| This past week, massive protests continued in Israel against Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister. Since his reëlection to a sixth term, in November, Netanyahu has advanced legislation that would dramatically weaken the democratic system of checks and balances, allowing his far-right government to override the Supreme Court with a simple parliamentary majority. Violence has flared in the West Bank, and economic trouble looms as investors react to the instability. On Thursday, the coalition headed by Netanyahu, who is currently on trial for corruption, voted to strip the attorney general and courts of the power to remove the Prime Minister. As the seventy-fifth anniversary of Israel’s founding approaches, in May, the new law is likely to be challenged before the besieged Supreme Court. In 1998, shortly before he became The New Yorker’s editor, the staff writer David Remnick travelled to Jerusalem to profile Netanyahu. Then in his first term as Prime Minister, the forty-eight-year-old Netanyahu had suffered a “series of flubs and fast ones,” including rancor within his own Cabinet, embarrassing scandals involving his wife, and a botched assassination attempt against a leader of Hamas. By Netanyahu’s design, the Oslo peace accords, with the Palestinians, had stalled, chilling his relationship with the American President. Israeli voters would punish Netanyahu at the ballot box the following year, exiling him to the political wilderness for a full decade. And yet, twenty-five years after the Profile’s publication, the article captures much of what continues to drive and distinguish the man widely known simply as Bibi: the outsized influence of his father, a scholar of Inquisition-era Spain; the legacy of Netanyahu’s older brother, who died rescuing hostages after the hijacking of a plane; and the Prime Minister’s own instinct for survival. “Bibi’s enemies see him as an incompetent, unimaginative, and cynical politician,” Remnick wrote, “with a singular gift for staying in office.” | 
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