Benjamin Netanyahu was born in 1949, just a year after the State of Israel declared its independence — a country carved out from the ashes of the Holocaust, and deeply contested from the moment of its conception. His birth wasn’t just personal, it was political. Every street, every institution, every conversation was charged with the weight of survival, of territory, of memory. The land he grew up on was soaked in both hope and blood. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was a fierce ideological Zionist and a renowned historian. But Benzion wasn’t just academic; he was emotionally militant in his belief that the Jewish people were always one step away from annihilation. To him, the world had abandoned the Jews in their hour of need — and might do so again. Benzion’s version of history wasn’t about cycles of peace and conflict; it was about eternal vigilance. That shaped everything. Imagine growing up in that household. Conversations over dinner weren’t idle. They were sharp, focused, intense — often about the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust, and Arab nationalism. For Benjamin, strength was not a luxury. It was existential. The idea of compromise wasn’t noble — it was dangerous. Even as he moved to the United States during his teen years — attending high school in Pennsylvania, then later studying at MIT and Harvard — Netanyahu never softened. America taught him technique, sure. Presentation. Strategy. But not empathy. Not diplomacy. Those traits — the ones that build bridges — were not part of his core software. In Israel, there’s a saying: “Ein breira” — there is no choice. Netanyahu absorbed that mindset early. His world was binary — strong or weak, safe or doomed. And then, Yonatan. His older brother. Brilliant, idealistic, brave — and killed in the 1976 Entebbe raid. That death broke something open in Benjamin. It wasn’t just grief. It was canonisation. Yonatan became a symbol — not just of what Israel had lost, but of what Netanyahu must now become: the embodiment of heroic sacrifice. So it’s not surprising that the young man who returned to Israel from the U.S. didn’t become a professor or a philosopher. He became a soldier. Then a diplomat. Then a prime minister. And every step he took, he took with his father’s voice in one ear… and his brother’s ghost in the other. This is the psychological blueprint of Benjamin Netanyahu: forged in grief, fuelled by fear, and fixated on survival. He had no Palestinian friends growing up. He didn’t share classrooms, cafes, or futures with Arabs. They were not part of his social fabric — they were framed as part of the threat.