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Wife at the Top
Netty C. Gross
As soon as her husband won election as prime minister, Sara Netanyahu made it clear that she wanted a high-profile role alongside him. And while six months of relentless media castigation have made her shun the solo spotlight, she's not budging from his side.
One Autumn Morning, Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu stepped into a Jerusalem hall packed with hundreds of applauding American Jewish women, delegates to the tony, $5,000-a-head Lion of Judah philanthropists' conference.
Sara had been scheduled to come the night before - a guest of honor in her own right. But she canceled, preferring to tag along with her husband in the morning. Aides didn't give any reason for the change in plans and Sara, looking regal in a tailored, pale green suit and marcelled blonde hairdo, said nothing, keeping a tentative low-beam smile trained on her husband.
It was five months since Netanyahu had made his victory speech in an adjoining hall. On that occasion, Sara changed the face of Israeli political culture by insisting on sharing the limelight with her husband. They waltzed onstage, his arm around her shoulder - the confident wife of a prime minister seeking the status of First Lady, American-style, as well. And Netanyahu, intent on fashioning an American-style presidency, was more than happy to have her by his side. The Sabra version of Camelot, after all, would require a wife.
Only the Netanyahus hadn't bothered to share their honeyed vision of the future with their aides, who had therefore failed to provide a seat for Sara on the victory dais. So, embarrassingly, Netanyahu was forced to squeeze up next to Sara on a hastily plunked down plastic chair.
Returning to that ballroom in the fall, it was Sara who seemed ill at ease, casting frequent nervous glances at the crowd of women, as though smoothing her by-now rather crumpled image into a more presentable shape. Her decision months before to push herself into the limelight had invited high-wattage media scrutiny, throwing her every flaw into sharp relief. And the impact of the scrutiny showed in her body language: The naive confidence of last May had been replaced by a wary caution born of countless media attacks.
Still, if Sara was in no mood to chat with the Lions of Judah, her husband was. Israeli women view him as something of a cad. But American Jewish women like him precisely because he goes on the charm offensive - flaunting his mellifluous English, boyishness and charisma. And Netanyahu was in top form. Careful to open with his customary mention of his wife: "As I was telling Sara this morning... ," he then coyly made a plea to the chic audience not just for "your checkbooks but for your bodies" - encouraging them to make aliyah. "I promise you an interesting life, I really do. You won't be bored here," he said, cocking his head and playing the crowd like Engelbert Humperdinck at the Concord Hotel on a Saturday night. Laughing, clapping, snapping his picture, the women all but threw their hotel keys at him. Sara smiled wanly.
Sara has increasingly little to smile about these days. The list of her misadventures as catalogued by the media is lengthy and relentless. Her ex-husband Doron Neuberger, an obscure kibbutznik, briefly threatened to write a tell-all book about her; her children's ex-nanny, Tania Shaw, is suing her for "enslavement," back pay and slander; tabloids have accused her of being a hand-washing "clean" freak as a mother and a borderline plagiarizer as a graduate student.
Instead of Camelot, Sara appears to be recreating Peyton Place. For the prime minister, the sole apparent benefit is that by comparison, she has made him look good - even worthy of sympathy. But even that benefit is marginal and limited, since it is recognized that Netanyahu himself wanted his wife, and children, in the public eye - to back up his "presidential," American approach to the premiership and to promote the image of a devoted family man, deflecting criticism of his previously tangled private life, with its divorces and affairs. By attacking or mocking Sara, the press, and much of the public, has at once accepted the imported concept of First Family - and shown profound discomfort with the change.
In recent months, Sara, evidently trying to carve out a significant role, has attracted criticism for declaring herself to be a child psychologist worthy of heading a delegation of Israeli experts to a professional conference in Stockholm, despite not having completed the four years of field experience required for a license. (Her plans were canceled after a media report that her suite at the Grande Hotel would cost the state $1,000 a day.)
She has been accused of being a Hillary Clinton wannabe who meddled in cabinet appointments - trying to keep out Communications Minister Limor Livnat, and forcing the prime minister to drop long-time aide Eyal Arad. Livnat, the sole woman appointed by her husband to a ministry, supposedly arouses Sara's jealousy; Arad was the spin doctor who advised Netanyahu to make his televised confession of adultery in 1993 at the height of the Likud primaries campaign, deeply embarrassing his wife.
