How America inspired Benjamin Netanyahu to remake himself — and Israeli politics

The moment he stepped into the Knesset, aged just 38, Benjamin Netanyahu shone brilliantly in the skies of Israeli politics: He sprinkled stardust and prophecies of doom, and somehow, they both worked together.

Within five years, he had crushed all the Likud party’s “princes” and taken control of the right.

In his first meeting with the pollster Mina Tzemach, she showed him slides with data about voters who opposed him, along with some recommendations about how to win them over. Netanyahu cut her off impatiently.

“There’s no point wasting resources on people who disagree with me,” he said. “Better to focus on my supporters.”

And thus, with one simple but revolutionary statement, Netanyahu rebelled against decades of political orthodoxy.

Netanyahu drew his inspiration from the same source as many of his imported ideas: America.

This was around the time the United States saw the launch of a new network: Fox News.

Its founder, Roger Ailes, proposed a revolution: Instead of appealing to all Americans, it would broadcast only to Republicans.

Fox would offer them brash, provocative, right-wing, conservative news. America was big enough to make a lot of money from them.

Netanyahu knew Ailes very well. He was about to transform the Likud into the “Fox News Party”: a party that would appeal to the right, not the center.

But it would take time even for him to act on this principle.

Because in the 1990s, the most important voter was someone called the “median voter.”

Imagine the voter located perfectly in the middle of the Israeli political spectrum. Let’s call him Shabtai.

Nobody in the country is less ideological than Shabtai. He is neither right wing nor left wing, neither Haredi nor secular, neither a socialist nor a capitalist.

In 1996’s direct prime ministerial elections, Shabtai was like real estate on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard: a highly prized asset in the most central location imaginable.

In a head-to-head contest between two candidates, whoever won Shabtai’s vote would sweep the election.

Why? Because if Netanyahu could convince Shabtai that Peres was dangerous for Israel, every voter to Shabtai’s right would automatically fall in line.

It would be easier to persuade the voter to Shabtai’s right, and the voter to his right, and so on, like dominoes falling one by one until the most extreme right-winger at the end.

Campaigns based on attempts to persuade the median voter have several features.

First, they appeal less to the heart than the head.

Nonideological voters are less interested in tribal belonging and more in tax plans and detailed manifestos.

Second, they are more concerned about the future than the past.

Campaigns targeting centrist voters will struggle to persuade them to “return home” because these are precisely the voters who enjoy switching parties at every election.

These sorts of campaigns are more about promises than memories.

And most important, they’re about persuading voters that a particular leader is more moderate and less extreme than he seems.

Netanyahu’s 1996 slogan included the obviously left-wing term “peace” (“Making a Secure Peace!”) while Shimon Peres used the right-wing buzzword “strong” (“Israel Is Strong with Peres!”).

Peres tried to convince voters he was Netanyahu, and Netanyahu — that he was Peres.

“Netanyahu’s coronation as the angel of peace has succeeded,” blared a Channel 2 headline a month before the elections, when using “peace” seven times in a single Likud broadcast had narrowed Peres’ lead to just 3 points.

In a world with one message targeted at the public from the same TV screen everyone is watching at the same time, this strategy was the way to win.

For ideologically right-wing voters, the campaign caused an outbreak of hives.

For three years, they had protested the Oslo Accords in the streets and been dragged by police officers at junctions, and when there was finally an opportunity at the ballot box to steer the country away from territorial withdrawals, they got white doves of peace on their TVs and jingles that sounded like they came straight out of Aviv Geffen’s songbook.

But the campaign wasn’t targeting those already fired up and ready to go but the swath of voters in the middle who needed a kick.

The ideological right already had some of the highest voter-turnout rates in Israeli history. Israel’s turnout was near 80%, and it was even higher in Haredi and national-religious areas.

At 10:15 p.m., after the exit polls forecasted victory for Peres, the telephone rang at my parents’ home in Ofra.

On the line was a Haredi relative who said he’d voted for Netanyahu but told the exit pollsters he’d voted for Peres.

My parents hung up. On the screen, the celebrations at Labor HQ were in full swing.

One hour after sunrise the next morning, the president of the United States called the man who was still adjusting to the title of “prime minister-elect.”

In his southern drawl, Bill Clinton told Netanyahu something supremely undiplomatic: “We tried to f–k you, but you have beaten us.”

It was an elegant hint at the Democratic administration’s overt meddling in the Israeli elections against the Likud’s candidate.

Like the Israeli public, the people working in the White House had gone to sleep with Peres and woken up with Netanyahu.

