Confidence and Media Savvy Aided ‘Bibi’

JERUSALEM —  Benjamin Netanyahu stood beside his older, more experienced rivals for the right-wing Likud Party leadership in a televised debate three years ago and asked rhetorically who better than he could take on the Labor Party government.

“I am here. . . . I am the only one who can replace it,” the Likud upstart asserted. “I am the only one who can return Likud to government.”

Such arrogance drew snorts of contempt from his competitors, including a sniff from one that he was a “Napoleon.”

It also secured Netanyahu the election as party chief and, as he predicted, apparently will propel him into the prime minister’s office following Israel’s first direct vote for a national leader Wednesday.

“Bibi” Netanyahu, as he is called, is nothing if not supremely confident. His meteoric rise to the top in Israeli politics attests to that. At 46, never having held a Cabinet post, Netanyahu appears to have beaten the incumbent prime minister, Shimon Peres, a septuagenarian Nobel Peace laureate who has served at the head of almost every Israeli government ministry.

Like President Clinton, the good-looking and prematurely gray Netanyahu would represent the passing of power to a new generation. He would be the first Israeli prime minister born after the 1948 War of Independence and founding of the state of Israel. He was 7 years old during the 1956 Sinai campaign and 17 during the 1967 Middle East War, led by Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin.

Netanyahu’s rapid ascent from foreign diplomat to party chief has drawn sneers from critics who view him as more dedicated to his own success than to a Likud platform or right-wing ideology. But even his critics acknowledge his formidable political talents.

“Bibi is unlike past Israeli politicians who stood for something,” said a disapproving Labor government official. “But I have always said that we should not underestimate him.”

Having spent the Reagan years in the United States, Netanyahu may have taken more cues from the “Great Communicator” than from Clinton, his contemporary.

Netanyahu understood that Israel was a country in transition to peacetime prosperity and 21st century politics, and he mastered the modern campaign of television sound bites and personality politics. He learned to market himself.

After the assassination of Rabin in November by a right-wing Jew opposed to the government’s land-for-peace agreement with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Rabin’s widow accused Netanyahu of having fueled the climate of political violence that led to Rabin’s murder.

Polls showed Netanyahu with just 24% of the nation’s support then.

Israel’s own great communicator quickly softened his message and moved his campaign to the political center, where the majority of Israelis clearly stand.

Suddenly, while still calling the peace process a failure, he said he accepted the agreements that Rabin and Peres had signed with Arafat and dropped his resolution never to meet with the Palestinian leader.

At the same time, playing on Israeli fears of terrorism, the square-jawed candidate with a battle-scarred upper lip promised over and over in his deep baritone that he would be strong against the Arabs.

Israelis who were ambivalent about the changes in their country, and about the peace process, were suspicious of Netanyahu’s American-style campaign. His glib talk and well-tailored suits made him seem slippery, nothing like the gruff and straight-talking army generals that Israelis were accustomed to. They said he was shallow and lacked vision.

Still, Netanyahu succeeded in blending the old-style ideology of Likud--a world view that often evokes Jewish suffering and places paramount importance on Israel’s military superiority over its neighbors--with his modern persona and organizational skills. The public apparently bought his new, more moderate image.

David Bar-Ilan, editor of the conservative English-language Jerusalem Post newspaper, insists that the image masks a great mind.

“Bibi stands head and shoulders above all other Israeli politicians I know in intellectual ability and world view,” Bar-Ilan said. “But he is Americanized, and there is a Eurocentric snobbism here and a feeling that an American TV personality is almost by definition superficial. Unfortunately, Bibi in a sense contributes to that [perception] because he is not only good at it but he seems to enjoy it.”

The “Americanization” of Netanyahu began when he was 14.

His father, Benzion, a fervent right-wing Zionist, took a job as a history professor at Pennsylvania’s Dropsie University and moved the family to the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was there, at an American high school, that Netanyahu acquired the colloquial American English that he later put to use in diplomacy and on worldwide television.

Netanyahu returned to Israel in 1967 for army duty, joining an elite secret commando unit called the Sayeret Matkel.

In 1968 he helped blow up 13 airplanes in a raid on Beirut International Airport. In 1972 he dressed in overalls as a mechanic to help rescue hostages from a hijacked Sabena airplane at Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv. He was shot in the arm in the latter operation.

His military service was considered brave and honorable, and he made the rank of captain before returning to the United States to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But it was Netanyahu’s older brother, Jonathan, who became the national military hero.

Yoni, as he was known, led the raid on Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976 to free 98 Jewish hostages on an Air France plane hijacked by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Sayeret Matkel squad saved all but three of the hostages. Yoni Netanyahu was the only soldier killed in the assault.

Netanyahu’s big brother seems to have been both his guiding light and his burden. His status as martyred national hero has both helped Netanyahu open doors and haunted him, inviting inevitable and occasionally unflattering comparisons.

“Especially in the beginning, Yoni Netanyahu’s reputation seemed so much superior,” said political scientist Yaron Ezrahi at the Institute for Democracy in Jerusalem. “He was a heroic Israeli warrior and seemingly more intellectual and sophisticated than his brother. But his name was a very important entree; everyone knew the name Netanyahu.”

After graduating from MIT with a master’s degree in business, Netanyahu founded the Jonathan Institute, a think tank dedicated to the fight against terrorism that was Netanyahu’s springboard to national and international prominence. Critics say this was a cynical use of his brother’s name.

His work setting up anti-terrorism conferences attended by such conservative American stars as George Bush and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick drew the attention of Likud Party bigwig Moshe Arens, who became Netanyahu’s political godfather.

Netanyahu was working to pay his bills as a sales manager for Rim Furniture in Jerusalem when Arens secured him the appointment as second in charge at the Israeli Embassy in Washington--one of Israel’s top diplomatic jobs and a real coup for a 33-year-old political neophyte.

Again with Arens’ help, Netanyahu went on to serve as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, where he made his name on American television by, among other actions, defending his country’s controversial repression of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

He came home again to serve as deputy foreign minister and, during the Persian Gulf War, found a world audience for his television skills, appearing nightly on CNN to present the point of view of Israelis, hunkered down in gas masks awaiting an attack of chemical weapons while Iraq fired Scud missiles their way.

In one memorable performance, Netanyahu removed his mask and spread his beefy hands end to end several times across a map of the Middle East to show the vastness of the Arab world, then stuck out his thumb to show that it covered all of little Israel.

Television also was the source of one of Netanyahu’s biggest political blunders when, during his run for Likud Party chief, he went on the air to admit that he had cheated on his third wife, Sarah. Netanyahu said he was making the declaration because a party rival had threatened to expose his dalliance with a compromising videotape, which he called “the worst political crime in Israeli history.”

Israelis thought that his performance further humiliated his wife and showed a terrible lack of judgment under pressure. They dubbed the affair “Bibigate.”

Nonetheless, Netanyahu has proven himself to be Israel’s master of the political quip. In a news conference with foreign journalists at the beginning of his campaign, he insisted that Peres would divide Jerusalem in final negotiations with the Palestinians. “What are we going to say,” Netanyahu joked, “next year in half of Jerusalem?”

He took an early stand against statehood for the Palestinians and explained his until-then steadfast refusal to meet with Arafat by saying: “Arafat is not a head of state, and if we have anything to do with it, he never will be.”

It is a testament to Netanyahu’s political and media skills that, after countless television and newspaper interviews, Israelis are still debating whether as prime minister he would be a moderate conservative or right-wing ideologue, and what exactly Netanyahu truly believes.

Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson contributed to this report.

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