Over the summer months of 1999, Netanyahu adjusted to life after the political circus that had dominated his time for more than a decade. He reflected on the commonalities of his personal narrative to his father, but, crucially, also the differences in political outlook and culture that made them distinct from one another.
The sum total of these differences was that his father was an ideologue and was not reconciled to any recognition of Arab and Palestinian rights in the conflict. His son was not. What they did share was the sense of being strangers in a strange land: for Netanyahu senior the strange land was the United States, and for Netanyahu junior it was Israel.
Benzion Mileikowsky was born in Warsaw, at a time when Poland was still part of the Russian empire. In 1920, when he was 10, his family left for Palestine. Soon after, Benzion’s Lithuanian-born father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, changed the family name to the Hebrew Netanyahu (God has given).
Like many Jews of his generation in Palestine, Benzion was politically active and toured Europe and North America trying to convince Jews to return to Zion. In contrast to his father, Benzion lived a secular life, and this lifestyle was passed on to his own three children. Despite Benjamin Netanyahu’s use of religious imagery in his speeches, and his frequent walks to the Western Wall to pray, he clearly shares his father’s secular orientation.1
As a student, Benzion majored in medieval history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, from where he graduated in 1933. Soon after graduating, he started co-editing Revisionist publications in Palestine.2 From 1940 to 1948, he was based in New York, and in 1944 married Tsila Segal, from Petach Tivka, who had studied law at Gray’s Inn, London, but never practised it.3
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Netanyahus flitted between living in Israel and the United States, with Benzion securing teaching posts in Philadelphia, at the University of Denver, and finally at Cornell University in New York. He retained a degree of anger towards the Israeli universities that he believed were run and staffed by left-wingers. The sense of discontent he felt about, in effect, having to go into exile to secure a position that would allow him to support his family, did not diminish with the passing of time.
Benzion believed that as a Revisionist Zionist he had been discriminated against for political reasons. He made no secret of his political leanings from an early age. He interrupted his academic career in British-controlled Palestine to become chief aide and secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zionists. After Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, he continued as an unofficial guardian of his legacy.
Like Jabotinsky, Netanyahu believed in a ‘Greater Israel’, a Jewish right to settle on both banks of the River Jordan, while maintaining an Iron Wall until the Arabs recognized the Jewish presence in Palestine.
He also believed in a free economy, in contrast to the socialist-dominated one that characterized the early years of the State of Israel. His preference for a free economy was one characteristic that was clearly passed on to his son, and could be seen in Benjamin’s business career and his political endorsement of free-market economics.
He opposed the UN General Assembly partition plan of November 1947, for not giving Israel enough land to survive behind viable and secure borders. His attitude towards the Arabs, if anything, hardened over time, leading him to fall out with Jabotinsky’s successor as leader of the Revisionist Zionists, Menachem Begin. This led to him becoming something of an outsider, not only in the United States, but also in the Revisionist Zionist movement of which he was a member.4
In the same interview with Maariv, during which he had openly speculated about his influence on the politics of his son, he outlined why he didn’t believe in the existence of the Palestinian people. As he put it:
The Bible finds no worse image than this of the man from the desert. And why? Because he has no respect for any law, because in the desert he can do as he pleases. The tendency towards conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.
Israel’s must be the same. The two states solution doesn’t exist. There are no two people here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population . . . there is no Palestinian people, so you don’t create a state for an imaginary nation . . . they only call themselves a people in order to fight the Jews.5
When asked about any potential solution, Benzion’s outlook was far from rosy:
No solution but force and strong military rule. Any outbreak will bring upon the Arabs enormous suffering. We shouldn’t wait for a big mutiny to start, but rather act immediately with great force to prevent them from going on.
From 1949 onwards, Benzion concentrated on his academic career, while earning additional income as editor of the hugely popular Encyclopedia Hebraica. He once told a journalist, ‘And for that I got the highest salary in Jerusalem.’6 He and the family moved to the United States in 1956. Effectively, this was an exile for the Netanyahus, but they did keep the family house in Jerusalem and returned to it later in their lives.
