Author's Note: Why I Call Him King BibiI did not invent the name. In May 2012, Time magazine put Benjamin Netanyahu on its cover under the words "King Bibi." The name stuck because it captured something true. Israel has no king. Yet one man has governed it for more years than anyone else, across three separate periods, under six prime ministerial cabinets, and through five wars. When a democracy keeps returning the same leader for that long, the title is not flattery. It is a description of a fact that demands explanation.That explanation is the purpose of this book. This is not a memoir, his or anyone's. It is my book on King Bibi. I have spent years as a theological author, publisher and statesman studying how power is built, kept, lost and regained, and that is the study I bring to him. Netanyahu has told his own story in Bibi: My Story (2022); I have no interest in retelling it. I am interested in what the man reveals about leadership, and in something deeper that the newspapers never touch: the name he carries. He is called Benjamin, and Benjamin is a name with three thousand years of Scripture behind it. So this book has two parts. Part One reads the leader. Part Two reads the seed of Benjamin, from Genesis to Revelation, through 153 scriptures, and asks what the last Benjamin company means for the return of Jesus Christ.So let me say plainly how I have worked. Everything factual here comes from the public record: his speeches, his books, official statements, court filings, and reporting from Israeli and international press. I have not invented a single quotation. The chapter on his security services (Mossad, Shin Bet and the IDF) uses only what those agencies and the government have acknowledged, or what serious journalists have documented. I have no access to classified material and I would not print it if I did.I have also refused to write a hagiography. A book for universities that hid the conflicting unfinished trial, the 2023 protests, the failures of October 7, the war in Gaza and the International Criminal Court warrant would be worthless to a serious reader. In each chapter I give the case his admirers make and the case his critics make. The reader is a grown-up. I trust you to weigh them.What I bring, beyond the record, is a way of reading leadership that I have developed over a lifetime. I look at six things in any leader: history, humility, hallmarks, hidden assets, highest achievements, and hope. Those are the six chapters of Part One. Together they form a method any student of power can apply to any leader, in any nation, in any century. In Part Two I bring the other half of my method, which I call foresights, backsights and insights: what Scripture foretells, what Scripture records, and what Scripture teaches. I apply all three to the tribe of Benjamin, because I am convinced that the seed of Benjamin holds a key to the end of the age, and that a leader named Benjamin standing in Jerusalem in 2026 is no accident of history.One more word. In my tradition a watchman on the wall is not there to admire the city. He is there to see clearly and to say what he sees. I have tried to be that kind of watchman here. Selah, which is an old Hebrew word for "pause and weigh it." Pause, and weigh it.Dr. BenyPowerful
