In a move that jolted the Israeli political scene, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stripped Reuven Rivlin, the longtime Knesset speaker, of his post in mid-March as the new government was being sworn in.
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Almost immediately, the Israeli media began speculating on what precipitated Rivlin's political demise. Had he bungled an important political issue? Was he insufficiently loyal to Bibi? No, his sin was rumored to be something different: He had angered Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister's wife.
In a subsequent prime-time television interview, Rivlin seemed to validate the rumors. He said that in addition to the prime minister and Avigdor Lieberman, the former foreign minister, there was a third person responsible for his dismissal -- "a person that is always at the center of things but apparently behind the scenes." When the interviewer asked whether that person was Sara Netanyahu, Rivlin didn't deny it, saying only that he didn't want to wade into gossip.
The Rivlin spat was just the latest instance of the overweening power supposedly wielded by Israel's first lady. "She's running the show here in Israel," a 2012 Vanity Fair article quoted an anonymous Israeli tycoon as saying. "She can make or break anyone."
Many Israelis, however improbably, believe this to be true. Indeed, Sara Netanyahu, 54, was just chosen by Forbes Israel magazine as Israel's most powerful woman, beating out multimillionaire business leaders, influential journalists, and actual politicians.
There is nothing rational about the topic of Sara Netanyahu. When it comes to "Sara," as most people in Israel refer to her, salacious gossip and anonymous leaks are the coin of the realm. Very few people in a position to really know talk about her, and certainly not on the record.
Instead of facts, pop psychology is the order of the day. The media tends to paint her as a hysterical, vain, power-hungry woman -- a combination Lady Macbeth and Imelda Marcos. Netanyahu supporters, and the first couple themselves, push a counternarrative of Sara as a loving and hardworking mother, a supportive spouse, and an easy punching bag for the prime minister's political opponents. As a recent Haaretz profile asked, is Sara Netanyahu "the victim of a witch hunt, or is she the witch?"
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The Rivlin dismissal is small change in the legend of Sara Netanyahu. If media speculation is to be believed, only two months ago she almost cost her husband the premiership. After the Jan. 22 general elections, it took Bibi more than two weeks to meet with Naftali Bennett, the leader of the pro-settler Jewish Home party viewed by many as a natural ally of the prime minister. The snub led Bennett to forge an unlikely alliance with Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party. To form a government, Netanyahu eventually had to give in to the pair's lofty demands.
The scuttlebutt was that Netanyahu's relationship with Bennett was strained due to Bennett's tumultuous term as Netanyahu's chief of staff. The cause of the strain? Sara.
The Israeli media reported that Sara didn't like Bennett, that she thought him too ambitious, that he threatened the first lady's influence, and that, in a fit of rage, Sara screamed at Ayelet Shaked, a Bennett protégé and Netanyahu's then office manager, unleashing a barrage of abuse that wouldn't have been out of place in a south Tel Aviv construction site.
Neither Bennett nor Shaked has ever unequivocally denied that their exit from Netanyahu's office was due to the first lady. In an interview during the campaign, Bennett was queried about his relationship with the Netanyahus. "You always claim that it ended well between you and Netanyahu, and you and Sara Netanyahu," the interviewer probed. "No, I claimed that it ended well between me and [Benjamin] Netanyahu," Bennett replied curtly.
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