In the gossip columns, Sara's short skirts and leggy look have seen her derided as a would-be Princess Di who craves attention while being intellectually vacuous. She's also said to have pulled rank with neighbors who complained about renovations in the couple's Jerusalem apartment and, most recently and naughtily, to have become besotted with her own bodyguard.
While no popularity polls have been taken, the image of Sara in the public's mind has clearly been battered: Once the shy, loyal wife who gritted her teeth and masked the pain caused by her husband's public declaration of infidelity, she is now seen as a powerful woman, controlling politics from the bedroom and turning the virile Netanyahu into something of a wimp. Sara has been cast as Omphali, the figure of Greek myth who forced Hercules to spin and do women's work.
Netanyahu has twice had to dash out of important government meetings to accompany Sara to the doctor - both times son Yair, 5, fell in kindergarten and required stitches. Her persistence in showing up everywhere with him, critics say, makes Netanyahu look like he is on a leash, and has fed the rumor that she's phobic about having other women around him. The weekly satirical puppet show, "Haharzufim," has a running gag about her chasing Netanyahu around the apartment with a shoe in her hand, ready to strike. When Netanyahu hesitated for several days before canceling his early-November visit to the United States, an Israeli columnist joked snidely that he'd been terrified of telling Sara the trip was off. Not since the snobbish, deeply disliked Vera Weizmann, wife of Israel's first president Chaim, announced that she would never deign to speak the Hebrew language, has the wife of an Israeli public figure been bashed quite so publicly.
That Weizmann incident apart, the American-style First Family fascination, reminiscent of British royal-watching, has hitherto been foreign to Israel. Leah Rabin only briefly, if disastrously, caught the cameras' glare in 1977, when the revelation that she had an illegal foreign bank account led her husband to drop his reelection bid. Shulamit Shamir or Sonia Peres could and can pass unnoticed on the street.
But Sara-bashing has now become a national pastime, shared by the media and even Likud bigwigs, who are intimidated by the access Sara has to her husband and the growing power she appears to wield over him. "She intimidates even many of Bibi's closest aides," says one insider. "She wants co-equal status, she wants to be `a player,' and she's determined to achieve that." A report in the daily Ha'aretz - supposedly leaked by the prime minister's own bitter aides - noted that on a recent flight to Washington with the prime minister's entourage, Sara woke up from a nap, stepped into a high-level meeting in the "closed" section of the plane, and forced Netanyahu's bureau chief David Agmon, a general in the reserves, to get up, saying, "You're sitting in my seat." "And that's not the first time," noted the article, that Sara has barged in on cabinet-level meetings.
Indeed the accusation that Sara has access to classified material is a popular motif. Doron Neuberger, who was married to Sara for seven years in the 80s, said he decided to write a book about her after he saw Sara nuzzling her husband and reading over his shoulder what Neuberger thought were classified documents, "relating to matters of state." The book was allegedly going to shed light on conversations he had with Sara after her marriage to Netanyahu, in which she bragged about the privileged information to which she was privy. While Sara never openly addressed the issue, her phalanx of lawyers successfully pressured Neuberger's kibbutz, Ga'ash, to persuade the gangly special-ed teacher to drop the project.
"The attacks on Sara are ridiculous - politically inspired drivel and jealousy," says Sara's childhood friend Miri Porat. Porat and her family spent Rosh Hashanah with the Netanyahus at the resort guesthouse of Kibbutz Hagoshrim. "She's a warm, wonderful woman. She's bright and, yes, ambitious and something of a perfectionist. But why is that a crime? She's a good, loyal friend, wife, mother. It's all left-wing garbage."
But nothing goads her detractors more than the suggestion that the leftist media is "out to get Sara." "She's Sar hanetanyahu" (a Hebrew word play meaning "minister of the Netanyahu"), counters Carmit Sapir, a trendy gossip columnist and avid Sara-watcher for the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir. "She's got the biggest and best portfolio in the cabinet: her husband. And she loves every minute of it. Don't cry for Sara."
