I served as the bodyguard to three Israeli prime ministers. There was Shimon Peres, part-man, part-tornado, a 70-something who I could barely keep up with when I was an ultra-fit 22 year old.
Another, Ehud Barak, then the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, became a successful Labour Party politician and eventually prime minister when the dust had barely fallen off his epaulettes.
And then there was the third prime minister I protected, the man who I escorted around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and accompanied into the world’s power centres to meet popes, prime ministers and presidents; the man who more than any other Israeli has determined the path of my country in this century: Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Ashkelon, the city between Tel-Aviv and Gaza where I grew up in the Seventies, I dreamed of becoming a video-game designer. At night, my father, born in Romania, told me stories about the Holocaust he had somehow survived.
When I was eight years old, the threat to Israel came from Iraq, not Iran. In the summer of 1981 Israeli Air Force F-16 jets bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor a few miles south-east of Baghdad. Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, who, like my father escaped the Holocaust, created the “Begin Doctrine”, which stated that no Arab country was allowed to have nuclear weapons.
Like all Israelis, I served three years in the IDF. Wondering what to do after my release, I saw an advert in a newspaper for a posting as an air marshall. The job was to provide security on Israeli national airline flights. But you could also travel the world. There was still plenty of time to study. I applied for the job.
When the training finished I was pulled into a room. Clearly, I had done something right because I was asked by an official from the security agency Shin Bet if I would like to become the bodyguard of Yitzhak Rabin, who was then prime minister of Israel.
Two years previously, on 27 August 1993, Rabin had shocked the world when he announced that months of negotiations had been held between representatives of his government and senior members of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in sequestered locations around Oslo.
I was stunned. The negotiations were kept secret from the Israeli media, kept secret even from Rabin’s cabinet. The PLO had agreed to officially recognise Israel and commit to ending terrorist campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel itself. In turn, Israel would recognise the PLO, and its leader, Yasser Arafat, would be allowed to establish a Palestinian Authority in Gaza and in the West Bank. Peace between Israel and the Arab world seemed tangible. Shimon Peres, then Rabin’s foreign minister, spoke euphorically of “a new Middle East”.
By the time I was asked to be his bodyguard in 1994, the Oslo Accords and Rabin were under immense pressure. Hamas launched suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. These fuelled protests against Rabin’s government. Demonstrators burned images of him and called for his death. The protests were prolonged and intense, a toxic watershed in our history. The Israeli public began to turn on the Oslo process, as tides of violence washed over the country.
I was daunted by the opportunity to serve my country in such a precarious moment. It was not part of any plan I had for myself. Somewhere in the back of my mind I assumed that I would still end up creating video games.
I signed the Shin Bet’s four-year contract. I believed in Rabin and the Oslo process. Although I would be robbed of the chance to meet him, I could tell Rabin was a special prime minister: he was extremely wise, detail-oriented, and passionate about security.
I had everything mapped out. Rabin would make peace with the Arab world while I stood by watching over him. Then I would become a software developer. My nerves ebbed away. This was a unique opportunity. I was barely 22 years old.
Most Israelis who were alive then remember where they were when it happened. I was with my parents; we were watching Crocodile Dundee in their apartment. It was a Saturday evening in November 1995. The next day would be my first on the job protecting Rabin with the Shin Bet.
Paul Hogan’s face abruptly vanished from the television screen. The channel cut to the news. Earlier that evening Rabin had addressed a pro-Oslo rally in central Tel Aviv. “I always believed the majority of the nation wants peace, is prepared to take risks for peace,” he told the crowd. “Violence eats away at the foundation of Israeli democracy. It must be denounced, condemned, isolated.” It was to be his last speech.
As he left the rally Rabin was shot three times by a violent right-wing extremist who opposed the peace process. He died hours later in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, his lungs punctured by bullets.
At some level I’ve never accepted Rabin’s death. I always wonder what would have happened if I had been there, through some scheduling change. Could I have saved him? Where would Israel be today if he had lived?
