JERUSALEM - Israel’s wily political survivor Benjamin Netanyahu, who returned to power on Thursday with the backing of far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, has described protecting the Jewish state as his “life’s mission”.

A highly divisive figure, the silver-haired 73-year-old right-winger is revered as “King Bibi” by his loyal Likud party base but labelled the “crime minister” by opponents as he fights charges of corruption, embezzlement and breach of trust in court.

Known as a cunning strategist, Mr Netanyahu staged his comeback 18 months after he was ousted by an unlikely cross-party coalition to start his third reign after previous terms as premier from 1996-1999 and 2009-2021.

In Israel’s fifth election in less than four years in November, his bloc secured a 64-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset which on Thursday approved his new government, described as the most right-wing in the country’s history.

Mr Netanyahu’s admirers see Israel’s longest-serving prime minister as the ultimate guardian of the Jewish state against its foes – from armed Palestinian groups he labels “terrorists” to Israel’s arch nemesis Iran and its allies in the Middle East.

Under his rule, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the 1990s all but stalled while Jewish settlements were massively expanded in the occupied West Bank.

All sides agree that the gravel-voiced politician is a tireless campaigner in his dogged, lifelong pursuit of one office – the Israeli premiership – which he believes he is uniquely qualified to hold.

Mr Netanyahu “will try to do whatever he can to form a coalition, no matter how crazy”, his former spokesman and Likud insider Aviv Bushinsky recently told AFP.

“In his head, he has a mission from God to save the country.”

Brother’s death

Born in Tel Aviv on Oct 21, 1949, Mr Netanyahu is the son of a historian who was active in right-wing Zionist groups, an ideological inheritance that helped shape his political career.

Mr Netanyahu, who served as a soldier in a commando unit, was marked strongly by the death of his older brother, Yonatan, the only Israeli soldier killed in a daring 1976 special forces raid to free hostages at Uganda’s Entebbe airport.

In a memoir, released this year, he recalled that he felt he would “never recover” from the loss. “When the news reached me that Yoni had died in Entebbe, I felt as if my life had ended.”

Raised partly in the United States, Mr Netanyahu graduated from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

With his fluent English, he regularly appeared on US television, defending Israel throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s – exposure that raised his profile both at home and abroad.

Mr Netanyahu became Likud’s leader in 1993 and led the conservative party to victory as Israel’s youngest-ever prime minister in 1996, aged 46.

He lost power in 1999, but regained it 10 years later and stayed in power for more than a decade.

‘My ancient people’

During his years at the helm, Mr Netanyahu has never engaged in substantive peace talks with the Palestinians, rather overseeing a boom in expansion of Israel’s West Bank settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.

Countering Israel’s arch-foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran – including its alleged nuclear weapons programme and allied armed groups like Lebanon’s Hezbollah – has been the centrepiece of his foreign policy.

In his last year in office, Mr Netanyahu, a close ally of former US president Donald Trump, clinched historic, Washington-brokered normalisation agreements with several Arab states, some of which also see Iran as a threat.

After establishing ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, a similar breakthrough with Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, would be a “quantum leap for peace” in the region, Mr Netanyahu recently told Dubai-based Al Arabiya.

He reflected on his achievements in his autobiography, which he wrote after being ousted from office by an unlikely alliance of rivals in June 2021.

“As a soldier, I fought to defend Israel on battlefields,” he wrote.

“As a diplomat, I fended off attacks against its legitimacy in world forums, as finance minister and prime minister I sought to multiply its economic and political power among the nations,” he went on, concluding that he had “helped secure the future of my ancient people”.

Mr Netanyahu has two sons with his wife Sara and a daughter from a previous marriage. AFP