I once got an unexpected, unpleasant, and altogether unforgettable phone call from Benjamin Netanyahu. This was in 2004, when Netanyahu was serving as finance minister in Ariel Sharon’s government and I was editor of the Jerusalem Post. At the time, nobody thought of Israel as the dynamic “Start-up Nation” that it would later become, thanks largely to Netanyahu’s policies. Instead, it was a country beset not just by waves of Palestinian suicide bombers but also by the stultifying legacies of the country’s socialist roots: high taxes, inefficient state-owned companies, excessive welfare subsidies, a bloated public sector. From an economic standpoint, Israel was more likely to be compared to Argentina than, say, Switzerland.
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