BIBI

This is the first biography written for an international audience that collects the threads of Netanyahu's tumultuous personal life, controversial public career and struggle to establish himself as the Jewish state's leader and master of its destiny. It is told with an insider's knowledge of Israel's national psyche and Netanyahu's role on the international stage, by a writer who has spent his career explaining the world to Israelis and interpreting Israel for a global readership.

For many in Israel and elsewhere, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an embarrassment, a threat to democracy, even a precursor to Donald Trump. Yet despite repeated scandals and missteps, he continues to dominate Israeli public life. How are we to account his rise, his hold on Israeli politics, and his outsized role on the world's stage?

In Bibi, the Haaretz journalist Anshel Pfeffer argues that we must understand Netanyahu as representing the triumph of the underdogs in the Zionist enterprise. Born in 1949, one year after the state of Israel itself, Netanyahu came of age in a nation dominated by liberal, secular Zionists in the tradition of David Ben-Gurion. Yet from the start Netanyahu identified with the groups at the margins of Israeli society: the right-wing Revisionists, the orthodox, the Mizrahi Jews, the small-time professionals living in the new towns and cities dotting the Israeli landscape. With a vision integrating Jewish nationalism and religious traditionalism, Netanyahu cultivated each faction individually and then fused them into an often unstoppable coalition.

At the same time, Netanyahu is achild of America, where he spent many years as a young man, and where he learned the techniques of modern political campaigns as well as the necessity of controlling the media cycle. The productof theaffluentEast CoastJewish community and theReagan era, Netanyahu's politics and worldview were formed as much by American Cold War conservatismas by his family's hardline right-wing Zionism.

As Pfeffer demonstrates in this penetrating biography, Netanyahu's Israel is a hybrid of ancient phobia and high-tech hope, tribalism and globalismjust like the man himself.

Anshel Pfeffer has written on Israeli politics and global affairs for two decades. He is a senior commentator and columnist for Haaretz's English edition and The Economist's correspondent in Israel, as well as a contributor to the Guardian. As a journalist he has covered wars, revolutions and political upheaval on four continents. Pfeffer's first book, Maran: a biography of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was published in Hebrew in 2004. Haaretz has recently published an e-book in English of his dispatches from Europe, The Cossacks Aren't Coming: The Future of Europe's Jews. Born in Manchester, he currently lives in Jerusalem.