The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition | The New Yorker

"In 2021, Netanyahu was voted out as Prime Minister after a dozen years; over time, his divisive rhetoric and ever-expanding arrogance alienated even some of his most loyal aides and ministers. And so he decided that he would write a memoir, not unlike his idol, Winston Churchill. “Bibi: My Story,” which was published in Hebrew and English in 2022, is a self-admiring tome, in which he is right in every argument, the hero of every anecdote. Across some seven hundred pages, he portrays himself as the singular guardian of Israel, his father’s son. Even when he appeared amenable to compromise—as when he delivered a speech at Bar-Ilan University, in 2009, that conveyed a wary and highly conditional openness to a Palestinian state—he did so tactically, to ease pressure from internal political currents and, more often, to get American Presidents off his back. In this instance, Barack Obama.

Most of his American interlocutors long ago came to understand the dodge. “The Bar-Ilan speech was part of his bullshit,” Martin Indyk, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, told me. “We met a day or two after the speech. He was all puffed up and he said to me, ‘All right, I said it, now can we get on to dealing with Iran?’ "

read article by David Remnick​

The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition | The New Yorker: