Netanyahu makes Macbeth look positively benign

President Joe Biden is absolutely right to be furious at the realization that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lied to him regarding the latter’s professed willingness to agree to a deal to bring home those hostages from Hamas’ October 7 pogrom who are still alive somewhere in Gaza.

According to a senior Biden administration official, as reported by Haaretz, Biden told Netanyahu at their recent White House meeting to “stop bullshitting me.”

What Biden should not have been, however, is surprised. To use a legal analogy, we are all entitled to take judicial notice that Netanyahu, to put it in the most charitable terms, has a strained relationship with the truth. Discovering or at least being reminded of Netanyahu’s propensity for prevaricating if not outright lying brings to mind Claude Rains as Captain Renault exclaiming in the classic film Casablanca that he was “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”

As far back as 2011, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard telling President Barack Obama about Netanyahu on a “hot” microphone that “I don’t want to see him anymore, he’s a liar.” Obama’s matter-of-fact but exasperated reply: “You’ve had enough of him, but I have to deal with him every day!”

Sarkozy is far from the only one to hold this opinion. The ultranationalist Israeli politician Bezalel Smotrich, now Netanyahu’s finance minister, once famously called Netanyahu a “lying son of a liar.”

Israeli journalist Nehemiah Shtrasler once branded Netanyahu a “certified liar” in a Haaretz column headlined “Netanyahu, Israel’s Leading Pathological Liar,” leaving little to the imagination.

It would have been bad enough if Netanyahu had given his barefacedly mendacious assurances that he supports the efforts to free the hostages only to Biden and other Israeli or international political or governmental figures. Despicably and unconscionably, however, he has done so to the families of these hostages, giving them false hope.

Netanyahu has demonstrated and is demonstrating conclusively that he doesn’t give a damn about the hostages, unless, of course, they can be a useful prop or rote talking point in his desperate attempts to cling to power. Hence his taking former hostage Noa Argamani with him to Washington.

While he professes to be willing to have Israeli negotiators try to work out the terms of an agreement, he appears hellbent on sabotaging the process by setting new conditions every time there is even a possibility of such an agreement being reached. This is not idle speculation on my part. A frustrated senior member of the Israeli negotiating team told Haaretz on Friday that Netanyahu has no interest in even a temporary ceasefire that could free the hostages.

On the contrary, Netanyahu believes that being a wartime prime minister gives him at least a measure of job security and he therefore wants the Gaza war, or any war for that matter, to last as long as only possible. Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon did not mince words at a demonstration in Haifa a few days ago when he said that “This week it was proven, again, that the government does not intend to release the hostages. For the government and its head, it’s better to sacrifice them than stop the fighting – because the length of the war will be the length of a term in office.”

Ya’alon is hardly a peacenik. A political conservative and military hawk, he served as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from 2002 to 2005 and represented Netanyahu’s Likud party in the Knesset from 2009 until 2016.

In the same vein, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi have apparently accused Netanyahu in no uncertain terms of deliberately trying to blow up the negotiations. Gallant is reported to have told Netanyahu that “There is no security reason to delay the deal. Since we’re speaking candidly, I am telling you that you are making considerations that are not beneficial to the matter.”

The fact is that even a brief respite from the Gaza war is Netanyahu’s worst nightmare. He is fully aware that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have made it clear through their relentless demonstrations against their government that they want new elections, and he is petrified at the prospect of having to face the Israeli public at the polls.

Simply put, Netanyahu is being true to form in putting personal political considerations ahead of the lives of the hostages. While the Haredi (ultraorthodox) Knesset Member Moshe Gafni, whose party belongs to Israel’s ruling coalition, supports freeing the hostages “at any price,” explaining that the redemption of captives “is one of the most important commandments in the Torah,” Netanyahu has aligned himself with the fascisti in his extremist far-right government who have threatened to blow up the government and Netanyahu’s prime ministership if any deal is ever reached.

That is the essence of Israel’s present existential political and moral tragedy. In his ever more transparent megalomania, Netanyahu makes Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Richard III look positively benign.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).