Israel's longest-serving and most polarizing leader built his entire career on the belief that only strength, not peace deals, keeps his country safe.

• Netanyahu grew up shaped by his father's hard-line view that conflict with Arab states was permanent, not solvable, and that belief only hardened after his brother died leading the famous 1976 hostage rescue in Uganda.
• He built his political brand in the US and at the UN as the English-speaking face of Israel's fight against terrorism, long before he held office at home.
• As prime minister starting in 1996, he repeatedly used a stall-for-time strategy on peace deals: never fully saying yes or no, just running out the clock while making only grudging concessions under US pressure.
• His first term collapsed in 1999 after the right turned on him for conceding land, but terror attacks and the Gaza withdrawal's aftermath later convinced many Israelis he had been right to distrust the peace process all along.
• As finance minister in the early 2000s, he pushed sweeping free-market reforms that revived Israel's economy but alienated working-class voters who bore the cost of the cuts.

Outlook: His rivalry with Iran over its nuclear program, and his deepening alliance with US Republicans over Democrats, set the stage for the conflicts that would come to define the rest of his career.