelis call 'the situation'), he is probably closer to the center than any Likud Prime Minister was before him, but I didn't believe he was reasonable, no matter what he said about Palestinian statehood.
For years, I thought he was a fanatic, the son of Jabotinsky's right-hand man (look him up...) with so many daddy issues that he'd never let go of the infinitely militarized 'Greater Israel' vision that could lead Israel to ruin as quickly as if Israel laid down its arms forever. But it took him embracing the fanatics I thought he was to figure out that he was no fanatic.
Bibi is not unreasonable, he's too reasonable. In his heart he's not a fanatic, he's a sociopath. He's not so Jewish that he'd run the Jewish people aground out from his own fanaticism, he's so American he'd run the Jewish people aground for his own ego.
Then the scandals hit: bribes in the form of personal gifts, promising Israel's main newspaper (Yediot Akh'ronot) that he'd push through legislation to limit the circulation of competitors so long as they portrayed him better, promising a guy with a website and shady finances to change financial regulations if he gets better portrayal there too. Don't ask me to explain them more than that, it would take too much time and I'm not totally sure I understand them myself.
The point is not that Netanyahu is corrupt. In Israel, political corruption is a trade hazard; like everywhere else, but unlike everywhere else, Israel sends its corrupt leaders to jail. But Netanyahu is not garden variety corrupt like his predecessor, Ehud Olmert (remember him?). Netanyahu is snake-in-the-garden corrupt, like Trump, so corrupt he'd be willing to take his country down with him. So many fanatics have a cripplingly perverse integrity and prize the idea that they'd go down saving the ship. If staying Prime Minister means Netanyahu ruins Israel, he seems perfectly fine with it.
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