Prime Minister’s Office, Jerusalem.
The appointment was scheduled for nine in the morning.
It might be a bit later. There was also a phone call with the American president on the agenda, and that, of course, took some precedence.

We set up our two cameras in an adjoining room.
“Dutch television, right?” asked the hurried press officer.
I sat in Netanyahu’s chair. Adjusting light and framing.
Ah well, we had time to spare.

That I was here had, in a roundabout way, something to do with a holiday romance.
At sixteen, I had fallen in love with Edith Dayan at the Sea of Galilee. We had hitchhiked through Galilee and Judea.
It was a magical journey—the beginning of a near-lifelong love affair with the Jewish land.

What started as a teenage crush turned into a growing fascination with Israel, Zionism, World War II, the Holocaust, Judaism, Palestinians, and the Middle East.
I devoured books, learned modern Hebrew, co-founded a Working Group on Israel with Ronnie Naftaniel in Nijmegen.
Later, as the youngest member of the Brandpunt team, I claimed Israel/Palestine as my near-exclusive beat.
Had I been there fifty times? A hundred? Often, quietly, I searched for Edith Dayan, with whom I had lost all contact.
Her name turned out to be the Israeli equivalent of Els Jansen. With help from hotel receptionists, quite a few Els Jansens called me—but not her.

That would come later.
Just like Benjamin Netanyahu would come later.
Message at 11 a.m.: “Might be sometime this afternoon.”

The PR genius

I had never met him. He was described to me as a PR genius of the right.
Former ambassador to the United Nations.
Ideologically, he followed in the footsteps of Menachem Begin, but—unlike that former “Jewish king”—he was more of a modern performer.

In Bibi’s waiting room, I rehearsed my questions.
The minutes dragged on.
Now and then a door opened. Another glass of herbal tea, offered by the household staff.
“Dutch TV, right?”

It always amazed me how much time Israeli leaders made for Dutch television.
I was regularly welcomed. The coolly amiable Shimon Peres, a man who spoke in antique phrases.
So unpopular in his own country that even the murder of Rabin couldn’t win him an election.

When confronted with dire polls, he once told me:
“Polls are like perfume. Nice to smell but hard to swallow.”
Right-wing Israel sarcastically called Peres a “beautiful soul.” Apparently, an insult.
Never a general—so, a hollow philosopher.
That he had helped his country acquire nuclear weapons apparently wasn’t martial enough.

I was impressed by his politeness, patience, and his ability to abstract the raw conflict into velvet language.
Even after overtly pro-Israel sentiment in the Netherlands had flipped, Peres remained liked—or at least respected.

It’s now lunchtime at the Prime Minister’s Office.
Sandwiches arrive with the tea. It might take a while.
There’s an impromptu meeting and we’re still waiting on the American president’s call.

What can I do but accept the priorities of world politics?
I stare out the window. Limousines come and go past bored security guards.
The sun is shining. I close my eyes. Just as I did back home in Nijmegen after my journey with Edith.
Dreaming at the window that I was there. That I was here.

“Good for the Jews”

I wander down the hallway. Chat with a secretary. She’s been to the Netherlands.
On vacation. Fell in love.
It didn’t last. But “there’s nothing like Holland,” she says. “They were good to the Jews.”

How strange that this misconception could survive for so long.
No country in Western Europe was more efficiently de-Judaized by the Nazis than ours.
We were well-organized bystanders.

But here, “good to the Jews” usually means “good to Israel.”
That special relationship lasted for decades.

Even former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once swore it to me, somewhere in this very building.
On the eve of the Gulf War—when Iraq’s Scud missiles loomed—I was, by rare exception, granted an interview.

Former terrorist leader. Former Mossad chief in Europe.
An unflappable man.
It was said he wouldn’t look up from his paper if a gun went off in the next room.

But he greeted me warmly.
First sentence: “We have a strong connection.”
By “we,” he meant The Hague and Jerusalem.

The exclusive interview was broadcast worldwide—but content-wise, it was thin.
A few platitudes, served stoically.
Shamir was good at silence.

Netanyahu would not be silent.
Israel’s eloquent poster boy on American television, he had mastered the art of slogan soundbites.
The conflict boiled down into digestible chunks.

At the time I was waiting for him, he was still relatively unknown in the Netherlands.
That would be my first question: “Can you introduce yourself to our viewers?”
A deliberately open question for a seasoned media performer.

I had visualized the interview a hundred times in my mind.
Kept adding questions, interventions.

It’s 1:30 p.m. Still no Netanyahu.

But Edith Dayan had surfaced.
My brilliant student, Sven Kockelmann, had enlisted the show Spoorloos to find her for a film marking my career.
Less than a week later, we embraced in a restaurant in Herzliya.

A reunion after 25 years. Unforgettable.
Just like the interview I once did with Yitzhak Rabin, then Minister of Defense.
A CBS crew had filmed Israeli soldiers allegedly breaking the arms of Palestinian youths.
Shocking footage that exposed the moral bankruptcy of Israel’s occupation policy.

