Bibi's Blues

Buoyed by strong approval ratings, beset by corruption allegations, Benjamin Netanyahu could be heading for his fifth term as Israel’s prime minister—or to court

- Matthew Campbell and Gwen Ackerman

As the main weapons buyer for the Israel Defense Forces, Shmuel Tzuker spent years selecting everything from trousers to drones for the country’s troops. Just about anything the IDF buys will be used in action sooner or later—probably sooner—a reality that Tzuker, a ramrod-straight former infantry officer, understood better than most. He’d spent 31 years in the army, overcoming a severe wound from an Egyptian artillery shell to go on to fight in virtually every Israeli theater.

In the summer of 2014, Tzuker was preoccupied with a request from the navy for four patrol vessels suitable for policing the Mediterranean coastline, protecting natural gas platforms, and assisting in Israel’s next conflict. Surface ships play a minor role in the country’s defense doctrine—Hezbollah and Hamas are not maritime powers—so the size requirements were modest. The plan was to spend about $400 million on ships that displaced 1,200 tons of water. (By comparison, the U.S. Navy’s front-line destroyers displace about 9,000 tons.) Few European or U.S. builders would bother with such a contract, so Tzuker began soliciting bids from South Korea.

One afternoon, Tzuker got a call in his office, behind the high walls of the Kirya, the central Tel Aviv compound that is Israel’s equivalent to the Pentagon. A senior officer was on the line: The navy’s commanders had changed their minds. They wanted to give the order directly to a longtime supplier, Germany’s ThyssenKrupp AG, and increase the ships’ size to 2,000 tons—far larger than anything in the current fleet, but a size that would be attractive for the company to build.