BY PAUL NUKI
LONDON - There is a psychological profile of Benjamin Netanyahu in the academic archives that remains apposite to his behaviour today.
“Personal success is more important to him than ideology, and he constantly strives for it,” behavioural scientists from Tel Aviv University concluded during Mr Netanyahu’s first term in office in the late 1990s.
He had “difficulty appreciating perspectives other than his own” and difficulty distinguishing between “the personal and public” realms, they added.
To many outside Israel, Mr Netanyahu’s behaviour over the last few days will have seemed extraordinary, and deserving of psychological examination.
With a deal on the table for a “sustainable calm” in Gaza and a hostage release that he had agreed just days earlier, he set about undermining it at the weekend before Hamas could reply.
It started on the Sabbath when an unnamed official briefed Channel 12, the country’s biggest news station, that “Israel will under no circumstances agree to end the war as part of a deal involving the release of hostages”.
The official added: “The IDF will enter Rafah and destroy the Hamas battalions remaining there, whether there is a temporary truce for releasing the hostages or not.”
Mr Netanyahu has denied trying to sabotage the deal, but it later transpired that the anonymous source of the briefing was the prime minister himself.
Then on Sunday he doubled down, his behaviour verging on the messianic. On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, he spoke of dark forces from the “international community” trying to restrain Israel, and warned: “We cannot trust the promises of gentiles.”
At the ceremony itself, he added: “From here, from Jerusalem, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, I send a message, loud and clear: ‘You will not tie our hands.’
“If Israel is forced to stand alone, we will stand alone, and will continue to smite our enemies until we achieve victory. Even if we must stand alone, we will continue fighting human evil.”
To the fighter pilots from the UK, France and America who just three weeks before had risked their lives shooting down a fusillade of more than 300 drones and missiles launched at Israel from Iran, his words may have stung a bit.
But as his psychological profilers observed way back when: “Some [of his] behaviours betray self-involvement to the point that others receive no consideration… an equally clear trait is Netanyahu’s difficulty in appreciating perspectives other than his own.”
In Israel itself, people do not find Mr Netanyahu’s behaviour surprising. They have long been inured to his antics.
“He’s made a whole career out of doing things that nobody ever did before and are considered scandalous,” said Dr Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political scientist, pollster and political consultant.
“So I don’t think it’s that extraordinary that he would both violate the Sabbath [for his religious voters] in order to torpedo a deal that the majority of the Israeli public desperately wants”.
Almost all domestic political analysis in Israel portrays Mr Netanyahu as something akin to a trapped beast fighting for its life.
He has long been facing corruption charges that could land him in jail, and he has recently become convinced – probably not unreasonably – that he will soon be the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
Some say his ego and survival instinct should take him in the direction of Menacḥem Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister, Nobel laureate (and former terrorist), who signed the country’s historic peace deal with Egypt in 1979.
This is something the Americans have been encouraging Mr Netanyahu towards. Sign a deal with Hamas, they say, and you will enable a historic normalisation of relations with Saudi Arabia and a new relational security alliance against Iran. Like Begin, you too could yet secure a positive place in history.
But, as Dr Scheindlin points out, the parliamentary maths is difficult and uncertain. If Mr Netanyahu agrees to a deal with Hamas, the extreme Right-wing parties upon which his governing coalition relies, including Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit, will walk out. They want “total victory”, and will settle for nothing less.
Opposition parties have said they will prop the government up if a deal can be done to save the remaining hostages – filling in the gap left by the extreme Right.
“They will immediately jump in to support the government, they have said that repeatedly, and they will indeed do it”, Manuel Trajtenberg, an Israeli economist, told The Telegraph.
But this is unlikely to be enough for a man with the psychological profile of Mr Netanyahu. Were he to agree to such an arrangement, the opposition would have him exactly where they have always wanted him – under their control.
One false move on his part and they could dissolve the government and call fresh elections, which he would almost certainly lose.
“Netanyahu sees the game of politics as being governed by the ‘laws of the jungle’, where the strong survive and the weak fall by the wayside,” according to his old psychological profile. “To him, achievement of the goal justifies any political means”.
