Peepee for Bibi
Accommodating an Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu for decades has been a polarizing figure on the world stage.
Israel’s longest serving prime minister is a hero for many on the right wing of Israeli domestic politics and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the diaspora. They applaud his uncompromising response to terror groups and militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, in which several thousand Israeli citizens and soldiers were murdered or wounded and some 250 were kidnapped.
Israelis with centrist and liberal views are more likely to desire Netanyahu’s retirement. They oppose his politics, consider him a threat to democracy and point to his indictments on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in several cases. Netanyahu is currently on trial and the prime minister has been testifying, for security reasons, from a bunker beneath Tel Aviv.
The International Criminal Court, last month, issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, along with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes in connection with the Israeli military response in Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the past 14 months.
Netanyahu, known as Bibi, is in his sixth term atop Israeli politics, which has proven to be the most tumultuous. If nothing else, the 75-year-old has proven to be a survivor in combat and in political battles.
My initial encounter with the graduate of Pennsylvania’s Cheltenham High School and MIT was during his first term in office, in 1997.
At that time I was president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. The club, since its inception in the early days of General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation of the defeated Japanese empire, has played a consequential role in society there. Nearly every Japanese prime minister has addressed the club, which at its peak had about 2,500 journalist and associate members. All of the domestic media and many foreign outlets cover these events.
Just about anyone who is anybody and has visited Tokyo since 1945 speaks at the FCCJ — presidents, monarchs, religious leaders, star athletes and entertainers. Frequently the question-and-answer sessions make news as the correspondents launch provocative but respectful verbal inquisitions, especially compared to the softball line of inquiries that speakers receive at the rival Japan National Press Club. In summary, the FCCJ has been a taboo breaker in Japan, a place where uncomfortable truths can be said publicly, breaking free of the oft-criticized kisha kurabu system of information control.
As a member of the FCCJ board for some years prior to my presidency, I had been the moderator of a number of such sessions. I always delivered a compelling introduction of the guest speaker, ensured they did not ramble too long with their prepared remarks and kept the Q&A at a good tempo to ensure the maximum number of journalists could ask questions while cutting short those reporters who veered into monologues. We always had a few eccentrics in the audience attempting to hog the spotlight.
In the summer of 1997, I learned that the new Israeli prime minister would be making his first visit to Japan. I spearheaded a team that negotiated the details of a possible appearance at the FCCJ. This involved numerous sessions with some Club staff, Israeli diplomats and security officials and the SP — the Security Police division of the Tokyo Metro PD, responsible for protecting domestic politicians and foreign dignitaries.
Japanese are known for meticulous planning, while the Israelis have a reputation for expertise in security protocols. I was the man in the middle as the Club’s elected leader attempting to ensure a compromise could be found to allow the Israeli prime minister’s visit for lunch and a chat before an audience of members and outside media.
I considered it a small miracle of Chanukah proportions when we reached an agreement for the prime minister to speak to us on August 26, 1997.
On the scheduled date a police car rolled into the subterranean entrance of the Yurakucho Denki Building’s parking garage. It was followed closely by a black Cadillac limousine stuffed with beefy, stern Israelis and their valuable protectee facing them in the back seat.
Suddenly the Japanese and Israelis in the garage swiftly moved hands to ears, from which plastic cords dangled. A Japanese with an SP badge on his lapel snapped at one of his Israeli counterparts, “There’s an Arab on the 20th floor!”
Several of the security personnel converged on the rear left door of the limo and re-shut it as Netanyahu was about to disembark. There was no way they were about to let the prime minister into the building amid a potential terrorist threat on the top floor, where the lunch was to be held.
It took me a few seconds to figure it out.
“Oh, that’s just Dr. Khan,” I told Chaim Choshen from the Israeli Embassy. “He’s no threat.”
Another small miracle. My assessment defused the alert. I knew well Umar D. Khan, the veteran Arab News Service correspondent. I had defeated him in the most recent FCCJ presidential election.
Netanyahu was allowed out of the car and Choshen introduced me and the club’s general manager, Yamada-san, to the Israeli prime minister. After Netanyahu extended a firm handshake, a phalanx of security agents surrounded us as we walked to the elevator.
As we slowly ascended, the prime minister, speaking slightly above a whisper, looked me in the eye and said, “Mr. Herman, I have a favor to ask you?”
What could this head of government, who I had just met, suddenly want from me? I doubted he needed my assistance in establishing back-channel communication with Saddam Hussein. Perhaps he was going to hit me up for a donation to the Jewish National Fund to plant more trees in the Holy Land.
“Yes, Mr. Prime Minister, what is it?” I replied with some apprehension.
The prime minister, who had spent his formative years on the U.S. East Coast, cleared his throat and said: “I need to make a pit stop.”
I was suddenly faced with the first crisis of my two-month-old FCCJ presidency. This called for quick decision-making the members of the club had obviously entrusted to me as their elected leader.
Our 20th floor restrooms were out of action for renovation, but this was obviously one situation our landlord, Mitsubishi Real Estate, had not anticipated.
“Yamada-san, 19th floor bathroom stop for the prime minister,” I urgently sputtered in Japanese, glancing up and noting the elevator light was indicating floor 15.
