Greaves also spoke of attempting to contact Bullock on numerous occasions and ask him to publicly condemn the threats of violence against the Satanic Temple. They were in vain, he said. “Pastor Bullock’s failure to condemn the violent threats being hurled at us, while he still promotes an organized protest against us, must surely be seen as a tacit endorsement of those threats.”
“Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, and Freedom of Assembly mean nothing if we can not learn to accept their value in protecting even — perhaps especially — those views with which we disagree. While the modern Evangelical Right increasingly strives to deify the Founding Fathers, wrapping the cross in a flag and claiming the Constitution as Holy Writ, it takes but a lawful (though admittedly decadent, elaborate, and bizarre) Satanic celebration to strip away the cheap façade, revealing them for the stale theocratic oppressors they aspire to be.”
The location of the unveiling will remain a secret for the time being, as members of the Temple have no assurance of the statue’s, the venue’s, or for that matter, their own safety.
I already saw fire in Netanyahu’s eyes the following dawn after his plane landed at Washington’s Dulles Airport. He paused at the top of the stairs, glaring. In place of his usual wave and smile was a grim expression that barely disguised his fury. In the two years since my appointment, I had come to know that anger well—a monumental rage capable, it sounded, of cracking a telephone receiver. But I also gained a more intimate and nuanced perspective of Netanyahu. He is one of the world’s most complex, seasoned, divisive, and hounded leaders, and perhaps its loneliest.
His résumé reads more glowingly than even the most sterling of the Obama administration’s CVs. It includes Netanyahu’s service in Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s equivalent of the Delta Force. The chances of making it into the Unit, as it is popularly known, much less completing its agonizing training, are exceedingly limited. Netanyahu not only finished the course, he became an officer. Once, during a television interview in Israel, the producer introduced himself to me as another Unit veteran. “I can’t stand Bibi,” he said. “But he was not only an exceptional officer, he was a courageous one.” Participating in numerous operations behind enemy lines, wounded in action, Netanyahu also fought in the Yom Kippur War and achieved the rank of captain.
Accepted at Yale and studying at Harvard, he graduated from MIT with an honors BA in architecture and a master’s degree in management. He became a successful analyst at the Boston Consulting Group and would remain, at heart, an economist. For a solid hour once, I listened nearly openmouthed as Netanyahu and Bill Clinton theorized about the mechanisms of markets. Next, Netanyahu became a statesman—first an eloquent deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Washington, and then a media-savvy ambassador to the UN. Returning to Israel in 1988, he entered politics. He distinguished himself as a foreign minister and finance minister, twice headed the government, and was now closing in on Ben-Gurion’s record as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. All that, plus Netanyahu was a published author, a superb orator in Hebrew and English, conversant in French, a serious reader, and, in his heyday, famous for his good looks. Who would not be impressed by that résumé, if not intimidated?
And yet respect and fear were far from the only emotions the prime minister evoked. “Recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous”—were just some of the adjectives that, according to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, senior White House officials attached to Netanyahu. In the left-leaning Israeli press, especially, vilifying him was close to a national pastime. “He panics quickly in the face of every lurking shadow and every insinuated threat,” carped political columnist Ben Caspit. “He plays against himself and always ends in a tie.” For Netanyahu, TV analyst Raviv Druker observed, “it’s always the world against Netanyahu.” Nahum Barnea, Israel’s equivalent of Tom Friedman, wrote most cuttingly, “He’s not so big that he can afford to be so small.”
But the real Tom Friedman was no less censorious. For him, Netanyahu was “annoying” and “disconnected from reality” and, most commonly, “arrogant.” No less than their Israeli counterparts, American commentators—almost all of them Jewish—were fiercely indisposed toward Netanyahu. Joe Klein, of Time, decried him as “outrageous . . . cynical and brazen.” For The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Netanyahu was “smug and lacking diplomatic creativity,” a firebrand who posed a risk “to the future of his own country.” In The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier described him as a “gray, muddling, reactive figure . . . a creature of the bunker.” When I suggested to Leon that his hatred of Bibi had become pathological, he merely shrugged and admitted, “Yes, I know, it’s pathological.”
