# The Siege Mentality *A Biography of Netanyahu* — Legendary Biographies No. 117 - **Subject:** Benjamin Netanyahu - **Written by:** Yoav Eldan - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / World Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 278 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 278 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 278 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-050-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · 9h 18m · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-031-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/117-the-siege-mentality.html ## About this book A boy presses his ear to the wall of his father's study in Jerusalem, listening to the historian's lectures on exile, betrayal, and the long memory of the Jewish people. Decades later, that same boy will stand at a lectern in Washington and warn the world about Iran; will bury a brother at Entebbe; will become the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, and the most fiercely contested. Yoav Eldan follows Benjamin Netanyahu from the seminar rooms of MIT to the commando units of Sayeret Matkal, from the television studios where he refined a new political vocabulary to the coalition rooms where he assembled, broke, and rebuilt governments. He traces a worldview forged in Revisionist Zionism and tempered by the certainty that the Jewish state lives always within range of its enemies — a siege mentality that became both political philosophy and governing instinct. The book reckons with the costs. Corruption indictments. The judicial overhaul that split a country down its center. The intelligence failure of October 7, and the war that followed across Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond. Drawing on Israeli, Palestinian, American, and Arabic sources, Eldan offers neither prosecution nor defense. He presents a man inseparable from the history that produced him, and asks what it means when a single life so thoroughly shapes — and is shaped by — the fate of a nation. ## Contents 1. The Inheritance 2. Cheltenham 3. The Unit 4. The Institute 5. The Hot Tape 6. First Term 7. Wilderness 8. The Iran Clock 9. The Congress Speech 10. The Settlements 11. The Trump Years 12. The Trials 13. The Overhaul 14. October Seven 15. The Gaza War 16. The Expansion 17. The Longest-Serving 18. Rising Lion 19. The Warrant ## Questions **Who is The Siege Mentality about?** Benjamin Netanyahu. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Siege Mentality — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,030 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 85,000 words, 19 chapters, 278 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 9h 18m, measured from the finished masters. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Yoav Eldan is a Tel Aviv-based political journalist who has spent over a decade reporting on the Israeli right and the nation's security establishment. His investigative pieces and commentary have appeared regularly in Haaretz and Foreign Policy. Drawing on archival research and interviews with defense insiders, he writes biography of the figures who built and ran the state. His debut book, The Siege Mentality, examines the psychological and political frameworks of the country's early leadership. He lives in Tel Aviv, where he works as an independent reporter and spends his weekends cycling along the Mediterranean coast.