Yamada-san nimbly maneuvered around gun-toting bodies to hit the critical button just in time.
The packed elevator’s passengers stepped out and a path was cleared to the men’s room, startling a young Parisbank employee who had been minding her own business, waiting for a downward elevator.
I figured protocol did not demand I follow the prime minister into the lavatory, but it obviously was part of the job for some of the security contingent.
A minute later, one floor above, agents barged into the library, our ad hoc green room, where Netanyahu shook hands with other board members and signed the guest book. On the way out, he paused and noted the piles of newspaper clippings in the cubbyholes behind the librarians’ desks. He laughed.
“I can see you’re state-of-the-art here,” the MIT graduate said with a grin in that era of the IBM Thinkpad and Windows NT.
I squelched an explanation of our upcoming modernization renovation and just muttered, “Yeh, we’re pretty high-tech.”
Making our way into the dining room I had a moment to reflect on what it had taken to get to this point. It had commenced a couple of months previously with a tip from a self-described “second-class” associate member of the club and Tokyo’s Jewish community leader, Ernie Solomon, a Holocaust survivor.
Amid the negotiations, we realized it was probably a go when the Israelis and Japanese authorities, after touring the premises, made a number of requests, including removing our lobby furniture and having a bottle of Golan Heights white at the head table.
Netanyahu appreciated the wine, although he didn’t eat or drink much. I recounted to the Israeli ambassador, Moshe Ben-Yaacov, sitting to my immediate left, an embarrassing bit of FCCJ lore about Israeli hero Moshe Dayan’s visit to the club many years previously. The one-eyed general was served a definitely not kosher ham sandwich and he ate it. I assured the ambassador we had learned from our mistake.
“The food doesn’t have to be kosher, just say it is if anyone asks,” the ambassador replied with a straight face. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or seriously advising me to break two of the Old Testament’s 600-plus commandments. Tokyo new Conservative rabbi was somewhere in the audience and I thought I’d relay the ambassador’s commentary, which I did not recall from the Talmud.
I scanned the audience for the rabbi and other faces I expected to see but the overflow crowd and, minutes later, the lectern, made it difficult to discern who was facing us.
The imposing lectern had me apologizing to several incensed members after the lunch because, as the moderator, it blocked my view of their wildly waving hands throughout the Q&A session.
While the audience has scant sympathy for those of us who hobnob with the VIPs at the head table, the toughest job for any moderator is fairly handling the questioning. At a standing room only session, such as I faced with Netanyahu, I sought to strive for diversity — geographic, media type and gender. All these years later I will confess to a couple of biases that day. I didn’t allot questions to the Japanese press as they had enjoyed an opportunity with the prime minister the previous day at the Japan National Press Club. In consultation with the ambassador it was agreed we should avoid the dozen or so attending representatives of the Israeli media, who got a crack at Netanyahu on a nearly daily basis.
A few members lobbied days in advance for me to call on them. My response was to suggest they arrive early and secure prime seating. Two of the club’s past presidents in that era, Gebhard Hilscher of Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung and Sam Jameson of the Los Angeles Times, managed to get in questions at most every important event because they took their seats in advance and had a reputation among moderators as lifesavers as an alternative to some of the club’s more rhetorically challenged stalwarts. The other way to ensure you got your question answered was to get elected club president.
Perhaps I spurned great opportunities for exclusive quotes, but as was the case with Netanyahu, I would rarely engage speakers in serious banter prior to their remarks from the lectern. I always assumed they were the most nervous person in the room besides the moderator, of course. We would get our share of Japanese politicians and business leaders who were virgins in dealing with the relatively rambunctious foreign press. I sometimes felt a bit sorry when I noticed trembling hands among those accustomed to being honorifically addressed as sensei or shacho.
Bibi, that day, was a seasoned pro, cool as a cucumber, saying a lot and nothing at the same time. Before he took to the lectern he chewed on an unlit Davidoff cigar (which I collected as a souvenir after the event).
Netanyahu, during the Q&A session, was rarely at a loss for words. One moment that generated laughter was when a Polskie Radio reporter asked the Israeli leader his thoughts about expanding NATO. Netanyahu, after a long pause, replied: “Let me see how many toes I can step on now.”
Another question was also prescient. A correspondent for India’s The Hindu newspaper asked the prime minister why he would not negotiate with Hamas. In a lenghty response, Netanyahu noted Hamas sought Israel’s destruction and he paraphrased philosopher Immanuel Kant’s riff that in non-democracies “you cut somebody’s head off.”
The full session was subsequently seen by audiences beyond the Yurakucho Denki Building, airing on C-SPAN in the United States later that week. (It’s still viewable online.)
At the conclusion of the event, as was customary, I handed Netanyahu an envelope with a card inside giving him a one-year honorary club membership. He thanked me and quipped, “I will try to read the news and make less of it.”
That making news part was certainly one goal he did not achieve.
A few minutes after Netanyahu departed, I went down one floor to oversee another of the club’s speaking events — welcoming a more obscure foreign politician at the time. That guest was a member of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Cabinet, his federal minister for the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety. Her name was Angela Merkel.