Not surprisingly, Sara hates the press. It's apparent in the defiant, tight smile she keeps plastered on her face when appearing before the cameras with her husband, the strain in her eyes. Staffers in the Prime Minister's Office - while extremely cautious not to cross her - express frustration at her unwillingness to be more media-savvy and grant more interviews.
Netanyahu spokesman Shai Bazak, who often lands up running interference for Sara, is said to believe that her strategy of starving the media until she is promised total control over any interview only worsens her reputation. (After agreeing to be interviewed by The Jerusalem Report for this article, she changed her mind without explanation.)
Is there more to the Sara serial than widespread personal dislike? Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrachi says there is: The attacks represent a "healthy resistance" to Netanyahu's attempt at Americanizing Israeli political culture. "Netanyahu," says Ezrachi, "correctly interpreted the different, personal mandate he had been given and brought his wife into the focus. But there is a great deal of ambivalence about the president's wife in the U.S., and even more so here - where the concept of a politically active wife is alien and irrelevant. It makes her a natural target."
As for the purported left-wing bias against Sara, Ezrachi believes it is there - and says it has a meaning. "The left's mockery of Sara Netanyahu is essentially a mockery of the so-called Republican `family values' that the Netanyahus try so hard to project," he says. "Again it's an irritant and rings dishonest because Netanyahu himself has such macho values. For example, the picture of Sara receiving her Hebrew University master's degree diploma from Netanyahu's hands, rather than from the rector's, was very strange, very infantalizing, makes you wonder about their relationship."
Still, it's characteristic of democracies, Ezrachi adds, to go through a period of ritually cutting a newly elected leader down to size. "Netanyahu particularly invites this because of his distrust, arrogance and the increasing charges of incompetence." But Hillary Clinton largely recovered from her savaging. Sara Netanyahu may yet, too.
Behind Sara's image is a peculiar combination of insecurity and obnoxious self-confidence. The roots of her "childish megalomania," as one former friend calls it, are in Sara's complex family and the relatively unspectacular role she played in it. Until, that is, she married Netanyahu in 1991.
Born in 1958 to Bible teacher Shmuel Ben-Artzi and his teacher wife Havah, Sara was the youngest child and only daughter in a traditionally Jewish and fanatically academic family dominated by three bookish, brainy older brothers, each of whom won prizes in the prestigious annual Bible Quiz. (Sara has said she never participated in the quiz only because the Yom Kippur War broke out the year she was eligible - although the war was in October and the quiz in May.) Tellingly, on her current curriculum vitae, the bedazzled kid sister still lists her elder brothers' academic achievements before her own more modest ones. "Matanya is a professor of math... Haggai is about to complete his PhD... and Amatzia is a doctor of computer science."
Sara grew up in Kiryat Amal, a neighborhood of modest middle-class homes that later became part of the ritzier Kiryat Tiv'on - which Sara now names as her hometown. A childhood friend remembers her as "someone burdened with a lot of family expectations, bright, somewhat introverted, and definitely neither the prettiest nor the smartest in the class." However, in a preelection interview and profile published in the daily Ma'ariv (which Sara is said to have approved before publication), her high-school grades are described as "all 9s and 10s" - the equivalent of straight "A"s.
Now Sara's prominent position has highlighted a painful family rift, further isolating her. Hebrew University professor Matanya, an ardent left-winger, recently gave a front-page interview to the Jerusalem weekly "Yerushalayim," in which he argued for making East Jerusalem the Palestinian capital and turning Mt. Scopus over to Palestinian control. Haggai - the brother to whom Sara turned for advice after learning of her husband's affair - is a right-winger who recently publicly denounced his brother-in-law for reneging on electoral promises and moved to Hebron in protest against redeployment there.
Divorced after a seven-year childless marriage to the quixotic Neuberger, Sara became an El Al stewardess - where she is remembered as quiet and spacy - and began working intermittently on her master's thesis in educational psychology at the Hebrew University, under the tutelage of Dr. Sorel Kahane. She took 10 years to complete it, getting a special extension to the university's five-year limit on completing MA degrees. The dissertation, for which Sara's curriculum vitae states she received a grade of 92 percent, analyzes the sources of error psychologists make when evaluating IQ tests given to Israeli children. The study is, in large part, based upon a more comprehensive thesis written by fellow MA student Ruth Ben-Ephraim, which challenges the accuracy of these IQ tests. Ben-Ephraim, who provided Sara with data from her own unused research, was dismayed to discover that, when the media seized upon the import of the work, Sara (by now the prime minister's wife) had failed to credit her for the research.
