Beirut, Lebanon – Gal Hirsch has no known experience with hostage negotiations, and in 2006 he left the Israeli forces, disgraced by his role in military failures during the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Yet when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose the former military commander to lead efforts to free captives taken by Hamas to Gaza after its Oct. 7 attack, the move made sense to political psychologist Saul Kimhi.
“He chooses people (to join his wartime administration) based on their opinions about him and not based on their fitness for the job,” Kimhi said. Hirsch is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and – like the Israeli prime minister himself – has been accused of corruption.
Kimhi, who teaches at Tel Aviv University, has studied Netanyahu’s mind for nearly a quarter of a century. In 1999, the same year Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister ended, Kimhi’s behavioral analysis of the leader revealed a disturbing pattern of behavior. Some of his conclusions: Netanyahu was narcissistic, entitled and paranoid, and he responded poorly to stress.
Kimhi revisited Netanyahu as a subject in 2017, but found that little had changed. According to Kimhi, as people get older, their behaviors tend to become more extreme. For Netanyahu, his paranoia and narcissism have increased. He doesn’t trust anyone, except perhaps his immediate family, and prioritizes his “personal future” above all else, according to Kimhi’s research.
Today, as he leads his nation in the war on Gaza, the personality traits that shape Netanyahu’s biggest decisions could directly affect the lives of millions of Israelis and Palestinians and the direction of the conflict. And the signs so far, Kimhi and other analysts say, are worrying.
Undecided and suspicious
Netanyahu’s behavioral analysis, according to Kimhi, suggests that he is indecisive and has difficulty making difficult decisions. “He’s not a resilient person at all,” Kimhi told Al Jazeera.
Before Netanyahu appointed Hirsch on October 8, the hostage negotiator position had remained vacant for more than a year. Hamas captured more than 200 Israelis during its raid in southern Israel, and only a handful have been released so far. This, Kimhi said, is an example of Netanyahu making “difficult decisions at the very last minute.”
To be sure, Netanyahu also possesses qualities that appear to have helped him become one of the world’s great political survivors. A 2021 personality study by Jordanian political science professor Walid Abd al-Hay found that Netanyahu was very charismatic, “with a strong memory and great analytical skills.”
In a career at the top of Israeli politics that spanned nearly three decades, these qualities often worked for him.
Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. He first came to power in 1996 and served a three-year term before being replaced by Ehud Barak. He would return to power in 2009 and would go on to serve for 13 of the last 14 years.
On a few occasions, Netanyahu’s time seemed to be running out. In 2015, with his back to the wall, he used scare tactics by claiming that “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” He was re-elected.
After losing the prime ministership for a year, he returned to power in 2022, this time assembling the most far-right government in Israeli history.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was convicted of inciting racism, destroying property and joining a “terrorist” organization when he was 16. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich leads the hardline Religious Zionist Party which not only rejects the creation of a Palestinian state, but denies the existence of the Palestinian people and has condemned LGBTQ activists. Interior and Health Minister Aryeh Deri is an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who was sentenced to three years in prison for accepting bribes.
In forming such a cabinet, critics accused Netanyahu of choosing his own political survival over Israel’s interests. An opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called some of Netanyahu’s ministers “neo-Nazis” and “neo-fascists.”
However, none of this will matter much to Netanyahu. The important thing for him, according to Kimhi and other analysts who have studied the Israeli prime minister, is that he is in power, whatever the cost.
The extremist views of his cabinet may not bother him because “everything goes through him without the ministers knowing,” Thomas Vesconi, an independent researcher and author of two books on Palestine and Israel, told Al Jazeera.
Killing the “two-state solution”
Netanyahu’s paranoia and entitlement have arguably also shaped his vision of a Palestinian state. Although he has publicly declared himself open to a two-state solution, he has undermined the process at every turn – including by insisting that a Palestinian state should have no military or security control over its territory.
Under his rule, settlement expansion has flourished and political repression against Palestinians is endemic. Even before October 7, this year was the deadliest on record for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, with more than 150 people killed by Israeli forces, including 38 children. More than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7. Netanyahu attempted to circumvent the creation of a Palestinian state by reaching regional agreements with Arab states through the Abraham Accords.
The settlement issue and Netanyahu’s perceived reluctance to engage in good-faith peace talks have angered many of Netanyahu’s foreign contemporaries over the years. “I can’t stand Netanyahu,” former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was caught telling former U.S. President Barack Obama on a hot mic in 2011. “He’s a liar.”
“You’ve had enough of him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you do,” Obama replied.
According to Vesconi, Netanyahu believes that all of historic Palestine should belong to Israel. It’s a belief that has its roots in Netanyahu’s upbringing.
Father’s son
Benzion Netanyahu, the prime minister’s father, was a supporter of Ze’ev Jabotinsky – a supporter of what is known as revisionist Zionism – who believed that a Jewish state should extend across both banks of the Jordan River. In fact, this means an Israel that includes the country’s current territory, the West Bank, Gaza and part or all of Jordan.
After failing to secure a position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Benzion moved his family to the United States and accepted a position at Cornell University where he taught Judaic studies. He carried this rejection for the rest of his life, and with it, a distrust of intellectuals and the Israeli Labor Party.
Netanyahu held his father, who died in 2012 at the age of 102, in high regard. He said his father knew how to “identify danger in time” and “draw the necessary conclusions”.
Netanyahu learned that relationships were transactional – not altruistic – and “that humans live in a constant Darwinian struggle for survival,” according to Abd al-Hay’s study.
The Israeli prime minister is currently waging his own struggle to survive in power. It once enjoyed the support of deeply religious conservatives and young liberal capitalists working in sectors like technology – what Vesconi calls both bourgeois.
But lately he has lost liberals while the religious right has stepped up its support for what Kimhi calls “almost like a cult.” Starting in January 2023, Israelis took to the streets to protest sweeping judicial reform. Netanyahu said the changes were aimed at balancing an interventionist court.
At the same time, he is currently on trial for corruption, fraud and breach of trust and public opinion blames him largely for enabling the October 7 attack that saw Hamas breach a border fence, killing around 1,400 people and capturing some 200 others.
And after
Under fire once again, Netanyahu’s character flaws are once again on display, Kimhi said.
Analysts believe Netanyahu will likely want to prolong the war, as few in Israel will call for a change of leader in the middle of a war. More than 8,500 Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks in an attack of unprecedented intensity on Gaza. Among them, more than 3,000 are children. But these figures, like those of the hostages, do not seem to worry Netanyahu.
Prioritizing one’s survival is consistent with the findings of Kimhi’s and Abd al-Hay’s studies. Whatever decision he makes next, he will do so with this in mind.
“The Israeli public,” Kimhi said, “needs a true leader who can unite the people.”
Additional reporting by Nils Adler