(October 25, 2015)

A political consultant once related how he lunched with Benjamin Netanyahu, who ordered a hamburger with fries. He was not supposed to be eating such foods – doctor’s orders. As they were finishing up, Bibi’s wife, Sarah, came in, saw the evidence and began to see red. Netanyahu, all righteous indignation, looked her straight in the eye and said he had eaten no such hamburger. The storyteller said he was convinced at that moment that Netanyahu himself believed it.

If apocryphal, it is definitely in character. Netanyahu regularly embraces bad ideas or even lies so totally that he convinces himself of their rightness. Others start to believe them too. His outlandish idea, uttered in a speech, was that Hitler would have been happy with just expelling Jews if a Palestinian, the then grand mufti of Jerusalem, had not suggested annihilation instead.