Probably the oddest rivalry in international politics today is that between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is not because of any excess of personal animosity between the two; at worst, there seems to be a cold indifference to each other at work in their relationship; but rather because of how extraordinarily similar the two men actually are.
Obviously, they are not similar in terms of their beliefs or backgrounds. Netanyahu is a scion of the closest thing Israel has to the Kennedy family (unless one counts Moshe Dayan’s profoundly dysfunctional brood). His father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, besides being one of the most influential historians of Jewish history in the twentieth century, was one of the founding fathers of the rightwing Revisionist faction of Zionism, which later became the opposition Herut Party and then the largest faction of the Likud. (Well into his nineties, the old man is still very much alive, and while I was living in Jerusalem we coincidentally shared a barber. Encounters with history indeed.) Netanyahu’s older brother, Yonatan, was a veteran of two wars and a decorated commander in the Israeli special forces who became a national hero after he was killed in the 1976 raid on Entebbe. Shortly after Yonatan’s death, a series of letters he wrote to family and friends were published in book form, becoming a touchstone for a generation of Israelis.
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