Benjamin Netanyahu has become the fourth world leader to be issued with an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). It puts him alongside Vladimir Putin of Russia, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.
The warrant relates to Israel’s military actions towards the Palestinians from the day of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October onwards. It includes allegations of starving civilians as a method of warfare, murder, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, and extermination.
Netanyahu’s then-defence minister – as well as three Hamas leaders – faced similar accusations.
The move by the ICC was greeted with outrage across Israel, where Netanyahu is widely regarded as a deeply divisive figure, with even his bitterest political enemies denouncing it as unconscionable.
It came at a pivotal time for Netanyahu – Israel’s longest serving prime minister – who is in the midst of leading wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and an on-off conflict with Israel’s arch-foe, Iran.
The wars, meanwhile, are taking place against the backdrop of a criminal trial inside Israel of Netanyahu on suspicion of bribery and corruption – charges he emphatically denies.
The conflicts have delayed the proceedings (giving rise to claims by some that Netanyahu wants to prolong the war in Gaza to avoid facing the trial). The attack of 7 October, and the war which followed, also put the brakes on weekly mass protests against judicial reforms planned by Netanyahu which polarised the country for months. Netanyahu’s critics accused the prime minister of tearing the country apart and being a danger to democracy.
Despite all his woes, many of which have threatened to topple him, Netanyahu has a reputation as a wiley political survivor.
Re-elected for a record fifth time in November 2022, he leads – as head of the Likud party – the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history.
His return to power followed a relatively brief spell in opposition after 12 straight years as prime minister, his dramatic comeback sealing a belief among his supporters that “King Bibi” is politically invincible.
Netanyahu, 75, has held office six times, an unrivalled success which owed much to the image he cultivated as “Mr Security” – the best person to be in charge of Israel’s defence.
He has previously said he wants to be remembered most as Israel’s protector.
But, on 7 October 2023, Israel suffered the most catastrophic attack in its history under Netanyahu’s watch, when hundreds of Hamas gunmen burst through the border from Gaza. They killed about 1,139 people and took 251 others back to Gaza as hostages.
Netanyahu launched a war to destroy Hamas in response, one which is still being fought over a year later. At least 44,000 people have been killed by Israel’s attacks in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, bringing condemnation on Israel from the international community.
Netanyahu has also faced – and resisted – huge pressure domestically to agree to a ceasefire to bring about the release of about 100 hostages still being held by Hamas. Israel and Hamas have blamed each other for the failure to reach a deal.
Meanwhile Israel has also faced over a year of attacks by the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which says it is acting in solidarity with the Palestinians. At least 60,000 people have been displaced from their homes in northern Israel because of the attacks.
Netanyahu’s approval ratings plummeted in the wake of the 7 October 2023 attack, with opponents – and even supporters – calling on him to accept responsibility for the worst intelligence failure in Israel’s history. Netanyahu has so far deflected personal blame.
But some major successes for Israel – including the killings of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah – and a popular ground offensive against Hezbollah have seen Netanyahu’s ratings rebound.
Brother’s legacy
Benjamin Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1949. In 1963, his family moved to the US when his father Benzion, a prominent historian and Zionist activist, was offered an academic post.
At the age of 18, he returned to Israel, where he spent five distinguished years in the army, serving as a captain in an elite commando unit, the Sayeret Matkal. He was wounded in a raid on a Belgian airliner hijacked by Palestinian militants which landed in Israel in 1972, and fought in the 1973 Middle East war.
In 1976, Netanyahu’s brother, Jonathan, was killed leading a raid to rescue hostages from a hijacked airliner in Entebbe, Uganda. His death had a profound impact on the Netanyahu family, and his name became legendary in Israel.
Netanyahu set up an anti-terrorism institute in his brother’s memory and in 1982 became Israel’s deputy chief of mission in Washington.
Overnight, Netanyahu’s public life was launched. An articulate English speaker with a distinctive American accent, he became a familiar face on US television and an effective advocate for Israel.
He was appointed Israel’s permanent representative at the UN in New York in 1984.
Rise to power
Netanyahu became involved in politics when he returned to Israel in 1988, winning a seat for Likud in the Knesset (parliament) and becoming deputy foreign minister.
He later became party chairman, and in 1996, Israel’s first directly elected prime minister after an early election following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
Netanyahu was also Israel’s youngest leader and the first to be born after the state was founded in 1948.
Despite having fiercely criticized the 1993 Oslo peace acccords between Israel and the Palestinians, Netanyahu signed a deal handing over 80% of Hebron to Palestinian Authority control and agreed to further withdrawals from the occupied West Bank to much opprobrium from the right.
He lost office in 1999 after he called elections 17 months early, defeated by Labour leader Ehud Barak, Netanyahu’s former commander.
Political revival
Netanyahu stepped down as Likud leader and was succeeded by Ariel Sharon.
After Sharon was elected prime minister in 2001, Netanyahu returned to government, first as foreign minister and then as finance minister. In 2005, he resigned in protest at the Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Gaza Strip.
His chance came again in 2005, when Sharon – just before a massive stroke that left him in a coma – split from Likud and set up a new centrist party, Kadima.
Netanyahu won the Likud leadership again and was elected prime minister for the second time in March 2009.
He agreed to an unprecedented 10-month freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank, enabling peace talks with Palestinians, but negotiations collapsed in late 2010.
Although in 2009 he had publicly announced his conditional acceptance of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, he later toughened his position. “A Palestinian state will not be created, not like the one people are talking about. It won’t happen,” he told an Israeli radio station in 2019.
Palestinian attacks and Israeli military action repeatedly brought Israel into confrontation in and around the Gaza Strip before and after Netanyahu returned to office in 2009.
The fourth such conflict in just 12 years erupted in May 2021, putting a temporary halt to efforts by parties opposed to Netanyahu to oust him following a series of inconclusive elections.
Although during the conflicts Israel had the support of the United States, its closest ally, relations between Netanyahu and President Barack Obama were difficult.
They reached a low point when Netanyahu addressed Congress in March 2015, warning against a “bad deal” arising out of US negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. The Obama administration condemned the visit as interfering and damaging.
Trump ties
The advent of Donald Trump’s presidency in 2017 led to a closer alignment between US and Israeli government policies, and within a year Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
The move sparked fury across the Arab world – which supports the Palestinians’ claim to the eastern half of Jerusalem occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war – but it handed Netanyahu a major political and diplomatic coup.
Netanyahu had a close political relationship with Donald Trump
And in January 2020, Netanyahu hailed Trump’s blueprint for peace between Israel and the Palestinians as “the opportunity of the century”, though it was spurned by Palestinians as one-sided and left on the table.
Netanyahu also saw eye-to-eye with Trump on Iran, welcoming the president’s withdrawal in 2018 from the Iran nuclear deal and reinstatement of economic sanctions.
Trump however made stinging remarks about the Israeli leader, accusing him of disloyalty, after he congratulated Joe Biden on winning the presidency in November 2020.
Spectacle of trial
After 2016, Netanyahu was dogged by a corruption investigation, which culminated in him being charged with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in connection with three separate cases in November 2019.
After being charged in 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu railed against what he saw as an “attempted coup”
Netanyahu is alleged to have accepted gifts from wealthy businessmen and dispensed favors to try to get more positive press coverage.
He denies wrongdoing and says he is the victim of a politically motivated “witch hunt” engineered by his opponents. He went on trial in May 2020, becoming the first serving prime minister to do so.
BBC