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.
This experience transformed Netanyahu’s life, somewhat in the way that the death of Joseph P. Kennedy in World War II changed the life of his brother John F. Kennedy Jr. In the United States at the time, Benjamin Netanhayu resolved to enter politics, with a focus on combating terrorism.
After founding the Jonathan Institute, Netanyahu called a conference on terrorism in July of 1979 in Jerusalem. He attracted such notables as George H. W. Bush, then a former head of the CIA, as well as future Reagan cabinet leaders George Schultz and Ed Meese, then-FBI Director William Webster, and soon-to-be American ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick. To this group Netanyahu offered shocking details of a Soviet network of training camps for Muslim terrorists.
Out of this conference came Netanyahu’s first book, an edited compilation of the speeches from the event together with two analytical chapters by the editor. It was called International Terrorism: Challenge and Response; Proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism. The second conference was held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, DC, in 1984, and attracted another group of luminaries and produced another notable book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, also edited and with an introduction by Netanyahu. Highly impressed, George Schultz gave the book to Ronald Reagan, and he is said to have read it later on a plane to Asia. Then in 1995, Netanyahu wrote his own book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network, which was republished after 9/11 with a foreword consisting of his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress.
Netanyahu singlehandedly shaped the U.S. response to terror of three American administrations. Like Churchill, he took his enemies at their own word and resolved to overcome them, whatever it might take. His own first administration ended in three years with an economic crisis caused by the bursting of the tech bubble, and he was defeated in a sweep by his former special forces commander, Ehud Barak. But both Netanyahu’s economic policies and his view of terrorism were vindicated by subsequent events.
Netanyahu is a flawed politician, but he is flawed like Churchill — stogies and drink (though Bibi is a teetotaler compared to Churchill’s famed capacity) and a succession of three wives. Like Churchill, Netanyahu was more than a decade ahead of his contemporaries in grasping that the enemy is serious and that their stated goals must be weighed seriously. Now he must confront the Iranians at a time when it appears that the only plausible path is the overthrow of their government. Perhaps, though, there is an implausible alternative.
“The first and most crucial thing to understand [about terrorism],” as Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress after 9/11, is that “there is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states…. Terrorists are not suspended in midair. They train, arm, and indoctrinate their killers from within safe havens in the territories provided by terrorist states.” The reality is that Hezbollah and Hamas are creatures of Iran, that al-Qaida is harbored by Pakistan, that the Palestinian Authority depends on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Nations, and that the Kurdish PKK, the Islamic jihad, and Hamas all subsist on Syrian support. North Korea aids Iran and Pakistan in their nuclear ambitions, which portend the most lethal threat that terrorism poses.
Even suicide bombings, as Netanyahu observes, “are seldom carried out by solitary individuals. A whole array of people inculcate the suicide, provide him with explosives, guide him in their use, select the chosen target, arrange for his undetected arrival there, and promise to take care of his family after the deed is done. In short, suicide attacks require a significant infrastructure, and the people who provide it are anything but suicidal.” These people are all ensconced in nation-states, and by them are taught, sustained, encouraged and their families financially rewarded. In addition, he explains, the “terrorist states and terror organizations together form a terror network, whose constituent parts support each other operationally as well as politically.”
Netanyahu spurns the romantic image of the lone caveman terrorist who poses a mere police problem. As Boston University strategist Angelo Codevilla explains the issue, this concept “substitute[s] in our collective mind the soft myth that terrorism is the work of romantic rogues for the hard reality that it can happen only because certain states want it to happen or let it happen.”
The influence on U.S. policy of Netanyahu’s great insight has been both profound and lamentably limited. When George W. Bush responded to 9/11 by finally dropping the cops-and-robbers model of fighting terrorism, focusing instead on punishing the Taliban, the state sponsors of 9/11, he was following Netanyahu’s prescription. Far more so than the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the exemplary termination of the Taliban regime was the crucial response to 9/11, defining the risk to any state sponsors contemplating attacks on the United States.
Missing Netanyahu’s message and perpetuating the myth of stateless terrorism is the U.S. practice of declaring war on something called “terror” while continuing to offer foreign aid and prestige to the very governments that enable and sponsor actual terrorist acts. Apart from drug dealing, none of the terrorist organizations have any substantial means of internal support. None of them is capable of running a country that partakes of the productive activities of humankind. Most of them run front organizations as shells for the collection of money from the West in a kind of global shakedown racket. As Michael Yon shows in his devastating portrait of al-Qaida in his book, Moment of Truth in Iraq, the terrorists’ grip on the local population is driven more by fear and dependency than by any heartfelt unity.