Sara had met Netanyahu, by then twice divorced and deputy foreign minister, in 1989, at a duty free shop in Amsterdam, and fell hard for him. In accounts of their romance, she describes shared activities such as idyllic "walks along the Seine." In fact, by the time they married (at a modest ceremony in Netanyahu's parents' Jerusalem apartment in March 1991), Sara was four months' pregnant and had twice suffered the indignity of Netanyahu postponing the wedding. Netanyahu was finally reined in by then-Tel Aviv chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.
According to Sarah (Saraleh) Davidovitch, long-time Jerusalem society figure and flack, Sara's current difficulties with the press are directly related to her initial lack of acceptance by Netanyahu himself. "You have to understand," says Davidovitch, "that Sara Netanyahu was a nice girl but an absolute nobody from nowhere. Sara's claim to fame was that she managed to hook Bibi, of all people. Bibi, whom a lot of women liked. And that created a lot of problems for her. Other women felt she wasn't pretty enough, wasn't tall or good enough for him. And everyone knew that he didn't want her. There was a very negative association with her immediately. It was hard on her."
Then her husband humiliated her even further: After she received an anonymous phone call about his affair with Likud image consultant Ruth Bar, Bibi told all on live television. Humiliated, Sara wanted to file for divorce, hoping to put the nail in the coffin of Netanyahu's political ambitions, and turned to Ya'acov Ne'eman, a prominent establishment insider attorney. Lau, by now Ashkenazi chief rabbi, again intervened, and Ne'eman hammered out a deal with Netanyahu's trusty attorney Yitzhak Molcho for continued marriage - an arrangement, some say in writing, that provides for Netanyahu to demonstrate unswerving loyalty to wife and family above all else.
Today, Davidovitch says, Sara Netanyahu's social stock has risen immensely, despite the press sniping. When Sara was recently appointed chairman of Yad B'Yad, a charity that provides "safe houses" for abused and needy children, the event was swamped with glitterati. Sara and Bibi, she notes, are beginning to make the rounds at prime-time Tel Aviv social events where the rich and powerful tend to be Labor party supporters. "I saw Sara and Bibi at the birthday party of (tycoon-philanthropist) Yuli Ofer," she reports. "And personally, I like the fact that Sara made a mentsh out of Bibi. If she has to put on lipstick, he waits in the car for 10 minutes and doesn't say `Boo.' Every Israeli man should treat his wife like that."
But Sara has more trouble ahead. One particularly prickly thorn is the case called Tania Shaw v. Sara Netanyahu, due to open in a Jerusalem labor court on December 26. The case will pit the First Lady against a 21-year-old South African immigrant, who claims to have been mistreated and cheated as an employee. (A previous nanny named Heidi Ben-Yair also "fled" from Sara's employ, citing lack of adequate food and rest.) Though the 80,000-shekel ($25,000) civil suit is sure to undercut Sara's desired image of commitment to help children and young people in distress, Shaw's lawyer, Moshe Zingel, says Sara has stubbornly refused to back down.
In the meantime, Sara is apparently planning to wall herself off further from the solo spotlight. Only at the urging of the Foreign Ministry did she recently agree to host two Dutch women who had collected some 200,000 signatures on behalf of Israeli MIA Ron Arad.
The Netanyahus, ever playing their private issues out in public, have recently gone to great lengths to show the world they are truly in love, constantly embracing and hugging. "I have a sense that they are growing closer together," says an insider. "There's a new solidarity there, born of the loneliness of the top."
And yet, unlike Bill Clinton, who has spoken openly of the anguish he has been caused by his wife's suffering at the hands of the American press, Netanyahu has said nothing publicly in her defense. "What I don't quite understand," says Prof. Ezrachi, "is why there isn't more sympathy for Sara Netanyahu. She had been rather cruelly treated. She's suffered from the shock of exposure. Picking on her doesn't serve any vital political purpose. Maybe Netanyahu is using her to buttress his own image. After all, she's so much easier a target to hit."
1996
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