For the first time, the prime minister’s office was occupied by someone born after the establishment of the State of Israel, a young man of only 47 years, who dyed his hair white to look more authoritative.

Since then, for nearly 30 years, he has always looked 60 years old.

In his first term, he maneuvered, quite clumsily, between his innately right-wing positions and the constraints of a world that still gave peace a chance.

He flew to America for a summit with Yasser Arafat and gave him Hebron.

One day, the Palestinian chairman sent him, through his adviser Ahmad Tibi, a large bouquet of flowers for his birthday.

“It’s Bibi or Tibi!” roared the Likud’s billboards before the election, but afterward, it was both.

Two years later, at the Wye River plantation, Netanyahu signed another withdrawal agreement with Arafat.

When Netanyahu returned home, having committed to transfer 13% of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority, his coalition unraveled, and in the streets of Jerusalem, in a hallowed tradition, there appeared images of him wearing a keffiyeh.

The prime minister tried to form a unity government: He invited opposition leader Ehud Barak for a conversation in the most discreet place imaginable, the headquarters of Mossad, at an undisclosed location in central Israel.

It was no use: Netanyahu had nose-dived off a right-wing tower, but at the bottom, there was no left-wing safety net.

He ended up imploding spectacularly, suffering a defeat on a scale no prime minister had ever seen.

Netanyahu learned a lesson: Never pick a fight with the national-religious right.

A few years later, in 2006, he would also learn not to mess with the Haredim and the Likud’s own voters.

These two angry power bases took revenge on him at the ballot box for his economic policies, which had been essential to saving Israel’s economy but slashed the incomes of hundreds of thousands of his voters overnight.

Netanyahu’s conclusion from this decade was unequivocal: Don’t mess with your base.

In the summer of 1999, after his defeat to Barak, Netanyahu was almost the only person who still bothered to go to work at the prime minister’s office during his government’s final days.

Everyone was convinced Netanyahu, only 49, had seen the end of his political career, and that, like a meteor, he too had fizzled out.

Everyone, that is, besides Netanyahu himself.

Packing his belongings, he was already planning a comeback.

If he returned one day, he told associates, it would be with a media outlet that would give him a tailwind against the hostile, liberal, secular, left-wing media in Tel Aviv he blamed for his downfall.

Eight years later, when he was opposition leader of the opposition, Israel Hayom’s first edition went to print, flush with cash and copies of his speeches, owned by the Nevada Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

But until then, Netanyahu’s salvation came from another, much younger Jewish billionaire, a Democrat rather than a Republican, who did not support him and who, as far as we know, had never met him: Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook, the social-media network he created in 2004 to connect students, quickly became the most powerful media outlet in the world.

Netanyahu won the lottery without even buying a ticket.

Social media allowed him, finally, to reach his millions of voters directly without worrying something would get cut out in editing, without annoying questions, without journalists.

At first, even he struggled to adjust to the new reality: Netanyahu was Israel’s “Mr. Television,” a wizard of camera angles and snappy messages, conscious of the power of one short clip to lift politicians up or destroy them.

When he spotted camera crews on their way to a government meeting that would impose painful cuts, he made a snap decision to pop a burning cigar in his pocket.

“Mr. Netanyahu,” came a radio reporter’s unforgettable cry, “you seem to be on fire!”

His suit was toast, but his career survived.

But Netanyahu seized the advantages of this new medium.

There is something odd about the fact Israel’s greatest social-media whiz is in his 70s, has never performed a Google search or owned a smartphone and still writes his speeches with felt-tip pens on pieces of card.

He won a victory no pollster or journalist had forecasted in 2015, thanks to his direct contact with voters.

Facebook’s algorithm is not particularly tolerant of official, polished messages filmed behind mahogany desks.

But it really does love extreme, surprising, buttoned-down messaging.

Gradually, the “Mr. Prime Minister” of the TV studios evolved into the “Bibi” of the social networks.

In 2016, Donald Trump and his rage-filled Twitter account conquered the Republican Party. “Be like Trump,” Netanyahu urged his aides.

Facebook and Netanyahu’s base merged to strengthen his conviction from the 1990s: There is no point trying to persuade people, only to rally them to action.

Thanks to Facebook’s more-like-this algorithm, voters doubled down on their opinions, and it became harder to shift votes between blocs.

The same resources that could be used to persuade one person from the other side to switch to voting for Netanyahu could be used instead to get four or five sleepy and disgruntled right-wingers to go out to vote.