That was the tone of my confrontational interview.
Rabin—the renowned hardliner—struck me as a shy man.

No Way Out

Afterward, he wanted to continue the conversation—off camera, unfortunately.
He asked how Dutch public opinion was evolving.
Would I have questioned Margaret Thatcher as critically about the Falklands, so far from home?

He described the despair of a conflict playing out over a few square kilometers.
An army facing young Palestinians fighting with death-defying courage.
Gunfire against stones and Molotov cocktails. No way out.

This was long before he would shake hands with Arafat.
And pay for it with his life.
A bullet from his own ranks. Yigal Amir.
Incited—also—by the man I was about to meet.
Benjamin Netanyahu.
It’s now 4:00 p.m.

In occupied East Jerusalem, construction has just begun on yet another Jewish neighborhood.
The entire West Bank has become a chessboard of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

Israel won the Six-Day War, but lost on the seventh day—by becoming an occupying power.
Settlement policy, driven by “historic rights.”
Tel Aviv? Just a strip of beach.
The annexationist ambition was all about biblical Judea and Samaria.

Settlers spread across the hilltops.
Hope for a territorial compromise drowned in land grabs.
In 1972, Edith and I had traveled carefree through Palestinian territory.
A peaceful holiday trip.
Unthinkable today.

Exactly 6:00 p.m. Bibi arrives.
He doesn’t look at me as he sits. Legs wide.
He’s heavier than I expected. Much heavier.
His belly hangs colossally over his belt.

Ankie Rechess, the correspondent who arranged the meeting, had warned me:
“This man is not interested in European attention. His focus is the American audience.”

That much is clear.
He says: “Okay, five minutes.”

Somewhere between indignation and defiance, I reply:
“Then I might as well leave now. I didn’t come all the way to Jerusalem for five minutes.”
“Okay, we’ll see,” he says curtly.

Aggression

Within thirty seconds, I know it’s going to be a memorable interview.
I mention the names of his globally known predecessors and ask if he can introduce himself to the Dutch public.

He is visibly irritated.
The room instantly fills with tension.

I steer the conversation toward the new annexation plans in East Jerusalem, Palestinian despair, and the hopeless, stagnant state of the conflict.

It’s not the content that makes it breathtaking—it’s his aggression.
Unlike Peres, Rabin, or Shamir, who spoke slowly, Bibi pulls me into a verbal pressure cooker.

He leans in. Slaps my knees.
Calls my questions ridiculous.
Fakes belly laughs at my "stupid" suggestions.
Sighs in theatrical disbelief.
“You’re worse than even the Israeli journalists,” he spits.

I realize he’s highly sensitive to my body language.
I nod sympathetically, almost pityingly, during many of his answers. A trick.
The footage is too arrogant to air, but it works.

He feels challenged.
The quotes come flying, staccato—he seems to want to overpower me with conviction.

It lasts 18 minutes.
“Thank you, Mr. Netanyahu.”
He stands and storms off.
“My goodness, Fons,” sighs Ankie.
“That was good television.”

Turning Point

It dawns on me: this Netanyahu is a different breed.
The first Israeli prime minister born after the founding of the state.

Since Ben-Gurion, Israel had mostly been led by hardliners who—having escaped the diaspora, antisemitism, pogroms, and Holocaust—had armed themselves to the teeth.
But for whom occupation was often more of a burden than a destiny.

I had always been moved by the spiritual conflict at the heart of the country:
a persecuted people seeking survival in the very thing that had always threatened it—nationalism.
Doers and thinkers. Sparta and Athens at once.

A nation in armor, yet still questioning its own righteousness.
Even hawk Rabin had internalized it: “We must not be occupiers.”

After the interview with Netanyahu, I felt a mental turning point.
I had met a man utterly untouched by doubt.
He would go on to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
And steer the country sharply—perhaps fatally—to the right.

Hailed as “Mr. Security,” he changed the national spirit.
The left disappeared as a political force.
The Oslo Accords were shredded.
The Palestinian question locked away.
Parliament and public discourse hardened into hysteria.

He is accused of corruption.
At the time of writing, he has been sidelined—not for ideological reasons, but by a strange center-right coalition united by one thing: life without him.

Years later, I realize that my encounter with Netanyahu also cast a shadow within myself.
Maybe I had been too dreamy all those years.
I still consider the creation of Israel the most hopeful event after the Holocaust.
A Palestinian state alongside Israel seemed to me a logical, necessary outcome.

But I had underestimated how quickly the ideals of peaceful coexistence could be crushed.
Starting with language. Netanyahu’s language.

I had provoked him. Instinctively. With looks.
Maybe also out of irritation that he had dismissed me so completely. “Okay, five minutes.”
A cockfight.
But in hindsight, it was revealing.
It illustrated—and foreshadowed—the tone of “his new Israel.”
And my farewell to certain illusions.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that I have thousands of reasons to love Israel.
With or without Bibi.

But those 18 minutes felt like a prelude:
Much hope and idealism had been washed away in the land of Edith Dayan.
The latest news is that she now lives in America.