Adam Shatz on biographer Max Hastings meeting Benjamin Netanyahu

The defining drama of Netanyahu’s life as a young man took place in July 1976, when [older brother] Yoni was killed at Entebbe airport, during a mission to rescue Israeli and Jewish hostages from Air France Flight 139, which had been hijacked by four members of a German cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

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Commissioned by the family to write Yoni’s biography, Max Hastings portrayed him as a moody, stubborn loner, much like his father, only without his father’s brains – ‘a troubled young man of moderate intelligence, striving to come to terms with intellectual concepts beyond his grasp’.  Far from being the peerless commander, Yoni had been ‘actively disliked by more than a few of his men’.  Furious at Hastings, the Netanyahus had the book published in a bowdlerised form.  Hastings, who wrote about his encounter with the family in his memoirs (‘one of the sorriest episodes of my career’), took a particularly strong dislike to Bibi, who boasted: ‘In the next war, if we do it right, we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out … We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.’  Bibi’s racism, Hastings recalled, wasn’t limited to Arabs.  ‘He joked about the Golani Brigade, the infantry force in which so many men were North African or Yemeni Jews.  “They’re OK as long as they are led by white officers,” he grinned.’ 

~ Adam Shatz, "The Sea is the Same Sea: A Biography of Netanyahu," Portside, August 30, 2018