The antagonism sparked by Netanyahu, I gradually noticed, resembled that traditionally triggered by the Jews. We were always the ultimate Other—communists in the view of the capitalists and capitalists in communist eyes, nationalists for the cosmopolitans and, for jingoists, the International Jew. So, too, was Netanyahu declaimed as “reckless” by White House sources and incapable of decision making by many Israelis. He was branded intransigent by The New York Times, yet Haaretz faulted him for never taking a stand. Washington insiders assailed him for being out of touch with America, and the Tel Aviv branja—the intellectual elite—snubbed him for being too American. The Israeli right lambasted him for spinelessness, the left for intractability, the Ultra-Orthodox for heresy, and the secular for pandering to rabbis. All agreed in labeling Netanyahu disingenuous, imperious, and paralyzed by paranoia—qualities not uncommon among politicians.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu remained in office, virtually unopposed. In Israel’s often cutthroat political culture, that achievement would be remarkable enough, but was even more astounding in light of Israel’s precarious political system. Unlike the U.S. president’s four-year term, an Israeli prime minister’s can be ended at any time by a no-confidence vote. The commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces is the president, but the IDF’s commander is the Israeli government, which the prime minister has to persuade to act. “Your worst day in Washington is Bibi’s best day,” Ron Dermer periodically reminded me. In contrast to Obama’s cabinet, often described as a Lincoln-like “team of rivals,” Netanyahu’s contained multiple ministers actively seeking to unseat him.
For years, though, none succeeded. No other politician could engender the sense of security that Israelis, for all their grousing about Netanyahu, needed to feel at night when tucking in their children. The majority of Israelis still could not trust anybody else to manage a war, meet the Iranian nuclear threat, and prevent a Gaza-like Hamas state from arising in the West Bank. “One way or another,” one Israeli pundit told me, “every election for the past twenty years has been about Bibi.” And each time, he had won. Benjamin Netanyahu might not always be loved—not by his people, not even by his own party—but neither could he be replaced.
This was the Netanyahu I had come to know, a man of mighty contradictions. Less than a modern Jew, he reminded me of an ancient Hebrew, a biblical figure with biblical strengths, flaws, appetites, valor, and wrath, scything his foes with rhetorical and political jawbones. Uncannily robust, he retained in his sixties the physical heft and endurance of a Sayeret Matkal captain, only rarely revealing the depths of his exhaustion. Though he tried to get five hours of sleep each night—“Someone’s got to drive,” he said—Netanyahu rarely got more than four, and was frequently awakened by emergencies.
Pundits often tried to plumb the origins of Netanyahu’s outlook, especially the influence of his father, Benzion. A hard-line Zionist historian who nevertheless spent many of his 102 years in the United States, Benzion chronicled the racist roots of anti-Semitism from antiquity through the Inquisition and the Holocaust. That gloomy view of Jewish fate—to be hated for who we are irrespective of how we hide it—darkened the son’s worldview, analysts said. Though Netanyahu dismissed such insights as “psychobabble,” the images of Masada, Auschwitz, and looming Jewish apocalypses permeated his speeches and even our private talks. “The world sees Israel as the most powerful Middle Eastern state,” he once told me, “but that could change overnight, rendering us very vulnerable.”
Another influence on his life was his brother, Yoni, the dashing Sayeret Matkal commander who lost his life rescuing Jewish hostages hijacked by terrorists during the 1976 Entebbe Operation in Uganda. Yoni, who would remain young, handsome, and iconic, joined Benzion in setting another bar—the armchair therapists alleged—that Netanyahu could never reach. But no one swayed the prime minister more than his wife, Sara, so the papers claimed. Politically outspoken, a working child psychologist and mother of two, she might be expected to serve as an inspiration for Israelis, especially women. Instead, Sara supplied lurid headlines about her alleged mistreatment of staff members, her overspending, and undue influence on policy.