These thoughts came years later. My mind blanks when I try to remember those first weeks with the Shin Bet. The personal protection unit would spend the next year barely sleeping, attempting to rebuild our systems from scratch.
I was entering a new world in insane circumstances. By 1996 I was sitting in the back seat of a silver Cadillac the Shin Bet used to transport Israeli prime ministers. Rabin was gone. Netanyahu sat beside me, staring ahead.
You have to remember that the politicians you see on television or on a social media feed are not like that in real life. What you see on a screen is a show that is put on for your entertainment.
When their lives depend directly on your decisions, you begin to understand them differently. Foibles appear that are not displayed on the show. I can still remember Bill Clinton, who was at the time the most powerful man in the world, with the ability to destroy the planet several times over with his fleets of strategic bombers and nuclear submarines, asking me, his security guard and escort for the day, permission to go to the toilet. I let him relieve himself.
Shimon Peres became prime minister immediately after Rabin’s assassination. Netanyahu was the opposition leader, tarnished, Israelis like me thought, by attending rallies where calls for Rabin’s murder had been made throughout 1995. It always made me think of a phrase in Hebrew, from 1 Kings 21:19: “Have you murdered and also inherited?”
I had never met anybody like Peres. A simple, humble man who slept for two hours a night, refreshing himself with 20-minute naps in the back of the official Cadillac. His wife, Sonia, drove a tiny car and worked anonymously in a hospital with children and the disabled. Peres was one of the last links back to Israel’s founding generation, an established legend when he fought an election against Netanyahu in May 1996.
On the security detail we went to bed on election night thinking Peres would win. When we woke up, Netanyahu was the prime minister.
We already knew all about Bibi, or at least we thought we did. When you’re running personal protection with the Shin Bet you might spend two days with the prime minister and then maybe three days with the leader of the opposition.
I thought I understood Netanyahu back then. He was flashy. A marketer. You have to remember that this was the late Nineties, scarcely a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most successful politicians in the world were Clinton and Tony Blair. They looked comfortable in a new global world. They looked good. I could tell that Netanyahu wanted to be like them.
Today, when his politics are closer to fascism, it’s easy to forget that this version of Netanyahu was essentially a liberal. He was friendly with the courts and the media. In my pocket I kept a small Shin Bet book, filled with picture after picture of potential assassins to look out for. One of the men in that book, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is today the Minister of National Security in a coalition government led by Netanyahu. In 1998 we thought that Ben-Gvir, an extreme religious right-winger, was more likely to try to kill an Israeli prime minister than work with them.
Netanyahu was the youngest prime minister in our history, the first born in an independent Israel. He had incredible confidence. After a meeting with Clinton – to his credit Netanyahu continued the Oslo process – the president, worn down by hours of Netanyahu’s energetic brinkmanship, remarked: “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?” Netanyahu was prepared to give swathes of territory away to the Palestinians. At the Wye River Summit in October 1998, I watched him race around in a golf buggy with Yasser Arafat. The memory still bewilders me now, almost 30 years later.
My job was planning. Routes. Logistics. I could never rest. Israeli politicians and diplomats have been the most threatened on planet Earth since at least the Seventies. You feel the weight of this responsibility. It’s not about individual prime ministers. They are symbols. You are not protecting a person: you are protecting all of Israel.
I began to suspect that Netanyahu was not ready for the job. There were constant family problems. Sara, his wife, was ambitious but fragile. She was a young mother, trying to raise her two children but Netanyahu needed her to be a diplomat and a performer, like Bill needed Hillary. Sara became miserable. Over the years she became more and more influential. One of those young children, Yair, sees himself today as a potential successor to his father.
But the greatest pressure on Netanyahu came from his father, Benzion. A historian and a failed political player, the Benzion I saw was a wise old man who treated his son with enormous indifference. Benzion’s speciality was Spanish Jewry. In The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th Century Spain, Benzion argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was based in race hatred – directly tying it to a thread that led all the way forward into the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism was eternal. Militant vigilance against this hatred was the levy every single Israeli leader would have to pay.
