Benjamin Netanyahu | The comeback ‘king’

Published 10 June 2026 · politics

In his long political career that started in the early 1990s, Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu was written off several times. And every time, he made a

In his long political career that started in the early 1990s, Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu was written off several times. And every time, he made a stronger comeback. In 1996, he became Israel’s youngest Prime Minister, and the first to be born in the state of Israel. After losing the 1999 election heavily to Labour’s Ehud Barak, Mr. Netanyahu would go for a brief retirement, but would return to power in 2009. His hold over Israeli politics would be challenged again in 2019 after the fall of his government. In back-to-back elections, Mr. Netanyahu failed to form a stable coalition and three corruption cases cast shadows over his career. In 2021, his rivals from across Israel’s political spectrum joined hands to form a coalition with the main goal of keeping Bibi out of power. But after 17 months in opposition, Mr. Netanyahu made another stunning comeback this week, with his right-religious coalition securing a comfortable majority in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. The era of Mr. Netanyahu, ‘King Bibi’ for his loyal supporters, is a present continuous one. Netanyahu to run for re-elevction, his party says, after Trump raises doubts Born in 1949 in Tel Aviv, a year after the state of Israel was formed, he grew up in Israel and the U.S. He enlisted in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in 1967, the year of the June War in which Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza Strip and Sinai from Egypt and Golan Heights from Syria — all in six days. Netanyahu would become a combat soldier and a team leader at an elite special forces unit of the IDF, Sayeret Matkal, “a unit that changed the reality of our lives,” as he later recalled. When Sayeret Matkal was deployed in 1976 to Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue hostages held at the city’s Airport, Mr. Netanyahu’s older brother Yonatan was the commander of the unit. Militants of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations had hijacked an Air France plane with 248 passengers and made it land in Uganda, which was then ruled by the dictator Idi Amin.

The Sayeret Matkal’s mission was successful as most of the hostages were rescued, but Yonatan was killed in action — the IDF’s only fatality. The loss of his brother, according to Mr. Netanyahu, has shaped his views on “terrorism”, which he called a form of totalitarianism. Arguably the most influential politician in Israel today, Mr. Netanyahu rose to power in 1996 when Israel was undergoing major changes. Three years earlier, Israel, led by Labour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) had signed the Oslo Accord. The PLO recognised the state of Israel and the latter agreed to the formation of a provisional government (Palestinian Authority or PA) in the occupied territories. After the tumultuous period of the first Intifada (the Palestinian uprising) that began in 1987, there was a strong constituency in Israel for peace. But this period also saw the growing strength of the political Right and the threat of Jewish extremism. On November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Rabin the main architect of the Oslo Accords, was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. Rabin’s successor Shimon Peres called for early elections, which he thought would strengthen his hands to go ahead with the peace plan. But in the election, the first direct election to choose the Prime Minister, Mr. Netanyahu, a hardline critic of the Oslo process, emerged victorious. In power, Mr. Netanyahu made some minor concessions, but walked back on several promises his immediate predecessors had made. When the Palestinian Authority was formed, both sides agreed that it would be the first step of an ambitious peace plan. The real goal was to find a permanent solution to the Palestine question through the two-state proposal. But the PA, with limited powers in parts of the occupied lands, became a permanent mechanism as the Oslo process unravelled under Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership. His version was that the peace process made Palestinian militancy stronger. Hamas, the Islamist movement that had also opposed the Oslo Accords, had carried out several suicide attacks during this period. Mr. Netanyahu held the PA, then led by Yasser Arafat, responsible for increased violence.