Binyamin Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Oct. 21, 1949. “Bibi” and his two brothers grew up in Jerusalem until 1963, when their father accepted a college teaching position in Philadelphia, Pa. When the family moved to the United States, Bibi began using the English spelling of his first name. When Arab-Israeli tensions heated in the spring of 1967, he took his high school senior exams early and sped to Israel for the Six-Day War, which gave Israel control of scattered former Arab lands. By August Netanyahu was old enough to fight. He joined an elite commando unit and in 1968 took part in an attack on 13 unoccupied airplanes in Beirut, Lebanon. He rose to captain and recruited his brothers to the unit. After helping rescue 100 hijacked airplane passengers in Tel Aviv in 1972, he left the army to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

A year later he was back in Israel, fighting in the Sinai and the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War. He returned to MIT, earned a bachelor's degree in architecture and a master's in business management, and in 1976 went to work for the Boston Consulting Group. That July his older brother, Jonathan, was killed in a rescue of Israeli hostages at Entebbe, Uganda. He commemorated his brother by founding the Jonathan Institute, which sponsored international conferences on terrorism. Still in Boston, he became marketing manager for a furniture retailer in 1979, and published his brother's letters in1981. Through the Jonathan Institute he met Moshe Arens and other Likud party leaders.

Arens became Israeli ambassador to the United States in 1982 and recruited Netanyahu as deputy chief of mission. After two years Netanyahu left the embassy to become Israel's permanent representative to the United Nations (1984–88). In 1988 he won election to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and was appointed deputy foreign minister. His role as Israeli spokesman to the foreign press in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War and the Middle East peace negotiations in Madrid, Spain, made him well known to international television audiences. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made Netanyahu his deputy minister in 1991.

After elections in 1992 ousted the Likud party from the governing coalition, Shamir retired from party leadership. Likud party members elected Netanyahu their leader in 1993, despite his admitted infidelity to his third wife and revelations that American businessmen financed his campaign. Netanyahu denounced Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's land-for-peace agreement with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat that September. Emotions escalated around the country. When a right-wing Israeli assassinated Rabin in November 1995, Rabin's widow and others blamed Netanyahu for letting passions get out of control. His sagging popularity revived after a series of suicide bombings left Israelis feeling unsafe. On May 29, 1996, Netanyahu was elected prime minister by a margin of less than 1 percent. He promised to observe the peace agreements but delayed implementation to ensure Israeli security.

Netanyahu met with PLO leader Yasir Arafat for the first time in September 1996. The peace process became deadlocked in 1997 after Israel approved construction of a new housing development in East Jerusalem. The move was strongly criticized by the Palestinians, who saw it as an attempt to ignore provisions of the 1993 Oslo peace agreement. In the fall of 1998 the two leaders agreed to resume negotiations, and in October of that year they signed a new accord. Under the terms of the new agreement, Israel would cede land to the Palestinians in exchange for a Palestinian vow to crack down on Palestinian terrorist actions against Israel.

Criticism of Netanyahu over his handling of the peace process led the Israeli parliament to vote to dissolve the government in December 1998. Netanyahu's Likud party was soundly defeated by the Labor party, led by Ehud Barak, in elections held in May 1999. (See also Israel.)