Benzion’s research focused on another aspect of Jewish history, the origins of the Spanish Inquisition in fifteenth-century Spain. His scholarly work he sees as fitting within the overall framework of Jewish history of being ‘a history of holocausts’.7 His research findings on the causes of the Spanish Inquisition are unsurprisingly dark. He concluded that Jews would not be saved by conversion. Such was the resentment towards them they would still be subjected to exile and mass killing.8
While he was a successful scholar in the United States, Benzion felt that he never received the recognition that his work merited. This sense of dissatisfaction was coupled with a desire to seek revenge on the parts of Israel that he felt were controlled by left-wing elites, namely academia and the media – especially television. His son’s deep mistrust of large segments of the Israeli media had its origins in his father’s contempt for it.
As a result of his father’s career move, Benjamin and his two brothers spent much of their formative years in the United States. For the young Benjamin Netanyahu, the United States represented home. He was fully immersed in the culture and educational values of the US. The family retained an air of superiority that came with the rank of their father and were seen as upwardly mobile Jews.
As he grew up, Netanyahu envisaged his future being in the United States. Much as he admired his father, enjoyed conversations and arguments over Jewish history, he showed little interest in following in his father’s footsteps to become a historian. Benjamin sensed there were limited opportunities in the field, and that the salary wasn’t especially good.
The key to understanding Netanyahu was that while he was to some extent influenced by the politics and outlook of his father, he was more influenced by American political culture that promoted pragmatism over ideology. That is not to say that his father’s politics did not leave their mark on him.
For the young Benjamin Netanyahu it was easy to fall into the same type of mindset as his father. During the 1970s, there was no meaningful peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians, in an era that was characterized by violent exchanges between the two sides. In short, there was no peace plan for resolving the conflict, and the PLO had not met the minimal American requirements for joining the diplomatic process: an abandonment of violence and recognition of Israel.
Netanyahu viewed Israel’s war in Lebanon, which started in June 1982, as a legitimate attempt by Israel to impose a military solution on the Palestinian issue. Although he did not serve in the war, his strong defence of it in the United States indicated that he subscribed to its aims. The war, with its heavy civilian casualties as the result of Israeli air raids and shelling, did not go down well in America, even in the era of the strong pro-Israel President Ronald Reagan.
Israeli war aims in Lebanon failed on both military and political fronts. Yasser Arafat and the PLO were able, with international help, to be evacuated from Beirut and set up a new headquarters in Tunis, from where it carried on its campaign against Israel. The failure of the Israelis to install an apparent Christian ally into power in Lebanon also came to define the failed military campaign.
Israel’s failures in Lebanon, and the damage to the perception of the country in the United States despite the best efforts of Netanyahu and other pro-Israel groups, led to a slow process of transformation in Israel. The key to the change was the increasing awareness, first among senior members of the IDF, and then among the centre-left politicians, that if Israel could not militarily defeat the PLO, it would at some point have to talk to them.9
As Netanyahu started out on his diplomatic career at the United Nations, the political ground beneath Israel was slowly shifting. The debate in Israel was mirrored within the institutions of the Palestinian national movement. Doves within the movement argued that the Lebanon War confirmed that its armed struggle against Israel was not working. They called instead for the abandonment of the armed struggle, and its replacement with a political campaign that would see the PLO call for a two-state solution to the conflict. The hawks in the PLO, and the debate between the two groups, dominated the PLO agenda in the subsequent years.
The changed thinking among both key elements in Israel and the PLO took time to be developed into new policies that transformed the desire of both parties – for differing reasons – to seek an accommodation with each other. While this change did not make the extremist politics of Benzion Netanyahu irrelevant to the new political realities, it meant that it would be difficult for his son to follow such policies in the political mainstream in Israel.
In 1999, as people considered the influence of Benzion on the politics of his son and the government he led, many appeared to miss the point that Netanyahu was a centrist politician who understood how to win elections in Israel – and how to lose them. He may very well have sympathized with his father’s attitude towards the Arabs, and specifically the Palestinians, but the policies his government adopted towards the peace process did not reflect this.