Even when Netanyahu became prime minister, Benzion made it clear he disapproved of almost everything about him. The son believed that the father, who had failed to keep several academic jobs in Israeli universities, had been failed by the country. Over time, I began to see this as the core of Netanyahu’s psychology, the reason why he began to attack elites and the media and the courts, the shame and insecurity and pessimism of the father handed down to the son like an heirloom. None of this was Bibi’s fault. It was just the way the family was.
There was only one small sign of the man that Netanyahu became. I escorted Sara and him to expensive restaurants where they ate together late at night. The first time they left without paying the bill, the owners usually didn’t mind. The second time they were puzzled. By the third time the Netanyahus left without paying, they were angry, literally chasing them in some cases out of the restaurant.
You watch this as a young man and turn it over in your mind. Why didn’t he pay? He could have afforded to. Decades later you know that you were watching a little thief in the process of becoming a big gangster.
You might think that you hate Benjamin Netanyahu. Trust me, if you spent five minutes in a room with him you would come out raving about how wonderful he is. He would lie to your face again and again and again. You wouldn’t even realise. He can summon entire make-believe worlds out of words better than anyone alive today. The only comparison that makes sense to me is with cult leaders. Deep down, the cultists know they are being fooled by the leader. They don’t care though, because the illusion is too beautiful to abandon.
There was a famous Likud rally in Tel Aviv in 1999. Netanyahu was fighting for his political survival against Ehud Barak. Polls showed – and they were right – that Netanyahu had no chance of winning the election. Nevertheless, there was Bibi at the rally, firing up the crowd, leading them in a Hebrew chant: They are afraid, they are afraid.
The crowd chanted over and over as I stood there, scanning it for threats. I have had the privilege of seeing political leaders from all over the world in the most intimate and the most public settings. I had never seen a campaigner rally a crowd like that. I have never seen anything to match it since.
After my contract ended I left the service. I became a software developer. I lived in China and opened a business in India. Netanyahu returned to power in 2009 and has only left office, very briefly, once in the last 16 years.
The showdown with Iran is something most Israelis support. Since the revolution in 1979, the Iranian regime has made no secret of its desire to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. To allow them to have nuclear weapons would be to invite a second Holocaust.
Netanyahu sees his destiny at this moment. To protect Israel from the eternal hatred identified by Benzion in his historical works. To prevent the Holocaust my father survived from happening again. Netanyahu is cynical about many things, with an electoral coalition powered by pandering to the ultra-orthodox and the most extreme settlers in the West Bank. He is not cynical about Israel though. He believes he has been ordained to save the country.
Such beliefs are the stuff that catastrophic leaders are made from. Netanyahu has tried to undermine the independence of our Supreme Court for years, with moves that would shame any country that calls itself a democracy. He surrounds himself with fools and lackeys like Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, a man who could not run a restaurant, let alone an economy. He never believed that Hamas was a threat, allowing millions of dollars to flow into the group in the years leading up to 7 October. And has waited until the last possible moment to stop Iran, allowing them to come within months of securing weapons that could wipe out me, my children and my entire family, along with the rest of Israel. The hostages remain in Gaza.
Netanyahu thinks historically. He knows how history is written thanks to the example of his father. He knows that if he leaves office now he will go down as the most catastrophic leader in Israeli history. He is nothing like Churchill or Bismarck. Great leaders prevent the situations like the one Israel finds itself in today.
I know Benjamin Netanyahu. Over the years, like many leaders, he has become terribly lonely. There are few people he can trust or turn to any more. Just Sara, who has grown more unstable as the years have passed, and Yair, the son who dreams of replacing his father in power. The saddest part is that he could have stepped down long before now without destroying Israel. Today, as we watch the skies nervously, we wonder what comes next. The end of Netanyahu’s political legacy or the end of democratic Israel.
[See also: Is Trump the last neoconservative?]
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