Benzion’s curious interview with Maariv, during which he effectively tried to paint his son as ‘one of us’ – meaning extremist – failed to reflect his son’s record in office. The point he argued, that Benjamin Netanyahu was somehow deceiving the world into thinking that he was something that he was not, was particularly damaging to his son, and provided his political enemies with much ammunition with which to attack him.
According to Benzion there was a difference between what his son believed and what he was able to do as Prime Minister. This was a clear criticism of the role of the Americans in pressuring Netanyahu into doing something he didn’t want to do: Hebron and Wye being two major examples.
While it would be naïve to ignore the influence of the Clinton administration in leaning on both the Israelis and the Palestinians at key junctures to reach an accommodation, this was not the primary reason that Netanyahu proved willing to put his name to agreements with Arafat.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s upbringing and education in the United States made him more an American politician than an Israeli one. His rapid concession of the election to Barak, and the announcement of his resignation from the leadership of the Likud with immediate effect, was typical of the American rather than the Israeli political system. In these respects, along with his deeply held belief in free-market economics, Netanyahu was more American than he was Israeli.
It was true that he adored his father, wanted to please him, sympathized with his ideology and shared his sense of being an outsider, but this was not translated into the practical – more pragmatic – politics needed to run a country like Israel. The death of Yonatan at Entebbe had moved Benjamin up the ladder in importance to his father.
Benjamin’s transformation from middle manager to Prime Minister was, in no small part, down to his newly found ambition to carry the family torch, and to right the perceived injustices that had been inflicted upon his father. There is little evidence to suggest that all of this was translated into any desire to try to implement his father’s extremist views towards the Arabs.
In retrospect, in political terms Netanyahu’s decision to resign so soon from the leadership of the Likud was a mistake. It is doubtful whether a home-grown Israeli political leader would have erred in this manner. Netanyahu should have stayed and fought for the soul of the Likud.
He genuinely believed that his defeat to Barak did not represent a rejection of his policies, but, rather, was the result of the wheeling and dealing at both cabinet and coalition levels that he was forced to undertake in order to keep an unruly government from collapsing.
By handing over the reins to Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu allowed his political rival the opportunity to rebuild the Likud and change its orientation, away from Netanyahu, and towards the new leader. It would take Netanyahu six years to return to the leadership of the party, by which time it was on the brink of becoming irrelevant to Israeli politics.
By exiting the stage so soon, Netanyahu lost an ability to help shape the national debate towards the terms of the final agreement with the Palestinians. He also missed the opportunity to gain from the political fallout, when the parties failed to agree a deal just over a year later.
Just as the Netanyahus had relocated to America when Israeli academia failed to take Benzion into its bosom, Benjamin Netanyahu looked in the same direction after the Israeli public had so convincingly rejected him as their political leader. The connection with America as a shelter from the storm, and as an opportunity to earn a pot of gold, was therefore passed on from father to son.
This connection between the Netanyahus was far more substantive than the ideological ones that Netanyahu’s political foes back in Israel liked to highlight. Netanyahu looked to use his contacts to help develop ties between Israeli high-tech companies and the United States. On top of this, he joined the lucrative speaker circuit in the United States, where he continued to draw big audiences.
Over the summer months, the wave of optimism that had originally greeted Barak’s victory over Netanyahu started to subside among Israelis. Familiar problems – forging a viable governing coalition, along with Barak’s autocratic modus operandi – quickly reminded Israelis that the removal of Netanyahu was not the end of the story in terms of solving the country’s problems.
If Benzion Netanyahu was displeased with his son’s efforts as Prime Minister and the deals he struck with the Palestinians, he must have been outraged about what materialized in the brief 18 months of the Barak government and its peacemaking agenda. While the Netanyahus watched on from the sidelines, Benjamin’s old army commander tried in vain to complete the circle of peacemaking that Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had started in 1993.
The first 18 months of the post-Netanyahu era were to prove difficult ones for Barak, the government, the Clinton administration and the Palestinians. The only people who gained were the extremists on both sides, who, as the political process unravelled, were able to fill the vacuum with their brand of violence and destruction. Although they didn’t know it at the time, many Israelis would come to look back over the first Netanyahu era with a sense of nostalgia, for the relative calm that it had brought them in terms of security.